The Etymology of Istanbul
Istanbul is one of the great place-name jokes of European history. To Byzantine Greeks, Constantinople was simply hē Polis, the City — so dominant a metropolis that no qualifier was needed. Greek-speakers heading there said eis tēn polin, "to the city", and Greek-speaking peasants and merchants in the surrounding countryside used the phrase so habitually that it sounded like a single word: ee-stim-BOH-leen. Turkish ears, hearing this constantly from local Greeks, pickled the phrase as Istanbul, and the form is recorded in Turkish from the years just after the conquest of 1453. Ottoman documents continued to use Konstantiniyye in formal contexts, but Istanbul (and the variant Stamboul, the old walled city) became the popular name. The Turkish Republic standardised it in 1930 and asked foreign governments and post offices to follow suit. English Istanbul is therefore Greek "to the city", overheard, repeated, and frozen.