"Can’t Go Back to Constantinople
Istanbul’s history deserves preservation, but at what cost to development?
Anyone who has ever sat in one of Istanbul’s endless traffic jams, listening to a taxi driver blast his horn and curse the son-of-a-donkey unloading a moving van in front of him, will agree that the city’s transportation system leaves much to be desired. City planners meant to solve this problem when they began construction of a $4 billion subway tunnel beneath the Bosporus. Then, to the planners’ horror, the project’s engineers discovered the lost Byzantine port of Theodosius. Known to archaeologists only from ancient texts, the port had been sleeping peacefully since the fourth century ad—directly underneath the site of the proposed main transit station in Yenikapı."
More:Can't Go Back to Constantinople by Claire Berlinski, City Journal Spring 2011
