"24 June 2005
The city of Istanbul, located astride the eastern edge of Europe and western edge of the Asian continent, shown in an Envisat radar multi-temporal composite image.
What is today Europe's third largest urban centre has been a major city for the last two thousand years. It has known three different names in that time: Byzantium when it was the gateway to Greek settlements on the Black Sea, Constantinople when it became the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, then Istanbul when it fell to Muslim invaders in 1453."
More:ESA - Observing the Earth - Earth from Space: Istanbul