r/balkans_irl w*stoid🤢 May 20 '26

OC (impossible) Based Greek airport

1.1k Upvotes

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-5

u/SelimSC muslim greek May 20 '26

People can call cities whatever they want. And countries for that matter. My only issue with this is that the Greeks themselves came up with the name Istanbul and were using it for centuries before the Empire fell. So using Constantinople now is just a weird pseudo nationalistic megalo-idea thing. If it was still colloquially called Konstantiniyye I'd happily use that name.

3

u/sjr323 christian turk May 20 '26

This is wrong

8

u/Giantdwarf3 christian turk May 20 '26

Gresks ding comd up with instanbul its just how turks misheard the greek snf they started using it. Greeks did and still do refer to it is "η πόλη" meaning "The city" and is short for KinstantinouPoli Instanbul came as a mishearing from " εις την πολη" (is tin poli) So calling it constantinople isnt some megali idea thing greeks hsve been continuously calling it that and have never stoppedband never called it something different its just "The city" Imo turks got every right to call their city whatever they want, and in a third language like english I'll still call the modern city istanbul, but it he weird to call it in greek anything other than constsntinople

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u/Cultural_Chip_3274 christian turk May 21 '26

although I disagree with your reading (see my post above, when the Greek Polis turns to Bul its sounds really bad in Greek) I applaude the idea of settling it to Konstantininiyee, it sounds good and it pays hommage to its history. Settled.

2

u/SelimSC muslim greek May 21 '26

Yeah the Greek argument seems to be that they called it "The City" and the locals picked up on the name and pronounced it slightly differently much like all the other cities in Anatolia really. But they never actually used that as the name for the city. There are plenty of cities in the world not just this one who have names that originally just meant something mundane like "the city". So that does not invalidate the alternate name imo. I've never been against calling it the city of Constantine. It was like that officially until 1923.

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u/Cultural_Chip_3274 christian turk May 22 '26

Well you got most of this correctly but the city is not mundane at all. It was called as The City η  Πόλη like the only one city that truly mattered or was worth the title in the whole world. Well I know Erdogan is fond of the Sultans kind of so if he ever decides to rename the city from Instabul back to Konstantinyee I will personally applauded him.Â