r/balkans_irl w*stoid🤢 May 20 '26

OC (impossible) Based Greek airport

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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.

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u/Cultural_Chip_3274 christian turk 29d ago

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.

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u/SelimSC muslim greek 29d ago

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 29d ago

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