In the mid-7th century BC when Byzas, the leader of colonists from Megara (a city state near Athens), consulted the Oracle at Delphi to ask where to establish his new city, he was told to find it ‘opposite the blind ones’ and that the site would look like a ‘horn’. This is the legend of the founding of modern Istanbul, capital of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires, ‘queen city’ of all ages.

Byzas sailed northeast across the Aegean Sea, through the Dardanelles, and into the Sea of Marmara. It is only when he reached the Bosphorus that he understood the words of the Oracle. Here he saw the established city of Chalcedon on the eastern shore (Asia). When he then looked at the western shore, he saw a hill overlooking an inlet from the sea in the shape of a horn! He thought the people who had founded Chalcedon must have been blind not to have chosen the site on the western shore with the inlet subsequently known as the Golden Horn. After his death, the city he established there was called Byzantion after his name. The city stood where the land route between Europe and Asia was severed by the sea route between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Until the rise of the Italian maritime states, it was the most important commercial, political, and cultural centre in the Mediterranean world, as well as a goal or stopping place for pilgrims and other travelers.