A city (ISTANBUL) that has been continuously inhabited for hundreds of Essay

A city (ISTANBUL) that has been continuously inhabited for hundreds of years - Essay Example The city covers more than five thousand three hundred square kilometres and is coterminous with the Istanbul province whose administrative capital is the city itself neighbouring Bosporus strait in the northwest. The establishment of Istanbul occurred as a Greek colony known as Byzantium in the seventh century BC then in AD 196, it fell to the Roman Republic up to 330 when it became the capital of the Roman Empire and renamed Constantinople (Spielvogel, 2012). In the later antiquity, Constantinople grew to become the biggest in the western hemisphere with almost half a million inhabitants and was the headquarters of the Eastern Roman Empire referred to as Byzantine Empire which came to an end with the Muslim conquest after which it became Ottoman Empire’s capital. There has been a decline in population in the medieval era, but as the Ottoman Empire was approaching its peak, the population of the city rose to about seven hundred thousand inhabitants in the sixteenth century which was second only to Beijing and surpassed only by London later in the eighteenth century (Lafferty, 2009). With the founding of the republic of Turkey in 1923, the headquarters were moved to Ankara from Constantinople and from the thirties, the native title Istanbul has been the only official name of the city and has replaced Constantinople. Istanbul’s public transport can be traced back to mid-1869 when a contract was signed to construct a tram in Ottoman Empire’s capital and by the 1950s, the tram lines were almost one hundred and thirty kilometres long. The trams remained serviceable on the European side up to 1961 and on the Asian section up to 1966. O the other hand, the ferry can be considered as the oldest transportation means in Istanbul, which has to parts split by the Bosporus strait and encircled by the sea. In 1837, boats that belonged to Britain and Russia began transport in the Bosporus with the Istanbul maritime company being started in 1851 through a decree of