This story ran as part of the 2024 Readers’ Choice Awards. To find out all the winning airports, read here.
25.09.2024 - 14:46 / matadornetwork.com
Nowhere in the world embodies humanity’s living history quite like the Bosphorus Straight. Cutting 19 miles through Istanbul and northwest Türkiye, the straight is the only shipping channel connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and, eventually, the Mediterranean. As such, it’s an imperative lifeblood for West Asia and the Caucasus, and throughout human history has carried, celebrated, and cursed some of the most powerful armies the world has ever seen. Indeed, if only these waters could talk.
Nowadays Istanbul, a global hub of more than 15 million people divided in half by the Bosphorus, remains the most imperial city the world has ever known, with the Straight’s banks through the city serving as the seat of empires stretching back some 3,000 years. Thanks to the recent remodel of the five-star Çırağan Palace Kempinski, you can embrace the city’s global ties on a stay in the city right on the banks of the Bosphorus – and there’s no better way to immerse yourself in lore, legacy, and luxury.
The hallway connecting the historic palace to the hotel serves as a museum. Photo: Tim Wenger
What is now Istanbul, Türkiye’s largest city and the cosmopolitan bridge between Europe and Asia, has historically been the seat of several of mankind’s most powerful empires. First settled by the Megarans as Byzantium in the 7th Century BC, Constantine I then established the seat of the Roman Empire on the same stretch of land under the moniker Constantinople in 272 AD. The city has since been sieged thrice by the Arabs and at least five times by the Ottomans. The latter finally ousted the resurgent and resistant Byzantine empire in 1453 and put the city firmly in Ottoman hands in a 55-day marathon battle known as the Fall of Constantinople (check out the Netflix series “Rise of Empires: Ottoman” for a dramatic reenactment of the latter and a much more thorough backstory on the region’s significant players).
On October 29, 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne was signed, officially establishing the modern Republic of Türkiye. Ironically, and largely due to Istanbul’s vulnerable and desirable location straddling two densely-populated continents, the long-time seat of human desire then lost its capital status to Ankara, several hours inland and thus firmly safe from water-born attacks. Humanity’s living history lives on in Istanbul, however, and the best way to experience it on a trip to Istanbul is to base yourself where the sultans themselves lived – right along the shores of the Bosphorus.
The only place to do this is the Çırağan Palace Kempinski (pronounced Cheer-an). Here, you can sleep adjacent to where Sultan Abdulaziz and his successors Sultan Muard V and Abdul Hamid II, slept, in contemporary 5-star luxury and the
This story ran as part of the 2024 Readers’ Choice Awards. To find out all the winning airports, read here.
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