Istanbul is rightful Greek soil

the turks rebuilt the city after the sack during 4th crusade if anything. the circled area is the original size of constantinople

So you also believe that the US enforcing kosovos independence in spite of the fact that its local population was bred out, because more people call it home who are albanian? Is it right to demand clay is yours because enough of your spawn inhabit it?

Also I've been to istanbul. Aside from the inner city it's a shithole. They still have open sewers, it's filthy, crowded and the worsr large city on the aegean. Even turks agree.

Still perhaps the single most strategic nipple of land on earth

it's a shame modern turkey repays him by pissing on his grave and every ideal he stood for

truly, this is the better timeline over Constantinople being a demilitarized international zone

Byzantines didn't even hold 50% of what's in OP's map

I didn't know the Mediterranean connects to the black Sea until I was like 24

I knew of the strait of bosphorus but I thought the water ended at the sea of marmara

I didn't know about the dardenelles

I'm a fucking retard that should prolly be euthanized

Istanbul could have been an almost decent city had the Greeks not been incompetents in the 20s.

Athens today suggests the Greeks wouldn't have added anything to Istanbul it lacks under the Turks

athens is a shithole though

I'll refrain from commenting on the issue of Kosovo as I'm wholly unfamiliar (to my detriment) of the history of the Balkans post 1948, and thus am necessarily ignorant of a worlds of context that would allow me to extricate any metaphor from that in grace.

I do feel that I can comment on the logic of your argument by returning the conversation to your initial premise

Lets suppose that 'Istanbul is rightful Greek soil.' It isn't. But lets suppose that it is.

So how are we going to get it back? Really we have only two options, War and Spawning followed by Democratic Secession.

1) War: I say these are the only two because you better believe that Turkey would never diplomatically give/sell/exchange Istanbul for anything. Beyond the ultimate issue of 'whose homeland is whose?' combined with 'there are already lots of Turks living in Istanbul' which I've already tried to lay out, there is plenty of reason to believe that Greece would neeever get back the city, at least not in any shape that anyone would want. One, the Turks would want it more. Again, mostly because 14 million of them call it home, but beyond that, secular as the Turks try to be, they're still a muslim nation and thus, I'd have to point you to a certain hadith from the Quran

Hadith of the Prophet -- Allah bless and greet him and his Family:

"Lataftahanna al-Qustantiniyya wa lani`ma al-amiru amiruha wa lani`ma
al-jayshu dhalika al-jaysh."

"Verily you shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful leader will her
leader be, and what a wonderful army will that army be!"

Good luck getting back the city when you have a combination of Patriotism, Numbers, and renewed religious ferver on your side. Is that one hadith everything? No, but its pointing at an idea that there would only be one side fighting a ‘holy war’ and it wouldn’t be the side trying to reestablish the Ecumenical Patriarch to his throne in the Church of Holy Wisdom.

[continued from above]

Not that Greece could take the city if they wanted to. As I’ve already mentioned, Greece has three million less people in their entire country than there are Turks in the Bosporous, let alone an army that can compete with one made up on the spot by Bosporous Turks alone. Hell, there’s probably only two armies on earth that could take and hold the city (and not without in the process wrecking everything and all we hold dear about it), the US and Russia, both of which are very much ever in their weird melange of proxy economical conflicts and weird geopolitics that are way over my head, but certainly not for any reason like irredentism. You get Russia drunk enough, and I might just give you that they’d invade the rest of the Ukraine, but sure as shit not Constantinople.

So that leaves us with 2) Spawning. Lets say that you can somehow reimbue the entire nation of Greece with the megali idea and to do so through Quebecois-like outbreeding of the enemy like catholic rabbits. Once this is done, they all en masse begin swarming through the immigration channels of Turkey (something Turkey generally opposes owing to this very reason), and once in place, breed for generations in the city, all while maintaining this megali idea, their own language, faith, and culture. Give us about a hundred years and we fiiinally have the proper kosovo-like ratio of some 60 million Greeks living in a city that still somehow only has 15 million turks.

[continued from above]

After years of participating in Turkish politics, lands, processes -- somehow not getting embroiled in a religious civil war up until now -- and somehow not ever losing that same fervor that you, great gyro of the greeks you are user, imbued them with, THEN, and only THEN do they begin the process of democratically breaking away in the manner of Kosovo. And then, wholly unlike Kosovo which has no plans of uniting with the current state of Albania and instead only prefers the universal ethos of telling people to fuck off while you do your own thing, they somehow decide to merge politically -- all while wholly unapposed in actions by the state of Turkey -- with the presumably much smaller Greece. Parts of this last aspect of the scenario are believable. Greece by then would be represented by a little red mark of debt on the hypothetical future map of Europe, and would jump at the chance to merge with this megalopolis of a city. But for the most part, even here, in the wildest ceilings of our fantasy do I find it hard to believe that people would go back to pronouncing all six syllables of ‘Kon-stan-ti-nou-po-lis’ over “‘Stan-boul” any day of the week. Don’t be silly

when the ottomans conquered it in 1453 it was a decayed shell of its former self. by making it there capital the ottomans made the city great again

and now they have held onto that land for more them 500 years so to put in eu4 terms turkey has cored it

the city alone is doing better then the entirety of greece combined

Good posts

Yeah but why would you want it?

Well that is kind of what you did with Bosnia, and you have no problem claiming it as your own, by your own logic Kosovo has the right to claim independence

>Bottom of the barrel nato country can defeat a top tier nato country

Sure buddy

>Antioch
>Alexandra
>Jerusalem
>Constantinople

They are lost forever aren't they?
Fuck man....

What do you mean lost forever? They're still there. You know what isn't? Mycenae, Halicarnassus, Persepolis, and your mom's anal virginity.

>hurr it's not rightful land because there aren't Greeks living there even though Turks have proven in history that they make their lands "rightfully" theirs by ethnically cleansing the original owners
>ignoring historical significance when Constantinople has been Greek for most of its lifetime
Dumb roach, I bet you also defend the existance of the Turkish puppet state of North Cyprus

It is Turkish by right of conquest. If Greek takes it back then it will be theirs by right of conquest.

Blah blah blah 'blood and iron'. Soft power is a meme

Greece has probably sold that soil to Istanbul by now to cover their outstanding debt.

not an argument

why?

>Istambul
>not T*rk occupied Constantinople

>why
what the fuck? access to both the Mediterranean and black sea along with asia for that there trade

When will Greekfags get over the fact that Istanbul will never be Greek? Greece didn't even exist at the time.

Istanbul is pretty nice now, whilst Athens is a commie-tier shithole.

This. If the Greeks hadn't shit the bed they'd have taken Istanbul already. But they haven't, because they aren't the same as the people who helped run Rome and Byzantium.

*Constantinople

*Konstantiniyye, efendi

If ottomans eathnicly clensed the land they occupied, there would not be a single cristian country in the Balkan

>black sea
Completely irrelevant now considering almost all the countries surrounding it are nobodies and you can build train-rails from it to the Aegean to transport goods if you really wanted to.

The most strategic places now are the Seuz Canal, Gibraltar, and the Panama canal. Byzantine was important back when farming was the most capital producing industry and when the most effective way of getting your goods from Asia was camel back through Central Asia, but it has lost it's significance. Copenhagen is more economically important with the amount of goods and minerals that get shipped by it than the Dardanelles

It absolutely is an argument, though.

All that shit about "it's been a Turkish city for centuries" -- yeah, it has, but Istanbul was still a pretty multicultural, multiethnic city circa 1910, with a very substantial Greek population. It had less than a million residents, not 14 million, and about a third of those residents were Orthodox Christians (Armenians as well as Greeks), with a further fifty thousand Jews (over 5% of the total population) and ten thousand Catholics (1%). There were entire neighborhoods where essentially no Muslims lived.

Its multicultural nature, and its large Greek Orthodox population, substantially influenced the culture of the city. It didn't become overwhelmingly Turkish Muslim until later in the 20th century.

Gosh, I wonder what happened to all those Armenians and Greeks?

I hope nothing bad. That might substantially undercut this statement
>The city has been a Turkish one for hundreds of years. You want to go fight 10 million people who have a greater right to call that spot 'home' than anyone else on the planet
and make the current demographics of the city seem sorta like an injustice, and not just the way things have always been.

But hey. I'm sure most of them left voluntarily, and none of them were killed or forcibly expelled from the city that had been their rightful home for hundreds of years and that was the seat of their religion and center of their entire way of life.

Not really. The modern greeks are pretty far divorced from the empire.

I love the eastern roman empire. I fucking hate the greeks.

Was unable to respond to this due to being on mobile at work and my samsung being spastic and not allowing reply posts.

Simply put your argument is to the tangible possibilities of istanbul being returned to the greeks in a realistic setting. This wasn't the topic of the thread, though. The discussion in the thread was about the actual legitimacy of the claim to Istanbul and who should rightfully own the city. I believe that breeding enough times on a ground doesn't entitle you to it, like the albanians did in Kosovo. There was also a significant population of greeks in istanbul up until 1900 or so, at some stages even a majority. I don't believe that tangible/logistical capacity to take it should influence the fact that the city itself does rightfully belong to the greeks, irrespective of whether or not the turks bred enough people on top of it.