The group immediately barrage the scruffy headed bartender/urban planning major with questions about his city. I nurse my beer and listen in as he deftly manages their plethora of inquiries. Via the waitress, he tells them much of what you see in Istanbul today was born from fire. After the Ottoman Empire’s successful conversion of Christian Constantinople into Islamic Istanbul, the city and the empire would expand largely unscathed by major disruption for nearly 200 years.21
Photo: Chen Hu