Just curious as it was always the name for the capitals at the time of the Byzantine Empire and Ottoman Empire just curious on why Turkey changed it when Carthage has still kept its name.
Hello, the word "Istanbul" is a local Turkish/Arabic corruption of the Greek phrase eis ten polin "to the City." Like many modern cities (like New York or San Franscisco), Constantinople was called just "the City." This prepositional phrase pertains to economic and religious traffic "to" the City. The suffix "-bul" and "-bolu" in Turkish are borrowings from the Greek word for city, polis, where the -p- has changed to a -b- (very common linguistically; cf Latin capite and Spanish cabeza).