The city still bears the mark of each culture that has lived within it, so that there is no shortage of places to see in Istanbul, and to walk through its older areas is to explore an open archaeological site in which the layers of history are visible to all.
It has been Istanbul's fate, over centuries, to be at the epicentre of enormous shifts in geopolitical power from East to West and back again. The city was originally Hellenic, became subsumed and shaped by the Romans, who in their turn were moulded by indigenous traditions and those of the East in general, before finally being supplanted by the Ottomans. After centuries of vitality the late Ottomans crumbled before the ever-increasing power of Western Europe. In the last major plot twist, coming after the empire's disastrous defeat in World War I, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a gifted general, packed the last Sultan onto the Orient Express with a one-way outward-bound ticket, and created the modern, Westernized, nationalistic republic that Turkey is today.