My husband, who fancies himself as something of a classicist, was delighted to see the Turkish investigators of the Khashoggi horror in Istanbul with ‘Polis’ on their T-shirts. Against the odds of Ottoman rule and the Turkish cultural initiatives of Ataturk, this Greek word for a city society, polis, still designates the guardians of civic peace.
The borrowed word was all the more striking as the police were acting in Istanbul, the name of which derived from the Greek phrase eis ten polin, to the city. Where are you going? Eis ten polin, which by the 16th century had become Istanbul. A Turkish folk etymology derives the name from Islam bol, ‘plenty of Islam’, but this has no more basis than the popular version of asparagus in English being sparrow-grass.
When Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train was published in 1932, the destination of the Orient Express (the name of the novel in the United States) was still referred to as Constantinople.
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