{"id":26188,"date":"2010-11-19T13:48:57","date_gmt":"2010-11-19T11:48:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=26188"},"modified":"2023-04-04T20:06:49","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T17:06:49","slug":"geography-in-song-istanbul-not-constantinople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2010\/11\/19\/geography-in-song-istanbul-not-constantinople\/","title":{"rendered":"Geography in Song: Istanbul (Not Constantinople)"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><span style=\"font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px;\">Istanbul (Not Constantinople) is not a serious song.\u00a0 It was not serious when first performed by The Four Lads nor was it serious when the modern group They Might Be Giants covered it.\u00a0 The music video from the television show Tiny Toons is not serious as well.\u00a0 However, there are still cultural geography insights to be gained from listening to the song and watching the cartoon.<\/span><\/h3>\n<p>The song and video does represent geographic confusion in Western culture.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The fez was popular in the last one-hundred years of the Ottoman Empire but prior to the modernizing reforms 1820s it was only worn in certain parts of the empire.<\/li>\n<li>Sand dune deserts and tents are steretopyical visions of Arabia.\u00a0 Istanbul\/Constantinople is in Europe.<\/li>\n<li>The two-humped, Bactrian, camels are found in Central Asia and Mongolia, not in the lands of the Ottoman Empire.\u00a0 The most common camel in the empire was the Dromedary, also known as the Arabian, camel.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So where does the whole mix up of the European-Ottoman, Arabian, and Central Asian regions come from?\u00a0\u00a0A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.\u00a0 That book is a combination of stories from across the Islamic world.\u00a0 Its popularity in nineteenth century Europe and early America served to create the template for the stereotype of the Islamic world for Westerners: camels, sultans, deserts, palaces, and buried treasures.\u00a0 All these were envisioned in the music video.<\/p>\n<p>By the way, why did Constantinople change to Istanbul? Well,\u00a0that is no one&#8217;s business but the Turks and Greeks.Posted by\u00a0Catholicgauze<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-26189\" src=\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/istanbul_constantinople.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"460\" height=\"344\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/istanbul_constantinople.jpg 460w, https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/istanbul_constantinople-300x224.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 460px) 100vw, 460px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Istanbul (Not Constantinople) is not a serious song.\u00a0 It was not serious when first performed by The Four Lads nor was it serious when the modern group They Might Be Giants covered it.\u00a0 The music video from the television show Tiny Toons is not serious as well.\u00a0 However, there are still cultural geography insights to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":26189,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[4397,4395,4396],"class_list":["post-26188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-constantinople","tag-geography-in-song","tag-istanbul-not-constantinople"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26188\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}