section_path: Names
section_name: Names
paragraph_text: Names
  
  The first known name of the city is Byzantium (Greek: Βυζάντιον Byzántion), the name given to it at its foundation by Megarian colonists around 657 BCE. Megarian colonists claimed a direct line back to the founders of the city, Byzas, the son of the god Poseidon and the nymph Ceroëssa. Modern excavations have raised the possibility that the name Byzantium might reflect the sites of native Thracian settlements that preceded the fully-fledged town. Constantinople comes from the Latin name Constantinus, after Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who refounded the city in 324 CE. Constantinople remained the most common name for the city in the West until the 1930s, when Turkish authorities began to press for the use of "Istanbul" (Turkish: İstanbul) in foreign languages. Ḳosṭanṭīnīye (Ottoman Turkish: قسطنطينيه) and İstanbul were the names used alternatively by the Ottomans during their rule.
  
  The name İstanbul (Ottoman Turkish: استانبول) (Turkish pronunciation: colloquial Turkish pronunciation:) is commonly held to derive from the Medieval Greek phrase εἰς τὴν Πόλιν (Greek pronunciation:), literally 'to the city' and is how Constantinople was referred to by the local Greeks. This reflected its status as the only major city in the vicinity. The importance of Constantinople in the Ottoman world was also reflected by its nickname Dersaadet (Ottoman Turkish: درساعدت) meaning the 'Gate to Prosperity' in Ottoman Turkish. An alternative view is that the name evolved directly from "Constantinople", with the first and third syllables dropped. Some Ottoman sources of the 17th century, such as Evliya Çelebi, describe it as the common Turkish name of the time; between the late 17th and late 18th centuries, it was also in official use. The first use of the word Islambol (Ottoman Turkish: اسلامبول) on coinage was in 1730 during the reign of Sultan Mahmud I. In modern Turkish, the name is written as İstanbul, with a dotted İ, as the Turkish alphabet distinguishes between a dotted and dotless I. In English the stress is on the first or last syllable, but in Turkish it is on the second syllable (-tan-). A person from the city is an İstanbullu (plural İstanbullular); Istanbulite is used in English.