The Queen of Cities, my current home

"The Persian name was Dersaadet—Door to the Ultimate Happiness. The Greeks called it Teofilaktos—City Guarded by God; the Romans, Nuova Roma—New Rome; the Arabs, Farrouk—City Separating Two Continents; and the Ottoman Turks, Ummti-diinya—Mother of the World. Now, and since 1923 when the Turkish Republic formally renamed it, it is called Istanbul, meaning just The City—as though there were none other to compare.
Knowledgeable travelers today acclaim Istanbul as one of the three most beautiful cities on earth, ranking it with Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro, whose hilly silhouettes are also reflected in surrounding waters. Neither, however, is as exotic or romantic as Istanbul with its singular skyline of almost 500 domed mosques flanked by tapering minarets, and its sun-drenched shores embanked with white marble palaces, medieval fortresses, fine mansions, weathered wooden houses, colorful cafes and tea gardens built among or on the old sea walls.
Protruding into the water, hills of İstanbul form a common harbor where dozens of doughty ferryboats bustle back and forth from Europe to Asia, dodging passenger and merchant steamships of all flags, carefully skirting the bellowing oceangoing tankers and freighters. North from the harbor of Greater Istanbul, a ribbon of picturesque suburbs and fishing towns on the parallel shorelines, extends the city 17 miles up the Bosporus to the Black Sea.
This sparkling channel called the Bosporus is the city's lifeline: as a year-round highway carrying people and commerce on its surface and an amazing variety of fish—some 400 types—in its depths. It is also its May to November swimming pool by day, waterfront dining room and dance hall by moonlight.
Like any city astride an international crossroads, Istanbul has become a city of the most striking contrasts. It is a melange of oriental mentality and gracious hospitality, occidental appetites and ambitions, northern pace and energy, southern lassitude and contentment. It is a veritable Tower of Babel where some 30 languages are spoken daily and in architecture, transport, dress and customs it shows its origins, its history and 'its brilliantly cosmopolitan character. Here, a Roman aqueduct loops across a boulevard in front of a modern city hall; there, a sagging house propped up on Greek columns leans into a stark, rectangular office building. Here, a towering new hotel overlooks the Bosporus; there a vacated villa, plastered with Nile mud to comfort a homesick Egyptian princess, shares the view. On the avenues, outsized Cadillac and Mercedes cars edge past peasants' horse carts. Before posh apartments on the steep cobbled "Street of the Chicken Which Cannot Fly" or "Come On In, Don't Wait Street," the dancing bears of the gypsies perform. In the bazaars women from country villages cocooned in black robes from hair to hemline pull aside their veils to eye their mini-skirted, mink-coated sisters from other climes and times. Turbaned watersellers offer su to ragged laborers at a penny a glass in front of chrome-plated snack bars aswarm with hairy young Edwardians and itchy hippies. Nightclub clients drink "coexistent" Votka and Coke as hostesses alternate the Jerk and the Shake with languid belly dances.
İstanbul will remain the queen of cities, the place where the sun bursts out of Asia to lighten Europe's morning windows and exits dramatically behind the haze of the Golden Horn; where great ships steam across the waters in between, writing their smoky calligraphy upon the skies; and where the heavens, punctuated by a parade of minarets, echo to the muezzins' five-times-a-day call to prayer in the poignant wail that captures the magic of the East.