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The metropolis on the Bosporus is the cultural capital. But above all, it is the capital of many cultures. Istanbul, as the European Capital of Culture 2010, will enrich European culture with a dimension that does not yet have deep roots in Europe: the oriental dimension. In contrast to Jewish tradition and culture, which are deeply rooted in Europe, oriental culture is almost completely unknown to Europeans. The cultural capital of Istanbul is therefore very convenient at a time when we must nolens volens deal with Islam.

The stranger, who comes to Istanbul for the first time, discovers the Orient everywhere, be it Byzantium or Ottoman Empire. Nearly 90 years of the Turkish Republic, which ended Turkey's process of integration into the West, did not eliminate the dominance of the Orient in Istanbul. Maybe that's because of the uniqueness of the city. Istanbul went overnight from the capital of the Byzantine Empire - Constantinople - to the capital of the Ottoman Empire - Istanbul - with no hair bowed to the city, and with an attitude that almost borders on today's "business as usual".

Islam and Christianity do not exist so close to each other anywhere else in the world. This is primarily the result of oriental pluralism. For the Christian churches, the Greek Orthodox and the Armenian Gregorian, are also Eastern religions. It remains an open question whether this coexistence of cultures with a Western religion, such as the Catholic, would have been possible. The history of the city definitely provides an example of this. Byzantine Constantinople experienced the greatest destruction not by the Ottomans after the conquest of the city, but in 1204 by the Catholic crusaders and the Venetians, to whom the Orthodox religion was much more hated than the Muslims. The memory of the devastation of the city and the countless human sacrifices were so deep in the minds of the Byzantines that two and a half centuries later they considered the conquest of the city by the Ottomans the lesser evil.

The cultural diversity of Istanbul stems from the diverse nations that have inhabited the city for centuries. These minorities have profoundly shaped the culture of the city. The easiest way to recognize this is the different languages ​​spoken in the city. When I started my high school studies in the Austrian Sankt-Georg-Kolleg at the end of the 1940s, I had to go through the Kuledibi district, which at the time was an almost Jewish district, to attend school. In addition to Turkish, I almost only heard the Ladino, the dialect of the Sephardic people. In the district Kurtulus, where my family lived, one spoke mostly Turkish and partly also Armenian except Turkish. This happened to many neighborhoods. Balat on the Golden Horn was a Jewish quarter, but Fener on the other side, where the Ecumenical Patriarchate is based, was a Greek quarter. In contrast, Samatya or Bakirkoy were Greek-Armenian neighborhoods.