Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

Small Greek City on the Bosporus

It was Caesar Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus, better known simply as Constantine the Great or just Constantine, who moved the capital of Rome to Byzantion, a relatively small Greek city on the Bosporus, a strait of water that connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara, a strait with vital strategic and commercial shipping importance.

Byzantion was renamed Nova Roma Constantinopolitana. Even after the city fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the name stuck. It was called Konstantiniye. It wasn’t until after the demise of the Ottoman Empire that the name changed. In 1930, Turkey asked the rest of the world to call it Istanbul (which means essentially “the city.” In one form or another throughout its history, in one language or another, it was often simply called “the city.”  Even today, newspaper editors and authors of books will sometimes inserted Constantinople in parenthesis after the name Istanbul. The change of name was memorialized in a 1953 song performed by the Four Lads. Here is one verse of Istanbul (Not Constaniople):

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks