Turkey's president marked the 566th anniversary on Wednesday of Istanbul's conquest by Ottoman troops, "which started a new age and changed the course of world history."
"May Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II and his heroic army rest in peace," Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Twitter more than half a millennium after Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II stormed the city straddling Europe and Asia on May 29, 1453.
Then called Constantinople, Istanbul had previously been the metropolis from where the Byzantines had ruled the Eastern Roman Empire for more than 1,000 years.
The conquest transformed the city, once the heart of the Byzantine realm, into the capital of the nascent Ottoman Empire.
