For this recipe, we travel to ancient Constantinople (modern Istanbul), the capital of the mighty Byzantine Empire. Founded in the seventh century BCE as a Greek colony known as Byzantion, the city prospered for centuries as a trading hub. In 330 CE, the Roman Emperor Constantine I—who famously legalized Christianity—“refounded” the city, renaming it Constantinople and establishing it as the eastern capital of the Roman Empire. When Rome and the western empire fell in 476, Constantinople continued as the capital of the Byzantine Empire for nearly a thousand years, until its fall to the Ottomans in 1453. Despite this long […]
