- Constantinople
- her Byzantine name, which she carried a thousand years before the Ottoman conquest
- Mehmed the Conqueror
- the sultan who fulfilled the foretold conquest in 1453 while still a young man
- Hagia Sophia
- the Byzantines' great cathedral, which became a mosque and later a museum
- Suleiman the Magnificent
- the sultan in whose reign the empire reached the peak of its power
- Sinan
- the age's master architect, who built the Suleymaniye and the city's finest mosques
- the Bosphorus
- the strait that splits Europe from Asia and cuts the city in two
- the Ottoman caliphate
- the sultans' rule seated in Istanbul for four centuries, until 1924
- the Grand Bazaar
- her great covered market, which goes back to the Conqueror's era
- 1453
- the year of the Ottoman conquest that closed the Byzantine age
- the Byzantines
- her eastern Roman rule, which lasted a thousand years before the Ottomans
- the Blue Mosque
- the famous Sultan Ahmed mosque that stands facing Hagia Sophia
- the Suleymaniye
- Suleiman's mosque, which Sinan raised on the hill above the Golden Horn
