An intriguing element of this poem is Yeats's choice of setting. Though the work itself is surreal, remixing the everyday and the otherworldly until they are inextricable from one another, Yeats chooses a very real place in which to set the work: the ancient city of Byzantium. This is, furthermore, not the only one of Yeats's poems to feature Byzantium as a realm of spiritual exploration; it serves the same function in the poem "Sailing to Byzantium." By the time Yeats wrote these works in the twentieth century, the ancient city of Byzantium was long gone, making it a suitable symbol of a lost, mysterious, and illustrious past. However, the history of Byzantium is in a sense ongoing: today, the city of Istanbul sits on the same site as the Byzantine capital. What was, and is, the real city behind Yeats's symbol?
Byzantium sat at a strategic location: at a peninsula in what is today modern Turkey, straddling the continents of Europe and Asia. As a result, it was a site of conflict in the ancient world, frequently fought over until 300 B.C. but largely under Greek rule. That year, the Roman Emperor Constantine named Byzantium the capital of the Roman Empire. Soon after, the Roman Empire was divided into several regional sub-empires, with Byzantium serving as the capital of the "Eastern Roman Empire"—more commonly known as the Byzantine Empire. As the Byzantine capital, the city was known as Constantinople, in honor of the Emperor who had founded it. Constantinople, in addition to being a commercial and political hub, was a center of the early Christian world. It would, as Christianity itself evolved, become the center of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. One of the most famous churches of the Byzantine period, the Hagia Sophia, still stands in the city. But Constantinople went into a dramatic decline during the late Medieval period, largely due to attacks by Crusaders coming from Europe.
In 1543, Constantinople entered its Ottoman period, becoming the fourth capital of the Ottoman Empire when Sultan Mehmed II conquered the city. Under Ottoman rule, the city shifted from a site of Christian power to a site of Muslim power, with the iconic Hagia Sophia converted from an Orthodox church to a mosque. Ottoman rulers transformed Constantinople almost from scratch, even going so far as to deport the small remaining population of Byzantine Christians. Ottoman Constantinople was not only large but also diverse, with large Christian, Jewish, and Greek minorities, who were often relatively tolerated throughout the Ottoman period. While Constantinople remained the capital of the Ottoman Empire until the Empire's collapse in 1922, the sixteenth-century reign of Suleiman the Magnificent was especially important in the city's history. In particular, Constantinople was marked by the architectural achievements of Suleiman's reign, including the still-standing Süleymaniye Mosque. While Constantinople remained the city's official name into the twentieth century, it was more commonly referred to as Istanbul, a word that comes from a Greek phrase for "to the city."
The city's name and identity again shifted with the establishment of the modern Turkish state. In 1923, the newly-created Republic of Turkey shifted its capital from Constantinople to Ankara, causing the former capital to enter a decline in power and population. Shortly after, as part of a broader nationalist effort, the city's name was officially changed to Istanbul. Over the course of the twentieth century, as Turkey sought to create a national identity and consolidate power, the city underwent rapid changes, including both immense population growth and the loss of many minority populations threatened in a newly nationalistic atmosphere. Today, Istanbul is one of the world's largest cities by population due to both immigration from outside of Turkey and an influx from other regions of the country. Moreover, this population growth has led the city to sprawl far past its Ottoman borders, which had been delineated by city walls. In the early twenty-first century, the city has remained a diverse, growing metropolis but has also been a center of conflict. In 2013, millions demonstrated against a variety of authoritarian government policies in central Istanbul's Taksim Square, while in 2016, it was a major center of a failed military coup.
Yeats's poem was published late in the history of this complex city, several years after the founding of the Turkish state. However, in it, he casts his imagination back into the distant past—to the time in which the city was not yet known as Constantinople or Istanbul, and had yet to become a globalized metropolis. As a result, the city comes to stand in for a lost past, linked to the mundane realities of the present day and yet wholly separate from them. The Byzantium of Yeats's poetry is at once inspired by history and utterly fantastical, occupying a real past and a mythological one in concert.
