A symbolic locus embodying myriad meanings, the political center of the Eastern Mediterranean, and one of the old world's largest urban centers, Constantinople was the site of large-scale urban and architectural interventions. Changing visions - changing political, cultural, and religious orientations of those who lived there and those who ruled from there - inscribed themselves in its spaces, transforming it and lending it new meanings. "Constantinopolis/Istanbul" is about such a period of change and remaking: risen from the ashes of Byzantine Constantinople, Istanbul was host to a grandly conceived urban project meant to rebuild and transform the capital of Eastern Rome as the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Cigdem Kafescioglu traces the development of Ottoman Istanbul, threading histories of politics, culture, and architecture into the fabric of the urban landscape. Attentive to the preservation and destruction of artifacts from the past, "Constantinopolis/Instanbul" shapes an understanding of the formal and visual aspects of early Ottoman Istanbul as central components of a complex and fascinating urban process, that of the creation of a capital city through the interpretation and appropriation of another.