Byzantium was an ancient Greek city founded in 667 BCE by Greek colonists from Megara and named after their king Byzas. It was later renamed Constantinople and served as the capital of the Roman and Byzantine Empires for over 1000 years. According to legend, Byzas consulted the Oracle of Delphi and was told to found a city "opposite the blind," which he interpreted to mean on the European side of the Bosporus directly across from the Greek city of Chalcedon. Byzas went on to found Byzantium in this strategic location at the entrance to the Black Sea, later conquering Chalcedon.
2. WHAT IS THE BIZANCIO? Byzantium was an ancient Greek city, founded by Greek colonists from Megara in 667 BCE and named after their king Byzas . The name Byzantium is a Latinization of the original name Byzantion. The city was later renamed Constantinople and briefly became the imperial residence of the classical Roman Empire, and then subsequently was, for more than a thousand years, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, the Greek-speaking Roman Empire of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Constantinople was captured by the Ottoman Turks, becoming the capital of their
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4. HISTORY The origins of Byzantium are shrouded in legend. The traditional legend has it that Byzas from Megara , founded Byzantium in 667 BCE, when he sailed northeast across the Aegean Sea. Byzas had consulted the Oracle at Delphi to ask where to make his new city. The Oracle told him to found it "opposite the blind." At the time, he did not know what this meant. But when he came upon the Bosporus he understood: on the opposite eastern shore was a Greek city, Chalcedon, whose founders were said to have overlooked the superior location only 3 kilometres away. Byzas founded his city here on the European coast and named it Byzantion after himself. It was mainly a trading city due to its strategic location at the Black Sea's only entrance. Byzantion later conquered Chalcedon, across the Bosporus on the Asiatic side.
