Istanbul, or Constantinople as it was known, has been at the apex of many important incidents in world history. But when the Ottoman empire collapsed after WW1, a great power of centuries vanished from the world stage in the twinkling of an eye. The vastly scaled down Republic of Turkey, which took its place, began the long slide to a Third World state, lacking all the necessities of modern infrastructure, backward, isolated and weighed down by rural and urban poverty.