City that breathes oxygen of commerce

The Blue Mosque at dusk in Istanbul. Daniel Acker / Bloomberg News

Naples is supposed to be the city to see immediately before departing this life.

Judging by the number of Neapolitan tourists at the Agia Sophia on a recent trip, however, perhaps the minarets and domes of Istanbul should replace it.

Istanbul is a breathtaking city, best seen from a rooftop cafe in the Sultan Ahmet historic district where the famed and beautiful Blue Mosque hangs over all.

Other than their architectural beauty, the great cities of the world share certain important attributes that have allowed them to prosper. Chief among them is a large, industrious and ethnically diverse population drawn for centuries by commercial opportunity. An important waterway for said people to navigate and trade along is also essential. Istanbul has both in spades.

Thousands of Istanbullus commute up and down the Bosphorus every day on one of a dozen or so large municipal ferries.

An architectural history of the Ottoman Empire can be seen on both banks of the waterway that links the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea but the strait is far more than a maritime highway for visitors and workers.

The Bosphorus is Istanbul's main commercial artery along which the oxygen of trade has travelled for millennia. Today, it is one of the busiest waterways in the world, with more than 200 million tonnes of oil passing through each year.

All that trade helped the city accumulate a GDP of US$182 billion (Dh668.48bn) at the most recent count, about one third of the whole of Turkey.

The waterway also divides Asia and Europe, which made Istanbul the originator of globalisation thousands of years before the internet.