Lonely Planet İstanbul Guide

Turk leaders resigned, fled İstanbul and went into exile, leaving the city to be occupied by British, French and Italian troops placed there in accordance with the Armistice of Mudros, which ended Ottoman participation in the war. The city was returned to Ottoman rule under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which defined the borders of the modern Turkish state. The founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale, arrived at the Selimiye Army Barracks near Üsküdar in 1854 to nurse soldiers wounded in the Crimean War and stayed for three years. Her nickname ‘The Lady with the Lamp’ was inspired by her solitary late-night medical rounds through the barrack wards. The post-WWI campaign by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) for independence and the reinstatement of Turkish territory in the Balkans was directed from Ankara. After the Republic was founded in 1923, the new government was set up in that city. Robbed of its status as the capital of a vast empire, İstanbul lost much of its wealth and atmosphere. The city’s streets and neighbourhoods decayed, its infrastructure was neither maintained nor improved and little economic development occurred there for the next half century.