Lonely Planet İstanbul Guide

In 1997 the council announced that Refah had flouted the constitutional ban on religion in politics and warned that the government should resign or face a military coup. Bowing to the inevitable, Erbakan did as the council wished. In İstanbul, Mayor Erdoğan was ousted by the secularist forces in the national government in late 1998.

Although he was instrumental in moving the capital of Turkey from İstanbul to Ankara, Atatürk loved the city and spent much of his time here. He kept a set of apartments in Dolmabahçe Palace and died there on 10 November 1938.

National elections in April 1999 brought in a coalition government led by Bülent Ecevit’s left-wing Democratic Left Party. After years under the conservative right of the Refah Partisi, the election result heralded a shift towards European-style social democracy. Unfortunately for the new government, there was a spectacular collapse of the Turkish economy in 2001, leading to its electoral defeat in 2002. The victorious party was the moderate Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party; AKP), led by phoenix-like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In İstanbul, candidates from the AKP were elected into power in most municipalities, including the powerful Fatih Municipality, which includes Eminönü. The Empress Theodora makes a great subject in Stella Duffy’s rollicking biographical novel Theodora: Actress. Empress. Whore. (2010) and the palace intrigues orchestrated by Süleyman the Magnificent’s consort Roxelana make for great TV drama in the enormously popular prime-time Turkish show Muhteşem Yüzyıl (The Magnificent Century). Elections in 2007 and 2011 had the same result, as did the municipal election in 2014. The result of the 2014 election was a disappointment to many secular and left-leaning İstanbullus, as well as to former AKP supporters who had changed their political allegiance as a result of the government’s handling of the 2013 Gezi Park protests. These protests,