ABSTRACT
The wonder of the Ottoman Turkish houses was their conformity to the strictures of their environment. The cities of the Ottoman Empire included most of the great Eastern cities of antiquity Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Athens, Salonica, Smyrna and of course Constantinople. As in other regions, economic life in the Middle East and Balkans naturally was directed from cities. The political life of cities reflected political life in Istanbul. The Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus helped to moderate the weather of Istanbul, giving the city breezes that cooled the summers and making it warmer in winter than the lands in either northwest Anatolia or Thrace. The Sea of Marmara, the Golden Horn, and the Bosphorus were integral to the Ottoman city of Istanbul. As mosques marked the Islamic character of the city, so did government buildings mark it as Ottoman. The table overleaf lists the population of Istanbul as it was recorded in the late nineteenth century.
