Milonov's 2016 Call to Rename Istanbul Constantinople in Russia

St Petersburg Lawmaker Proposes Calling Istanbul “Constantinople”

In June 2016 Vitaly Milonov, then a member of the St Petersburg Legislative Assembly, wrote to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev asking that Istanbul be called Constantinople on all Russian maps and in state-approved school textbooks. He framed it as a symbolic act of memory rather than a territorial claim, describing it as "the return of Istanbul's historical name". The proposal was never adopted, but it touched a nerve that runs through Greek, Russian and wider Orthodox history.

Below is what Milonov actually proposed, who he is, why the name Constantinople still carries such weight, and how and when the city's official name really changed.

What Milonov proposed in 2016

According to RT, which reported the letter on 15 June 2016 citing RIA Novosti, Milonov argued that many Russians still associate the city mainly with Byzantium, and that before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution Russians did not call it anything but Constantinople. He pointed to Greece and other Orthodox Christian nations as examples of countries that keep the old name alive.

His letter stressed that Russia would not reject the modern name in everyday use. The aim, he said, was to show that Russia and its people remember "the tragic fate of Byzantium". In other words, it was a gesture about historical justice expressed through a symbol: what appears on a map and in a schoolbook.

The timing mattered. Relations between Moscow and Ankara were at a low point after Turkey shot down a Russian military jet near the Syrian border in November 2015, and some Russian politicians were looking for ways to signal displeasure.

Who is Vitaly Milonov?

Milonov, born in Leningrad in 1974, is a member of the United Russia party. He sat in the St Petersburg Legislative Assembly from 2007 to 2016 and was elected to the State Duma, Russia's national parliament, in September 2016, a few months after this proposal.

He is best known as the leading sponsor of St Petersburg's law against so-called "homosexual propaganda" directed at minors, which preceded the nationwide federal law of 2013. He has a long record of provocative initiatives, including a 2012 proposal to give civil rights to the unborn and a 2014 suggestion that Apple chief executive Tim Cook be barred from Russia after Cook spoke publicly about being gay. Against that background, many commentators read the Constantinople letter as one more headline-grabbing gesture, even though the history it invokes is very real.

From Byzantium to Constantinople

The city began as Byzantion, a Greek colony founded by settlers from Megara around 657 BC on the European shore of the Bosphorus. Its position, guarding the passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, made it one of the most strategic sites in the ancient world.

In AD 330 the Roman emperor Constantine the Great refounded it as a new Christian capital, and it took his name: Constantinople, the City of Constantine. For more than eleven centuries it was the heart of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, a Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian state whose churches, law, scholarship and art shaped much of Eastern Europe, including Russia. Russia received Orthodox Christianity from Constantinople, and Old Russian texts often called the city Tsargrad, "the City of the Emperor".

The fall of 1453 and why it still hurts

On 29 May 1453, after a siege of about 55 days, the Ottoman army of Sultan Mehmed II broke through the walls. The last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, is generally believed to have died in the fighting, and the Hagia Sophia, for nearly a thousand years the greatest church of Christendom, was turned into a mosque. The city became the Ottoman capital.

For Greeks the fall is a national wound, remembered every 29 May. It also marks the start of centuries of Ottoman rule that would end, for the Greek, Armenian and Assyrian Christians of Anatolia, in the genocides of the early twentieth century. The city's own Greek community, still large in the early twentieth century, was later devastated by the 1955 Istanbul pogrom and the expulsions that followed, and today numbers only a few thousand. That is why the name Constantinople is not mere nostalgia for many Greeks: it carries the memory of a living city and its people.

When did Constantinople officially become Istanbul?

RT's original report said every country, including the Ottoman Empire, officially used the name Constantinople until 1930. That is close but simplified. Under the Ottomans, the formal name in official documents and on coins was Kostantiniyye, the Ottoman Turkish form of Constantinople, used alongside other names such as Islambol and Dersaadet. In everyday Turkish speech, "Istanbul", which comes from a Greek phrase meaning "to the City", had been common for centuries.

After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the Republic of Turkey was declared on 29 October 1923 with Ankara as its capital. The official name was changed to İstanbul on 28 March 1930, and Turkey asked foreign governments and postal services to use the Turkish form. The United States State Department began using "Istanbul" in May 1930. Greeks, however, have never stopped calling it Konstantinoupoli, or simply "i Poli", the City.

What happened next, and why names matter

Milonov's request did not lead to any change; official Russian maps continue to use Стамбул (Stambul). Its significance lies elsewhere. Names on maps are never neutral. They tell a story about who belongs to a place and whose history counts. Greece and the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which is still based in the city, have kept the old name alive for centuries, while Turkey treats Istanbul as the only proper name.

Readers can disagree about whether a politician's letter was a sincere act of remembrance or a political stunt. The history beneath it, from Constantine to 1453 to the suffering of the city's Christian communities, deserves to be remembered on its own terms.

Sources: RT: St Pete lawmaker asks to rename Istanbul (original report); Wikipedia: Vitaly Milonov; Wikipedia: Istanbul; Wikipedia: Names of Istanbul; Wikipedia: Fall of Constantinople.

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