Cultural memory, the hope of History, often proves to be as powerful as the historical event.
Here we have Constantinople personified. A place where fairy tales and stories clash and blend; a city that generates ideas and information in order to weave its own memory. A prize that was equally significant as something abstract, as a dream, as it was in reality. A city that long preserved a timeless tradition, as old as the birth of the modern mind – a place where narratives are cultivated that describe who we are in the present. In strict historical terms, the failures of the Arabs indeed marked the change of an ambition. The goal was no longer to "cut off the head" of the Byzantine Empire, but to focus on the lands around it, to the east, south, and southwest. The result was 700 years of uneasy coexistence of the new monotheists, a coexistence that witnessed collaborations as well as conflicts. Yet no one forgot that the "bone in Allah's throat" had not been removed.
