'Culture' is a flexible conception, but if one interprets it to mean the whole range of human experience and achievement, then nowhere is better qualified to be the Cultural Capital of Europe than Istanbul, née Constantinople.

It even looks the part. In all European travel there is no spectacle more tremendous than the sight of Istanbul massed beside the sea – a solidification of history, jumbled houses and docks and palaces along the shore, mighty domes and soaring minarets, ships and ferries swarming everywhere, rumbling traffic over terrific bridges – a timeless metropolis, familiar to travellers for a thousand years, and of such consequence that for centuries it was known to half the world simply as The City.

Technically it is, of course, only debatably European at all. It is the chief city of republican Turkey, which is not yet a member of the European Union, and it is as monumentally a western gateway of Asia as it is an eastern portal of Europe. The moment travellers step ashore in Istanbul, they know they are in a city sui generis, partly familiar, partly marvellously exotic. It has been in its time pagan, Muslim, Christian and officially secular. The most celebrated of all its monuments, Hagia Sophia, began as a church, became a mosque and is now a museum, and to my mind this overlapping of civilizations makes it all the more suitable as cultural capital of a continent becoming inexorably more various as the generations pass.

But still the fascination of the magnificent old place is its Turkishness, the ultimate patina (so far) that covers its successive layers of historical memory. Nowhere in Europe is more suggestive than the rambling enclave that is the Topkapi Palace, where once the Ottoman sultans held court, where the harem gossiped and the executioners sharpened their blades, and from whose gardens one may look out across the fateful waters of the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus. No refreshment break is more satisfying than a cup of thick coffee and a sweetmeat taken at a table beside the Golden Horn, frequented by seafarers since the days of Homer. One may imagine in these streets the imperial legionaries of Constantine himself, the janissaries of Islam, looting Christians from Venice on their way to the Crusades, merchants from all the nations setting up their stalls in its famous markets.

But presiding over it all, stocky, tough, indomitable, is that easternmost sentinel of Europe, the modern Turk of Istanbul. It is his style, his history, his lively intellectual life, his own shifting circumstances, that qualify the city for its status, in 2010, as cultural capital of us all. If he needs a text to celebrate its elevation, he could do worse than quote an old popular song out of America: "Why did Constantinople get the works? / That's nobody's business but the Turks . . ."

The article was originally published in The Guardian newspaper.

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