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Dawn reveals a lurid sight: streets crimson with blood as Turkish soldiers race through the city, slaughtering, sacking. Screams split the air as they drag women and children from hiding places in looted homes. They topple altars, seize golden chalices. They force open the massive bronze portals of Hagia Sophia and burst in upon the last Christian service ever held in Justinian’s great church.

At midday Mehmed, whom history will call the Conqueror, rides into the city on his white horse. The chronicler Kritovoulos reports that the sultan shed tears of compassion: “What a city we have given over to plunder and destruction!”

It is Tuesday, May 29, 1453. Don’t ever ask a Greek to embark on an important project on a Tuesday. That’s the unlucky day his city fell to the Turk.

Catastrophically, the Byzantine Empire was no more. Zealots of Islam removed the cross from atop Hagia Sophia, and soon the muezzin’s chant rang from minarets rising by the Bosporus. But Byzantium lived on.

Priding himself as a new Constantine sitting on the throne of the Caesars, Mehmed the Conqueror repopulated his new capital and restaffed its bureaucracy partly with Greeks and Serbs. In his court, influenced by Persian as well as Byzantine traditions, he became an aloof autocrat surrounded by elaborate ceremony.

The once migratory Ottomans, now based in Constantine’s city, proceeded to conquer a mosaic of nations similar in extent to Justinian’s empire. The Ottoman Empire let its Orthodox subjects keep their Christian religion and Greco-Roman laws—so long as they paid tribute, kept their churches inconspicuous so as not to offend Islamic eyes, and furnished levies for its armies and administration. This tithe in humans periodically took the strongest, most intelligent Christian Balkan boys, aged eight to fifteen, converted them to Islam, and drafted them into the elite army corps, the Janissaries, or trained them as court functionaries.

The conquerors emulated Hagia Sophia in their great single-domed shrines, such as Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, built over and using materials from the Great Palace. Greeks became prominent in trade, seafaring, banking, and medicine; Greek and Serbian initially served alongside Turkish as the languages of the chancery; and the Turks, who had long used Byzantine currency in foreign exchange, minted their own gold coins two decades after the conquest.

“When we Turks came off the steppes, we were nomads with little culture,” Dr. Nezih Firatli, then director of Istanbul’s Museum of Archaeology, told me. “It was natural to adopt some Byzantine ways. Our forebears had no ovens for making bread—only portable iron griddles for unleavened flat cakes. Hence the Turkish word for oven comes from the Greek.” The Turkish han replaced the Byzantine caravansary, and the famed Turkish bath, the Byzantine bath.

Daily life in Nicaea or Philadelphia (Turkish Iznik and Alaşehir) only two generations ago differed little from Byzantine times. “Byzantine continuity is not a popular idea in Turkey,” said Dr. Firatli, looking me squarely in the eye, “but it is the truth.”

To create a modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) turned his back on cosmopolitan Constantinople and made his capital at Ankara, in the heart of Anatolia (though, ironically, the national flag bore the crescent-and-star device first stamped on coins of ancient Greek Byzantium). In 1922, during an abortive Greek attempt to reconquer Ionia, considered a “cradle of the Hellenic civilization,” came a violent break with the Byzantine past.

In that fateful year Atatürk’s army hurled the invaders back into the sea amid the wreckage of 3,000 years of Greek settlement in Asia Minor. This rout triggered a mass exodus from Turkey. A twenty-three-year-old correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star, Ernest Hemingway, described a silent, ghastly procession: “Twenty miles of carts … with exhausted, staggering men, women and children … walking blindly along in the rain” as the Christians