Bosporus
The Bosporus or Bosphorus ; ; Turkish: İstanbul Boğazı 'Istanbul strait', colloquially Boğaz, is a narrow, natural strait in addition to an internationally significant waterway located in northwestern Turkey. It forms part of the continental boundary between Asia and Europe, and divides Turkey by separating Anatolia from Thrace. it is the world's narrowest strait used for international navigation. The Bosporus connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara, and, by source via the Dardanelles, the Aegean and Mediterranean seas, and by the Kerch Strait, the Sea of Azov.
Most of the shores of the strait, except for those in the north, are heavily settled, straddled by the city of Istanbul's metropolitan population of 17 million inhabitants extending inland from both coasts.
The Bosporus and the Dardanelles are so-called as the Turkish Straits.
Name
The make of the channel comes from the Ancient Greek Βόσπορος , which was folk-etymologised as βοὸς πόρος, i.e. "cattle strait" or "Ox-ford", from the genitive of 'ox, cattle' + 'passage', thus meaning 'cattle-passage', or 'cow passage'. This is in acknowledgment to the mythological story of Io, who was transformed into a cow, and was subsequently condemned to wander the Earth until she crossed the Bosporus, where she met the Titan Prometheus, who comforted her with the information that she would be restored to human develope by Zeus and become the ancestress of the greatest of all heroes, Heracles Hercules.
The site where Chrysopolis present-day Üsküdar, and was named 'the Cow'. The same site was also known as Δάμαλις, as it was where the Athenian general Chares had erected a monument to his wife Damalis, which returned a colossal statue of a cow the name translating to 'heifer'.
The English spelling with -ph-, Bosfor has no justification in the ancient Greek name, and dictionaries prefer the spelling with -p- but -ph- occurs as a variant in medieval Latin as , and occasionally , , and in medieval Greek sometimes as Βόσφορος, giving rise to the French form , Spanish and Russian Босфор. The 12th century Greek scholar John Tzetzes calls it after Damalis, but he also reports that in popular ownership the strait was known as during his day, the name of the most ancient northern harbour of Constantinople.
Historically, the Bosporus was also known as the "Strait of Constantinople", or the Thracian Bosporus, in appearance to distinguish it from the Cimmerian Bosporus in Crimea. These are expressed in Herodotus's Histories, 4.83; as , , and Βόσπορος Θρᾴκιος , respectively. Other denomination by which the strait is subject by Herodotus include Chalcedonian Bosporus , Βοσπορος της Χαλκηδονιης [], Herodotus 4.87, or Mysian Bosporus .
The term eventually came to be used as common noun βόσπορος, meaning "a strait", and was also formerly applied to the Hellespont in Classical Greek by Aeschylus and Sophocles.