Understand
Istanbul Province basically extends over two peninsulas surrounded by Black Sea, Bosphorus, and the Sea of MarmaraâÃatalca to the west of Bosphorus on European mainland and Kocaeli to the east of Bosphorus on Asian mainland.
Since 2005, Istanbul Province is officially co-terminous with the city of Istanbul, as the city borders were extended to include everything within provincial borders, but whatever official designations say, other than the huge metropolitan areaâin a triangular shape, which has its base on the Marmara coast, covering an area up to 25-30 km long from the southern mouth of Bosphorus at each side, with the height of the triangle going all the way to Black Sea along the Bosphorusâthe rest of the province is rural, or at least suburban, in character.
On Ãatalca Peninsula, geographically an extension of Thrace, a continuous conurbation formed by summer houses of Istanbulitesâconcrete cottages in usually densely packed, albeit somewhat leafy, housing estates, which people of the crowded city flee in every possible opportunity, which makes highways west of city highly congested on Sunday evenings in summertimeâlines the southwestern coasts along Marmara. Inland is mostly open farmlands producing much wheat and sunflower, and dotted by villages, although landscapes get more industrial as you get closer to the major highways or the outskirts of Istanbul. The vegetation gets lusher as you approach Black Sea coast, although some of the forests close to the shore are pierced by ugly open pit-mines. Another feauture along Ãatalca's Black Sea coast is quite large Lake Terkos Terkos Gölü, a.k.a. Durusu Gölü, a freshwater lake although seperated from brackish Black Sea only by a series of dunes and one of the major sources of drinking water of Istanbul.
On the Marmara coast of Kocaeli Peninsula, the city of Istanbul proper well extends to and beyond the provincial border. Inland of this peninsula is more verdant than Ãatalca, with some of the hills around AlemdaÄ covered by heathlands, a rare habitat that is found only in a handful of locations across the World naturally. The Black Sea coast of this half of the province is also wooded, but again just like its counterpart to west, is cut through by open-pit mines at several locations.
On both peninsulas, the southern coasts are flatter and it gets hillier as you go north, which is a part of the mountainchain that lines all along the southern edge of the Black Sea, albeit divided by the deep "valley" of the Bosphorusâthere is indeed a theory that hypothesizes the Bosphorus was a river in prehistory, emptying into the Black Sea which was then a quite large freshwater lake but still smaller than its current size, that was later flooded by the rising waters of the Mediterranean at the end of glacial age, turning the riverbed into the strait that it is. The theory goes on arguing that this might gave rise to the legends of great flood and Noah's Ark.
