Tsargrad
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Tsargrad (Old Church Slavonic: Цѣсарьградъ, Church Slavonic: Царьгра̀дъ, Template:Lang-ru, Bulgarian: Ца̀риград (Tsarigrad), Romanian: Ţarigrad, Template:Lang-ua, Serbian: Цариград (Carigrad), also rendered as Czargrad and Tzargrad; see Tsar) is a historic Slavic name for the city of Constantinople, which is modern-day Istanbul in Turkey.
The word is an Old Church Slavonic translation of the Greek Βασιλὶς Πόλις. Combining the Slavonic words tsar for "Caesar" and grad for "city", it stood for "the City of the Caesar". Per Thomsen, the Old Russian form influenced an Old Norse appellation of Constantinople, Miklagard (Мikligarðr).
Bulgarians also applied the word to Turnovgrad, one of the capitals of the Bulgarian tsars. Since the Balkans fell under Ottoman rule, the Bulgarian word has been used exclusively as another name of Constantinople, because in the vernacular of the Balkan Slavs the Ottoman sultans were called tsars.
After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the burgeoning Russian Empire had begun to see itself as the last extension of the Roman Empire, and the force that would resurrect the lost leviathan (Third Rome). This belief was the supported by the Russian Orthodox Church and given at least an air of legitimacy by the marriage of Ivan III to the heiress of the last Byzantine Emperor. It was allegedly an objective of the Tsars to recapture the city, but despite many southern advances and expansion by the empire, this was never realized owing to the Western inteference in the Crimean War.
As the zeitgeist which spawned the term has faded, the word Tsargrad is now an archaic term in Russian. It is however still used occasionally in Bulgarian.