Turkey is home to an incredibly diverse and bountiful selection of historic sites and artifacts from a vast array of time periods, empires and civilizations. Unsurprisingly, in the modern Turkish republic, where political strife and ideological battles have remained constant, the country's relationship with its history is complicated.

In recent years, a stream of television series and films centering on the glorious triumphs of the Ottoman Empire have found massive popularity, while President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party have continually paid lip service to the predecessors of modern Turkey in what many have branded neo-Ottomanism or Ottoman nostalgia.

But at least half of the country does not share such nostalgia. The frustration boiled over in 2013, when Erdogan announced plans to reconstruct an Ottoman-era military barracks outfitted with shops on top of Gezi Park, the only major green space in the central Beyoglu district of Istanbul, located next to the city's main Taksim Square. The uproar culminated in the protests that erupted in Istanbul and spread to nearly every province in the country in the late spring and summer that the government fiercely denounced and suppressed.

While the government has glorified Turkey's Ottoman past, it doesn't look so favorably upon the Byzantines from which Constantinople was seized in a protracted battle. Among the reasons it took so long for Mehmet the Conqueror to capture the embattled city and defeat the weakened Byzantines was their seemingly impenetrable 5th-century city walls, arguably the most important defensive structure in the history of the world. They had thwarted numerous attempted invasions from other enemies prior to the Ottomans. To this day, sections of the walls remain remarkably sound, while long stretches have been restored in lousy patchwork jobs and others lie in ruin, with city utility companies using the land along the walls as parking lots or storage areas.