Constantinople

This article is about a city in NationStates. For the real life city, see Wikipedia:Constantinople.

Constantinople was once a thriving city in Zwangzug, and is now an underpopulated capital.

For most of its inhabited history, the "nation" was more accurately a loose collection of city-states. More "naturally"-developing cities arose later as places for people from the scattered communities to trade. Of these, Constantinople was one of the largest and most diverse. People from all areas of Zwangzug congregated there: if a national identity could ever have developed at all, the city would have been one of the most likely places for it to do so. Like many major cities in Zwangzug, it was named in honor or parody of a place which, if it did exist at all, was so ancient that it had faded into myth.

While not the largest city in the country, it was probably the largest of its type by 1965 CE. Large black walls isolated it from the world in the four cardinal directions, but vertical expansion continued. It also hosted a selective university which included a large congregation of physics students and professors, who may or may not have had something to do with the sudden appearance of an extradimensional portal in the northern wall.

Subsequent events almost completely destroyed the city, but also established a camaraderie between not only natives of the city, but visitors from across the nation. Many of the "veterans", as they became known, traveled to the country's farthest extents in a successful effort to establish a functional nationstate with a barren capital. Improbably, the west, south, and east walls remained standing. Perhaps in an effort to "start fresh", they too were pulled down and their materials used to construct the Ziggurat, the structure that serves as Zwangzug's seat of government. As the government has increased in bureaucratic responsibility, the ghost town has slowly expanded.