After Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently told a newspaper columnist in an interview that he has an undisclosed "crazy project" for Istanbul up his sleeve, Turks have been all atwitter about just what the project might actually be. Some possibilities thrown out were a giant mosque modeled after the classic Ottoman one in the city of Edirne or the creation of a massive park on the current site of Istanbul's Ataturk airport.
A report in the English-language Today's Zaman, though, says it has the real scoop. The "crazy project" is going to be a canal that links the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, which would allow tankers to stop using the crowded Bosphorus strait that cuts through the heart of Istanbul and thus save the city from the potential environmental disaster that a shipping accident might cause.
The article relies on one anonymous source who says that an unnamed Russian company has told Erodgan that it could build the canal (by 2023 and for $10 billion, no less). So it remains to be seen if this is indeed the "crazy project" Erdogan has in mind.
Things, meanwhile, could get even "crazier." According to the article, once the Bosphorus is free of tanker traffic, Erdogan wants to build a stone bridge across the strait, to be named "The Bridge of Civilizations." Full details here.
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