ISTANBUL (Reuters) - It's not the minarets, the sunsets or the Bosphorous views making Istanbul's April crowds coo with pleasure -- it is the tulips.
With a tulip blooming for almost every one of its 12 million inhabitants the city hopes to remind the world that Turkey was the original home of the flower now more usually associated with clogs, cheese and windmills.
"Istanbul was a city without flowers, now the tulip has returned," Istanbul Mayor Kadir Topbas told Reuters, speaking by a steep bank blanketed by rich red-orange blooms, the result of a massive bulb-planting programme which began three years ago.
"People are hugely excited by them."
Tulips hail originally from eastern Turkey and the steppe of central Asia and were cultivated by the Ottomans, who took the flower to their imperial capital Istanbul, where they adorned the Sultan's palaces and the gardens of the elite. The word "tulip" derives from the Turkish word tulbent, referring to the Sultan's turban headdress, which the flower resembled in shape.
An angry mob uprising in the eighteenth century saw Istanbul's opulent tulip gardens all but disappear, and the city had been largely without beds of the flower ever since.
Today tulips line the Sea of Marmara coast, protrude from concrete islands amid Istanbul's notoriously heavy traffic and nestle in colourful clusters by the city's key tourist sights.
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