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The Byzantine Empire was the Roman Empire—this isn't just an opinion but a historical fact. The Byzantine emperors maintained Roman law, institutions, and traditions, and they called themselves 'Romans.' The term 'Byzantine Empire' was a later Western invention.

The debate over its identity today is influenced by historical tensions, particularly between the Orthodox East and Catholic West. Events like the Fourth Crusade (1204) illustrate this divide. Instead of aiding their fellow Christians, Western Crusaders sacked Constantinople, looting churches and homes, slaughtering civilians, and desecrating holy sites. They even replaced the Orthodox Byzantine government with the Catholic-led Latin Empire (1204–1261). This betrayal weakened Byzantium and contributed to its eventual fall to the Ottomans in 1453.

This tragic history reflects how political and religious divisions undermined the Byzantine Empire, and seeing this still continue in these kind of debates is awful.

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Beautiful churches! I think the “Byzantine empire” was a Roman state through and through, his inhabitants called it Rhōmania, a vernacular Romaika (medieval Greek) term, meaning “the land of the romans”. Of course it changed through times in most aspects, first and foremost, it declined from a universal empire capable of projecting his power throughout a third of the known world, to a regional power, on the brink of collapse in the VII century, during the Arab invasions; with that being said, changes and shifts don’t make for a new state, Rome was born from the union of three tribes as a little city state, it dominated first Italy, then the whole oecumene. The ethnic and cultural narrative of Byzantium being “Greek” does not stand, Greek identity, and identities in general, are social constructs, most of Greece population didn’t call themselves Greek until Filiki Eteria brought back the term “Hellene” from certain death (it was only briefly a ethnic term, for all late antiquity and medieval times it meant pagan in the lands of the empire).
Unfortunately Istanbul has a lot to offer from that time period, but populist and nationalist Turkic narratives from Erdogan and his party preclude any possibility of true reconciliation and recognition of the Roman glorious past of Asia Minor and Istanbul. I’m Italian, we had a lot of mosques turned churches during the Norman invasion of Sicily, and it was wrong then; turning museums/churches into mosques is equally deplorable, if not worst, considering the society we live in today, secular, that is.

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