The name Byzantium may derive from that of Byzas, leader of the Megaran Greeks who captured the peninsula from pastoral Thracian tribes and built the city.

The origins of Byzantium are shrouded in legend.

The traditional legend has it that Byzas from Megara (a town near Athens), founded Byzantium in 667 BCE, when he sailed northeast across the Aegean Sea.

Byzas had consulted the Oracle at Delphi to ask where to make his new city.

The Oracle told him to find it "opposite the blind."

At the time, he did not know what this meant.

But when he came upon the Bosporus he understood: on the opposite eastern shore on the Asiatic side was a Greek city, Chalcedon, whose founders were said to have overlooked the superior location only three kilometers (1.9 miles) away.

Byzas founded his city here on the European coast and named it Byzantion after himself.

It is mainly a trading city due to its location at the Black Sea's only entrance.

Byzantion will later conquer Chalcedon.