Istanbul is known as the City on the Seven Hills (Turkish: Yedi tepeli şehir). The city has inherited this denomination from Byzantine Constantinople which – consciously following [citation needed]the model of Rome – was built on seven hills too.
The seven hills of Constantinople
The seven hills, all located in the area within the walls, first appeared when the valleys of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus were opened up during the Secondary and Tertiary periods. In the Ottoman Age, as in the earlier Byzantine period, each hill was surmounted by monumental religious buildings (churches under the Byzantines, imperial mosques under the Ottomans).
The fourth hill on which stood the Church of the Holy Apostles and, subsequently, the Fatih Mosque, slopes down rather steeply to the Golden Horn on the north and, rather more gently, to Aksaray on the south.
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On the fifth hill is the Mosque of Sultan Selim. The fifth and the sixth hills are separated by the valley running down on the west to Balat on the shore of the Golden Horn.
The seventh hill, known in Byzantine times as the Xērolophos (Greek: ξηρόλοφος), or "dry hill," it extends from Aksaray to the Theodosian Walls and the Marmara. It is a broad hill with three summits producing a triangle with apices at Topkapı, Aksaray, and Yedikule. It was divided from the rest of the city by the Lycus creek.