Bosphorus

Can a cow give its name to a sea? It hardly sounds plausible; and yet this is exactly how the story of the Bosphorus begins. In Greek mythology, Zeus turns Io, with whom he has fallen in love, into a heifer to hide her from the eyes of jealous Hera. When the gadfly sent by Hera gives her no rest, poor Io flees from land to land and at last swims across this narrow water between Asia and Europe. From that day on, the strait was called Bosporos, “the cow’s crossing”…