, Columnist
No Easy Passage For Erdogan’s Canal Plan
The Montreux Convention muddies the waters for a Bosphorus bypass.
What if there’s another way?
Photographer: Kerem Uzel/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is famously fond of mega-projects. Under his leadership, Turkey has built one of the world’s largest airports in Istanbul, the most complicated tunnel under the Bosphorus Strait and one of the biggest suspension bridges linking Asia to Europe. Critics have accused him of padding his own legacy with these grand projects, but they have for the most part been popular with the Turkish public.
None of them has stirred up the controversy that now surrounds Erdogan’s latest oversize undertaking: A manmade canal, entitled Canal Istanbul, running parallel to the Bosphorus between the Marmara Sea and the Black Sea.