ABSTRACT
The arrival of the German battlecruiser Goeben and light-cruiser Breslau in Constantinople (Istanbul), the capital of neutral Turkey, a few days after the outbreak of war in August 1914, might have passed as a curiosity against the backdrop of the mobilisations and deployments going on elsewhere in Europe at the time – a strategical footnote similar in kind to Graf Spee’s flight to Montevideo 25 years later, in the opening phase of another world war. But it was to prove very much more than that.
