Bosphorus music band was founded by Nikiforos Metaxas in 1986 with the intent to make the voice of Istanbul universally heard as one of the special places where different continents, peoples, religions, cultures and seas cross. The band embodying the most important virtuosos of Turkey is the fruit of a tense team work.  The primary motive for the foundation of the band is to explore the roots of the synthesis between Greek and Turkish music. This synthesis inherited from Byzantine and Persian music systems is paradoxically called today as Turkish Classical Music, while it was historically called as “scholarly music” or “Oriental music.” Notably the Turks and the Greeks, and to a certain extent the Jews and the Armenians living in Istanbul in the past centuries played an important role in the development of this music style.