The centerpiece of spring in Istanbul is a giant carpet of millions of tulips woven into the city’s iconic Sultanahmet Square – once the Roman-Byzantine hippodrome – that fronts the Blue Mosque.

For more than a millennium, April’s wealth of tulips has heralded the arrival of spring in Turkey (Türkiye). To provide the flowers for this year’s display, the City of Istanbul’s gardeners planted more than 30 million bulbs. Expansive swaths of tulips bring colour and the joys of spring to parks, groves, piazzas and gardens throughout Türkiye’s largest city, whose neighborhoods span Europe and Asia.

Tulips were blooming in Türkiye centuries before they reached western Europe. The tulip bulb originated in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia. Turkish traders brought them to Istanbul in the 10th century AD. By the 12th century, tulips had not only become a symbol of the city, but a central motif in Turkish culture, adorning mosques, palaces, homes, clothing, and Turkish carpets. In the 15th century, trade brought tulips first to Vienna, and then on to Holland, England, and North America.

The Turkish passion for tulips expanded during the reigns of Ottoman emperors Suleiman the Magnificent and Sultan Ahmet III. By the beginning of the 18th century, Turkish agronomists had developed some 2,000 varieties of the flower. And it was then that the varied colours of the flowers developed special meanings: red tulips, of course, symbolized love; white tulips represented purity and innocence; purple blooms denoted nobility and romance; yellow tulips signified hopeless love; and the rare black tulip signaled unattainability and rarity. Most charmingly, striped tulips meant “you have beautiful eyes.”

Istanbul’s mass of tulips is expected to remain in bloom into the first days of May.