In the spring of 2011 Turkish Prime-Minister Erdoğan organised a press conference and announced with – even to his standards – exceptional bombast his personal plans for the construction of a second Bosporus channel[1]. Matching complete grandeur with complete insanity, this new channel – 50 kilometres long, 150 meters wide and 25 meters deep – should be completed on the hundredth birthday of the republic in 1923.