This is a big undertaking: the musical history of a city, not just any city but one of the world's greatest — Istanbul, where continents kiss and cultures mingle. DÜNYA are a Boston-based musicians' collective and here they link up with the Schola Cantorum and Ensemble Trinitas to present a thousand years of the music that has been heard in this city where Europe and Asia meet. The driving force behind DÜNYA is Mehmet Ali Sanlikol, who came to the USA years ago to study classic music and ended up playing jazz (although there's not much evidence of that here). Sanlikol's interest in his native Turkish musical heritage came surprisingly late but he appears to have made up for lost time and now is an acknowledged expert on the genre commonly known as Janissary music or Mehter.

Istanbul started out as Byzantium, headquarters of the Eastern Orthodox Church and this Grammy-nominated collection kicks off with choral work of the Byzantine Greek Orthodox tradition before running more or less chronologically through the musical styles of the many and various occupants of this great city. The musical journey takes in millennium-old Crusader ballads, Central Asian folk tunes, Ottoman melodies and Jewish and Armenian compositions along the way, ending up with Sufi chants and even full-on saz-driven Turkish pop. Things start to sound more like what one might traditionally think of as Turkish by the 15th century, especially when we reach "Ceng-i Harbi", the last track on Disc 1.

By Disc 2 we are definitely in "Istanbul, not Constantinople" territory, with busy, complex Anatolian tunes that have a hint of Klezmer about them. Although this is not a dry or academic anthology by any means, there is an awful lot to take in and this double CD set is the sort of thing that repays repeated listening. This is music to savor and return to as the mood dictates — to listen to attentively or perhaps use as a background to reading something by Orhan Pamuk.