Few would associate today’s Turkey with media freedom. It’s jailed more reporters than any other country for two years running, according to the Committee to Project Journalists. Yet Istanbul is quietly emerging as a hub for media outcasts from across the region. As their war at home has dragged on, some 700,000 Syrian refugees have made themselves at home across Turkey, launching 30 newspapers and a handful of radio stations. A few weeks ago, an Egyptian political group announced the launch of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Rabaa TV in Istanbul. Days later, Gulnara Karimova, the tabloid-friendly, all-but-exiled daughter of Uzbek President Islam Karimov, detailed the silencing of her own media properties in a rare, 5,000-word interview with the Istanbul-based Turkish newspaper Hurriyet.

Perhaps all this shouldn’t come as a surprise: The former Constantinople has been welcoming vocal outsiders for ages. Jonah ben Jacob Ashkenazi, a publisher with roots near Lviv, in what is now Ukraine, launched Istanbul’s first Hebrew printing press in 1711. Years later, Ibrahim Muteferrika, a Protestant from present-day Romania who had converted to Islam and become a palace messenger, launched the city’s first Arabic press after persuading the Grand Mufti to issue a fatwa permitting the printing of books in Arabic, ending a two and a half-century Ottoman ban (violations were initially punishable by death). And in the mid- to late-19th century, Persian intellectuals settled in Istanbul and printed books, newspapers, and pamphlets that were later smuggled back into Iran.

Mustafa Kemal broke with these traditions when he founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Out went Arabic script, the Caliphate, and Ottoman hospitality; in came secularism, media controls, and Turkishness. The new xenophobia—“a Turk’s best friend is another Turk,” one saying goes—led to episodes of violence. By the 1990s, most of the city’s Greeks, Armenians, and Jews had fled, and the number of foreign-language newspapers had fallen from close to 300 in the 19th century to just a handful.

But the neo-Ottoman foreign policy of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) aims to resurrect that old Constantinople sense of welcome, leveraging the country’s demographic and economic strength to spearhead a regional revival. “We will continue to guide the winds of change in the Middle East and be its leader,” Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told Turkey’s parliament in April 2012.

That hasn’t exactly come to pass. In the lead-up to local elections in March, the ruling party has been seized by one crisis after another. Protests against creeping authoritarianism, originating in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, swept the country earlier this year. More recently, a massive corruption investigation has precipitated the resignation of three key government ministers and sparked calls for the government to step down, after nearly a dozen years in power.