Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a plan to build a massive canal connecting Turkey's Sea of Marmara to and the Black Sea.
The channel will be an alternative waterway to the Bosphorus, which runs through the center of Istanbul.
Erdogan claims the project is vital to saving Turkey's largest city from the threat of supertankers which use the Bosphorus daily.
But the project risks resurrecting historical international tensions over the control of one of the world's most important strategic and commercial waterways.
That tension has become a new flashpoint between Moscow and Washington as Dorian Jones reports in this second report of a two-part series from Istanbul
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