Maiden's Tower

Maiden's Tower occupies a tiny islet at the southern mouth of the Bosphorus, barely 200 metres off the coast of Üsküdar on Istanbul's Asian side. Its origins reach back to 408 BC, when the Athenian general Alcibiades is said to have built a watchtower here to monitor ships arriving from the Black Sea — a strategic chokepoint that any power controlling the Bosphorus needed to watch.

The structure known today has Byzantine roots: in 1110, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos built a wooden tower protected by a stone wall, from which an iron chain stretched to another tower on the European shore, in the Mangana district of Constantinople — a defensive system designed to close the strait to hostile vessels.

During the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the tower held a Byzantine garrison commanded by the Venetian Gabriele Trevisano. It was destroyed in the siege and rebuilt on the order of Sultan Mehmed II, going on to serve successive functions — lighthouse, quarantine station, and military outpost — throughout the Ottoman era.

The tower is famous for two legends that give it its two names. The first, the "maiden's legend" behind its Turkish name Kız Kulesi, tells of an emperor who had the tower built to protect his daughter from a prophecy that she would die from a snakebite; on her 18th birthday, an asp hidden in a basket of exotic fruit bit her anyway, fulfilling the oracle. The second legend, of Greek origin, gives the tower its alternate English name, Leander's Tower: according to the myth of Hero and Leander, Hero was a priestess of Aphrodite living in a tower at Sestos on the Hellespont; one stormy night, Leander drowned swimming to visit her, and Hero threw herself from the tower in grief.

Today the tower operates as a museum and café, and is one of Istanbul's most photographed landmarks, visible from both shores of the Bosphorus.