The tiny island that sits between Europe and Asia
Istanbul, Turkey (CNN) — The great and ancient city of Istanbul – formerly Constantinople, formerly New Rome, formerly Byzantium – straddles two continents.
The European side extends like a finger across the Bosphorus Strait, almost but not quite touching its Asian counterpart.
The strait is just 700 meters wide at its narrowest point, so the two continents are held permanently just a breath apart, like Adam reaching to God in Michaelangelo’s “Creation of Man.”
In these twinkling blue waters, connecting the small inland Sea of Marmara with the vast waters of the Black Sea, a tiny island of rock has been inhabited nearly as long as the city itself, a crucial outpost between two worlds.
Today it’s known as Kız Kulesi, or Maiden’s Tower, and over the past two-and-a-half millennia it’s served many roles.
Built as a customs checkpoint in 410 BCE, it’s been a defense tower, a castle, a lighthouse, a cholera hospital, a radar station, a cyanide storage facility and a self-declared “republic of poetry” for writers.
For most of those 2,500 or so years, it’s been a “mystery standing in the middle of the Bosphorus,” says Han Tümertekin, one of the architects behind its recent major two-year restoration. It was somewhere the city faced toward, from both Europe and Asia, but could not visit.
In the 21st century, it’s become a tourist attraction where visitors can go to look back at the city. Now, newly reinforced and renovated, the spick-and-span monument-museum reopened to the public once more in March 2024.
Crossroads of the world
The starting point for visitors is bustling Karaköy Pier on the European side. Istanbul was the No. 2 city in the world for international arrivals in 2024, according to data analytics company Euromonitor International, with an estimated 23 million visitors.
A lot of them will end up here on the Golden Horn, milling in and out of seafood restaurants and bars, people-watching as boats sail up and down the glistening waterway, under the celebrated Galata Bridge, with the Rüstem Pasha Mosque commanding the horizon.
“Each year, around 30,000 ships cross the strait,” historian and travel writer Saffet Emre Tonguc, tells CNN Travel. “It’s one of the busiest straits in the world.”
On a sunny Saturday in September, the tourist boat is laden with customers as CNN makes the short and scenic trip over to where Kız Kulesi sits at the southern end of the Bosphorus, just a short distance from the Üsküdar district on the Asian side.
We file off the boat on landing, scale the tower’s new internal staircase one behind the other, and spread out on the viewing platform, cameras in hand, to enjoy this polished piece of history.
Icon of the city
In its first incarnation as a customs point, a tower was built to inspect ships coming from the Black Sea and to collect taxes.
“It’s just standing at the entrance. It’s like the Statue of Liberty,” says Tonguc. “When you enter New York Harbor, you see the Statue of Liberty. And here you see the Maiden Tower.’
“Today, the Black Sea is very important […] because of petrol and natural gas,” says private tour guide Barış Partal. “In the past, it was gold, silver and copper, because the Georgian mountains were full of them — they still are — and the people who came from Greece in the ancient times, they wanted to travel the Bosporus to collect the stuff then come back.”
The Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, where the men must pass through Hellespont landing to stock up on supplies, is closely linked to this, says Partal, though transposed to a different location.
In the 12th century, a defense tower was built on the island during the reign of Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus, and a chain was stretched out to a second tower to control the passage of ships.
After the Ottoman conquest of 1453, Sultan Mehmed II had the wooden tower fortified as a stone castle.
From the late 17th century, after the addition of a lantern on the northern part of the tower, its primary function was as a lighthouse. “It’s not very deep, but the Maiden Tower area is very sharp,” says Partal.
Tower of legend
Some of the tower’s more unusual uses have been as a quarantine hospital during cholera outbreaks in the 1830s, its isolation from the mainland city making it an excellent choice.
For a brief time while it was under Turkey’s Maritime and Port management in the 1980s it served as a storage facility for cyanide.
Shortly after that, in May 1992, the tower was used by poets who declared it a “Republic of Poetry.”
The “pearl of the Bosphorus,” as the tower is sometimes known, has no shortage of its own mythology, however.
The most famous legend is about a king who is warned by a fortune teller that his daughter will die of a snake bite, so he builds the tower to protect her and sends her baskets of food. However, a snake finds its way to the island in a basket of fruit and kills her with its venomous bite. Says Partal, “You cannot escape from your destiny, that is the message.”
Another legend links the tower to Ovid’s Leander, which is why the tower is also sometimes called Leander’s Tower. In this tragic tale, Leander swims there each night to meet his lover, but one fateful night is drowned. Upon learning of his death, she too takes her own life.
There is even a legend that the Maiden’s Tower is in a loving relationship with the Galata Tower, another famed Istanbul structure. “They are a matching couple,” says Tonguc, standing out in the cityscape.
Built to last
The recent restoration is one of many, many changes and fixes to the castle and tower in its long history. It’s been buffeted over the years by earthquakes and fires and even the island on which it stands was reinforced by the addition of large rocks during repairs in the 1940s.
This most recent renovation is both to reinforce the structure and to once again reveal earlier architectural details that were lost during 20th-century makeovers.
After hopping off the boat, wandering around the castle and the viewpoint and the island base, there isn’t a great deal to do at the tower, other than have a snack at the simple on-site cafe. It’s the work of an hour and once everyone hops back on the boat — which returns to Europe rather than the Asian side just beside us — the island is near-deserted until the next boat arrives.
It is, however, a restful break from the hubbub of the city and a unique perspective on this most legendary of cities.
A trip there does not come cheap, as is the case with many of Istanbul’s top attractions. It costs 27 euros for entrance plus an extra five euros for the boat (about $33 in total), unless you have an Istanbul Museum Pass, which starts at a hefty 105 euros ($109).
Tonguc welcomes the restoration as a necessary step to a building that had been falling into disrepair. Istanbul’s historical monuments “were built in such a robust way,” he says, to resist the onslaught of earthquake, floods and fire over the millennia.
“They’re in a great condition because they were built to serve for centuries, not just for a couple of years.”
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