The Maiden's Tower: legend, history and the best sunset view in Istanbul

First structure

Around 410 BC — a customs post credited to the Athenian general Alcibiades

Present tower

Largely 18th–19th century, restored again recently

Past uses

Lighthouse, quarantine station, radio post, customs office

Getting there

Small boats from Salacak (Üsküdar) and Kabataş

Best photo spot

The Salacak promenade on the Asian side, an hour before sunset

Time needed

1 hour including the boat, or 15 minutes to photograph from shore

The legend everybody asks about

An emperor — or a sultan, depending on who is telling it — was warned by a prophecy that his beloved daughter would die of a snakebite on her eighteenth birthday. To outwit fate he had a tower built on a rock offshore, untouched by land, and placed her in it. On her birthday, delighted that the prophecy had failed, he brought her a basket of fruit to celebrate. A viper had travelled in among the grapes.

It is a beautiful, entirely unhistorical story, and Istanbul has been telling it for centuries. There is also a second tradition, borrowed from the Greek myth of Hero and Leander, which is why the tower is sometimes called Leander's Tower in older English sources — although that myth actually belongs to the Dardanelles, a couple of hundred kilometres away.

What actually happened here

Something has stood on this rock for around two and a half thousand years. The Athenian general Alcibiades is credited with placing a customs post here in about 410 BC, to tax ships coming down from the Black Sea — the rock sits at exactly the point where the strait narrows into the Marmara, which makes it a natural toll gate.

The Byzantines fortified it, and at one stage a great chain could be run from the tower to the shore to close the strait to enemy shipping. The Ottomans rebuilt it repeatedly after fires and earthquakes; what you see now is essentially an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century structure, restored again in recent years. It has served as a lighthouse, a quarantine station during a cholera outbreak, a radio post and a customs office, and it now houses a small museum and café.

Visiting the tower

Small boats run out to the tower from Salacak in Üsküdar on the Asian side, and from Kabataş on the European side. The crossing is short. Once there you can visit the interior and stand on the terrace looking straight back at the old city skyline, which is a genuinely lovely thing to do — the tower is one of the few places you can see Istanbul from the middle of the water rather than from a shore.

Ticketing and boat schedules have changed since the recent restoration, and the café is popular, so it is worth checking the current arrangement before committing an afternoon to it.

The best photograph is not from the tower

Here is the tip we give every guest. The finest view of the Maiden's Tower is from the Salacak waterfront promenade in Üsküdar, on the Asian side, about an hour before sunset. The light comes over your shoulder, the tower sits in the middle distance, and the domes and minarets of the old city rise behind it across the water. Fishermen line the railing, families walk, and tea sellers work the benches.

Very few visitors to Istanbul cross to Üsküdar at all, which is precisely why we like taking people there. It costs almost nothing, it takes twenty minutes by ferry, and it is the single best sunset in the city.

Fitting it into a tour

The tower is best combined with a Bosphorus cruise, which passes it closely at the southern end of the strait, or with an afternoon on the Asian side taking in Üsküdar's mosques and market streets. On a private tailor-made Istanbul tour we often finish a day here, because ending on the Salacak promenade as the light goes is a much better last impression of Istanbul than a shopping street.

Maiden's Tower — frequently asked questions