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istanbul —
It was a prison, a fortress, an imperial treasure, and a ruined ruin. For hundreds of years, Istanbul’s dark citadel has survived empire and neglect alike. And now, after a major rebirth, its deepest secrets are being revealed.
However, despite being one of Istanbul’s most historically significant landmarks, Yedikle Hisari, also known as the “Fortress of the Seven Towers,” receives only a fraction of the visitors of other tourist attractions such as Topkapi Palace and the Basilica Cistern.
That’s slowly starting to change, thanks to a multi-phase restoration project that began in 2020.
Idikuru’s history begins 1,700 years ago, when Emperor Constantine the Great declared the city, then known as Byzantium, the new capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and renamed the settlement Constantinople in his honor.
The 4th-century walls of Constantinople were one of the most elaborate and successful defense systems ever built in the world, and the part that borders the Sea of Marmara still stands today in Yedikle.
The Porta Aurora, or Golden Gate, is built on the western wall of the fortress. This is a 39-foot-tall triple triumphal arch made of Proconnesian marble with towers on each side and was the ceremonial gate through which Byzantine emperors departed on expeditions and (sometimes) returned in triumph.
Statues of four gigantic elephants pulling chariots once overlooked the imposing gilded doors while decorated with bronze statues of Emperor Theodosius and the goddess Nike.
Nowadays, the gates are covered with bricks and it is easier to enter through the walls than in the past, when the military had to surround it.
An entrance fee of 400 Lire (about $8) gives you access to the star-shaped fortress and its vast central courtyard.
This garden is often used as a concert venue and an open-air movie theater, but there is no hustle and bustle of tourists enjoying music or movies, and the space is quite deserted.
It takes a little imagination to see what the city looked like after Ottoman ruler Sultan Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1458, when he commissioned a fortress built on the walls of the Old City.
Tour guide Turan Ofraz said it was a “vibrant center of life” for four centuries, with large barracks, a mosque, a well, two Christian chapels and a school.
In the 19th century, Aslanhane (Lion House) was also built for the big cats that were kept at Topkapi Palace, the seat of the Sultan and the Imperial Family.
Today, no sign of the chapel, school, or lion can be found. The minaret of the 15th-century mosque remains, incorporated into the new structure, and only a stone path across the space remains.
This path not only divides the courtyard, but also divides the time.
“The path we walked from the entrance gate of the fortress to the mosque has remnants of the Ottoman Empire from 600 years ago,” says Ofraz, but the road beyond the mosque is “a Roman road from 1,600 years ago, and Yedikul is a “shared heritage” of two great empires.”
Historian Heyli Fehmi Yilmaz said: “It is unclear whether the Golden Gate was built by Theodosius I at the end of the 4th century or by Theodosius II around the middle of the 5th century.” However, it was undoubtedly his grandson, Emperor Theodosius II, who added a triple wall with four towers and a moat, a renovation that made Constantinople invincible from enemy attack for hundreds of years.
Sultan Mehmed II added three new towers and walls to the fortress, enclosing the space. “This structure is formed by combining Byzantine and Ottoman walls, representing both civilizations as a whole,” Yilmaz said.
Although called fortresses, they were built to protect the wealth of the empire.
Sultan Mehmed II used Yedikle “as a strategic center where the imperial treasury and important state archives were kept. In this respect, the fortress served as the Ottoman Empire’s ‘central bank’ and its most secure repository,” says Ofraz.
Some sources claim that each tower contained a specific treasure, while others suggest that they were all locked away in the Treasury Tower. The approximately 10-foot-thick walls were guarded 24/7 by the Sultan’s infantry, the Janissaries, making them ideal for storage.
Yilmaz said it contained valuable objects brought to Constantinople from campaigns in Persia, Syria, and Egypt, including “precious swords, shields, bows, quivers, and all kinds of instruments of war,” as well as “horse saddles and harness, and valuable books and bindings.”
In the 16th century, the treasury was moved to Topkapi Palace, and Yedikul then became a prison. The tower housed, within its tight, impenetrable walls, a veritable United Nations, made up of nobles and ambassadors from not only Turkey but also Poland, Russia, France, Hungary, and other countries.
Kitaveri Qureshi, the Tower of Inscription, is located directly opposite the Golden Gate.
Despite its romantic-sounding name, the prison allowed inmates to languish for months in small, near-dark rooms, awaiting release or death.
It housed Christians and other foreigners, including the consul, the Ottoman-appointed duke of Samos, Venetians, Armenians, and even Russians, including Ambassador Pyotr Andreevich Tolstoy, an ancestor of the famous Leo.
They left “inscriptions carved on stone walls” and made Kitaveri Qureshi “virtually a center of diplomatic memory,” Ofras said. The inscriptions are written in Latin, Hungarian, French, Italian and many other languages and “usually include the prisoner’s name, place of birth, date of imprisonment and, in some cases, their dissatisfaction with life,” Oflers added.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, many of the prisoners were Hungarians and Poles. At the time, the Kingdoms of Poland and Hungary were the Ottoman Empire’s most powerful and strategic rivals, and numerous battles were fought across their borders.
Enemy prisoners were taken to Istanbul and imprisoned in Yedikul, where they became “powerful political pawns in diplomatic negotiations” and were used “to protect national interests by protecting military secrets and, if necessary, returning them at a high ransom,” Ofras said.
Essentially, they were diplomatic bargaining chips.
A dark past and a bloody well
While some prisoners returned safely, others met a gruesome end within the walls of the fortress.
One of the most notable victims was David Komnenos, the last king of Trebizond (now Trabzon in northeastern Turkey). After the Black Sea stronghold fell to Mehmed II in 1461, the king was “captured and exiled with his family to the Balkans. In 1463, he was summoned to Istanbul on suspicion of conspiracy with foreign allies,” Yilmaz said. Once there, he was executed along with his three sons and other relatives. “It is said that with this execution the last known members of the Byzantine dynasty died, and they were buried in the moat in front of the city walls,” Yilmaz explains.
An even more tragic case was that of Prince Constantin Brancoveanu of Wallachia (present-day Romania). He successfully weathered changing alliances between various factions for a long time until Sultan Ahmed III questioned his loyalty. Brancoveanu and his family were taken to Yedikul in 1714, where they were tortured. Because they refused to recant and convert to Islam, the prince and his four sons were beheaded and their bodies thrown into the Sea of Marmara.
According to popular mythology, there is a well in Yedikul that is connected to the sea by a secret passage. According to the story, this is where the heads of murdered prisoners were thrown to be washed away by the tide. Known as Kanlu Kuyu (Blood Well), many believe it was inside the Tower of Inscriptions, but Yilmaz claims that “its location is unknown. There is no well inside the Tower of Inscriptions.” However, there is “a magnificent well dating back to the 15th century in front of the Treasury Tower” and “another well near the Golden Gate, where most of the Muslim prisoners were kept”.
This is where Ofraz believes the well was located in the southernmost tower next to the Golden Gate, a structure now known as General Osman Kure. It is named after Osman II, Genç, or “young” Osman. He was only 14 years old when he took over the empire in 1618, making him one of the youngest sultans of the Ottoman Empire. Three years into his rule, he led an unsuccessful campaign against Poland and accused the Janissaries of becoming more focused on independence rather than following orders and protecting the safety of their rulers.
Osman was determined to bring the Janissaries back under his control. When the Janissaries found out, he was expelled and then briefly detained in Yedikul before, in Ofras’s words, tragically “martyred in his cell in an event known in history as the ‘Young Ottoman Incident’.” Ironically, one of the young Ottoman assassins, Grand Vizier Kara Davud Pasha, was himself executed in Yedikul after he lost power.
Not all those detained in Idikul met the same tragic fate. Many foreign prisoners had considerable freedom, Yilmaz said, and were “able to move freely within the fortress and even stay in surrounding houses.”
Some, like François Poucqueville, roamed the city and traveled north across the Bosphorus to the Black Sea. Pucqueville was one of Napoleon’s emissaries and was eventually imprisoned in Iedicle from 1799 to 1801.
Ofraz said that he “not only survived nearly two years of imprisonment in Yedicle, but also turned this period into a period of immense intellectual growth”, devoting his days to correspondence with his compatriots and literary work in France. “As a doctor, he undertook the treatment of soldiers in the fortress,” says Ofras, who taught himself the local language and “Ottoman Turkish,” and “thanks to his contacts with the Greeks in Istanbul, he also perfected his knowledge of modern Greek.”
By the mid-20th century, Yedikul’s dark past was largely forgotten, and it was best known as the site of Yeşilçam, Turkey’s mid-century film boom that was Turkey’s answer to Hollywood. By the mid-1970s, however, both Yeşilçam and the fortress were in decline, gaining a reputation as a garbage dump.
With the restoration, İdiğkül has regained its rightful place as the “Mühül of Istanbul,” says Ofraz. Mühür was a special seal used by the Ottoman sultan to stamp and vouch for correspondence, and for him Yedikul is the signature of Istanbul.
Standing atop the Golden Gate, he declares, “On one side is the hustle and bustle of the modern world, and on the other is the silence that has lasted for 1,500 years. Looking out at Istanbul from here, it’s like breathing in the splendor of Rome, the aesthetics of Byzantium, and the power of the Ottoman Empire all at once.”
