Maiden's Tower

A tiny tower on a tiny island in the middle of the Bosphorus, and it has been making people cry for two thousand years. The most famous legend involves a sultan who locked his daughter in the tower to protect her from a prophecy that she would die of a snakebite on her 18th birthday. On the birthday itself, the sultan brought a basket of fruit as a gift, and an asp hidden among the figs struck — the prophecy fulfilled itself through the very act of celebration. It is an ancient story about the futility of trying to escape fate, and Turks have been telling it so long that nobody remembers if it was ever true.

The tower's actual history is only slightly less dramatic. The Athenian general Alcibiades built the first structure here in 408 BC as a customs station for ships passing through the Bosphorus. Byzantine Emperor Alexius Comnenus rebuilt it in 1110 and stretched an iron chain from here to the European shore to block hostile ships. The Ottomans used it as a lighthouse, a quarantine station during cholera outbreaks, and a watchtower.

Sitting 200 meters off the coast of Üsküdar on the Asian side, the tower is also associated with the Greek myth of Hero and Leander — the lovers separated by a strait, with Leander swimming nightly to reach Hero until a storm extinguished her guiding light and he drowned. The tower appeared in the 1999 James Bond film "The World Is Not Enough" as a villain's lair, which is arguably the most dignified use of the building since the Byzantine chain.

After extensive restoration, the tower reopened as a museum and cultural center. The ferry ride to reach it takes just a few minutes, but the view of Istanbul's skyline from the island's tiny terrace — caught between two continents, surrounded by water — is worth every second of the wait.