Galata Tower: The Genoese Tower of Christ
Why is it significant?
Walk into the little square and turn slowly around the base of the tower. The stone walls are several metres thick, the windows are narrow slits, and the pointed cone on top seems to float above the rooftops of Galata. The Genoese built it in 1348 and called it the Tower of Christ.
Key Facts
| Place | Galata Tower: The Genoese Tower of Christ |
|---|---|
| Address | Bereketzade, Galata Kulesi, 34421 Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.02560, 28.97420 |
| Part of Walk | Across the Golden Horn: Hidden Galata and Pera, Istanbul |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the little square and turn slowly around the base of the tower. The stone walls are several metres thick, the windows are narrow slits, and the pointed cone on top seems to float above the rooftops of Galata.
The Genoese built it in 1348 and called it the Tower of Christ. It was the highest point of the walls of their colony, a self-governing trading town that the Byzantine emperors had granted them in the thirteenth century. Galata had its own walls, its own podestà sent from Genoa, and a fleet that sometimes fought the emperor whose city lay across the water. Allies, rivals, neighbours... it was complicated.
In 1453, while Constantinople fell, Galata surrendered by treaty, and the Genoese kept their homes and churches in exchange for loyalty to the sultan. The Ottomans used the tower for many things over the centuries: a lookout, a store, at times a prison, and above all a fire watchtower, from which guards scanned the wooden city and raised the alarm. The pointed cap you see today dates from a restoration in the 1960s.
And then there is the flight. According to the seventeenth-century traveller Evliya Çelebi, a scholar called Hezarfen Ahmed Çelebi strapped on eagle-like wings, jumped from this tower, and glided all the way across the Bosphorus to Üsküdar. The sultan, the story goes, rewarded him with a purse of gold, then sent him into exile, because a man who could fly was too dangerous to keep around. Historians doubt every part of it. Istanbul loves it anyway.
Look at the cafés around the square and the old houses leaning together. This was the heart of a Latin Catholic town for nearly two hundred years before the conquest, and its alleys still follow the medieval plan. Now leave the square by the street running uphill to the north-east, Serdar-ı Ekrem, and look out for a steep-roofed Gothic church that seems to have been lifted out of an English village.