Kız Kulesi in Istanbul, the Maiden Tower Restoration That Removed 500 Tonnes of Concrete and Made a Lighthouse a Euro-Priced Museum
In September 2022 a video went round Turkish social media showing a ferry passing the Maiden's Tower, Kız Kulesi, on its rock off Üsküdar. Something was missing. The tower's top had vanished behind scaffolding and sheeting, and thousands of people concluded the government had knocked down one of Istanbul's best-loved landmarks. The culture ministry had to put out a statement: the tower had not been demolished, it was being restored.
It was both. The restoration took out about 500 tonnes of the tower's fabric.
A rock with a long job list
The islet sits a few hundred metres off the Asian shore at the southern mouth of the Bosporus (the strait in numbers). Tradition says the Athenians kept a customs post there in 408 BC. The documented history starts with the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who fortified the rock in 1110. The Ottomans rebuilt it after an earthquake in 1509 and a fire in 1721, and Sultan Mahmud II gave it its present shape in 1832.
Image: pxef.com
It has been a lighthouse, a cholera quarantine station, and from 1964 a radar post watching the strait for NATO. The Turkish legend is of a sultan who locked his daughter on the rock to cheat a prophecy that a snake would kill her, only for the snake to arrive in a basket of fruit. The Western name, Leander's Tower, borrows a Greek myth that really belongs to the Dardanelles.
What came off
The ministry's case was technical. After a fire in the 1940s the upper tower had been rebuilt in reinforced concrete, and engineers found the concrete made with sea sand full of shells, hand-mixed, with columns and beams not tied together and reinforcing bars badly corroded. In an earthquake, they said, it would not hold. About 500 tonnes of it came out. The cap was taken down and rebuilt in masonry, timber and lead to its early 19th-century form, steel braces went inside the old walls, and new piles and wave barriers went in around the rock.
The outcry was not really about the engineering. It came from long experience. Turks have watched restorations under the ministry turn Şile's Ocaklı Ada castle into something people compared to SpongeBob's house, roof İshak Pasha Palace in glass and metal, and fit PVC windows into Mamure Castle. When Kız Kulesi disappeared behind sheeting, people assumed the worst.
Reopened, on new terms
The tower reopened as a museum on 11 May 2023. Culture Minister Nuri Ersoy said at the ceremony that the government was "changing the functionality" of iconic buildings as it restored them, especially in tourist areas. He has said the same about Haydarpaşa station.
The functionality now has a price list. In 2026 foreign visitors pay 27 euros for the museum, plus the boat from Salacak or Karaköy, while Turkish citizens pay a separate, lower rate in lira. Boats run from 9.30 in the morning, the last one back leaves at 17.45, and the weather on the strait cancels them often enough to check before going (ferries and cruises).
The restoration looks right from the water, which is how most people see it. Whether a lighthouse needed to become a euro-priced museum is a different question.