The Galata Tower is the round stone tower with a conical roof on the hill of Beyoğlu, north of the Golden Horn, standing 62.59 metres to its tip. The Genoese built it in 1348, and for six centuries it was a working building: watchtower, prison, observatory, fire lookout and signal station. Since 2020 it has been a museum, and most visitors come for its eighth floor, a terrace that takes in the old city, the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus at once. Below it the streets drop to Karaköy and the Galata Bridge, and above it İstiklal Avenue begins at Tünel.
A Genoese tower rebuilt many times
The Genoese held Pera from 1267. Between 1335 and 1349 they pushed their quarter up the slope and closed it with walls, ditches and bastions, and the tower, begun in 1348, crowned that circuit. A cross on its cone gave it its Latin names, Christea Turris and Turris Sancte Crucis. According to the ministry, a watch and light tower may already have stood in the area around AD 500, though nothing of it can be seen. In 1453 the Genoese handed Pera over without fighting, and Mehmed II ordered the damaged defences repaired.
After that the tower was rebuilt about once a century. The earthquake of 1509 toppled the tower down to 13.20 metres, and Murad bin Hayrettin, architect to Bayezid II, raised it again. Under Süleyman it held prisoners; under Murad III it briefly served as an observatory; under Murad IV, the story goes, Hezârfen Ahmed Çelebi flew from it across to Üsküdar. From 1717 a great drum was beaten here when fire broke out in the city. Fire took the wooden cone in 1794; after a second fire in 1831, Mahmud II cut the tower back to 32.60 metres and added a viewing floor of fourteen arches in the Empire style. A storm tore off the cone in 1875.
Fire watchers and naval signallers used the tower until 1964, when rotten timber and cracked arches closed it. Work between 1964 and 1967 reopened it for visitors, with a roof close to its nineteenth-century shape. It joined UNESCO's Tentative List in 2013, came under the General Directorate of Foundations in 2019, and became a museum after the 2020 restoration, which kept to the inside because swifts nest on the walls from May to August.
Inside the Galata Tower museum
Counting a basement and a mezzanine, the tower has eleven floors. A lift goes from the ground floor to the sixth, and steel stairs carry on to the eighth. The ground floor is for tickets and security, the first for the shop. The next three hold the permanent displays: an animation of Hezârfen's flight with material on the astronomer Takiyüddin, photographs from the War of Independence, and the history of the tower and the Galata walls. The seventh floor has temporary exhibitions, telescopes at the windows and a city model.
Up the hill: the Mevlevi lodge, Tünel and İstiklal
A short walk uphill, at Galip Dede Caddesi No 15 by Tünel, is the Galata Mevlevi Lodge, founded in 1491. The poet Şeyh Galib led it from 1791, and it reached its present form between 1851 and 1859 under Abdülmecid. The exhibits fill the semahane, the hall of the whirling ceremony, with the dervish cells below and calligraphy and instruments in the galleries; the grounds hold the Hamusan burial ground and the tombs of Halet Efendi and Şeyh Galib.
İstiklal Avenue grew out of a lane that once climbed north from a gate near the Galata Tower. It runs 1.4 kilometres from Tünel to Taksim Square, car-free, with a historic tram. At Galatasaray, halfway along, is the lycée, which began teaching on 1 September 1868 as Mekteb-i Sultanî; along the way are the Çiçek Pasajı, the neo-Gothic St. Antoine and Santa Maria Draperis. In nearby Tepebaşı, the Pera Museum fills the former Bristol Hotel of 1893 with Kütahya tiles, Orientalist paintings and old Anatolian weights and measures, and room 101 of the Pera Palace, where Atatürk stayed, is kept as a museum. At Şişhane, beside the Neve Shalom Synagogue, the Museum of Turkish Jews tells the history of the Jews of Anatolia from the fourth century BC.
Down the hill: Karaköy, the bridge and Tophane
In Karaköy, on Bankalar Caddesi, the building that was the Ottoman Bank's headquarters between 1892 and 1999 is now Salt Galata, and the Ottoman Bank Museum sits in its old strongrooms. From Karaköy the Galata Bridge, 490 metres long with tram lines down its middle, crosses the Golden Horn to Eminönü, Yeni Cami and the Mısır Çarşısı. The first bridge here was a wooden one of 1845; the pontoon bridge that served from 1912 burned on 16 May 1992, and the present one was completed in December 1994.
On the Karaköy waterfront, İstanbul Modern reopened on 4 May 2023 in a building by Renzo Piano Building Workshop on the site of its first home, Warehouse No. 4. Close by in Tophane, Antrepo 5, a Sedad Hakkı Eldem warehouse, is home to İRHM, the painting and sculpture museum founded in 1937. The Kılıç Ali Paşa mosque at Tophane, completed in 1580 and attributed to Sinan, plays on the plan of Hagia Sophia, with İznik tiles round the mihrab and the admiral's tomb behind it. Nearby on Amerikan Pazarı Sokak stands the Tophane clock tower, raised for Abdülmecid, one storey of which lay under the earth until Galataport's construction uncovered it.
