Yedikule Fortress is the stretch of İstanbul's land walls that became a fortress in its own right after the conquest of the city. Mehmed II had new towers added to the walls that Theodosius II had raised in the fifth century, as Fatih Municipality, which looks after the site, explains. The three new towers went up in the late 1450s; together with four older Byzantine ones they made the seven towers, yedi kule, that give the place its name, and new curtain walls linked them into an enclosure that housed a garrison. One of the seven rises above the Golden Gate and is the soundest of them all.
The Golden Gate was the ceremonial entrance to Constantinople. It stood where the Via Egnatia, the road from Thrace, reached the walls; inside, the way continued as the Mese, the city's main street, to the Augustaion square in front of Hagia Sophia, and emperors entering at the head of a triumph came through here. The gate is named after the gilded door leaves fitted after a victory in 425, and statues once stood above it, among them a Nike and a chariot drawn by elephants. The Byzantines had already fortified the ground behind it: a five-towered stronghold was begun under John I and finished under Manuel I, wrecked when the city fell in 1204 and rebuilt in 1350, and in 1391 Sultan Bayezid I forced John V to tear it down by threatening his son Manuel, then a captive of the Ottomans.
Under Ottoman rule the fortress had many uses, above all as a prison and as the home of the imperial treasury, the Hazine-i Hümayun. The treasury was kept in one of the towers until Murad III had it moved to the palace. Two towers were dungeons for state prisoners, and fires later damaged their wooden floors. The best-remembered event here is the killing of the young sultan Osman II by the Janissaries in 1622; the tower that carries his name, the Genç Osman Tower, takes it from the room on its second floor where he died.
Yedikule was given museum status in 1895 and kept that role under the Republic, but for safety reasons it was partly closed to visitors in 2004 and shut completely in 2013. In 2020 it was assigned to Fatih Municipality, which started restoration on approved projects under the eye of a scientific committee. The rubble dumped inside during the years of neglect was cleared and new footpaths laid out, and excavations run under museum supervision brought to light original stone paving from the Roman and Ottoman periods and the foundations of the Fatih Mescidi. Walls needing urgent structural attention were shored up and repaired, as was the mescid's minaret.
Fatih Municipality describes Yedikule as the first restoration site in Türkiye that the public could walk around while work was under way, with guided visits from the very beginning. The fortress is also the fourth stage of the municipality's Karasurları Millet Bahçesi along the walls: about 16,000 square metres of ground inside it, long out of use, were opened as an open-air museum and event space, with a stage, exhibition areas and greenery in a project area of 30,000 square metres. Workshops, publications, a biennial, exhibitions and concerts have been organised here, and the municipality points out that its open ground, one of the widest on the historic peninsula, could meet a real public need after a natural disaster.
