Galata Tower

This guide to Istanbul's Galata Tower turns on a claim from the 1630s: that an Ottoman scholar named Hezarfen Ahmet Celebi, who had spent years studying how birds fly, climbed to the tower's top, strapped on a pair of homemade wings, and launched himself into the wind above the Bosphorus. It traces the tower's own long life as a Genoese watchtower, prison and fire lookout, and weighs the single Ottoman chronicler's account against what physicists say about the feat. Sultan Murad IV was watching from below, and what he did next becomes part of the story. Best heard facing the water, toward the far shore Hezarfen was said to be aiming for.