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Istanbul. Between Cross and Crescent Moon
Sezione 1
Sezione 2
Leander's Tower
Mohammed II "the Conqueror". 1460
PLAY ME
This city,
capital of the so-called Eastern Roman Empire,
was in the early 1400s on its way to decline. We Ottomans were stationed outside the gates of Constantinople, ready to launch our final attack. For seven hundred years, the city's church had been separated from the Roman church, and the pope demanded that it give up its independence and submit to the authority of Rome.
Finally, in 1453, Constantinople finally came under our rule! It was a loss of unimaginable gravity for the Holy Roman Church and this wound would never heal... One of the many monuments that already existed at that time was Leander's Tower. "The 'Tower of the Maiden' is my favourite term for this building which for centuries protected the Bosphorus
and lit the way for thousands of sailors. It is located on a tiny island right between the two continents. If you look at it from afar, it seems to exude such charisma that it draws you in. History tells us that the tower was built four hundred years before Christ,
by the Athenian general Alcibiades, to control the traffic of Persian ships in the Bosphorus Strait, but would only be rebuilt as a fortress many years later, at the behest of the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus, in the late Middle Ages. After our conquest of Constantinople, we pulled down the previous tower and replaced it with a new wooden one.
Sezione 3
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