Yazili Kule: The Yedikule Prison
Entering the fortress through the Northeastern Wall, one need only turn to the immediate left to find the Yazili Kule or "tower of inscriptions," which gets its name from the many inscriptions carved by prisoners - names, dates and other details - during their sentences at the Yedikule prison. Murad III, Emporer of the Ottoman Empire between 1574 and 1595, commanded the treasury at Yedikule be relocated to the Sultan's Palace, the Yedikule Fortress turned into a heavily fortified prison used for all kinds of prisoners, domestic and foreign, including merchants, sailors, and prisoners of war, as well as foreigners whose countries were at at war with the Ottomans. Hostages were held for there possible future use in the Sultan's diplomatic strategy. Francois Pouqueville, a diplomat and member of the Institut de France was imprisoned in Yedikule between 1799 and 1801, and described the Yedikule he knew with "lofty towers filled with fetters, chains and old time weapons, graves, ruins; wells of blood, terrible tortures, vaults cold and hollow, under which there are many texts from Alkoran, shrill cries of owls and vultures mixed with the sounds of sea billows."
During this time, executions were carried out in the Northern two towers on either side of the Golden Gate, the massive entrance to the fort around which most of the fort was built. Most famously, the sixteen-year-old Sultan Osman II was imprisoned for trying to reform the Janissaries in 1622, and executed in the fort. His head was famously tossed in the "bloody well" along with the heads of other executed prisoners. During this time, the walls that had once housed the jewels and secret documents of the Sultan, the most precious items owned by the Ottoman Empire, turned into a virtual torture chamber, housing the state's foreign and domestic enemies, boarding them up and keeping them from threatening the rest of the empire. The move embodies growing anxieties as relations became tense with Russia, and the French during the Napoleonic wars. The fortress transformed from symbol of the sacredness of the Ottoman rule to enforcer of Ottoman rule via torture, execution, and containment of outsiders and threatening insiders, and ushered in a more anxious time for the Ottoman Empire than it had seen since its inception.