The Red Tower

The octagonal tower over the harbour went up in 1226, when Sultan Alâeddin Keykubad wanted his shipyard protected. The Aleppo architect Ebu Ali stacked five floors, and the red brick of the upper storeys deepens as the sun drops, which is where the name comes from. Inside it is now the Ethnography Museum. From the top terrace the harbour, the shipyard and the whole bay sit in one frame.

The story starts in 1221. That year Sultan Alâeddin Keykubad took the town, renamed it Alaiye and turned it into a busy harbour where the Seljuk sultans came to spend the winter. The shipyard was the heart of the fleet, and the tower was set right at the mouth of the harbour to close the way in.

Its dimensions tell you what it was for. It stands thirty-three metres on the east face and thirty on the west, with a diameter of twenty-nine metres. The lower part is stone, the upper part red brick, and that brick gave it its name. The inscription even keeps the builder's name: Ebu Ali of Aleppo. Eight hundred years on, it still faces the harbour from the same angle.

Today it is visited as the Ethnography Museum, and as you climb you are walking through the inside of the brick body you saw from the street. The municipality's concert series in historic venues also uses the tower and the shipyard as a stage, and on those evenings a building made for defence becomes a concert hall.

Our city tour stops here for half an hour. Tickets for the tower and the shipyard are not part of the tour price: if you want to go in, you buy one at the door, and if not, the tea gardens at the foot of the walls are a good place to sit and look up at it.

• 1226
• 33 m, octagonal, 5 floors
• Ethnography Museum