Ova Ceren on the Turkish folklore woven into The Book of Heartbreak
Once, an award-winning Turkish director described Turkey as “my beautiful and lonely country.” I’ve never gotten over that description. Geographically, culturally, and historically between Asia and Europe, that’s exactly what it is. A little lonely. A little heartbroken. Never fully belonging to either continent, often misunderstood, judged for the deeds of the Ottoman Empire, and forever trying to explain it is not a bird but a country — Turkey (or the newly official Turkiye) is simply itself.
Many secular Turks like myself often wonder what might have happened if our ancestors had not adopted Islam. Perhaps an entirely different story would have unfolded. But here we are, twelve centuries and many sultans later, still clutching the scraps of folklore that survived.
You’d be surprised how much has endured in Anatolia, the Asian part of Turkiye. I once lived forty-five minutes from a Temple of Artemis. Gorgeous ruins, zero marketing. Everywhere you go, there are stories: Greek, Byzantine, Roman, Ottoman, Turkic. Not so different from Britain, where every river or rocky hill carries a legend.
I was always drawn to the Maiden’s Tower. This tiny structure, about two hundred metres off the coast of Istanbul, was once a Byzantine watchtower. Battered by earthquakes, renovated many times, yet still standing. The tower and its myth survived the Ottomans.
When I began writing The Book of Heartbreak, I hadn’t planned to weave in the Maiden’s Tower. My heroine, Sare, is cursed to die of heartbreak, and her journey to break the curse takes her to Istanbul. The longer I wrote, the clearer it became that the tower’s story belonged in her fate.
The legend has many versions, but the most popular one is this: a seer foretold the Byzantine emperor’s daughter would die on her eighteenth birthday. Desperate, the Emperor built a tower in the sea, believing Death could not find his daughter there. But Death came anyway, disguised as a serpent in a basket of fruit.
Today the Maiden’s Tower stands in one of the most beautiful spots in Istanbul. Yet imagining a girl locked away inside it, abandoned and alone, I couldn’t help but feel her heartbreak. Sare too is heartbroken, with only one chance to survive. To break her curse, she must look back into history and unearth her family’s past, however uncomfortable.
The past can be painful when you come from a place where history is rewritten and identities relabelled. As one of this summer’s songs says, the winner takes it all, the loser has to fall. History remembers the victors. But myths? Myths are where the forgotten still speak.
The Book of Heartbreak is published by Hot Key Books on 26 August 2025
