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Photo: Nedim Ardoğa, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Substantial fortress occupying an islet 300 m off Kızkalesi village, reached by small boat. It was built in the 12th century, reinforced in the 13th and occupied into Ottoman times. The "maiden" is fictional, a princess supposedly sent here by her father the king to prevent her foretold death by snake-bite. But he sends her a basket laden with grapes and Freudian symbolism, and sure enough a snake hides in the fruit and bites her. This wily reptile must then have escaped, as he pops up in other legends about secluded maidens despoiled by fangs or similar ignoble pricks.
Kızkalesi is an island castle situated on a small island in Mersin Province of Turkey.
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Cennet & Cehennem
Two chasms formed when underground caves collapsed. Go first to Hell 200 m north of the entrance as the walking route doesn't let you return from Heaven. Hell is the smaller, deeper chasm at 120 m and decorated by stalagmites, but there's no access into it, just peer from the glass platform into its green depths. In legend Zeus temporarily imprisoned the monster Typhon in Cehennem, before placing him beneath Mt Etna. Continue to Heaven, which is larger and 70 m deep. You descend by 300 ancient steps into a green Arcadian gully. At its south end is a further descent of 150 steps to the ruins of St Mary's 5th century monastery. You can hear the rushing of an underground stream, but over the centuries pilgrims have choked off its access with plastic trash. If you're lucky the elevator will be working to return you to the entrance, otherwise you have to lump back up the steps.