Istanbul Beneath My Wings

The film is set in seventeenth-century Istanbul, in the reign of Murad IV. Hezarfen Ahmed Çelebi, Lagâri Hasan Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi and Bekri Mustafa are four close friends, the first two of them working on the problem of human flight. Francesca, brought to Istanbul aboard a ship seized in the Mediterranean, is the daughter of the killed captain and stays in Hezarfen's household. As the pressure from the city grows, the attempt to fly stops being a curiosity and becomes a challenge. The accounts of Hezarfen flying from the Galata Tower to Üsküdar and of Lagâri going up on gunpowder rest on a single source: Evliya Çelebi's Book of Travels. Historians treat that text as valuable but literary, and neither episode can be confirmed from independent records. Mustafa Altıoklar's film is not reconstructing history but deliberately enlarging the legend; Francesca's link to Leonardo's drawings is entirely invented. It was one of the few large-budget period films made in Turkish cinema in the nineties.