Once upon a time, on the site of the Akkerman fortress, there was the Greek city of Tyra, founded in the 6th century BC. e. Archaeologists have discovered numerous streets and buildings, fortress towers and other structures of the ancient city, which gives reason to call Tyra an important trading center of the North-Western Black Sea region. By the way, archaeological excavations are still being carried out on the right side at the entrance to the fortress.During the time of Kievan Rus, the Slavs called this city Belgorod. And in the 14th century, having become part of the Moldavian principality, the construction of the Belgorod-Dniester fortress began on its territory, which lasted about two hundred years. In the 15th century, the fortress became a Turkish possession and was named Akkerman, which means "white stone". The fortress is really built of limestone. The name stuck and has survived to this day.
During the XIV-XV centuries, a fortification was formed around the Akkerman fortress, consisting of: a citadel or a Genoese castle, a northern (garrison), and a southern port yard. The most ancient is the citadel, which, according to scientists, was built in the second half of the 13th century by the Genoese. The citadel is a quadrangle with four corner round towers. Entrance gates were built in the southern defensive wall of the citadel, and wall-mounted residential buildings and a chapel were located in the castle courtyard. Powerful defensive walls with a thickness of 3-5 m and a height of about 15 m ended with merlon battlements.
With open battle galleries, they were combined with five-tiered corner towers topped with merlon battlements and cone-shaped roofs. Slit-like loopholes have been preserved in the towers. Each tower had basements where ammunition was stored, and the upper tiers were used for certain functional purposes. So, in the southwest there was a prison, in the northwest - the treasury, and the southeast was the commandant's. It was in it that in 1789 the commandant of the Turkish garrison handed over the keys to the fortress to Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian commander.
Throughout the history of its existence, the fortress was repeatedly under siege and suffered from attacks by Tatar, Turkish, Cossack and Russian troops.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Akkerman fortress became the property of Russia, and already in the middle of the 19th century it lost its strategic importance.
Among the 24 towers that have survived, there are two towers with which legends are associated: the Pushkin Tower and the Maiden's Tower.
According to ancient legends, the tsarist government sent Alexander Pushkin into exile in the city of Chisinau, where he lived for three years. The poet was exiled for writing poems that gave rise to revolutionary protest. Once, a military historian and lieutenant colonel Ivan Liprandi was traveling to the Akkerman fortress on business, took Pushkin with him for company. The poet, during a three-day stay in the fortress, wrote the famous message “To Ovid”, because it was this area that reminded him of the exile Ovid, who, according to another legend, was exiled to the Greek city of Tyre.
There is another legend that concerns the Maiden's Tower. It is said that the Moldavian master Alexander Dobry had a daughter named Tamara, who was very smart and beautiful. Alexander almost constantly went hiking, and Tamara stayed at home. When the girl grew up, she began to lead a robbery lifestyle. Once Tamara asked her father to allocate money for the construction of a monastery. Alexander allocated money and summoned local residents to build a shrine, while he himself went on a campaign. However, instead of a monastery, Tamara ordered to build a powerful fortress and declared herself an independent queen.Having settled in the fortress, the robbers attacked neighboring towns and villages. When Alexander the Good returned home from the campaign and saw a fortress instead of a monastery and learned about the actions of his daughter, he cursed her. Then the father ordered Tamara to be walled up alive in the walls of the fortress, and since then the tower has been called the "Maiden".