City
Sestos
Yalikabat?
Listen to the story
Sestos guarded the narrowest point of the Hellespont on its European shore. Here the Persian king Xerxes bridged the strait in 480 BC, and here, in legend, Leander swam across by night to his beloved Hero. The city lay probably near Yalıkavat in Turkey. On the map only the first two letters of its name can still be read, beside a small drawing of a house, a mark of rank that recalls its former greatness rather than its late Roman decline. The town sits on a peninsula folded the wrong way round, and the red road line to Callipolis was forgotten.