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She’ll turn you to stone—or, okay, maybe she won’t this time, but the power of Medusa still emanates from two giant, snake-covered heads in an underground reservoir in Istanbul. Built in the sixth century by the Byzantine emperor Justinian as a place to store fresh water for his palace and nearby buildings, the reservoir was rediscovered a thousand years later when a scholar named Petrus Gyllius visited what was then Constantinople. He’d heard strange stories of locals drawing up water—and even fish—from their basements, and set out to discover what lurked beneath. In 1545, he found the secret: a gigantic subterranean cistern, beautifully carved and replete with the Medusas pictured above. But the incredible structure wasn’t fit for visitors for some time: during the Ottoman Empire, the cistern contained junk—and corpses.

Medusa was a monster, one of the Gorgon sisters and daughter of Phorkys and Keto, the children of Gaea (Earth) and Oceanus (Ocean). She had the face of an ugly woman with snakes instead of hair; anyone who looked into her eyes was immediately turned to stone. Her sisters were Sthenno and Euryale, but Medusa was the only mortal of the three. She was originally a golden-haired, fair maiden, who, as a priestess of Athena, was devoted to a life of celibacy; however, after being wooed by Poseidon and falling for him, she forgot her vows and married him. For this offence, she was punished by the goddess in a most terrible manner. Each wavy lock of the beautiful hair that had charmed her husband was changed into a venomous snake; her once gentle, love-inspiring eyes turned into blood-shot, furious orbs, which excited fear and disgust in the mind of the onlooker; whilst her former roseate hue and milk-white skin assumed a loathsome greenish tinge.