Ahmed Remzi Akyürek (1872-1944), who wrote under the pen name Remzî, was one of the last representatives of the Mevlevi poets trained in the divan tradition and the last sheikh of the Üsküdar Mevlevi lodge. Born in Kayseri, he died there again after a life spent between Konya, Kastamonu, Aleppo, Damascus and Istanbul. He was not from Amasya and never held office there. What ties him to the city is a one-day visit in the autumn of 1936, the ghazal titled "Amasya İçin" (For Amasya) that he sent by letter after that visit to the Amasya poet Ahmed Emrî Yetkin, and the poems of his that Emrî copied into a commonplace book kept in Amasya. Because the link rests on a single poem and a friendship, his life is treated briefly on this page and the weight falls on his relationship with Amasya.

His Life

Remzî was the son of Süleyman Atâullah Efendi, sheikh of the Kayseri Mevlevi lodge, and was born inside the lodge itself. The family descended from Seyyid Süleyman Türâbî, spiritual guide of Mehmed Said Hemdem Çelebi, head of the Mevlânâ lodge in Konya. After completing the neighbourhood school and the rüşdiye (middle school), he studied Arabic, Persian and literature with teachers and poets of Kayseri, his father foremost among them. In 1892 he went to Istanbul and, while working at the Divân-ı Muhâsebât (audit office), became a disciple of Celâleddin Efendi, sheikh of the Yenikapı Mevlevi lodge, and completed his training in the semâ. Returning to Kayseri a year later, he became teacher of ethics and religious sciences at the Kayseri İdâdîsi (secondary school), while also teaching Persian, the Gulistan, the Bustan and the Masnavi in madrasas.

After the Second Constitutional Period began he taught the Masnavi to the Çelebi family in Konya and was sent to the Ergûniye Mevlevi lodge in Kütahya as deputy sheikh. In 1909 he became sheikh of the Kastamonu lodge and in 1913 of the Aleppo lodge. During the First World War he joined the Mevlevi battalion bound for the Palestine front and went with it to Damascus and Medina. When Aleppo was occupied in 1919 he returned to Istanbul and was appointed sheikh of the Üsküdar Mevlevi lodge. After the dervish lodges were closed in 1925 he became an official at the Hacı Selim Ağa Library in Üsküdar, where for more than ten years he classified the books and compiled their catalogues. The sources give different dates for his departure from the library: according to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi he resigned on 1 February 1937 and went to Ankara, where he served as adviser at the Library of Antiquities; Yakup Şafak, by contrast, writes that he was appointed to the library in August 1927 and worked there until 1941. He died in Kayseri on 6 November 1944 and was buried in the tomb (türbe) of Seyyid Burhâneddin Tirmizî.

His religious and mystical poems in aruz and syllabic metre were published in periodicals such as Hazîne-i Fünûn, Mahfil and Tarih ve Edebiyat. He had part of his poetry printed in Kastamonu under the title Bergüzâr (1329). To teach Persian he prepared a grammar in verse, Manzum Kavâid-i Fârisî, and a verse dictionary, Tuhfe-i Remzî; he wrote verse hagiographies of Seyyid Burhâneddin and of Zeynelâbidin of Kayseri and an eighty-couplet account of a journey to Karaman, and he translated Vâhidî's Gül ü Bülbül as Gülzâr-ı Aşk. A small Persian divan remains in manuscript. His Turkish poems were collected by Hasibe Mazıoğlu in Ahmet Remzi Akyürek ve Şiirleri (Ankara 1987).

Remzî's relationship with Amasya ran through the poet and teacher Ahmed Emrî Yetkin (1886-1974), son of Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi, mufti of Amasya. A remark Emrî made in a letter to Feridun Nâfiz Uzluk in 1947, while listing the Mevlevi elders he had known, shows the nature of the relationship:

Remzi Efendi merhum ile musâhabem ve muhâberem var idi.

In English: I had conversation and correspondence with the late Remzi Efendi.

The most concrete trace of this correspondence is an 83-folio poetry anthology registered as no. 1645 in the Amasya Beyazıt Library. In the records of the library and of the Turkish Manuscripts Institution the work is wrongly attributed to Ahmed Remzi Akyürek. On the evidence of the handwriting and the content of the notes, Yakup Şafak has shown that the anthology belonged to Emrî, and suggested that the misattribution may have arisen from the large number of Remzî's poems it contains. According to Şafak's list the anthology holds nearly twenty of Remzî's poems. Among them are a nazire (response poem) to a ghazal by his Kayseri friend Gâlib Efendi, a "joint" ghazal composed together with Gâlib, a tazmin on a syllabic poem by Nâzım Paşa, a taştir of Âşık Ömer's ghazal with the refrain "dokunma", and a ghazal written while he was an official at the Hacı Selim Ağa Library. At the end of some of them Emrî noted the book from which he had taken the poem.

Two notes in the anthology document Remzî's visit to Amasya. One of them is written beneath a ghazal by Remzî on folio 81b:

Ahmed Remzi Efendi, damadı Çorum Sıhhiye Müdürü ile birlikte 4 Teşrîn-i Evvel 36 Pazar günü Amasya'ya geldi. O akşam Mevlevî şeyhi mahdûmu Celâl Bey'in hanesinde misafir oldu ve ertesi günü sabahtan Yüzbeyi Köyü'ne gitti ve geldikten sonra Çorum'a gitti.

In English: Ahmed Remzi Efendi came to Amasya on Sunday, 4 October 1936, together with his son-in-law, the Director of Health of Çorum. That evening he was the guest of Celâl Bey, son of the Mevlevi sheikh, at his house; the next morning he went to the village of Yüzbeyi, and after returning he went on to Çorum.

The Mevlevi sheikh mentioned in the note is, according to the source cited by Şafak, Seyyid Mehmed Cemâleddin Dede, the last sheikh of the Amasya Mevlevi lodge. That a former Mevlevi sheikh should be received in Amasya at the house of another Mevlevi family eleven years after the closure of the lodges can be read as a small detail showing how the ties of the order persisted after the lodges had been shut. The visit was brief, and the note does not say whom Remzî met in the city or whether he saw Emrî in person on this occasion.

His Poetry

Remzî's only known poem concerning Amasya is the eight-couplet ghazal "Amasya İçin", which he sent from Üsküdar to Emrî Efendi. The full text was published by Mehmet Arslan in his paper collecting divan poems written about cities. According to Şafak it also appears in Emrî's anthology, where a note at the end says the poem was taken from Remzî's letter dated 22 October 1936. The letter, written eighteen days after the visit, fits the opening line, "I saw the city of Amasya just briefly, like a dream." The ghazal praises the city's mosques, the Yeşilırmak, the water wheels on the river, the wooded valley and the apples; the seventh couplet names a governor called "Tal‘at", and the last mentions "Asrî", the pen name of Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn, author of the Amasya Tarihi. Arslan's list also includes poems Remzî wrote for Ankara, Çorum, Havza, Niğde and Üsküdar, which shows that the Amasya ghazal is one example of a kind of city praise he often turned to.

For the other poems in Emrî's anthology Şafak gives only the opening couplets. They have no thematic connection with Amasya, and all of Remzî's Turkish poems are found in Mazıoğlu's edition. The Amasya ghazal is given on a separate page in this category with its original text, a modern rendering and commentary. Detailed notes on the city appear on the page in the Amasya Poems section, and the poems of the Amasya mufti, father of the ghazal's addressee Emrî, in the article Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi: Poet and Works.

Chronology

1872: Born in the Kayseri Mevlevi lodge.

1892: Goes to Istanbul and becomes a disciple of Celâleddin Efendi, sheikh of the Yenikapı Mevlevi lodge.

1909: Becomes sheikh of the Kastamonu Mevlevi lodge.

1913: Appointed head of the Aleppo Mevlevi lodge.

1919: Becomes sheikh of the Üsküdar Mevlevi lodge.

1925: The dervish lodges are closed; Remzî becomes an official at the Hacı Selim Ağa Library in Üsküdar (appointed in August 1927 according to Şafak).

4 October 1936: Comes to Amasya with his son-in-law, stays as the guest of Celâl Bey, goes to the village of Yüzbeyi the next day and then on to Çorum.

22 October 1936: Sends the ghazal "Amasya İçin" to Emrî Efendi with a letter.

6 November 1944: Dies in Kayseri.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Books

Online sources