Where the Yeşilırmak divides the city in two, a slender tower rises at the head of the Government Bridge (Hükümet Köprüsü). The clock on it tells Amasya's everyday time, but what is most striking about the tower is that the structure we see today is in fact the second one. The first was built in 1865 by the then governor (mutasarrıf) Ziya Pasha, a well-known poet of Tanzimat literature. It was damaged in a fire the same year, is said by some sources to have been badly hit by the 1938 earthquake, and was demolished in February 1940 during the construction of the new bridge. Sixty-two years later, in 2002, it was rebuilt in keeping with the original. In Amasya the tower preserves the memory of a poet-governor's building programme and of the old layout of the riverside government quarter; a local story tied to the years of the Turkish War of Independence is attached to it as well.

Ziya Pasha and His Governorship of Amasya

The man who commissioned the tower was one of those Ottoman figures who pursued state service and literature together. Born in Istanbul in 1825 (1829 in some sources) as Abdülhamid Ziyâeddin, Ziya Pasha trained in the Chancery of the Grand Vizierate and in 1855 was appointed secretary at the Imperial Household (Mâbeyn-i Hümâyun). In those years he learned French and produced a verse translation of Molière's Tartuffe, the first verse play in translation in Turkish literature. After the death of Mustafa Reşid Pasha he could not get along with the new grand vizier, Âli Pasha, and was removed from the palace; he was posted first to the embassy in Athens, then in 1861 became governor of Cyprus, a post that brought him the title of "pasha". In Cyprus he caught malaria and lost his father and a child.

The governorship of Amasya came after these years, in 1863. Halil İnalcık, reviewing Kenan Akyüz's study based on archival documents, writes that Ziya Pasha's tenure in Amasya lasted two years, 1863-65, after which he was transferred to the governorship of Canik. According to İnalcık's account, the public works the pasha brought to the region included a bridge, a market, a covered bazaar (bedesten), six government buildings, six primary schools, a secondary school, a prison and roads; he also worked to suppress banditry. The clock tower is not named separately in this list. Yet the tower's date, 1865, falls in the last year of the pasha's term in Amasya, so it is one of the last works he left behind before departing the city.

Ziya Pasha's years in Amasya were not easy. The documents İnalcık summarises show that the pasha's real struggle was with the local notables (vücûh) and the ulema. Public works undertaken in the provinces under the Tanzimat administration required money, and since the central treasury could not cover it, the cost was raised through local levies. Ziya Pasha followed this path too, imposing financial burdens on the notables of the region and on the people. Lütfullah, who had served as mufti of Zile for twenty-two years, and Hacı Hasan Ağa of the Zile gentry opposed the practice. The pasha pressed them and the Amasya families, notables and merchants behind them, claiming that their wealth had been acquired by illegitimate means, and went as far as having them jailed. They in turn accused the governor of collecting levies unlawfully and pocketing the money. In the end it was reported to the Sublime Porte that unrest might break out among the people, and Ziya Pasha was transferred to Canik.

İnalcık reads this picture as an example of a wider tension between the centre's administrators and the local notables (âyân) of the provinces. In his view neither side can be called wholly right or wrong: there were governors who carried out useful public works like Ziya Pasha and others who worked for their own interest, and there were notables who protected the people from the abuses of administrators and others who used their influence to rob and dominate them. Of the mufti Lütfullah who opposed him, the pasha had said that he acted "as mufti in form, but in substance as governor, director and judge all at once". İnalcık also notes that traces of this experience can be found in the articles Ziya wrote in 1869 in the newspaper Hürriyet on provincial administration.

The pasha's later years are well known apart from this Amasya experience. Reappointed to Cyprus in April 1867, he went to Europe together with Namık Kemal and published the Young Ottomans' newspaper Hürriyet. He was able to return to Istanbul only after the death of Âli Pasha, took part in the preparations for the constitution, became governor of Adana in 1878 and died there on 17 May 1880. Works such as the Terci-i Bend, the Zafernâme and the three-volume Harâbât anthology are still remembered today. In Amasya his name lives on together with this tower at the head of the bridge.

The Setting: The Government Bridge

The tower stands in the city centre beside the Government (Helkıs) Bridge, right next to the Government House (Hükümet Konağı). The sources describe its position in two ways: some texts give the west side of the bridge, others the north end of the bridge. Both point to the same place; the tower stands at the end of the bridge on the Government House side. The bridge is called Helkıs because it lies close to the Helkıs Gate of the inner fortress, and Hükümet (Government) Bridge because it stands beside the official building.

The first form of the bridge was wooden. Its date of construction is not known with certainty; it is accepted to have been in use since the Roman period, and the Ottomans repaired it and kept it in service for a long time. Governor Talat Öncel had the wooden bridge demolished and a reinforced-concrete bridge built in its place. The sources give this work sometimes as demolition in 1938 and a new bridge in 1940, sometimes under a single date; official presentations tie the tower's demolition to the period when the bridge was being rebuilt in concrete, February 1940. The bridge links the two banks of the Yeşilırmak in the middle of the city, and the tower stands at the end of this crossing.

Clock Towers and the Order of Time in the Provinces

In the Ottoman provinces, clock towers were public structures that became widespread in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their main function was to show the time; they are also recorded as having served as fire-watch and lookout towers. More importantly, they led official bodies to move from the Islamic prayer-based system of reckoning (ezanî saat) to an order based, as in the West, on the mechanical clock and fixed working hours. The prayer-based system, which divided the day by prayer times and shifted daily with sunset, gave way to a conception of time that ran the same for everyone. For this reason clock towers were regarded both as administrative tools and as visible signs of the Tanzimat's ideas of order and modernisation.

The Amasya Clock Tower is one of the provincial examples of this approach. For a governor to build a clock tower beside the government house and the bridge, where administration and the market met, was the most direct way of showing that the state was both orderly and visible. The sources give no detail on why or how the pasha commissioned the tower; its relation to this outlook is an assessment drawn from the general practice of the period.

Fire, Earthquake and Demolition

The tower's story was not calm from the moment it was built. One piece of information is shared by nearly all the sources: the tower was damaged in a fire in the year it was built. The details of the fire, which part was damaged and how it was repaired, are not found in the records. The repaired tower then stood in its place for a long time.

Some sources note that the tower was also badly damaged in the 1938 earthquake. Its end, however, came with a bridge project. In February 1940, in the time of Governor Talat Öncel, the tower was demolished while the adjoining wooden Helkıs Bridge was being rebuilt in reinforced concrete. According to the reason given in local presentations, the tower obstructed the construction of the bridge, and a more modern clock tower was promised in its place. The promise was not kept; the tower was destroyed and Amasya lived for many years without a clock tower of its own. The official presentation mentions the demolition briefly as "during the reconstruction of the adjoining wooden bridge in reinforced concrete"; no source explicitly establishes a link between the earthquake damage and the demolition.

Reconstruction in 2002

For sixty-two years the tower lived on in old photographs and in the memory of the townspeople. One of these images is a photograph in the 1903 Sivas Province Yearbook (Sivas Vilayeti Salnamesi), which shows that the tower appeared in the province's official yearbook in the Ottoman period. The present tower was rebuilt in keeping with its original state and put into service on 18 June 2002 by the Governor of Amasya, Hüseyin Poroy. As described, its building materials are finely dressed cut stone, brick and timber.

Presentations of the tower say that the tower was built "true to the original". The architectural description below, however, belongs to the present structure; for the details of the original tower only old photographs and general descriptions are available.

A model of the Amasya Clock Tower stands in the Clock Towers Witnesses of Time Park (Zamanın Tanığı Saat Kuleleri Parkı) in Safranbolu. The park brings together miniature versions of clock towers from various cities of Turkey; the Amasya tower is part of this selection too.

Architecture

According to the description of the Amasya Museum Directorate, the tower essentially has the appearance of a minaret. The base is square in plan and built of finely dressed cut stone. On the east façade there is a window opening with a semicircular arch, and on the north façade a door with a semicircular arch and two window openings. The cylindrical shaft rising above the base is entirely of brick; it rests on a stepped foot made of sawtooth-patterned brick courses that taper slightly toward the four directions. Thus it is this brick shaft, more than the stone base, that gives the structure its elegant upward-tapering look.

The upper part of the shaft is arranged as a balcony (şerefe) after a cylindrical collar. The underside of the balcony is widened by corbelling out three rows of sawtooth courses alternating with plain brick courses, one above the other and outward, and the parapet is made of thin iron rods set at equal intervals. This arrangement is very close to the building language of minaret balconies and explains why the tower recalls a minaret. Above the balcony rises a two-stage, entirely timber upper section, obtained by chamfering the corners of a square.

On the lower stage of this upper section, a clock with a circular dial faces each main axis. The upper stage has a large semicircular-arched opening facing each direction. The two stages are separated by a moulded cornice, and the structure is covered by a low roof with wide eaves. The meeting of stone, brick and timber in one structure makes the tower an example that joins local building traditions in Anatolia with the Ottoman clock-tower type. Because of its position on the bank of the Yeşilırmak, the river, the bridge and the tower appear together in many photographs; when lit in the evening, the tower is also reflected in the water.

The Clock Tower at the Bedesten

The tower at the bridge is not the only structure that comes to mind when one speaks of a clock tower in Amasya. East of the Bedesten on Gümüş Street in the Hacıyahya quarter stands another clock tower, circular in plan and built of cut stone. In the inventory record of the Culture Portal the structure appears as "Bedesten and Clock Tower"; Köprülü Mehmed Pasha and Ali Rıza Bey are named as its patrons, the date of construction is given as a span, 1660-1883, and it is noted that it was repaired in 1900. Beneath the clock dial there is a section recalling a minaret balcony and an iron parapet. The two dates in the record suggest that the bedesten was built in the seventeenth century and the clock tower added later, but the record does not say so explicitly.

The plural title of Murat Çerkez's article "Amasya Saat Kuleleri" ("Amasya Clock Towers"), published in issue 45 of EKEV Akademi Dergisi, likewise indicates that there is more than one clock tower in the city. What is described here is the tower at the head of the bridge that Ziya Pasha built and that was rebuilt in 2002.

The Flag Incident Story

The Amasya Clock Tower is not remembered in the city merely as a timekeeping structure. According to local tradition, the tower was the scene of an incident in the years of occupation following the Armistice of Mudros. Official presentations relate this story as an event "told from generation to generation like a parable"; what follows should likewise be read less as a documented event than as a story carried by local memory.

According to the story, British units stationed in Merzifon began a series of moves to stir up trouble in Amasya and provoke the people. Two British officers who came from Merzifon, citing the fourth article of the Armistice of Mudros, demanded the release of all the prisoners in the Amasya prison. Governor Sırrı Bey, the prison director and the police commissioner İsmail Efendi would not yield to the demand, and the British were asked to leave Amasya at once. The next day the British returned to the city, headed by a representative named Solter; this time their aim was to arrest Sırrı Bey. Meanwhile a group of British soldiers broke down the door of the clock tower, took down the Turkish flag at the top and raised their own in its place.

When the news spread, a large crowd gathered before the tower. In some versions of the story, Artillery Captain Cevat Bey is reported to have said, "Did we fight on the battlefields for this?" As the crowd neared revolt, the mufti Hacı Tevfik Efendi, the judge (kadı) Ali Himmet Efendi, Hoca Bahaeddin Efendi and the preacher Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi hurried to the square and tried to calm the people. As Ali Himmet Efendi, in tears, was saying that a foreign flag could not fly in the land of a noble nation, a storm suddenly broke; it tore the British flag at the top of the tower to pieces and flung it into the Yeşilırmak. The British soldiers took refuge in the Government House, and the people raised the Turkish flag, brought down from the tower, back into place with the basmala and cries of takbir.

The details of the story have not been verified by documents. The core events, namely the prison demand, Governor Sırrı Bey's resistance and the raising of the flag on the tower, recur in different versions; the storm and the flag being flung into the air belong to popular memory. The date of the story is also unclear in the sources: one compilation gives the year 1919, while the official presentation says only "during the occupation of Anatolia". Even so, that the story lives on in Amasya shows that the tower is for the city more than a clock. It is remembered also as a place connected with the townspeople's memory of resistance in the years of occupation.

The Tower and Its Surroundings Today

Today the tower stands on the walking route in the city centre, beside the Government House and at the head of the Government Bridge. Near the Government Bridge, in front of the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, lies the Magdinus Bridge; this bridge, called Maydanoz or Madenüs among the people, is thought to have been built in 1485 by Fatma Hatun, daughter of the Mevlevi Tacibeyzade Sadi Çelebi, though this has not been proven. Because of its wooden construction, the bridge was destroyed in a flood in 1968, rebuilt with concrete piers and an iron body, and restored in 2011. The Yalıboyu houses and the cafés on the riverbank are also a short walk from the tower, and the tower is a natural stop on this historic route.

Chronology

1825: Ziya Pasha is born in Istanbul (1829 in some sources).

1863-1865: Ziya Pasha is governor of Amasya; he is then transferred to the governorship of Canik.

1865: The Clock Tower is built by Ziya Pasha; it is damaged in a fire the same year.

1903: The tower appears in a photograph in the Sivas Province Yearbook.

1938: According to some sources the tower is badly damaged in an earthquake; Governor Talat Öncel has the wooden Helkıs Bridge demolished.

February 1940: The tower is demolished during the construction of the reinforced-concrete bridge.

18 June 2002: The tower is rebuilt in keeping with the original in the time of Governor Hüseyin Poroy.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Culture Portal: Amasya Saat Kulesi (Amasya Museum Directorate and Promotion General Directorate archive).

Academic studies

  • Amasya Saat Kulesi, Vikipedi (based on Hakkı Acun, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu Saat Kuleleri, Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi, 2011; Meltem Cansever, Türkiye'nin Kültür Mirası 100 Saat Kulesi, İstanbul: NTV Yayınları, 2009; and Murat Çerkez, "Amasya Saat Kuleleri", EKEV Akademi Dergisi, issue 45, 2010). tr.wikipedia.org
  • Halil İnalcık, review of Kenan Akyüz's "Ziya Paşa'nın Amasya Mutasarrıflığı Sırasındaki Olaylar, Belgeler I", Belleten, vol. 30, no. 117, January 1966, pp. 163-164. belleten.gov.tr

Official sources

  • Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Culture Portal: Bedesten ve Saat Kulesi, Cultural Inventory (Amasya).

Other sources

  • Damla Duman, "Magnidus ve Helkıs Köprüleri", Online Türkiye Turizm Ansiklopedisi, 2019. turkiyeturizmansiklopedisi.com
  • Devlet-i Aliyye-i, "Amasya Saat Kulesi" (functions of clock towers and the 2002 reconstruction). devletialiyyei.com
  • İsa Çolaker, "Amasya'nın Sıralı Gelinleri: Köprüler", 2014.

Online sources