Throughout its history Amasya has been known not only for its walls, its madrasas and its markets but also for its dervish lodges, its zawiyas and its dervishes. In this city, built on both banks of the Yeşilırmak, the Sufi orders did not simply replace one another. From the Seljuk khanqahs to the last years of the Ottoman Empire, different paths lived side by side, sometimes under the same roof and sometimes in the same neighbourhood. Within this variety the Khalwatiyya holds a special place, both because the first Anatolian hearth of the order was lit here and because of the part it played over the centuries in the city's religious, scholarly and political life. Pir İlyas, Habib Karamânî, Şeyh Cui and the Mevlevi lodge are treated in separate articles, so these figures appear here only as far as necessary; the subject is the general history of the orders in Amasya, their chains of transmission and their network of lodges.

The Land of Zawiyas under the Seljuks

The first traces showing that Sufi life in Amasya was vigorous even before the Khalwatiyya go back to the Seljuk age. The sources report that the Seljuk sultans Mesud I and Alaeddin Keykubat I had khanqahs and zawiyas built in the city and appointed sheikhs to the dervish lodge known as the Hankah-ı Mesudiye. The interest these rulers showed in Amasya led the city to be called, for a time, the "land of zawiyas". For the Seljuk sultans, founding a lodge or zawiya was a pious deed, and it was also a way of giving a newly founded or enlarged city a life of learning and spiritual culture.

One of the most violent episodes in the city's Sufi history also belongs to this period. Baba İlyas-ı Horasânî, a Turkmen sheikh who had come to Anatolia fleeing the Mongol pressure, settled, according to the hagiography written by his grandson Elvan Çelebi in 1358-59, in the village of Çat near Amasya. There he opened a zawiya and began to teach a Vefaiyya-style form of Sufism to the semi-nomadic Turkmen communities. In 1240 he left the practical command of his uprising against Sultan Gıyaseddin Keyhusrev II to his deputy Baba İshak. The revolt suffered its first defeat at Amasya, where Baba İlyas, who had taken refuge in Amasya Castle, was captured by Seljuk forces and executed. In the assessment of Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, this movement laid the ground for the later abdalân-ı Rûm circles and for Bektashism. The same author stresses that Baba İlyas did not found an order in his own name but acted as a sheikh of the Vefaiyya. Given the loyalty of the Khalwati sheikhs of Amasya to the Ottoman state, it is striking that the same land should have witnessed two such different Sufi traditions within two centuries.

It is known that in the fourteenth century the Rifaiyya, an order of Iraqi origin, spread in Anatolia in cities such as İzmir, Bergama and Amasya. A lodge belonging to this order was founded in the city in 1433 under the name Darphâneci Tekkesi. This piece of information, which Abdizâde Hüseyin Hüsameddin reports in his Amasya Tarihi, is one of the few documents attesting the Rifai presence in Amasya.

The First Naqshbandi Lodge in Anatolia

Amasya was also an important step in the arrival of the Naqshbandiyya in Anatolia. In the year 807 (1404-05) Ammâdzâde Bedreddin Mahmud Çelebi, one of the city's well-known judges, had a lodge built for Hâce Rükneddin Mahmud of Bukhara, a deputy of Bahâeddin Naqshband. Known as the Mahmud Çelebi Tekkesi, this building is regarded as the first lodge of the order in Anatolia, and its first sheikhdom was held by Rükneddin Mahmud. The lodge, in what is today the Hatuniye quarter, passed in time into the hands of the Khalwatis. In the reign of Bayezid II Khalwati sheikhs served there, and the hatm-i hâcegân prayer of the Naqshbandi tradition continued, joined to Khalwati custom. Hayreddin Tokadî, one of the deputies of Cemal Halvetî, also served for a time as sheikh in this lodge. The lodge kept its vitality until 1828; it is said that Gürcü Hacı Osman Efendi, a former mufti who took over the last sheikhship, still had the hatm-i hâcegân performed there. The Naqshbandi trace in Amasya also appears in the nineteenth century at the Şamlar Tekkesi: after Salih Baba the lodge passed to the management of this order, and from 1816 Turabi Ali Efendi, a deputy of Şeyh Yusuf Nakşibendî, served as its sheikh.

How the Khalwatiyya Came to Amasya

The name of the Khalwatiyya comes from the practice of khalwa, in which the disciple withdraws into seclusion for set periods to discipline the self. The chain of the order goes back to Ömer el-Halvetî; from him it runs through Ahî Mîrem, Hacı İzzeddin and Sadreddîn-i Hiyâvî to Seyyid Yahyâ-yı Şirvânî, regarded as the second pir and in a sense the real founder. The Khalwatiyya was founded and developed in Azerbaijan and spread from there to Anatolia, the Balkans, Syria, Egypt and North Africa. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi states that the person who brought the order to Anatolia was Pîr İlyas of Amasya, one of the deputies of Sadreddîn-i Hiyâvî.

Pîr İlyas was a mufti who had grown up in Amasya. After the Battle of Ankara, while Timur's shadow lay over Anatolia, he is said to have had a share in saving the city from plunder. The sources report that he was sent by Timur's commander to Shirvan, to the learned city of Shamakhi, where he entered the Khalwati path. According to Kadir Özköse, he returned to Amasya in 1406 after Timur's death, and a year later his relative Hâce Celal Çelebi had the Gümüşlüoğlu Tekkesi built for the sheikh and placed it at the service of the Khalwati path. Also called the Tâciye, this lodge was the first in Amasya set aside for the Khalwatis alone. Its soup kitchen housed many refugees in a city suffering the troubles of the interregnum and became a door of hope for people unable to make a living. It is for this reason that Amasya can readily be called the first place where the Khalwatiyya sprouted on Ottoman soil. The claim of some researchers that the order entered Amasya only in the time Prince Bayezid II governed the city does not agree with the dates the sources give.

The death of Pîr İlyas is given in the sources as 833 (1429), but since the same sources place the death of his successor and son-in-law Abdurrahman Çelebi in 827 (1424), this order of events cannot be taken as certain. The details of his life, his family and the stories about Timur are treated in a separate article. What matters here is that the line that followed him took root quickly in Amasya. According to Abdizâde, the Khalwatiyya that appeared in Amasya with Pîr İlyas's return from Shirvan won the people's trust quickly: it encouraged learning and spiritual knowledge, directed its followers to asceticism and piety, and forbade interference with emirs and statesmen, so that in several respects it set an example even to the Babai and Mevlevi circles. The same work notes that under Murad II the Zeyniyya and the Naqshbandiyya were also spreading, but that with the fame of sheikhs such as Habib Karamânî and Çelebi Halife the Babai and Mevlevi paths lost their old popularity.

Chains of Transmission and Branches

The wide diffusion of the Khalwatiyya across Ottoman lands, after Pîr İlyas, came about through the Anatolian deputies of Seyyid Yahyâ-yı Şirvânî. One of them, Habib Karamânî, toured Karaman, Ankara, Amasya, Sivas and İskilip and spread the order. In Amasya he carried on his guidance in the Mehmed Paşa Tekkesi, which the vizier Hızır Paşazâde Mehmed Paşa had built for him, and his deputies reached as far as Mudurnu, Beypazarı and Istanbul. It is stated that the chain begun by el-Hac Hızır-ı Amâsî, one of Karamânî's deputies in Amasya, later led to the birth of the Shamsiyya branch. Çelebi Halife (Cemal Halvetî), trained by Pîr Muhammed Erzincânî, another deputy of Yahyâ-yı Şirvânî, founded the Jamaliyya branch of the Khalwatiyya. Çelebi Halife began his activity in Amasya. After studying in the city he had gone to Istanbul and had his first Sufi experience in the Zeyniyya; on returning to Amasya he attached himself to Tahirzâde of Tokat, a deputy of Pîr İlyas, and finally, having received his licence from Pîr Muhammed in Erzincan, he was sent to Amasya as a Khalwati deputy.

In time the Khalwatiyya divided into four main branches, the Rûşeniyye, Cemâliyye, Ahmediyye and Şemsiyye, and from these arose numerous sub-branches such as the Sünbüliyye, Gülşeniyye, Şâbâniyye, Cerrâhiyye and Uşşâkıyye. Amasya stands out in this network in two ways. First, some of the branches were founded by sheikhs trained in the city or drew sustenance from it. Second, sheikhs trained here moved to Istanbul and established the order in the life of the capital. Koca Mustafa Paşa, a disciple of Cemal Halvetî in Amasya who later rose from chief gatekeeper to the grand vizierate, had a dervish lodge prepared for Çelebi Halife in Istanbul. Among Çelebi Halife's deputies, Sünbül Sinan formed close relations with Selim I and Merkez Efendi with Süleyman the Magnificent. Hayreddin Tokadî of the Jamaliyya served in the Mahmud Çelebi Tekkesi in Amasya and was then sent to Bolu, where he became the guide of Şâbân-ı Velî, the founder of the Şâbâniyye. All this made Amasya both the starting point and the training ground of several Khalwati branches.

The Network of Lodges

Kadir Özköse's study of the Khalwati lodges of Amasya lists sixteen lodges; Abdizâde's Amasya Tarihi and later research add a seventeenth. The high number shows what kind of social network the order built in the city over four centuries. Most of the lodges were founded by the endowment of a single person, and the sheikhdom usually passed from father to son, to a son-in-law or to a deputy.

The doctoral dissertation Hasan Karataş defended at Berkeley in 2011 looks for the reason in the pattern of landholding. According to the study, in the early fifteenth century the local landholding practices in Amasya combined with the political developments of the time and led to the spread of a particular kind of Sufi architecture and to the urbanization of Sufi activity. The Khalwatiyya, which had arisen in rural Azerbaijan, was taken up by the city in the first half of the century and acquired an urban identity. The dissertation argues that an order which struggled elsewhere against longer established urban orders found a safe haven in Amasya and made its first contacts with the Ottoman elite there. In Karataş's account the city is not merely a setting but a historical actor that steered this process.

The Early Lodges

The Gümüşlüoğlu Tekkesi was founded for the sheikhdom of Pîr İlyas and is regarded as the oldest Khalwati lodge of Amasya. After İlyas the sheikhdom passed to Abdurrahman Çelebi and then to sheikhs of the Gümüşlüzâde family; in 1740, on the advice of Fatma Hanım of the Saray, the tomb-keeper İsmail Efendi had a madrasa built in place of the lodge. The Çilehâne Tekkesi, that is the Yâkub Paşa Tekkesi, was built and endowed in 1412 by Pazarlıoğlu Yâkub Paşa, the beylerbey of Ankara, for the mufti Gümüşlüzâde Abdurrahman Çelebi; its endowment deed was registered in February 1413 by the judge of Amasya, Mevlânâ Rükneddin Mahmud, known as Sarı Kadı. His deputy Şemseddin Mehmed Buhârî was appointed administrator. The death date of Abdurrahman Çelebi is given differently in the sources, as 1424 and as 1497-98; it is possible that two different sheikhs of the same name have been confused. The Çevikçe Tekkesi was built in 1428 by Şemseddin Mehmed Kırtâsî, a master of paper-making; the sheikhdom was assigned to the Khalwatis and the management left to the founder's sons. The lodge revived in 1766 with the arrival of Sheikh Hasan Efendi of the Sinâniyye, and after the death of two sheikhs it was turned into a madrasa in 1843.

From the Mid-Fifteenth Century

The Meydan Tekkesi was built in 1467 by Ehl-i Hatun, granddaughter of Şadgeldi Paşa, the emir of Amasya. The place visited as the Wishing Well is here; because her tomb lies inside the lodge, Ehl-i Hatun stipulated that seven parts of the Qur'an be recited daily and that the sheikhdom be given to someone worthy of it. In the same year Sadi Efendi had the Sâdeddin Tekkesi built; it was demolished in 1844. The Hoca Sultan Tekkesi was built in 1475 by Şemseddin Ahmed Çelebi, the tutor of Prince Bayezid in Amasya, and its sheikhdom was given to Çelebi Halife. When Bayezid came to the throne and summoned the sheikh to Istanbul, his son Bedreddin Mahmud Çelebi took his place; the descendants of Cemal Halvetî, the Çelebizâdes, remained among the administrators until their line ended in Amasya in 1686. The Mehmed Paşa Tekkesi was built in 1485 for Habib Karamânî in the manner of a külliye, with a lodge, a madrasa, a tomb, a soup kitchen and a mosque. After Habib Karamânî's death his deputy Seydî Halife and then his son Hasan Efendi served as sheikh; in 1879 Caucasian refugees were settled in the building, which became a private house and could not return to its original function.

The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The Şehre Küstü Tekkesi was built by the disciples of Pîr Sinan before the sheikh's death in the 1550s. It is told that Pîr Sinan criticised Prince Mustafa in his sermons, was banned from preaching in consequence, and withdrew in offence into seclusion; the name of the quarter is traced to this event. The lodge stood until 1826. The Şamlar Tekkesi was built in 1544 by Hoca el-Hac Salih Çelebi; there is a belief that one of its sheikhs, Salih Baba, cured the mentally ill. The Kuşbaz Tekkesi was founded in 1554 by Yâkub Efendi, one of the Khalwati sheikhs, and its endowments passed to the education authority in 1897. The Hızır Paşa Tekkesi was built in 1564 by the beylerbey Hızır Paşa, one of the Yörgüçpaşazâdes, and its first sheikh was İlyas Efendi, known as "Molla Şeyh"; it disappeared completely in the fire of 1730. The Ehlullah Tekkesi was built in 1654 by the deputy governor el-Hac Hızır Ağa and took its name from Ehlullah Efendi, who served as sheikh until 1698. The Kutub Tekkesi was built in 1609 by Şeyh Ahmed Halvetî, known as Kutub Dede, and the Müftüoğlu Tekkesi in 1603 by Ahmed Efendi, the mufti of Amasya; at the Müftüoğlu Tekkesi the sheikhs who served appear to have belonged to the Celvetiyya, and the building burned in 1688. The Nuhoğlu Zawiya was built as a madrasa in 1704 and after the fire of 1730 was turned into a Khalwati zawiya. One of the latest lodges, the Ak Hasanoğlu Tekkesi, was built in 1829 and with the death of Şeyh Mansur Efendi was converted into a classroom.

The Yâkub Paşa Tekkesi: An Example of Lodge Architecture

Within this network the building that stands today and that we can read best in terms of architecture is the Yâkub Paşa Tekkesi. According to the description of M. Baha Tanman, the two entrances of the lodge lie at the ends of a barrel-vaulted corridor running east to west. South of the corridor there is a mosque, and at its sides twelve vaulted units with hearths, six on each side. Six of these are khalwa cells without windows and six are dervish cells adjoining the outer wall. The khalwa cells are small rooms of about 1.90 by 1.90 metres, designed to reduce to a minimum the disciple's contact with the world while in seclusion. To the north the tevhidhâne, which opens to the corridor through a pointed arch, has the sheikh's room to its east and the tomb to its west. The wrought-iron lattice door of the tomb, signed "amel-i Ramazan el-Kastamonî", is a rare example of early Ottoman metalwork.

Because the land slopes, the building is arranged on four different levels: the mosque and khalwa cells at the highest, then the group of tevhidhâne, tomb and sheikh's room, and the main corridor at the lowest. Tanman finds it surprising that this plan was not continued in Khalwati lodges built in later centuries. It is also recorded that the building had a guesthouse, that it was used as a madrasa in 1622 and for this reason was counted among the madrasas of forty akçe. It is also reported that, because so many Khalwati sheikhs were trained there, the lodge was called the "dervish factory". Bayezid II had the building rebuilt in masonry in 1485, and in 1894 it was rebuilt again through the effort of the people and an income set aside from the endowments of Abdülhamid II. Damaged in the 1939 Erzincan earthquake, the lodge was repaired in 1967.

The chain of sheikhs of this lodge has been called in Amasya the "silsiletü'z-zeheb", the golden chain. After Gümüşlüzâde Abdurrahman Çelebi came, in turn, his son-in-law Pîr Abdurrahman Çelebi, Pîr Şemseddin Mehmed Buhârî, Pîr Celâleddin Abdurrahman Çelebi, Pîr Sun'ullah Halvetî of the Saddlers, Pîr Zekeriyyâ Halvetî, Pîr Safiyyüddin Mahmûd of the İğnecizâde family, Pîr Muhyiddin Mehmed Çelebi of the Kubalı Çelebizâde family, Pîr Mehmed of the Buhârîzâde family, Şeyh Ya'kûb, Şeyh Abdurrahman, and his sons Şeyh İzzeddin Hasan and Şeyh Hüsâmeddin Hüseyin. The sheikhdom was then continued by Şeyh Mehmed Efendi (d. 1688), Seyyid İbrâhim Efendi, his son Seyyid Mehmed Efendi, Hâfız Seyyid Mahmud Efendi and Hâfız Seyyid Abdullah Efendi (d. 1800). In 1622, to settle a dispute over the sheikhdom between the preacher Şeyh Hüsâmeddin Efendi and Şeyh Abdi Efendi, a madrasa was established in the mosque and khalwa units; the professorship was given to Abdi Efendi, while the lodge function was kept in the tevhidhâne and the sheikhdom left to Hüsâmeddin Efendi.

The Social and Cultural Role of the Lodges

A lodge was not only a place of dhikr and conversation. Kept alive by the endowments attached to them, these institutions received guests, sheltered travellers and fed the poor. Evliya Çelebi writes that Amasya had many guesthouses that fed the needy and the poor. The Pîr İlyas İmareti beside the tomb of Pîr İlyas, the Mehmed Paşa İmareti beside the Mehmed Paşa Mosque and the Yörgüç Paşa İmareti beside the Yörgüç Paşa Mosque were the main soup kitchens run in coordination with the lodges. In the years of the interregnum and the disorders after it, these lodges took in the people who came from the surrounding country and met the shelter and livelihood needs of those who took refuge in the city.

The link with educational institutions was also close. The Mehmed Paşa Madrasa was founded together with the lodge of Habib Karamânî, the Yâkub Paşa Madrasa with the lodge of Abdurrahman Çelebi, and the Hüsâmiye Madrasa with the lodge of Hüsâmeddin Hüseyin el-Halvetî, and all were run by Khalwati professors. The Bayezid II Complex, one of the city's most important buildings, is said to have been built in 1485 at the request of the Khalwati sheikh Cemal Halife to the sultan. The first professor of the Sultaniye Madrasa in the complex was Zembilli Ali Efendi.

The Khalwati sheikhs used poetry as a means of guidance. Mihri Hatun, the granddaughter of Pîr İlyas, is one of the most important women poets of fifteenth-century Ottoman literature, and the Tazarrunâme at the head of her Divan shows her attachment to the Khalwati path. Abdurrahman Çelebi, the son-in-law of Pîr İlyas, wrote ecstatic poems under the pen name "Hüsamî". Cemal Halvetî left works such as the Dîvançe, Cevâhiru'l-Kulûb and Çengnâme; his Dîvançe contains twenty-three hymns written in aruz and syllabic metre. In calligraphy, Ahmed Şemseddin Karahisârî, founder of the Karahisârî school, was among the Khalwati sheikhs, and the Amasyan calligrapher Muhaşşî Sinan was one of the deputies of Habib Karamânî. Molla Bahşî (Akbilek) in Qur'anic exegesis, Hayreddin Hızır b. İmam Ahmed (İcâdî), who served as palace tutor under Bayezid II and was known for his gloss on the Kashshaf, and Yusuf Sinaneddin Efendi, author of the Tebyînü'l-Mehârim, were also among those trained in this circle.

The Court, the Princes and Politics

Amasya's position as the city of princes drew the lodges directly into politics. It is reported that Pîr İlyas supported Çelebi Mehmed during the interregnum and invited him to govern the city only on condition that he treat the people well and give up his unruliness. Evliya Çelebi tells of an episode in which Murad II, respecting Şeyh Abdurrahman Çelebi, the Khalwati sheikh of Amasya, sent his sons Ahmed, Alaeddin and Mehmed to kiss the sheikh's hand. According to Evliya, the sheikh hung his own talisman round the neck of Prince Mehmed and prayed, "Serve the Muslims well in Constantinople", and Prince Mehmed conquered Istanbul twenty years later. The story is transmitted as a legend. Since the death of Şeyh Abdurrahman Çelebi is given elsewhere as 1424, the date and the link between person and tale cannot be taken as certain.

Seydî Halife, a deputy of Habib Karamânî, complained in a letter to Mehmed the Conqueror about the conduct of Prince Bayezid and the friends around him. The Conqueror sent a commission headed by the vizier Hamza Begzade Mustafa Paşa to investigate, and after the commission's report ordered the execution of three people in the prince's circle and the removal of the others. Learning of this order beforehand, Prince Bayezid had one of his friends, Müeyyedzâde Abdurrahman Efendi, smuggled to Iran and another, Tacibey, to Baghdad, while Mahmud Bey was executed. The episode also shows that the sheikhs of Amasya took on a role of supervision and information around the prince.

In the struggle for the throne between Bayezid and Prince Cem, Cemal Halvetî stood at Bayezid's side. Cem, governor in Karaman, had gained the support of the Sufi leaders there, of Şeyh Vefa, the Zeyniyya sheikh in Istanbul, and of the vizier Mehmed Karamânî. Bayezid for his part formed a bloc in Amasya that included Cemal Halvetî and the vizier İshak Paşa. Cemal Halvetî sent delegations to the Sufi leaders around Karaman and tried to make them withdraw their support from Cem. When Bayezid came to the throne he invited his sheikh in Amasya to Istanbul, and the Khalwatiyya thus became one of the leading orders of the capital. The Pîr Sinan affair in the time of Prince Mustafa shows, on the other hand, that in Amasya the sheikhs could be seen as an independent voice towards the administration. All this supports the view that the Khalwatis contributed to the security of the eastern frontier in the Ottoman-Safavid struggle and remained loyal to the central authority.

Karataş calls this process the "Ottomanization" of the Khalwatiyya. In his view, during the succession struggle of the later fifteenth century the Khalwatis joined the political faction led by Prince Bayezid (d. 1512); thanks to the tie formed with Bayezid, who eventually took the throne, Amasya gained a voice in the religious circles of the capital. The same study also questions the perception of early Ottoman Anatolia as a unified region and a backwater of the rising Ottoman world.

The Mevlevi Path and Other Orders

The rise of the Khalwatiyya did not remove the other paths in Amasya. The Mevlevi order, with the semâ and music that enriched its tradition around the teaching of Mevlânâ, took its place in the cultural life of the city; the sound of the ney and the turning of the semâzens fed the circles of lodge literature and music. Abdizâde's observation quoted above says that with the fame of the Khalwati sheikhs the Mevlevi and Babai paths lost their old popularity, but this does not mean that the Mevlevi presence disappeared. The Mevlevi lodge, dervish lodge and school founded in 1414 by Şeyh Cui Baba in the village of Yuvacık show that the tradition continued in the countryside too. The fact that sheikhs of the Celvetiyya served in the Müftüoğlu Tekkesi, a building made for the Khalwatis, and that the Sinâniyye branch revived in the Çevikçe Tekkesi, shows that the branches of the Khalwatiyya also lived side by side in the city. This plural Sufi setting around princes and sultans is also the background of Amasya's later name as the "city of saints". Travelers of earlier and later periods also gave the city names such as "the Oxford of Anatolia", "the Baghdad of Anatolia" and "the city of philosophers"; Mustafa Vazih Efendi (d. 1831), mufti and historian of Amasya, lists twelve monasteries in the city's pre-Islamic past.

Tombs and Places of Visitation

In his Amasya Tarihi Abdizâde names seventy-one tombs in the city, eighteen of which belong to Khalwati sheikhs. The principal ones are the tombs of Akbilek, İğneci Baba, Pîr İlyas, Pîr Sinan, Pîr Abdurrahman Çelebi, Çelebioğlu, Habib Karamânî, Hüseyin Dede, Sinan Efendi, Şeyh Zekeriyya, Abdurrahman Baba, the Saint of Kuba, Kutup, the Saint of Kurt Boğan, Gümüşlüzâde, Memi Dede, Mansur Baba and Yakup Halvetî. Some have survived to the present and the location of some has been lost. Most of these tombs are small mausoleum rooms rising beside a lodge or a mosque, holding the sheikh and his relatives together.

The Tomb of Pîr İlyas, in which the sheikh lies together with his son-in-law Pîr Abdurrahman Çelebi, his grandson Pîr Hayreddin Hızır Çelebi and members of his family, is called the "Tomb of the Pîrs" or the "Upper Pîrs", and is today one of the most visited places in the city. Pîr Celâleddin Abdurrahman, who lies in the room inside the Çilehâne Mosque, is known as the "Lower Pîrs". The area where the tomb stands used to be a cemetery with the graves of many important figures; the graves were removed in 1938 by the governor of the day, Talat Öncel, and the area was made into a park. Pîr Şerefeddin Hamza Halvetî, who lies in the Tomb of the Saint of Kurt Boğan, is reported to have been the father of Akşemseddin, the teacher of Mehmed the Conqueror. In the graves in the garden of the Mehmed Paşa Mosque, Habib Karamânî and his deputy Seydî Halife lie side by side.

The Decline of the Lodges

The end of the Khalwati lodges was a slow erosion rather than a collapse. Many lodges in Amasya were destroyed in fires: the Hızır Paşa Tekkesi in 1730, the Nuhoğlu Tekkesi in 1808, the Müftüoğlu Tekkesi in 1688. Buildings whose endowments were lost or whose income shrank were often turned into madrasas or classrooms: the Çevikçe Tekkesi in 1843, and the Ak Hasanoğlu Tekkesi in later years. The endowments of the Kuşbaz Tekkesi passed to the education authority in 1897. The Mehmed Paşa Tekkesi became a private house in 1879 with the settlement of Caucasian refugees. Yücer's survey of the nineteenth century lists as Khalwati lodges still working in the city at that time the Çilehâne, Çevikçe, Sâdeddin, Şehre Küstü, Kutup, Gümüşlüoğlu, Mehmed Paşa, Mahmud Çelebi and Meydan lodges. The lodges were closed in 1925. In Özköse's finding the Khalwatiyya directly influenced the religious, cultural, political and social life of the city from the fifteenth century to the end of the nineteenth.

Today what remains of the lodges in Amasya are the tombs, a few mosques, the Yâkub Paşa Tekkesi itself and the names of quarters. Place names such as Şehre Küstü, Pîrler, Çilehâne and Memi Dede are still part of the same memory.

Chronology

1240: The Babai uprising of Baba İlyas-ı Horasânî, which began in the village of Çat, was defeated at Amasya Castle; Baba İlyas was executed. The event is told in the hagiography written by his grandson Elvan Çelebi in 1358-59.

1404-05: The Mahmud Çelebi Tekkesi, regarded as the first lodge of the Naqshbandiyya in Anatolia, was built in Amasya; its first sheikh was Hâce Rükneddin Mahmud of Bukhara.

1406-07: Pîr İlyas returned to Amasya after the death of Timur; the Gümüşlüoğlu Tekkesi was built.

1412-13: The Yâkub Paşa (Çilehâne) Tekkesi was founded; its endowment deed was registered in February 1413.

1428: The Çevikçe Tekkesi was built by Şemseddin Mehmed Kırtâsî.

1433: The Darphâneci Tekkesi was founded in Amasya for the Rifaiyya.

1467: The Meydan (Ehl-i Hatun) and Sâdeddin lodges were built.

1475: The Hoca Sultan Tekkesi was built and its sheikhdom given to Çelebi Halife.

1485: The Mehmed Paşa Tekkesi was built for Habib Karamânî; the Bayezid II Complex was built; Bayezid II rebuilt the Yâkub Paşa Tekkesi in masonry.

1496-97: Habib Karamânî died in Amasya.

1544-1564: The Şamlar, Kuşbaz and Hızır Paşa lodges were founded; in the 1550s came the tension between Pîr Sinan and Prince Mustafa.

1622: A madrasa was established in the mosque and khalwa cells of the Yâkub Paşa Tekkesi after a dispute over the sheikhdom.

1730-1843: The Hızır Paşa Tekkesi burned (1730); the Nuhoğlu Tekkesi burned (1808); the Çevikçe Tekkesi was converted into a madrasa (1843).

1879: Caucasian refugees were settled in the Mehmed Paşa Tekkesi.

1894: The Çilehâne Tekkesi and its tomb were rebuilt.

1925: The lodges were closed.

1938: The graves around the Tomb of the Pîrs were removed and the area was made into a park.

1939-1967: The Yâkub Paşa Tekkesi was damaged in the Erzincan earthquake and repaired in 1967.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Abdizâde Hüseyin Hüsameddin. Amasya Tarihi. İstanbul 1330-1332.

Academic studies

Official sources

  • Budak, Abdülhamit. Bir Şehir Bir Tarikat: Amasya ve Halvetilik. Amasya Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları, 2015.

Other sources

Online sources