The change of hands of a city shows most lastingly in its buildings. When Amasya became part of the Turkish-Islamic world, the change appeared first in existing structures taking on new functions and then in the rise of new ones. Mosques, small mosques, madrasas, tombs and a hospital lined both banks of the Yeşilırmak valley and redrew the skyline of the town. Two important buildings along this line from the Danishmendids to the Ilkhanids, the Fethiye Mosque and the Burmalı Minare Mosque, are described in detail in their own articles and are mentioned here only for their place in the sequence.

The Danishmendid Period: The First Stones

Danishmend Gazi, founder of the Danishmendid dynasty, was one of the Turkmen emirs who entered the service of the Great Seljuk Sultan Alp Arslan in 1064. After Manzikert he took Sivas, which became the core of the dynasty, and with the beys in his retinue he also gained control of the area around Amasya, Tokat, Niksar, Kayseri and Çorum. From 1086 onward the dynasty began to act in its own name rather than on behalf of the Great Seljuks. What survives from this milieu is small in number and architecturally modest. The Garipler Mosque in Tokat is regarded as the oldest dated Danishmendid building. The Great Mosque of Kayseri was built under Melik Muhammed (1134-1143), and the Great Mosque of Niksar, according to oral tradition, in 1145. Researchers such as Semavi Eyice and the author of the Danishmendids entry note that these buildings are unassuming in material, technique and decoration, yet important as the first examples of an Anatolian Turkish architecture searching for its own identity in its formative phase. The same assessments hold that some design solutions, such as joining a mosque and a madrasa around a shared courtyard, anticipated solutions that would mature in later Seljuk and Ottoman architecture.

As for Amasya, the sources say that the oldest Turkish building in the town was a mosque built by the Danishmendid Melik Gazi just east of the citadel, on the site of today's Şamlar Mosque. That building has not survived. The Yağıbasan Han and the Palace of Danishmend Gazi are likewise lost. Among the survivors is the Çağlayan Bridge, which carries the Amasya-Çorum road over the Yeşilırmak six kilometres before the town. About seventy metres long, the bridge was built in the first half of the twelfth century by Hüsameddevle Hasan, son of İltegin Gazi, one of Melik Yağıbasan's emirs. Its six wide brick-arched openings, its alternating courses of cut stone with brick bonding, and the ruined tower on its axis, thought to be a chronicle pavilion, set it apart in early Anatolian Turkish architecture. The Küçük Ağa Complex, in turn, is a group of buildings founded in the Danishmendid period but almost entirely altered and revived by the Ottomans in the late fifteenth century.

The Fethiye Mosque: A Church Becomes a Mosque

The building that most plainly shows Amasya's transformation in the Danishmendid age is the Fethiye Mosque. Also known as the Kuba Dede Mosque, it stands in the Fethiye quarter on top of a Byzantine church. The church is thought to have been built by Helena, daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Phokas; since Phokas reigned 602-610, the structure is dated to the early seventh century. It is said to have been converted into a mosque in 1116, in connection with Danishmend Gazi's conquest of Amasya, and to have received the name Fethiye, meaning conquest, for that reason. The certainty of this date is open to question, because according to the TDV entry on the Danishmendids, Danishmend Gazi was among the leaders who took the Amasya region after 1071, the dynasty had been acting in its own name since 1086, and his son Gümüştegin had died in 1104; 1116 comes well after that line. Some texts drawn from the provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism instead say that the converter was Fetih Gazi, who served as governor of Amasya in the Danishmendid period. What is certain is that the building is among the earliest places of Turkish-Islamic worship in Amasya.

The Fethiye stands on the apse section of the church, which is why its east facade projects outward as a half hexagon. The church, thought to have been a rectangular basilica, had its mihrab moved to the south when it became a mosque, and entry is through a small door in the north wall. The west facade was recessed with a wide pointed arch, producing a stepped surface into which lower and upper windows were cut. Because the walls have been plastered and whitewashed, the original material is hard to identify. The brick minaret was added in 1883 by İncezade Hacı Mehmet Arif; it collapsed in the 1939 earthquake and was rebuilt. The building was repaired in 1956 and restored by the General Directorate of Foundations in 2006. The mummies taken from its basement in 1855 belong to the Pervane family and the Ilkhanid circle, and will therefore reappear in later sections.

The Halifet Gazi Madrasa and Tomb

The Halifet Gazi complex, on Torumtay Street in the Şamice quarter, shows both Amasya at the start of the Seljuk age and the passage of the Danishmendid legacy into Seljuk service. The madrasa's inscription shows it was built in 1209-1210. Its founder, Halifet Gazi, was an emir who entered Seljuk service after the Danishmendid principality came to an end. According to Aynur Durukan's TDV entry, he was appointed commander of the Black Sea coastal defence after İzzeddin Keykâvus I took Sinop in 1215, became governor of Amasya in 1222 under Alâeddin Keykubad I, then governed Erzurum, and in 1232 fell as a martyr during a campaign against the Georgians and was buried in his tomb at Amasya. The madrasa's endowment deed is dated 1225. A medical book was translated from Persian into Turkish in his name, and a work on sports in Anatolia was written in the same circle.

Today only the south wall and part of the east section of the madrasa remain standing. After the 1647 earthquake, Müderris Hasan Efendi had the fallen parts rebuilt in wood, and in 1888 the mufti of Amasya, Hacı Osman Hilmi Efendi, had the whole building thoroughly repaired. This stone-and-brick building, with spolia in its wall fill, is said in the Danişmendname to have been converted from a church into a madrasa, and Albert Louis Gabriel shares that view. Metin Sözen suggests that the arched section may be the facade of an older Byzantine building, while Tanju Cantay notes that a second storey above the vaulted space extending toward the tomb makes the madrasa two-storeyed. The tomb attached on the east has a square base, an octagonal body and a pyramidal cone, and has two storeys. The marble sarcophagus inside is a Roman-period woman's sarcophagus; Cantay thinks the burial chamber may point to a funerary chapel connected with the church. The common opinion dates the tomb to the first quarter of the thirteenth century, but Doğan Kuban proposes the mid-twelfth century and Gabriel and Oktay Aslanapa the year 1145-1146. The difference suggests that the building may date from the Danishmendid period.

The Burmalı Minare Mosque

Built in the mid-thirteenth century, under Gıyâseddin Keyhusrev II, by the vizier Necmeddin Ferruh Bey and his brother, the treasurer Yusuf, the Burmalı Minare Mosque is the best-known surviving mosque of Seljuk Amasya. The date based on the inscription is 1242 (640 AH); some sources give 1237-1246, the years of the sultan's reign. The mosque has a rectangular plan, is covered by three domes in succession along the central axis, and has side aisles with barrel vaults. Its mihrab is tiled and its minbar is of wood; the portal is framed by borders and takes the form of a pointed-arched iwan. The minaret that gives the mosque its name is a stone minaret whose shaft rises to the balcony in twisting grooves, and its date is disputed. Eyice says such a minaret could hardly have been built in the late Ottoman period; some sources point instead to the repair of 1730-1731. The octagonal tomb to the left of the entrance was built together with the mosque, and because of the mummy chamber below it is also called the Cumudar Tomb. The last restoration of the mosque was completed in 2024, and it was reopened for worship on 2 August 2024. All details of the building are given in its own article.

The Gökmedrese Mosque and the Torumtay Tomb

Seyfeddin Torumtay was a Seljuk statesman appointed governor of Amasya under Gıyâseddin Keyhusrev II. He built the Gökmedrese, which served as both mosque and madrasa. According to Selda Kalfazade's TDV entry, the date of construction is uncertain because the inscription was removed and lost, but Torumtay's endowment deed, dated 665 (1266-1267), shows that the building was completed by that year at the latest. The deed calls the building Gökmedrese. The name comes from the use of the entrance section as a madrasa and from the purple and turquoise tiles and glazed bricks on the drum of the tomb attached to the northeast.

Closed to the outside and built of thick, massive cut-stone walls, the building shows all the characteristic features of Seljuk architecture. Leaving the tomb aside, the plan is a regular rectangle. The facade is bounded on both sides by cylindrical corner towers, and the main doorway, reached by a flight of seven steps, sits inside a pointed-vaulted iwan. The borders around the doorway carry low-relief geometric decoration, and the windows have muqarnas hoods, colonnettes with goose-foot motifs, and interlacing eight-pointed stars. The wooden door leaves in kündekâri technique are in the Amasya Museum. Inside, two rows of four piers of cruciform section, eight in all, divide the space into three aisles; the aisles running perpendicular to the mihrab axis have five bays each, and of the fifteen bays in total some are covered by domes and some by vaults. The interior is plain, and the mihrab is only a half-cylindrical niche. The tomb rises on a square base with an octagonal brick drum and gives the impression of a second storey from inside. Just under the cone runs a frieze of Kufic script in turquoise glazed brick, and the insides of the arches are decorated with purple and turquoise geometric interlacing, rosettes and stars. The visiting chamber holds seven sarcophagi.

The Torumtay Tomb, directly opposite the Gökmedrese, dates, according to the TDV, to 677 (1278-1279). It has a rectangular plan, two storeys and a vaulted cover. Buttresses supporting the stairs and walls form projections on the body walls. Given that in Seljuk tombs decoration is generally gathered around doors and windows, it is notable that here the ornament sits mostly in the upper parts. A four-line construction inscription is set in the pediment of the ornamented window in a marble niche on the south facade, and verses from the Qur'an are on the arch of the niche. That the tomb was repaired in 1891-1892 is known from a verse repair inscription on the south facade. The sarcophagus of Torumtay in the lower storey bears Qur'anic verses in celi calligraphy, and the graves of his children and grandchildren are also there.

Two Phases of the Seljuk Age

Amasya's two great Seljuk complexes rose in two quite different phases of the same state. The Halifet Gazi Madrasa was built, according to its inscription, in 1209-1210, in the years when Seljuk rule had only just taken firm hold of the city. This date falls more than a decade before its founder's governorship of 1222; once the building stood, its endowment was established by the deed of 1225, during Halifet Gazi's years in office in Amasya. The Gökmedrese, by contrast, is documented more than half a century later as a regular pious endowment (waqf) through its deed of 1266-1267, in the years after the defeat at Kösedağ in 1243, when the Seljuk sultans reigned under Ilkhanid tutelage. Torumtay's tomb of 1278-1279 belongs to the same period. The first thus represents a Danishmendid emir's passage into Seljuk service, the second an endowment founded by a governor in Seljuk Anatolia under Mongol domination.

Building technique reflects the same difference. The Halifet Gazi Madrasa rests on reused material and, very probably, on the remains of an older structure; the use of a Roman sarcophagus as a grave in its tomb shows how material surviving from earlier ages was absorbed into new buildings. The Gökmedrese, with its closed, massive walls of cut stone, is a typical example of mature Seljuk architecture, and later repairs did not alter its plan but only disturbed the symmetry of its domes and vaults. Against the plainness of the stone façades, colour is gathered in the glazed brick and tile of the tomb's drum. Where at Halifet Gazi the ornament is carved in stone on the tomb's portal and window frames, at the Gökmedrese the same emphasis is left to the brilliance of turquoise and purple glaze.

The Ilkhanid Period: The Bimarhane

In the early fourteenth century Amasya was under Ilkhanid rule. The most important work of this period in Amasya is the Bimarhane, or darüşşifa (hospital), built in 1308-1309 by Anber bin Abdullah in the name of the Ilkhanid ruler Olcaytu Mehmed Han and his wife İlduz Hatun. It is of cut stone. Inverted column capitals made of Turkish triangles, peculiar to Seljuk architecture, are used especially on the front facade and its edges. The relief of a kneeling human figure on the keystone of the door is noted in the sources as unique to this building. Patients at Amasya are said to have been treated with music, and the building is known for this. Today it is used as the Sabuncuoğlu Museum of the History of Medicine and Surgery.

The darüşşifa as an institution arose in the Islamic world under the Abbasid caliphs, and the Bimaristan-ı Adudi built in Baghdad in 981 by the Buyid emir Adud al-Dawla was one of its important examples. In Anatolia, buildings such as the Gevher Nesibe Darüşşifa and Medical Madrasa at Kayseri (1206), the Keykâvus Darüşşifa at Sivas (1217), the Turan Melek Darüşşifa at Divriği (1229) and the Pervane Bey Darüşşifa at Tokat (1275) are the Seljuk-period links of this tradition. The Amasya Bimarhane is the example of this tradition in the Ilkhanid age in a town near the Black Sea.

The Mummies and the Ilkhanid Circle

Mummified bodies of the Ilkhanid period have been taken from two of Amasya's early Turkish-Islamic buildings, the basement of the Fethiye Mosque and the tomb attached to the Burmalı Minare Mosque. The burial vaults at the Fethiye were opened in 1855; they are reported to hold İzzeddin Mehmed Pervane, İşbuğa Noyan, Cumudar, Pervane Bey's concubine, his daughter and his son, and are kept today in the Amasya Museum. The tomb in the museum garden, formerly used as the Mummy Museum, is a twelfth-century building said to belong to Sultan Mesud; it is an iwan-type tomb with a barrel vault, its north-facing front of cut stone and the rest of rubble stone. The sources differ on where Cumudar lay. Who is buried in the tomb of the Burmalı Minare Mosque has not been settled either; Eyice says that the person or persons who founded the building should be buried in the tomb right next to the mosque, and that the mummies may have been placed there later.

Common Features

Taken together, these buildings show several regularities. Danishmendid buildings are small in scale and plain; examples built over older church structures or with spolia stand out, as at the Halifet Gazi Madrasa and the Fethiye Mosque. In Seljuk buildings the walls are of cut stone, facades are kept closed and thick, and decoration concentrates around portals and windows. Geometric interlacing, muqarnas, goose-foot motifs, eight-pointed stars and turquoise and purple glazed brick and tile are the recurring elements of this language. Giving place to both the mosque and the tomb in one whole, as at the Burmalı Minare Mosque and the Gökmedrese, is an early sign of the complex concept. Endowments ensured the continuity of charitable works; Torumtay's endowment deed of 1266-1267 and the Burmalı Minare deed reported to have been drawn up in 1299-1300 by Pervane Bey, son-in-law of Ferruh Bey, are documents of this.

Quarter names in use today, such as Gökmedrese and Fethiye, also come from these buildings. The buildings continued to be used and repaired in the Ottoman period: the Burmalı Minare after the earthquake of 1590-1591 and the fires of 1602-1603 and 1730-1731, and the Halifet Gazi Madrasa after the earthquake of 1647.

Amasya on the Ottoman Threshold

The early Turkish-Islamic buildings of Amasya form the background to the large complexes built in the Ottoman age. According to the TDV entry on Amasya, Seljuk-period works generally lie south of the river. The same entry reports that at the start of the sixteenth century the town had nine mosques, ten madrasas, four zawiyas, six soup kitchens and fifteen baths. Surviving buildings include the Gümüşlü Mosque (1326), the Darüşşifa (1308), the Saraçhane Mosque (1372), the Bayezid Pasha Mosque (1414-1419), the Yörgüç Pasha Mosque (1430), the Bayezid II Mosque and Complex (1486) and the Hatuniye Mosque (1510). The buildings in the first half of this list belong to the Danishmendid, Seljuk and Ilkhanid periods, and those in the second half to the Ottoman Amasya of the age of the prince-governors.

Chronology

1064: Danishmend Gazi enters the service of the Great Seljuk Sultan Alp Arslan.

1086: The Danishmendids are said to act in their own name from this date.

1116: The date at which the Fethiye Mosque is said to have been converted from church to mosque (its certainty is disputed).

1145-1146: One of the dates proposed for the Halifet Gazi Tomb (Gabriel, Aslanapa).

1209-1210: The Halifet Gazi Madrasa.

1225: Endowment deed of the Halifet Gazi Madrasa.

1232: Halifet Gazi falls as a martyr in a campaign against the Georgians.

1242: Date of the Burmalı Minare Mosque based on its inscription.

1243: The defeat at Kösedağ; the Seljuk sultans come under Ilkhanid tutelage.

1266-1267: Seyfeddin Torumtay's endowment deed; the Gökmedrese is accepted as completed by this date at the latest.

1278-1279: The Torumtay Tomb.

1308-1309: The Bimarhane (Darüşşifa).

1855: The burial vaults in the basement of the Fethiye Mosque are opened.

1883: A minaret is added to the Fethiye Mosque.

Bibliography

Academic studies

  • İsmet Kayaoğlu, "Turumtay Vakfiyesi", Vakıflar Dergisi, no. 12 (1978), pp. 91-112.
  • Refet Yinanç, "Selçuklu Medreselerinden Amasya Halifet Gazi Medresesi ve Vakıfları", Vakıflar Dergisi, no. 15 (1982), pp. 5-14.

Other sources

  • Semavi Eyice, "Burmalı Minare Camii ve Türbesi", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 6, Istanbul 1992. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Selda Kalfazade, "Gökmedrese Camii", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 14, Istanbul 1996, pp. 140-142. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Aynur Durukan, "Hilfet Gazi Medresesi ve Türbesi", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 18, Istanbul 1998, pp. 30-31. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Dânişmendliler" and "Amasya" entries, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi.
  • Tuğba Bağbaşı, "Amasya Fethiye Camii", Online Türkiye Turizm Ansiklopedisi, 2019; Göksu Demircan and Nazım Boy, "Bimarhane (Darüşşifa)", same encyclopedia. turkiyeturizmansiklopedisi.com
  • Cultural Portal records drawn from the Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism: Fethiye Mosque, Gök Medrese, Torumtay Tomb.
  • A. Gabriel, Monuments Turcs d'Anatolie, II, Paris 1934.
  • İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Kitâbeler, I, Istanbul 1927.

Online sources