The Fethiye Mosque stands in the centre of Amasya, in the Fethiye quarter that rests against the foot of the Kuba ridge, and is also known locally as the Kuba Dede Mosque. It came into being when the apse of a Byzantine church was converted into a mosque, and it takes its name from the memory of that conquest. Having fallen into ruin and been repaired several times over the centuries, the mosque preserves very little of its original masonry; even so, its passage from church to mosque can still be traced in its plan and in the arrangement of its facades. In the Ottoman period it was a neighbourhood mosque kept standing by the endowments of the quarter's leading families, a place where preachers of the chair taught and where preachers and Friday orators served generation after generation. The mummies brought up from its basement, meanwhile, give the building a place of its own among the well-known stories of Amasya.

The Quarter and the Origin of Its Name

According to the description of the quarters in Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin's Amasya Tarihi, the Fethiye quarter lies below Kuba; it is bounded by the stream to the east, by Hacı Hamza to the west, by Kuba to the south and by the Kılıççı quarter to the north. In the old registers the area appears as "Fetih Gâzi Mülkü", the property of Fetih Gâzi, and was later called "Fethiye". From this name Hüsâmeddin concludes that Fetih Gâzi, one of the Danishmendid commanders of Amasya, lived here. Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi, the Amasya historian of the early nineteenth century, offers a different explanation: in his view the quarter took its name because the commander who conquered the city, whom he calls "Re'sü'l-Menâbir", took this quarter first. In a footnote Hüsâmeddin writes that the man who conquered Amasya for the last and decisive time was Danishmend Ahmed Gâzi, and that Vâzıh must have meant him.

Fetih Gâzi's name reaches beyond the quarter's boundaries as well. The Temennâ quarter on the northern slope of Zencirli Kaya was, according to Hüsâmeddin, laid out on the site of the garden of Feth Gâzi, one of the Danishmendid emirs. Because the Persian poet Temennâ-yı Nîsâbûrî, who attended the princes' gatherings, lived in this "Fethiye Garden", the quarter has been registered under his name since 820 (1417-18). The Danishmendid governor's name thus survived together in the names of a mosque, a quarter and a garden. The mosque's second popular name, Kuba Dede, comes from the Kuba district just above the quarter; according to Hüsâmeddin, the name Kuba goes back to the Kubalı Şeyh Cemâleddin Hüseyin, who came from the town of Kuba in Fergana and lived there until 810 (1407-08).

Danishmendid Amasya and Fetih Gâzi

The mosque's story begins with Amasya's passage from Byzantine to Turkish rule. The city, which had served as the capital of the kings of Pontus in the Hellenistic age and entered the Roman frontiers in AD 63, kept its importance in the Byzantine period on the road linking the Black Sea to inner Anatolia. Amasya came briefly under Umayyad rule in 712, but Byzantium lost it for good only with the Turkish conquests of the eleventh century. The exact date of the conquest is unknown; it is clear that by the late eleventh century the city was in Danishmendid hands. Danishmendid rule lasted until their lands were annexed by the Anatolian Seljuk Sultan Kılıçarslan II, and in the Seljuk period the city was known by the title "Dârü'l-izz". After the Battle of Kösedağ in 1243 Amasya passed to Mongol governors and then to Eretna and his successors, until Bayezid I (Yıldırım Bayezid) brought it into Ottoman territory in 1398. The Mongol period in which the debate over the mosque's mummies is set is one link in this chain.

The oldest Turkish building in the city was the mosque that the Danishmendid Melik Gazi built just east of the citadel, on the site of today's Şamlar Mosque. Among the early works that have survived, the Fethiye Mosque is counted together with the Burmalı Minare Mosque (1237-1247) and the Gökmedrese Mosque (1266-1267); yet Fethiye holds a separate place in this list as the converted form of an older building. The city's real building boom lasted from the mid-fifteenth century to the early sixteenth, when great foundations such as the Bayezid II Complex (1486) and the Hatuniye Mosque (1510) rose. The Fethiye Mosque belongs to a far earlier and more modest age than these buildings.

The fullest account of Fetih Gâzi, who is held to have converted the church, comes from Hüsâmeddin. In his narrative Fetih Hân Gâzi Bey was the son of Kılıç Bey, chief of the Koyunlu tribe, and first served as governor of Ankara under the Danishmendid ruler Melik Gâzi İsmâil Hân. Hüsâmeddin relates that in the Crusader wars, which he places in 491 (1097-98), Fetih Hân defended Ankara, withdrew towards Çorum as the Crusaders' numbers grew, and together with Melik İsmâil Gâzi routed them in an ambush laid near Çorum. When rule over the Danishmendid lands passed after İsmâil Hân's death to his brother Melik Şemseddin İbrâhim Bey, the governorship of Amasya was given around 506 (1112-13) to Fetih Hân, then governor of Ankara. Hüsâmeddin writes that because Fetih Hân renewed the Church of Eleni at the place where he lived in Amasya, turned it into a mosque and improved his quarter, the church and the quarter were named "Fethiye Mosque, Fethiye quarter". The same author reports that in a record from 517 (1123-24) "Fetih Hân bin Kılıç" appears as the atabeg of Melik Mecdeddin Sunkur, ruler of Amasya, and that after İbrâhim Bey's death Sunkur was summoned from Niksar and made ruler in Amasya through Fetih Hân's efforts. Some of these details are known only from Hüsâmeddin's work, and the author rarely names his sources.

The Church Period and the Phocas Tradition

Nearly all of today's descriptive texts say that the church was built in the early seventh century by Helena, daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Phocas. Phocas's reign, 602-610, is given as the period of the building's foundation; some accounts give the date more generally as the first half of the seventh century. Official texts pass on this information in guarded language such as "is thought to have been built" or "is believed". The reason is that no inscription or endowment deed can be seen on the building today; in the identity data of the Cultural Inventory, too, inscription and endowment deed are marked "none".

Hüsâmeddin's work shows where the tradition came from. According to him, in 1300 (1882-83), while the mosque's trustee İncezâde Hacı Mehmed Ârif Efendi was repairing the building and adding a masonry minaret on its western side, a marble slab bearing a carved inscription emerged from the ground. From the translation of this Greek inscription it was understood that the building had been erected in the early seventh century by "Elina", a princess and daughter of the Byzantine emperor Phocas. Hüsâmeddin repeats the same information in the second volume of his work, in the form that Phocas built a church in Amasya in the name of his daughter Eleni, and he calls it the "Church of Eleni". The text of the inscription, who translated it and how, and where the stone was later placed are all unknown. The only document on which the tradition rests today is the translation Hüsâmeddin reports.

Hüsâmeddin considers Phocas a native of Amasya and supports this view with several arguments. He writes that Phocas was the nephew of Ayavasilos, patriarch of Amasya, that before becoming emperor he lived for a long time in Amasya as governor of Pontus, that he built a palace in front of the Kibrithane known as the "King's Palace", and that the old name of today's Bayezid Paşa quarter was "Foka quarter" for this reason. He adds that remains of the King's Palace came to light in a field on the road to Kirazlı Dere, and that Müneccimbaşı's Câmiu'd-Düvel also records Phocas as one of royal descent in Amasya. These inferences are Hüsâmeddin's own and have not been confirmed by any other document. For the same reason the information on the church's founder remains a tradition.

Conversion into a Mosque

Local sources accept that the church was converted into a mosque in 1116, in the Danishmendid period. In one version of the story the conversion is linked to the victorious campaign that Danishmend Gazi led against Amasya. In the texts of the culture and tourism authorities, however, it is said that Fetih Gazi, who served as governor of Amasya in the Danishmendid period, had the church turned into a mosque and named it the Fethiye Mosque. According to one author, Fetih Gazi had been brought from Ankara to the governorship of Amasya in 1116. Two different dates appear in Hüsâmeddin's work: in the section on the quarters he writes that the mosque was converted by Fetih Gâzi around 510 (1116-17) and that its name bears witness to this, whereas in the second volume, where he recounts Danishmendid history, he states that Fetih Hân came to the governorship of Amasya around 506 (1112-13). The date 1116, common today, is the Gregorian equivalent of the first figure.

What the accounts share is clear: the conversion took place under Danishmendid rule, and the name comes from the memory of conquest. The sources do not settle which commander made the conquest, nor whether "Fetih Gazi" is a personal name or a title. The genealogy Hüsâmeddin gives in the form "Fetih Hân bin Kılıç" treats it as a personal name; Vâzıh Efendi's interpretation, by contrast, ties the name to the quarter's having been the first place taken.

In the conversion only the apse of a large church was turned into a mosque; very little of the church building remains standing. Inventory records state that the building was altered and rearranged at that time, and that when it later fell into ruin most of it was renewed. The mihrab was turned to the south, and the mosque was entered through a small opening in the north facade. Hüsâmeddin, too, writes that the mosque's present appearance clearly shows that it was converted from a church.

Architectural Features

The building is thought to have originally been a basilica on a rectangular plan. On the east facade there is a hexagonal apse projecting outward from the wall surface; this is why the mosque's east facade looks angular, like half a hexagon. On the west facade a broad pointed arch is recessed into the wall surface, giving the facade a two-stage sense of movement. In the second stage there are three rectangular lower windows, with two pointed-arched windows above. Another description presents this face as the western part of the church having later been closed off as a broad arched niche, with the lower and upper windows opened into it.

The walls are entirely plastered and whitewashed. For this reason it is impossible to determine the building's original construction material or the wall remains surviving from the church period; the inventory records voice the same reservation. The mosque has no last congregation portico. The roof is a timber structure covered with tiles, and the interior is lit by seven wooden windows. The mihrab is of marble, the minbar of wood. The Cultural Inventory dates the building to the twelfth century and classifies it within Anatolian Seljuk culture, among churches converted into mosques.

The minaret was added later to the main mass of church origin. Its brick shaft is cylindrical, rises on a square base of cut stone, and has a single balcony. The row of muqarnas beneath the balcony is the minaret's only decorative element. Its joints and conical cap were renewed in later repairs. According to Hüsâmeddin's record, the minaret was added in masonry on the western side of the mosque; this shows that the eastern end, where the apse stands, was left untouched.

Repairs and Endowments in the Ottoman Period

The life of the Fethiye Mosque in the Ottoman period is best shown by the endowments that kept it standing. The earliest record in Hüsâmeddin's biographical volumes belongs to Bîçâroğlu Hızır Bey, one of the emirs of Mehmed I (Çelebi Mehmed); it is noted that he had a public fountain at the Fethiye Mosque and an endowment of money attached to the mosque. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Hüsrev Ağa, son of Ömer from the Fethiye quarter, had served in the Georgian and Caucasian wars and become deputy steward of Amasya and acting governor of the sanjak of Çorum; when he returned ill to Amasya in 1036 (1626-27), he bequeathed a third of his property to the repair and needs of the Fethiye Mosque, and died a few months later. In 1048 (1638-39) the mosque's preacher of the chair, el-Hâc Hasan Efendi, also endowed his properties and money to the mosque and had the building repaired.

The mosque suffered its heaviest damage in the earthquake of 1057 (1647-48). According to Hüsâmeddin, the repair after the earthquake was undertaken by Sıdkı Mustafa Pasha of Fethiye, the best-known statesman the quarter produced. Born in this quarter as the son of a family from the ranks of the judges, Sıdkı Mustafa received an education in learning and calligraphy, then moved into the chancery, twice served as nişancı (head of the chancery), attained the rank of vizier and died in Muharrem 1073 (1662). According to a record based on the Islamic court registers, the Pasha repaired the mosque of the quarter where he was born, built a primary school beside it, and set aside allowances for preaching and other posts at the mosque from the income of the money he endowed. In the section on the quarters, Hüsâmeddin writes that in arranging the endowments the Pasha acted together with his sister Âyşe Hanım, wife of Can Mirza Pasha. In the biographical volumes, however, the woman who registered a money endowment for the Fethiye Mosque in 1058 (1648-49) appears as Emine Hanım, daughter of Can Mirza Pasha and wife of Mustafa Efendi; the entry on Can Mirza Pasha likewise states that his daughter Emine Hanım was trustee of the endowment of her ancestor who had endowed money to the Fethiye Mosque, and that she herself endowed money as well. The woman's name and kinship therefore differ between sections of the work.

Repairs continued in the following century. In 1191 (1777-78) the mosque's trustee, el-Hâc Ali Ağa, had the building repaired. At the end of the eighteenth century Uncu el-Hâc İbrâhim Ağa, who had made his fortune in the flour trade and joined the city's notables after returning from the pilgrimage, endowed seven shops in the Pabuççular market and under the Serdar Han together with his money in 1203 (1788-89), and assigned part of this income to the preacher and staff of the Fethiye Mosque in his own quarter. Hüsâmeddin writes that İbrâhim Ağa, who he says looked after the quarter's poor during Ramadan, died in 1210 (1795-96). These endowments show that the mosque's preaching and teaching functions were long sustained by contributions from the people of the quarter.

The nineteenth-century repair came with the minaret. The minaret that the trustee İncezade Hacı Mehmet Arif added to the mosque, which originally had none, is dated in most official records to 1883; the Hijri year 1300 given by Hüsâmeddin also corresponds to 1882-83. One source, however, dates the same repair to 1884 on the basis of an inscription. The minaret collapsed in the earthquake of 1939 and was then rebuilt. With the 1956 repair the mosque was reopened for worship, and in 2006 the General Directorate of Foundations carried out the building's restoration. In the inventory records the building is under first-degree monumental protection, and the body responsible for its upkeep is the General Directorate of Foundations.

Learning and Worship at the Mosque

In Ottoman Amasya the Fethiye Mosque did not remain a mere neighbourhood place of prayer; it joined the mosques where preachers of the chair (kürsü şeyhi) taught the public. Hüsâmeddin's biographical volumes name many holders of this chair. El-Hâc Bayram Efendi, who took the pen name "Temennâyî" because he lived in the Temennâ quarter, taught at the Hızır Paşa, Ayas Ağa and Hüseyin Ağa madrasas and then began teaching Baydawi's Qur'an commentary at the Fethiye Mosque; he retired in 1018 (1609-10) and died a few months after completing the commentary in 1026 (1617). Bâyezîd Efendi, son of Selim from the Hacı Hamza quarter, became professor at the Hüsâmiye Madrasa in 1052 (1642-43) and afterwards moved to the chair of the Fethiye Mosque as a retirement post. A scholar known as "Sevincerli Hâfız Hoca" also died in 1088 (1677) while imam and preacher of the chair of the mosque.

The chair kept its vitality in the eighteenth century as well. Yûsufzâde el-Hâc Hasan Efendi, born in the Fethiye quarter in 1061 (1651), completed his studies in Erzurum, taught for some seven years at the Süleymaniye Madrasa in Mecca, was dismissed because of certain remarks in his sermons, and on returning to Amasya in 1120 (1708-09) took up the chair of the Fethiye Mosque and the public lectureship of the Enderun Mosque. Hacıköylüzâde İsmâil Efendi, after teaching for many years, died in 1191 (1777) while preacher of the chair of the Fethiye Mosque. Hüsâmeddin presents him as a scholar, jurist and preacher.

The posts of preacher and Friday orator also passed from generation to generation within certain families. Abdünnebî Efendi, son of Nasuh, won renown as preacher of the Fethiye Mosque and died around 1075 (1664-65). İreklizâde Hacı Hasan Efendi, professor at the Halfet Gazi Madrasa, likewise died in Muharrem 1151 (1738) while preacher at Fethiye. Among the Friday orators, Hâfız Osman Efendi took up the post in 1115 (1703-04); when he died in Ramadan 1150 (1737-38) his son Mehmed Efendi succeeded him, and he too died in 1201 (1787). Şeyhzâde Hanîfî Mehmed Efendi, appointed orator in the same year, handed the post over to his sons Hâfız Mehmed and Ali Efendi in 1220 (1805-06). Abdüllatîf Efendi, son of Kadızâde Mehmed Efendi, known as "Küçük Hâce", also served for a time as the mosque's orator.

A notable detail of the mosque's later life concerns Sufism. Şeyh Süleyman Efendi of Tirebolu, trained in Istanbul under the Naqshbandi sheikh Mustafa İsmet Efendi of Ioannina, came to Amasya in 1292 (1875) and settled in İçerişehir. According to Hüsâmeddin, when his disciples multiplied in the Fethiye quarter he mostly held the hatm-i hâcegân, the collective dhikr peculiar to the Naqshbandis, in the room of the Fethiye Mosque set aside for the muezzins, in a calm and dignified manner. This record shows that at the end of the nineteenth century the mosque had a muezzins' room and was open to the religious gatherings of the quarter.

The Fethiye Quarter and Its Buildings

The area around the mosque was a quarter where the judicial and scholarly families of Ottoman Amasya lived. According to Hüsâmeddin, the Amasya judge Muslihîzâde Abdurrahmân Çelebi, known as "Molla Beylik", built a bathhouse in this quarter, and his son, the military judge Molla Vildân Mehmed Çelebi, founded a madrasa above the bathhouse. Of these buildings, known as the Kadı Hamamı and the Kadı Medresesi, the first building of the madrasa was completed in 900 (1494-95) and its endowments were arranged in 911 (1505-06). With masonry outer walls but rooms and interior of timber, the madrasa could not withstand natural disasters and vanished entirely after 1163 (1749-50). Hüsâmeddin writes that he knew from the records that it stood near the mosque, but that its site could no longer be determined. The Kadı Hamamı, on the other hand, continued to be mentioned with its trustees in later centuries.

In the Ottoman period the quarter gave the city many statesmen and scholars. Besides Sıdkı Mustafa Pasha, the former acting governor of Amasya Sefer Ağa and his family were among the notables of this quarter and had a fountain there. Kadızâde Ahmed Pasha, son of Mehmed Ağa, trustee of the Kadı Hamamı, was also among the statesmen this quarter produced. Most of these names are connected with the endowments of the Fethiye Mosque, which suggests that the mosque's long life depended on these families of the quarter.

The city as a whole also grew in this period, while clinging to the limits of its narrow valley. In 1525 Amasya had fifty-five quarters, five of them non-Muslim, and a population of around eight thousand, of whom about two thousand were non-Muslims. At the end of the sixteenth century the number of quarters was still fifty-five, six of them non-Muslim, and the population had reached ten thousand. Hans Dernschwam, who came to the city in 1555, writes that the houses, mostly two-storeyed and of mud brick, were piled on top of one another in the narrow valley, that there were eleven mosques in the city, and that the Yeşilırmak was spanned by one wooden and three stone bridges. Evliya Çelebi records counting fifty-three quarters and some twenty thousand people in the seventeenth century. These general figures do not mention the Fethiye Mosque by name; the building's condition in that age can be followed through the endowment and staff records cited above.

The Mummies from the Basement

The second feature that sets the Fethiye Mosque apart among Amasya's known buildings is its basement. According to the inventory records, the bodies of İzzettin Mehmet Pervane and his family were brought out of the mosque's basement in 1855. In the account of museum officials this discovery was made by chance, and the mummies were taken from the mosque's basement to the nearby tomb, that is, the tomb adjoining the Burmalı Minare Mosque. The TDV Encyclopedia of Islam's entry on the Burmalı Minare gives the same information, saying that the mummies "are said to have been brought here from the Fethiye Mosque around 1271 (1854-55)". The oldest written source for this is Hüsâmeddin. Describing the Cümûdâr Tomb, he writes that people were still alive who knew that the coffins at the front of the tomb and two others had earlier lain in a crypt beneath the Fethiye Mosque and had been moved there around 1271.

According to Hüsâmeddin's description, the small stone chamber on the tomb's lower floor held eight coffins, some placed on top of one another and covered with green cloths. In the two coffins at the front the bodies were intact and were thought to be Arabs; the limbs of the others were incomplete, though the bones kept their original form. Who they were was unknown in Amasya. The sources also report differently the view of Vâzıh Efendi, the first to give the mummies an identity. According to one account, Vâzıh wrote that the mummies were called "the martyrs" and belonged to Muînüddin Pervâne Bey, his Arab concubine and two sons; Hüsâmeddin, by contrast, states that Vâzıh considered them the slaves and concubines of Pervâne Bey, while European researchers thought them mummified bodies from ancient times, and he regards both views as guesswork.

Hüsâmeddin's own interpretation brings the Fethiye Mosque directly into the debate over the mummies' identity. According to him, his research in the records showed that the tomb in front of the Burmalı Minare belonged to Prince Cümûdâr bin Yaşmut, grandson of Hülâgû Khan and overseer of Anatolia, and that the Amasya emir Abuşkay İşboğa Noyin was buried beside him. In opposing Vâzıh's view, he argues that in 675 (1277), when Muînüddin Süleyman Pervâne was killed, the mosque had not yet been built, and he finds it unacceptable that a large tomb would have been built at that date for his slaves and concubines. Nor does he consider it fitting that bodies from pre-Islamic ages should have been preserved beneath a building converted into a mosque. He finds it more plausible that they were the bodies of Fetih Gâzi, who turned the church into a mosque, of his son Mahmûd Gâzi, and of their wives or daughters. In the second volume of his work he writes that Fetih Hân's tomb was near the mosque and was later moved to the Cümûdâr Tomb. Thus, for Hüsâmeddin, those brought out of the mosque's crypt were members of the Danishmendid family that converted it.

The author of the TDV entry, Semavi Eyice, notes that Hüsâmeddin did not give the source of this information, which he presented as "according to the records", so that its accuracy cannot be known, and that one would expect the founder of the mosque to lie in a tomb adjoining it. The same entry mentions that Pervâne was the son-in-law of Ferruh Bey, who built the Burmalı Minare, and that he had an endowment deed drawn up in 699 (1299-1300). Museum officials today attribute the mummies to Prince Cumudar, overseer of Anatolia, to İşbuğa Noyan, emir of Amasya, and to İzzettin Mehmet Pervane, his wife and his children. There are eight in all, four of them children. All are said to date from the fourteenth-century Ilkhanid period. According to an account in the local press, those brought out of the Fethiye crypt were the mummies of Pervane Bey and his family, while those of Cumudar and İşbuğa were already in the tomb. In one museum statement, however, it is said that the mummies were kept in the Burmalı Minare tomb until 1855 and removed from there in that year; this statement contradicts all the other accounts.

The Movements of the Mummies

The mummies changed places several times in the following century. According to the museum director's account in 2011, they were displayed in the Burmalı Minare tomb until 1928, and when the madrasa of the Sultan Bayezid Mosque opened as a museum they were placed in one of its rooms. An account in the local press, drawing on the memoirs of Süheyl Ünver, adds that the mummies were first carried in ceremony to the Bayezid Mosque and from there placed in the madrasa used as a museum. Submerged in the Yeşilırmak flood of 1952, the mummies were badly damaged; they were then brought to the Gökmedrese Mosque, which had begun to serve as a museum, and in 1980 to the present museum building. After being displayed for a time in the museum's basement, they were placed in the Tomb of Sultan Mesud I in the museum garden, where for years they were exhibited in six sarcophagi. In 2011 they were moved to a special climate-controlled section on the museum's second floor, guarded by cameras.

The sources differ on the years of these transfers. One account says the mummies have been known since the museum was founded in 1925, that the Gökmedrese became a museum in 1962 and that the new museum opened in 1976; in the museum director's statement, however, the year 1966 is given for the Gökmedrese and 1980 for the new museum. According to the account in the local press, the person who carried the mummies to the new museum in 1962 was the teacher Tekin Tutak. Establishing the exact sequence would require a study of the museum's records.

Studies of the Mummies

The most striking aspect of the mummies is the technique of mummification. Unlike the Egyptian examples, they are not wrapped in linen, their bodies are uncovered, and they were mummified without removal of the internal organs; for this reason they are referred to as the first Turkish and Muslim mummies. Examinations by endoscopy and X-ray showed that İşboğa Noyan died at about thirty and suffered from arthritis, and that there was no brain in his skull. Cumudar is said to have died between thirty-five and forty, probably by strangulation, with deformation in his lumbar vertebrae from much riding. Pervane is estimated to have been fifty to fifty-five, and bears traces of anaemia and arthritis; the concubine was between fifty and sixty and had lost all her teeth. Of the children, the youngest was about one year old, the elder boy two or three, and the girl four or five; in the girl a curvature of the leg bone was found, pointing to a severe illness.

In a 2003 examination by National Geographic's mummy specialists, it was concluded that the children died of illness, while İşboğa and Cumudar were strangled. Local researchers also report that no marks of a cutting weapon or sword were found on the bodies. According to the museum researcher Muzaffer Doğanbaş, the Turks had a mummification tradition of their own; no linen wrapping is used as in Egyptian mummies, and some forty of the substances employed are recorded in Hacı Paşa's Şifâü'l-Eksân of 1380. Among them are salt and onion, used in cooking. Doğanbaş says that similar examples of mummies are also found in the Arap Baba Tomb in Elazığ, in the Danishmendid tombs at Kemah and in tombs in Konya.

The Burmalı Minare Tomb and the Place of the Mummies

The Burmalı Minare Mosque, to which the mummies were moved, was built according to its inscription by Ferruh b. Selçuk, one of the emirs of the Seljuk Sultan Gıyâseddin Keyhusrev II, during his reign (1237-1246). The tomb adjoining the mosque is an example of the Seljuk tradition of funerary monuments and was built together with the mosque. Built of cut stone, the tomb has an octagonal body; beneath it lies a crypt for the dead, and its upper floor is reached from inside the mosque. Since the upper floor was turned into a library in 1147 (1734-35), the sarcophagi that should have stood there had disappeared long before. When Evliya Çelebi visited Amasya around 1646, he described the Mahkeme Mosque, where bodies lay "standing at full length in their coffins inside a chamber", but he does not say who they were. It has been suggested that this mosque was the Burmalı Minare; Eyice does not find this identification convincing enough. If the bodies Evliya saw were indeed in this tomb, there were already mummies in the tomb some two centuries before the transfer from Fethiye; this possibility is consistent with the account that the mummies of Cumudar and İşbuğa had lain in the tomb beforehand.

The Mosque Today

The Fethiye Mosque is a neighbourhood mosque open for worship on Küba Street in the Fethiye quarter, within the historic district. With the hexagonal apse surviving from its church period, its later closed-off west facade and the brick minaret rebuilt after 1939, it is one of the Byzantine churches converted into mosques in Amasya that are still in use today. The building, where sermons, lessons in Qur'anic commentary and the office of Friday orator continued for centuries, still serves the congregation of its quarter.

Chronology

602-610: Reign of the Byzantine Emperor Phocas; the church is said to have been built by Phocas's daughter Helena (Eleni) (there is no firm documentary evidence).

712: Muslim conquest of Amasya; the city remains briefly under Umayyad rule.

1112-1113: According to Hüsâmeddin, Fetih Hân, governor of Ankara, is appointed governor of Amasya (506).

1116: Conversion of the church into a mosque in the Danishmendid period and the giving of the name Fethiye (around 510 in Hüsâmeddin).

1626-1627: Hüsrev Ağa bequeaths a third of his property to the repair of the mosque.

1638-1639: Endowment and repair by el-Hâc Hasan Efendi, preacher of the chair.

1647-1648: Damage in an earthquake; repair by Sıdkı Mustafa Pasha.

1777-1778: Repair by the trustee el-Hâc Ali Ağa.

1788-1789: Endowment by Uncu el-Hâc İbrâhim Ağa for the mosque's preacher and staff.

1855: The mummies said to belong to İzzettin Mehmet Pervane and his family are brought out of the basement and moved to the Burmalı Minare tomb (Hijri 1271).

1883: The minaret is added by İncezade Hacı Mehmet Arif; according to Hüsâmeddin a Greek inscription is found at this time (1884 in one source).

1928: The mummies are moved from the Burmalı Minare tomb to the museum in the Sultan Bayezid Madrasa (other dates are also given in the sources).

1939: The minaret collapses in an earthquake and is rebuilt.

1956: Repair and reopening for worship.

2006: Restoration by the General Directorate of Foundations.

2011: The mummies are moved to the climate-controlled section on the second floor of the Amasya Museum.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Official sources

  • Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, descriptive text "Fethiye Camii" (the same text is published in the Places to Visit section of the Kültür Portalı and in the Amasya Municipality City Guide). amasya.bel.tr
  • Kültür Portalı, Cultural Inventory: "Fethiye Camii - Amasya" (Inventory No. A33). amasya.bel.tr

Other sources

  • Bağbaşı, Tuğba. "Amasya Fethiye Camii." In N. Kozak (ed.), Online Türkiye Turizm Ansiklopedisi, 2019. turkiyeturizmansiklopedisi.com
  • Kültür Envanteri (kulturenvanteri.com), "Fethiye Camii, Amasya."
  • Yunus Çolak, "Amasya", İslam Düşünce Atlası; İlhan Şahin and Feridun Emecen, "Amasya", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 3 (1991), pp. 1-4. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Semavi Eyice, "Burmalı Minare Camii ve Türbesi", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 6 (1992), pp. 444-445.
  • "Amasya'daki mumyalar taşındı", Hürriyet (Anadolu Agency), 3 May 2011; "Amasya Müzesi'nin Müslüman mumyaları", Arkeolojik Haber (Anadolu Agency). hurriyet.com.tr
  • "İşte mumyalanmış ilk Müslüman Türkler", Timetürk, 10 August 2009; "Amasya: Öldürülen Vali ve Ailesinin Mumyaları", Haberler.com, 5 September 2006.
  • "Türkiye'nin En Geniş Mumya Ailesi Amasya'da", Yeşilırmak Gazetesi, 11 August 2025.

Online sources