The Gökmedrese Mosque stands in the centre of Amasya, beside the road that leads out toward Tokat, in the middle of the neighbourhood that takes its name from it. Dating from the second half of the thirteenth century, the building is a closed complex that joins a mosque, a madrasa and a tomb (türbe). The sources also call it the Torumtay Mosque after its founder, and some publications spell it Turumtay. The word "gök" in its name refers to the turquoise and purple glazed bricks and tiles that gave the building its colour, and above all to the blue decoration of the tomb drum. Most of this decoration has not survived, yet the fragments that remain on the drum are distinct enough to explain why the building bears this name.

The life of Seyfeddin Torumtay, who commissioned the complex, the full text of his endowment deed and his governorship of Amasya are the subject of a separate article; here the building itself is examined: its plan, its ornament, its tomb, its function and the changes it has undergone. In both architecture and function the Gökmedrese is not a conventional example among Anatolian Seljuk madrasas. For this reason scholars have long disagreed on whether it should be counted as a mosque, a madrasa, or both at once.

The Founder and the Date of Construction

The man who commissioned the building was Seyfeddin Torumtay, appointed governor of Amasya during the reign of a Gıyâseddin Keyhusrev. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi entry names the sultan as Gıyâseddin Keyhusrev II; yet in the 1260s the ruler on the Anatolian Seljuk throne, under Mongol (Ilkhanid) tutelage, was Gıyâseddin Keyhusrev III. For this reason some publications attach the building to the Seljuk period and others to the Ilkhanid. After the Battle of Köse Dağ in 1243 the Anatolian Seljuk state had in practice become subject to the Ilkhanids, and most governors and emirs served with Ilkhanid approval. The Gökmedrese is a product of this transitional age.

No foundation inscription of the mosque has survived. The inscription that was removed from its place could not be found; the building retains only a repair inscription dated 1316 (1898-99) and, on the door frame, a phrase that must refer to the craftsman. The exact year of construction is therefore unknown. Even so, because the endowment deed that Torumtay himself had drawn up bears the date 665 AH (1266-67), construction is accepted to have been completed by that year at the latest. The Kültür Portalı dates the building to 1267, while some publications take 1266; the one-year difference arises from the fact that the year 665 AH spans two years of the Gregorian calendar.

The date of the deed shows not the year in which the building was made but the latest year by which it existed. Fazilet Koçyiğit of Amasya University reads the deed's description of the building as "the madrasa famous under the name Gökmedrese" as a sign that the document may have been drawn up when the building had already been completed and used for some time. In the same researcher's view, the plan and decorative features bring the building closer to the Ilkhanid period; yet the wording of the deed also leaves open the possibility that it predates 1266. Koçyiğit states this possibility as the building having been constructed in the first half of the thirteenth century at the earliest.

According to the local historian Hüseyin Hüsameddin, in his Amasya Tarihi, the building rises on land where a church and a patriarchate had stood earlier. No excavation or document confirming this tradition has been reported. That the building, set on sloping ground along a north-south axis, still stands somewhat above the road is consistent with such a siting.

Plan and General Layout

With the tomb set aside, the building shows a regular rectangular plan. With its thick, massive cut-stone walls closed to the outside, it carries the distinctive features of Seljuk architecture. The north façade, where the entrance lies, is projected forward and bounded at each end by a cylindrical corner tower; the towers rise on chamfered cubic bases and give the building a monumental appearance. Because the tomb is set back behind the façade, it reads as a separate volume attached at the north-east corner of the main mass, and it somewhat disturbs the symmetry of the façade. Alongside cut stone the building also uses rubble stone: cut stone appears in the tomb and on the front façade of the mosque, rubble stone on the other façades. The ornament is concentrated on the front façade facing the road, built of cut stone, an arrangement common in Seljuk buildings.

The pointed-arched entrance in the middle of the façade is set within a pointed-vaulted iwan reached by a flight of seven steps. The iwan-shaped portal is a solution rarely seen elsewhere in Anatolia; Koçyiğit names the east door of the Sungur Bey Mosque in Niğde as the only other example designed in this manner. On the outside, a border with half-stars of six points forms a rectangular frame. The iwan arch is surrounded by borders in three tiers: the uppermost border is decorated with geometric motifs, the next is left plain, and the third shows plaited reed mouldings joined by links known as zencirek. Columns with geometric patterns stand on either side of the door, and a tall rectangular frame, like those of other portals, encloses the outside of the arch.

The windows on either side of the portal are arranged like mihrab niches. Each is covered by a muqarnas hood, framed by colonnettes on both sides and enclosed from outside by a broad rectangular border. On the shafts of the colonnettes a dense weave of interlaced goose-foot motifs appears, and in the border around the windows the typical Seljuk ornament formed by interlocking eight-pointed stars. Round medallions arranged one beneath another at the sides of the border are worked in low relief and openwork, and each contains a different interlace motif. Above the hemispherical bosses at the corners of the hoods are horizontal rectangular recesses resembling inscription niches. The rosettes carved into the areas outside the windows are not symmetrical, and some give the impression of having been left unfinished.

Apart from these two windows on the façade, only four windows are opened, all in the east wall. This approach, which gives as little opening to the outside world as possible, is the general attitude of Seljuk buildings. Even so, Koçyiğit regards the size and decoration of the windows on the north façade and on the tomb as an indication of a practice that became widespread after the Mongol invasion, and notes that the same feature appears in the Amasya Bimarhane (1308).

The Interior

Entering by the door, one passes into a space that extends perpendicular to the mihrab wall. Eight cross-sectioned piers, set in two rows of four, divide the interior into three aisles with pointed arches. Since each aisle running perpendicular to the mihrab has five bays, fifteen bays result in all. Koçyiğit writes that twelve of them are covered by domes and three by vaults of varying forms. The present asymmetry of the domes and vaults, and the way that in some bays the domes have lost their roundness and approach an elliptical shape, show that the upper covering was replaced in repairs of different years. The first bay of the central aisle after the entrance is covered by a dome with a lantern admitting light, and the second by a star vault; this arrangement distinguishes the central aisle from the side aisles and gives the space an axis.

Albert Gabriel writes that in the middle of the dome immediately in front of the portal there was a wide, circular opening. Today beneath this dome stands an eight-pointed star-shaped element with a drainage hole in its centre. Koçyiğit interprets this as the trace of a fountain with a lantern above it, as in courtyard mosques, and suggests that the congregation may have performed ablution here with carried water. The interior has no other notable ornament. The mihrab, nothing more than a half-cylindrical niche, is very plain and, according to Koçyiğit, is not original either; plaster marks on the south wall suggest that it was made later. The present mihrab is of plaster painted with yellow oil paint, framed by a border with geometric decoration, and has a muqarnas hood and colonnettes on each side. It was probably made during the repairs of 1963.

North of the prayer hall, on either side of the portal, lies a pointed-arched iwan, and these spaces stand at a lower level than the rest of the hall. Besides the portal on the north façade there is also a door on the east façade. The wooden door leaves of the building are today in the Amasya Museum. Made in relief kündekâri (joinery) technique, these leaves are counted among the fine examples of Seljuk woodwork. On the door, in thuluth script, one reads "Min amel-i Ebü's-Silm en-Neccâr", that is, the work of the carpenter Ebü's-Silm. Gabriel and Hüsameddin consider this man the architect of the building; Koçyiğit, because the phrase carries the epithet "carpenter", holds that he was only the craftsman who made the door.

The Tomb Section

The tomb attached to the north-east wall of the mosque is an interesting structure that gives, seen from outside, the impression of having two storeys. On a square stone base stands a cube-shaped volume of cut stone; above it rises an octagonal drum built of brick, which looks like a second storey. The conical roof with a sixteen-pointed star section that the drum carried is in ruins today; some descriptions present the roof as a star-shaped pyramid in brick. Each face of the drum, shaped like a small tomb, is animated by a shallow pointed-arched niche set within a rectangular frame. Of these niches only two have a small window; the others were left solid.

The main ornament of the tomb is concentrated on the drum. Immediately below the roof runs a Kufic inscription frieze built of turquoise glazed bricks. Some accounts describe the tomb drum as a zigzag-patterned surface of brick and single-colour dark green tiles, so the colour and layout of the decoration are not reported identically in the sources. The interiors of the pointed arches and the corner spandrels between the arches and the rectangular frames are filled with various interlace motifs made of purple and turquoise glazed bricks, with rosettes and stars of turquoise and purple tile set in between. The blue that gave the building its name is on this drum. Koçyiğit says that he can read this decoration largely from remains; it is evident that the corners, soffits and tympana of the arches were ornamented with glazed brick, and that the thick border above the niches was covered with the same material.

The tomb opens into the interior of the mosque by a deep arch in the form of an iwan. The inside of this arch is decorated with rows of diamonds in turquoise and purple bricks and surrounded by green tiles, while its tympanum is covered with plain square green tile slabs. The lower storey of the first, iwan-like section is arranged as a mummy chamber (mumyalık), and one sarcophagus (sanduka) stands above it. In the second section, entered through a square opening behind the iwan, seven sarcophagi covered with hexagonal and triangular tile slabs are lined up in the visiting chamber, which is domed from inside; two of them are small. Whom these sarcophagi belong to is not known; only one local account attributes one of the three sarcophagi on the left at the entrance to Necip Bey, a descendant of Torumtay, and no document has been produced to support this. The tomb can also be reached from outside the mosque by a narrow stair placed behind the left corner tower; Koçyiğit writes that this stair today serves to climb to the roof of the tomb, and that no trace confirms Gabriel's statement that the door opened into the tomb.

There are also popular accounts concerning the mummy chamber. Koçyiğit relays that people who witnessed Amasya's older days say mummies were to be found inside the sarcophagi of the chamber. These statements are not supported by documents.

The Decorative Programme

In the ornament of the building, geometric order is decisive. Vegetal motifs appear only in the rosettes, in the window borders, and in the shafts and capitals of the colonnettes, and the small flower forms nearly vanish within the geometric weave. According to the assessment Koçyiğit reports, this geometric idiom made of polygons and many-pointed stars had dominated Anatolian architecture since the early twelfth century. The use of tile and glazed brick as architectural ornament goes back to the first quarter of the thirteenth century. In the Gökmedrese the two idioms stand side by side: geometric ornament carved in cut stone on the façade facing the road, and turquoise and purple glaze on the brick drum of the tomb.

Koçyiğit traces the origin of the rosettes on the north façade to ancient Mesopotamian and Hittite tradition and notes that they carry a cosmological meaning like a sun symbol. The differences in the building's decorative programme, that is, reliefs beginning to gain a plastic value, large openings such as windows on the façade, and the absence of adherence to a typical plan scheme, may according to the same researcher be explained by the dispersal, after the Battle of Köse Dağ in 1243, of the court-affiliated Konya workshop. This workshop used to supply artists with the patterns that provided unity of ornament in buildings. With the workshop dispersed, craftsmen are thought to have felt freer to express themselves.

Koçyiğit compares the building in detail with other Anatolian works. The covering of each aisle with a different roof recalls the practice at Ani and the Divriği Great Mosque; the corner towers recall the Hunat Hatun (1238) and Sahabiye (1267) madrasas in Kayseri, the Sivas Gökmedrese (1271), the Kırşehir Cacabey (1273) and the Erzurum Yakutiye (1310). The addition of the tomb to the building is related to the practice at the Atabey Ertokuş (1224) in Isparta, the Kırşehir Cacabey (1273), the Erzurum Double Minaret Madrasa (1285-1290) and the Sungur Bey Mosque in Niğde (1335). These comparisons show that the Gökmedrese sits within the known patterns of thirteenth-century Anatolian architecture while fitting none of them exactly.

Mosque or Madrasa?

There is no agreement on the original purpose of the building. Some researchers count it as a mosque with a zaviye (a mosque with lodge rooms), others as a madrasa; there are also those who say it was a madrasa of astronomy, that is, an observatory. Torumtay's endowment deed, however, shows that the building was used as both mosque and madrasa: income was set aside separately for teaching and for the muezzin, the building is called a "famous madrasa", and the deed also shows that Friday prayers were performed here. Hüsameddin writes that on the north and west sides of the prayer hall there were many small rooms built of stone, and on the east a hexagonal, open-roofed lecture room. Koçyiğit interprets these rooms as student cells.

Hüsameddin also gave the names of the professors who served in the madrasa and recorded that the first professor was a physician, Gıyâseddin Mahmud-ı Garmînî. This information may be taken as evidence that the building was not an institution teaching astronomy. The other supports for the observatory view are weak as well: there is no trace of an observation well beneath the open dome that Gabriel mentions, and the tall drum of the tomb is not suited to observation. For the Cacabey Madrasa in Kırşehir a similar observatory view has also been advanced, but there too no trace of an observation well could be found.

The view that the building was a zaviye mosque (reverse-T plan) contradicts its plan type. Such buildings are generally founded in rural areas and contain, besides the tomb and the small mosque, units such as a guest house, a kitchen, a pantry and a stable; the Gökmedrese's urban position and plan do not fit this description. Koçyiğit notes that, since the payment set aside in the deed for teaching was covered by a small amount of wheat, the view that the building had a large madrasa independent of the mosque is not strong either. On this evidence the principal function of the building was that of a mosque, and it was also used as a madrasa serving a small number of students. According to another view, the section known today as the tomb was originally the main lecture room, and Torumtay's relatives were later buried there, turning the space into a tomb. That the flat-lintelled opening from the iwan into the tomb does not appear original supports this view, but no firm conclusion has been reached.

The Question of Torumtay's Grave

On where Torumtay lies, the sources do not fully agree. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi states that Torumtay lies in a tomb dated 677 (1278-79), built by himself and today separated from the building by a street, and records that who lies in the tomb attached to the mosque is not known. Some descriptive texts, on the other hand, say that its founder lies in the tomb attached to the mosque. From the available sources it cannot be settled whether these two accounts mean the same structure or two separate structures. For details on Torumtay's life and endowment deed, one may consult the article devoted to him.

Later Periods and Repairs

The earliest repair document known in the building is the repair inscription dated 1316 (1898-99). The irregularity of the domes and vaults and the near-elliptical form of the domes bear the traces of earlier repairs. The inscription dated 1316 is said to record a repair carried out in the reign of Abdülhamid II. In the twentieth century the building was repaired several times under the supervision of the General Directorate of Foundations, and today it is kept open for worship as a mosque. The mihrab is thought to have been renewed in the repair of 1963.

The building has one more place in Amasya's cultural history. The Amasya Museum was founded in 1928 as a museum depot with the works gathered in the madrasa of the Bayezid II Complex. When the works multiplied and new display space was needed, in 1962 they were moved to the Gökmedrese, one of the monumental buildings of the Seljuk period. The museum moved to its present modern building on 22 March 1977 and opened to visitors on 14 June 1980. Some accounts place the start of the museum use in 1926; this does not match the founding year of 1928 given above, and no record explaining the difference has been found. Over this period the Gökmedrese housed the city's archaeological and ethnographic collections for about fifteen years.

The district where the building stands took its name from it. In the Gökmedrese neighbourhood also stands the mosque built in 1428 by Yörgüç Pasha, one of the viziers of Murad II; thus the neighbourhood has become a point where Seljuk and early Ottoman buildings stand side by side. The Gökmedrese lies near the point where the Amasya-Tokat road leaves the city, and within a distance from which it can be visited together with Amasya's other historic mosques.

Chronology

1243: Battle of Köse Dağ; the Anatolian Seljuk state comes under Mongol domination.

1266-67 (665 AH): The Torumtay endowment deed is drawn up; the building is considered completed by this date at the latest.

1278-79 (677 AH): Date of the tomb in which Torumtay is reported to lie.

1898-99 (1316 AH): Repair inscription seen on the building.

1928: The Amasya Museum is founded as a museum depot in the Bayezid II Madrasa.

1962: The museum's works are moved to the Gökmedrese.

1963: Probable repair in which the mihrab was renewed.

1977-1980: The museum moves to its new building (22 March 1977) and opens to visitors (14 June 1980).

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

  • Fazilet Koçyiğit, "Amasya Gökmedrese Camii Üzerine Bir Değerlendirme", Uluslararası Sosyal Araştırmalar Dergisi, vol. 7, no. 35. sosyalarastirmalar.com
  • İsmet Kayaoğlu, "Turumtay Vakfiyesi", Vakıflar Dergisi, no. 12 (1978), pp. 91-112.

Official sources

  • Kültür Portalı, "Gök Medrese - Amasya" entry (Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism). kulturportali.gov.tr
  • Amasya Governorship, "Amasya Müzesi" page.

Other sources

  • Selda Kalfazade, "Gökmedrese Camii", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 14, Istanbul 1996, pp. 140-142. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Albert Gabriel, Monuments Turcs d'Anatolie, vol. II, Paris 1934.
  • Kültür Envanteri, "Gök Medrese Camii" entry. kulturenvanteri.com
  • "Gökmedrese", Amasya Hakkında (Abdulhalim, 2007) blog post.

Online sources