In Ottoman cities a fountain was often the plainest of pious works and the most heavily used. In Amasya such structures stand in front of a neighborhood mosque, in the courtyard of a house or at the gate of a madrasa. Some have lost their inscriptions and some have run dry, but behind each one there was a founder, an endowment and an income arrangement meant to keep the water flowing. The history of the city's water is therefore, besides a history of stone structures, a history of endowment deeds, court records and daily wages.

Plentiful Water in a Narrow Valley

Amasya lies in a narrow valley opened by the Yeşilırmak and flanked by high cliffs. The river runs through the middle of the city, while the cliffs squeeze the settlement into the valley. This geography made water a resource that was both abundant and in need of careful distribution. In a city where gardens, vineyards, mills and bathhouses all depended on the same water, securing its course and dividing it fairly was among the first duties of government.

For Ottoman administrators, the first tasks after the conquest of a place included repairing water channels, setting the fountains flowing again, distributing water justly and mending old bridges. Zafer Karademir writes that this care continued after the conquest and that the water supply of large settlements was among the matters that drew the most attention. Amasya was taken into Ottoman territory by Bayezid the Thunderbolt in 1398 and in the following centuries became one of the sanjak centers to which princes were sent. Because the princes brought with them a court circle, scribes, scholars and soldiers, the city's need for water grew not only with its population but with this political function.

When Evliya Çelebi visited Amasya in the seventeenth century, he praised the city's waters and made particular mention of the waterwheels (dolap) on the river. In eighteenth-century records, too, Amasya appears as a city famous for its mills. Drinking water, milling, irrigation and bathing were parts of a single water order, and when one of them faltered the others were affected as well.

Before the Fountain: The Ferhat Water Channel

Long before the Ottoman fountains, bringing water to Amasya had meant carving it through rock. According to the inventory of the Ministry of Culture's Kültür Portalı, the Ferhat Water Channel was built in the Late Hellenistic and Early Roman period to meet the water needs of the ancient settlement on the southern bank of the Yeşilırmak. The channel is known to run about 20-25 kilometers, and its start lies at the Kırkgöz locality in Meşeli Çiftliği village. In places it continues underground under a vault and ends in the Mehmet Paşa neighborhood. The part that can be followed by eye lies mostly at the Ferhat Arası locality.

The sources disagree on the date of construction. The inventory entry gives "1st century BC," while newspaper articles often link the channel to the reign of Emperor Hadrian (AD 117-138). The same articles report that it was cut with a calculated gradient, using a water-level system, and that according to records it ceased to function after the twelfth century. The name of the channel derives not from a historical person but from a folk tale, the story of Ferhat and Şirin. The story of the lover who pierced the mountain is not a document; it is the way the centuries remembered this labor. A direct link between the channel and the Ottoman fountain tradition has not been demonstrated, but it shows how far back the city's relationship with water goes.

Giving Water as a Pious Work

In Ottoman society, building a fountain went beyond bringing water to a neighborhood; it counted as a continuing charity recorded in the founder's name. Since every drop that flowed was credited to the one who had built it, a fountain was regarded as common property for rich and poor alike, and traveler and neighbor drank from the same spout. This outlook turned the fountain from an architectural program into a social habit.

The religious basis of this outlook is old. According to the entry on fountains in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, when the Prophet was asked which charity was the most meritorious, he once answered "providing water," and well-off Companions endowed wells to meet the community's need for water. This is why building a fountain and endowing one became a leading pious work among Turkish communities. Among the people it was believed that as long as the water flowed the founder's reward continued, so that a fountain was a kind of ongoing charity (sadaka-i cariye). Fountains were often not built alone but attached to a neighborhood mosque, a complex, a bathhouse or a han, and sometimes added beside a children's school (sıbyan mektebi) or a sebil. The sebil is a separate type of structure with its own character. At some fountains, sitting stones were placed at the sides for those waiting their turn at the water, and this played a part in making the fountain a gathering place of the neighborhood.

Amasya's fountains appear in two forms. Some were built on streets and neighborhood squares as independent pious works, while others were incorporated into mosque complexes (külliye) founded as endowments. According to the inventory of the Amasya Governorship, the historic fountains are found mostly in old neighborhoods and streets, in the courtyards of some old houses and, rarely, inside houses. These structures follow the traditional Ottoman fountain form while showing some local features, and they are built of cut stone and brick. Most of them are no longer functional today.

Fountains of the Princely Era

Selim Özcan's article on Amasya in the era of the princes, drawing on Hüsameddin Yasar's Amasya Tarihi and Ottoman survey registers, lists structures of water culture as it describes the physical makeup of the city. Among the bathhouses are the Hızır Paşa Bathhouse, built in 1466 by the beylerbey Atabekzâde Hayreddin Hızır Paşa in the neighborhood named after him; the Kumacık Bathhouse, built in 1495 by the chief palace gatekeeper (kapı ağası) Ayas Ağa in the Bayezid Paşa neighborhood; and the Sinan Paşa Bathhouse, built in 1511 by Sinan Paşa, beylerbey of Sivas, in the Kayabaşı neighborhood. The fountains are given with the following dates:

  • Acem Ali Fountain (1465): Hoca Acem Ali of Nishapur, one of the city's prominent merchants, had it built in front of his house in the neighborhood that bears his name.
  • Temennâ Fountain (1467): Built in the Temennâ neighborhood by Hacı Hüsameddin Ağa son of Abdüssamed, a freedman of Hızır Paşa.
  • Hacı Hamza Fountain (1468): Built by Hacı Hamza in front of the mosque of the neighborhood known by his name.
  • İlyas Ağa Fountain (1515): Built by Hacı İlyas Ağa in the neighborhood known by the same name.

What stands out in the list is the identity of the founders. They are not princes or viziers but a merchant, a freedman, a pilgrim and an agha. While the bathhouses carry the names of statesmen such as a beylerbey and a chief gatekeeper, the prominence of neighborhood-level benefactors among the fountains shows that charity in the form of water was not a privilege of the court circle and was kept alive at the scale of the neighborhood as well. According to the same article, the first survey of 1520 recorded 52 neighborhoods in Amasya, 48 Muslim and 4 non-Muslim, while Evliya Çelebi speaks of 48 Muslim and 5 Christian neighborhoods. Neighborhoods mostly took shape around a mosque, a madrasa or a lodge, and sometimes around a market, a square or a fountain. In this order the fountain was not only the neighborhood's water point but also its meeting place.

Fountains of the Complexes

The fountain of the Bayezid II Complex is the clearest example of a fountain attached to an endowed complex. The complex was built between 1481 and 1486 by Prince Ahmed, governor of Amasya, in the name of his father Bayezid II, and consists of a mosque, madrasa, tomb, soup kitchen (imaret), fountain and ablution fountain (şadırvan). The fountain stands at the southeast corner of the courtyard wall and measures 1.60 x 2.15 m. It is built entirely of küfeki stone, and apart from its trough, which measures 0.45 x 1.50 m, the parts appear to have been rebuilt recently. The niche-shaped fountain rests on two large stones up to stirrup height.

The Gatekeeper's Madrasa, also known among the people as the Büyük Ağa Madrasa, is a similar example. According to its inscription, it was built in 894 (1489), in the reign of Bayezid II, by the chief gatekeeper Hüseyin Ağa (Hüseyin Ağa son of Abdülmuîn) in the Şamlar neighborhood on the bank of the Yeşilırmak. Its octagonal plan arose not only from a search for form but also from the topography of the site, and it has hardly any counterpart in Ottoman madrasa architecture. With minor changes the plan was used by Mimar Sinan in the Rüstem Paşa Madrasa in Istanbul, dated 1550.

In front of the madrasa stands a classical fountain. It is a plain structure of large, evenly cut küfeki stone, with an arch laid in alternating courses of red stone and white marble and a trough carved from a single stone before it. The marble panel above the arch is blank; it was probably prepared for an inscription that was never placed. It is thought that the fountain may have been another pious work of Hüseyin Ağa, but this is a conjecture and rests on no document.

In addition to these two fountains, the governorship's inventory lists the Narlıbahçe, Hatuniye, Hünkar, Kadılar, Çilehane and Saraydüze Sultan fountains among the surviving examples of Ottoman-period water culture. Because no detail on the founders or construction dates of these structures could be found in open sources, no date or founder's name is given here. For travel and architectural details, see the site's article Historic Fountains of Amasya.

How a Water Endowment Worked

Building a fountain was only the beginning. The real question was keeping it flowing for centuries, and for that benefactors set up endowments that produced income for their fountains. The revenue was spent on clearing the clogged clay pipes (künk) of the water line, replacing broken spouts and paying the staff who looked after the water. This arrangement was a guarantee that allowed the fountain to run even after its founder had died.

The examples that Karademir cites from records of Sivas, Merzifon, Niksar and Divriği show this process in detail. Endowments that owned fountains were obliged to repair the water lines of those fountains, and keeping charitable fountains and drinking stations (sebil) flowing regularly was among the duties of the water-line keepers (suyolcu). Where water lines were not repaired, fountains inevitably ran dry. One of the branches of the Kara Mustafa Paşa endowment in Merzifon consisted of fountain endowments established in Merzifon and Çorum, and according to a record of January 1752, water had stopped flowing from some of these fountains because their water lines had not been repaired. To prevent such failures, officials called çeşmegân were appointed and received a fixed daily wage in return for maintenance and repair. The çeşmegân of the fountain in the Helekan neighborhood of Niksar was assigned 10 akçe a day in the endowment deed of 1740, and the revenues of a mill were endowed to cover the fountain's repair and maintenance costs.

The law also protected this order. According to a fatwa of the Şeyhülislam Feyzullah Efendi, if the clay pipe leading to an endowment's fountain passed through someone else's privately owned house, that person still had no right to interfere with the water. A certain quantity of water could be bought from endowments for a fixed daily sum in akçe, and individuals could likewise sell, donate or lease their water to endowments. At Merzifon the mosque, bathhouse and fountains of the grand vizier Mustafa Paşa's endowment were fed from a single source, which made any interference with that source a threat directed at the endowment as a whole.

What the Archive Shows: The Endowments of 1800-1875

Muhammet Okudan's article, based on the Archive of the General Directorate of Foundations, shows in figures the place of the endowment institution in the city in the nineteenth century. Because Amasya was one of the sanjak centers to which princes were sent in Ottoman times, it counts among the settlements where the finest examples of the endowment institution are seen. It has been established that 14 endowments were founded in the city between 1800 and 1875:

  • Nine of the founders were from the military class and four from the tax-paying subject class (reaya); three were women and two were non-Muslims (zimmî).
  • To provide income for the endowments, 14 vineyards, 2 gardens, 3 silkworm houses (böcekhane), 40 shops, 1 inn, 6 mills and 1 felt-maker's workshop (mutaf kârhanesi) were endowed.
  • As charitable institutions, one madrasa, two primary schools, two mosques, one dervish convent (hankâh) and one lodge (zaviye) were built.
  • In addition, separate allocations were set up for student scholarships, the celebration of the Mevlid, the construction of fountains and the repair of water channels.

In this century, too, fountains and water channels fell directly within the responsibility of the endowment. The rent of a mill or a shop would one day become the replacement of a clay pipe or the repair of a water line. That endowment revenues came from sources yielding steady rent or produce, such as shops, inns, mills and vineyards, freed the flow of a fountain from depending on the founder's survival or on the generosity of his heirs.

The Law of Water: Complaints of the Eighteenth Century

The value of water can also be read from the disputes around it. In Karademir's article on the Sivas Ahkâm Registers, 14 (21 percent) of the 66 records dealing with water problems, gathered from about 25 settlements, belong to Amasya and Merzifon; that is, these two cities experienced more water disputes than the other settlements. The same study shows that 29 of the water cases (43.9 percent) were recorded in spring, 18 in summer, 14 in winter and only 5 in autumn; the opening of the irrigation season also opened the disputes. The article further notes that the powerful endowments around Sivas and Amasya were active both in owning irrigated land and running waters and in maintaining fountain service, and that women in the region did not hesitate to seek their rights when their waters were interfered with.

Some of the Amasya examples in the article are as follows:

  • March 1742: In the village of Zire in the Akdağ district of Amasya, Çukadar Mustafa, Halil, Seyyid Ali and Seyyid Hüseyin unjustly interfered with the water of Şeyh Hasan Abdi and with the fountains of Acem Ali and El-Hac Ali.
  • August 1750: The water of Abdülgazi and Abdülkerim, who had set up waterwheels on the river beneath the Cağallar Bridge and were irrigating their vineyards, was obstructed by new waterwheels built by vineyard owners downstream; the dispute was settled through mediators and a court decision.
  • April 1751: At Arguva, when El-Hac İbrahim, his son Ömer and Hacı Hasan bought a mill on the Acısu, claimed that the water too belonged to them and cut a channel to their fields, those who had long had mills on the same water and irrigated their vineyards with it objected; the state decided that the water should remain with its former owners.

These records show that fountain water and mill water were protected by law and had owners, and that charity operated within an order of property. The attitude of the state in these examples is to preserve the old arrangement.

The Language of Fountains

Ottoman fountains mostly speak through their inscriptions: who built them, in which year and with what intention. The inscription often carries a date in verse; the 1728-29 inscription of the Ahmed III Fountain in Istanbul is a long poem of fourteen stanzas by Seyyid Vehbî. The blank panel on the fountain of the Gatekeeper's Madrasa recalls the opposite case; not every pious work had its name written on stone. What was written can also disappear in time. The inscription of the same madrasa was removed from its place and, broken into pieces, transferred to the Amasya Museum when the building was abandoned to decay after 1940. The dome of the lecture hall was badly cracked in the Amasya earthquake of 1942, the dome collapsed after 1965 and the portico in front nearly vanished. The madrasa was restored in the 1980s by the Directorate of Foundations, an ablution fountain was placed in its courtyard, and today it is used as a Qur'an course.

The Amasya Governorship states that most of the fountains are no longer functional. That a fountain should dry up when endowment income stops, when the water line is neglected and the clay pipes clog is an old problem, as in the Merzifon case of 1752 that Karademir reports. Protecting the historic fountains therefore requires, besides protecting the stone structure, reading from the records the order that made it flow.

Chronology

1398: Amasya is taken into Ottoman territory by Bayezid the Thunderbolt.

1465: The Acem Ali Fountain is built by Hoca Acem Ali.

1466: The Hızır Paşa Bathhouse is built.

1467: The Temennâ Fountain is built.

1468: The Hacı Hamza Fountain is built.

1481-1486: Prince Ahmed has the complex and its fountain built in the name of his father Bayezid II.

1489 (894): The chief gatekeeper Hüseyin Ağa builds the madrasa.

1515: The İlyas Ağa Fountain is built.

1742-1751: Complaints about fountain, waterwheel and mill water from around Amasya are recorded in the Sivas Ahkâm Registers.

1800-1875: Fourteen endowments are founded in Amasya; some of them set aside allocations for building fountains and repairing water channels.

Bibliography

Academic studies

  • Muhammet Okudan, "Amasya Vakıfları Üzerine Bazı Değerlendirmeler (1800-1875)", Kilis 7 Aralık Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 8/16, 2018, pp. 275-291. amasya.gov.tr
  • Selim Özcan, "Amasya'da Sancak Beyliği Yapan Şehzadeler Döneminde Amasya Şehri", Amasya Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, no. 5.
  • Zafer Karademir, "Osmanlı Sosyo-Ekonomik Yaşamında Su: 18. Yüzyıl Eyalet-i Rum Örneği", Tarih İncelemeleri Dergisi, XXIX/1, 2014, pp. 189-211.

Official sources

  • T.C. Amasya Valiliği, "Çeşmeler", amasya.gov.tr.
  • Kültür Portalı (Ministry of Culture and Tourism), "Ferhat Su Kanalı".
  • Kültür Portalı, "Tarihin Tanıkları: Çeşmeler."

Other sources

  • Gülay Burgaz, "Kapı Ağası Medresesi", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, 2001. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Amasya" entry, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (İ. Şahin - F. Emecen). islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Kültür Envanteri, "II. Bayezid Külliyesi Çeşmesi", kulturenvanteri.com.
  • "Çeşme" entry, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi.
  • Hürriyet Seyahat, "Bu kanalı Ferhat'ın oyduğunu sanıyorsanız yanılıyorsunuz".

Online sources