Today, time in Amasya is read from the clock tower at the head of the bridge. That tower, however, is the last link in a chain of arrangements the city made for measuring the hour. Before it, the day was set by the length of a shadow, by the sunset, by the call to prayer from the minarets, and by the instruments and clocks of the muvakkithane (timekeeper's lodge) in a mosque courtyard. The structure of the tower at the bridge head and the Amasya years of Ziya Paşa, who had it built, are told in detail in a separate article. The subject here is the understanding of time into which the tower was born: how the hour was reckoned in Amasya, who did the reckoning, how the mechanical clock entered the city, and when and how the old order came to an end.

The Day Measured by Shadow

The oldest way of measuring time was to look at the sun, and Amasya still carries a trace of it. The Amasya Museum displays a sundial from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. In sundials of this kind, carved as a quarter sphere from a block of marble or limestone, the shadow of a rod (gnomon) moves across lines cut into the hollow surface; according to the description given for the museum's example, the surface carries three horizontal and eleven vertical lines. The shadow is long in the morning and evening and short at noon, and the lines were drawn to suit the latitude where the dial would be used. Such dials were set up not only in houses but in streets, bathhouses and temples. Beyond this museum piece there is no document to say that time was read in public places in Amaseia, and the sources do not say which building in Amasya the dial came from.

In the ancient world, day and night were each divided into twelve parts. According to the Saat (Hour) entry of the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt day and night were divided separately into twelve equal hours without regard to the seasons; Herodotus says the Greeks learned the sundial and the division of the day into twelve from Babylon. The division of the day into twenty-four equal hours began in the Hellenistic period (330-30 BC). The same entry explains that two separate practices followed: the zevâlî (alafranga) system, which begins the day at noon or at midnight, and the gurûbî (ezânî, alaturka) system, which begins it at sunset. Throughout the Seljuk and Ottoman periods, the understanding of time in Amasya was the second of these.

The Ezanî Hour

In the gurûbî system the day began at the moment the upper rim of the sun touched the horizon, and that moment was counted as twelve o'clock. This follows from the Hijri calendar, in which the month begins with the crescent, that is, at sunset: a new day begins with the new month, and the night that comes with sunset belongs not to the day just passed but to the new one. The TDV entry points out one everyday consequence of this. Friday nights fall on Thursday night in the Gregorian calendar, and the nights of the kandil festivals and of the bayrams fall on the night before the day itself.

The practical result was that clocks had to be reset every day. If the sun set at six in the evening, noon and midnight would each show six o'clock. Because the time of sunset shifts with the season, noon and midnight corresponded to a different clock reading each day, which is why mechanical clocks were reset daily. Since prayer times also depend on the position of the sun, the rhythm of daily life was already organized around this order, and everyday affairs, such as the opening and closing of the market, rested on the call to prayer. The adhan heard from every quarter of the city was at once a summons to worship and a time signal.

Muvakkits and Muvakkithanes

The official who calculated the prayer times and announced them to the muezzins was called a muvakkit, and the place where he worked a muvakkithane. A muvakkithane was a small building of one or two rooms rising in the garden of a large mosque or beside it. By the common description, its street-facing front opened with wide windows so that passers-by could see the clocks easily, and inside stood a thick base topped with marble for the clock. Muvakkitship had arisen as early as the Umayyad period, from the need to determine prayer times precisely by the sun and to fix the qibla accurately; the first muvakkithane is said to have been established in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. It became an institution in Cairo at the end of the thirteenth century and spread in Syria in the fourteenth.

When the first muvakkithane was established in the Ottoman state is not known with certainty. Before the conquest of Istanbul there are records of muvakkits in some cities, but whether those cities had a separate muvakkithane is unclear. In Istanbul, the building in the courtyard of the Fatih Mosque is accepted as the first muvakkithane; one record dates it to 1470, and an accounting register shows that in 1489 a muvakkit named Mûsâ worked there for a daily wage of fifteen akçe. Among the cities where muvakkithanes were founded are listed Bursa, Konya, Kütahya, Tokat, Trabzon, Edirne, Safranbolu and Amasya.

Muvakkitship was one of the services of a pious endowment (waqf). The administration of the muvakkithane belonged to the trustee of the endowment to which it was attached, and the muvakkit, counted among the endowment's staff alongside the imam, the preacher and the muezzin, drew his salary from it. The required qualifications were written in the endowment deed: the muvakkit was to be versed in astronomy and in ilm-i mîkât (the science of determining time, especially prayer times, by the sun, moon and stars), to announce the times of prayer to the muezzins, to know how to measure the altitude of the stars and sun and so check the accuracy of the muvakkithane's clocks, and to be present in the gallery with the muezzins at Friday and bayram prayers. For new appointments, the chief astrologer (müneccimbaşı) in Istanbul examined the candidates, and those who succeeded were entered in the relevant office of the Imperial Council.

A muvakkithane held a quadrant board, an astrolabe, a sextant, an hourglass, a sundial and mechanical clocks, and calligraphic panels on the subject of time hung on its walls. Muvakkits prepared the yearly calendar and the imsakiye for Ramadan, gave basic lessons in astronomy to those who asked, and sometimes repaired clocks and made instruments. Cold spells, the cemre, storms were also observed there; some muvakkithanes worked like small observatories. As the mechanical clock spread, the work changed: the muvakkit was now not only the man who calculated the hour but the one who set clocks by the sun and repaired them when they broke. An account of the Konya muvakkithane shows how this worked. The townspeople looked at the large pendulum clocks there to learn the time, and arranged their worship and their work accordingly.

The Muvakkithane in the Bayezid Complex

The one building in Amasya that preserves this tradition is the small structure northwest of the Bayezid II Complex on the bank of the Yeşilırmak, near the mosque and the madrasa. The mosque had been completed in 1486 by Şehzade Ahmed on the order of his father Bayezid II; the muvakkithane was built three and a half centuries later, as one of the buildings added to the complex's endowment. According to the verse inscription of five couplets above its door, the building was commissioned by Kaptancızâde Hacı Hüseyin Zeki Efendi. One couplet reads: "Amasya şehri içre Camii'nde Bayezid Han'ın / Ne dilcu yaptı işte bir muvakkit-hane-i vâlâ" (in Amasya, in the mosque of Bayezid Khan, he built a lofty muvakkithane, how pleasing). The last couplet is a chronogram and ties the building to the Hijri year 1256, that is, 1840.

The sources do not agree on the date. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi takes the 1256 of the inscription as its basis, and Füsun Aytekin gives the same date. The building's other inscription reads 1255 (1839-40). A. Hüsamettin Yaşar's Amasya Tarihi gives 1258 (1842), a date that passed to Gabriel and Aslanapa as well; a tourism encyclopedia entry also places the building in 1842. Aytekin records Yaşar's 1258 as a separate date against the 1256 found in the inscription and the sources. It is known that Hacı Hüseyin Zeki Efendi had a library and a fountain built along with the muvakkithane and endowed his property. One promotional source writes that the complex's deed of 1496 also mentions a muvakkithane. The inventory of buildings listed in the deed, however, names the mosque, the soup kitchen, the madrasa, the refectory and other units, and does not mention a muvakkithane. Which is right cannot be settled here; at all events, the present building dates not from 1496 but from the nineteenth century. Whether a muvakkit served in Amasya in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries cannot be known from the sources at hand.

The building is a single room on a plan close to a square. At the entrance, reached by three steps, a large Bursa arch rests on two wooden columns; the hipped roof ends in a triangular pediment on each side. The lower part is of rubble stone and the walls are brick up to the eaves; today the exterior is entirely plastered. Semavi Eyice calls the building Tanzimat in style, and Günsel Renda treats it as Empire style. Renda notes that a façade with columns and pediments was favored for public buildings in the reign of Mahmud II, while the Bursa arch and the hipped roof are traditional elements, and she therefore counts the building among the important examples of late Turkish architecture. Five large windows, two each in the south and north walls and one in the east wall, widen outward. In the west wall, facing the entrance, there is a niche with Baroque ornament and small cupboards on either side of it. According to Aytekin, these cupboards held books when the building served as a library and, for as long as it was a muvakkithane, the instruments that measured time.

The painted frieze about thirty centimeters wide that runs around the wooden ceiling edge is what makes the muvakkithane special in Anatolia. In this band are houses, mosques, tombs, tents, bridges, castles, pavilions and rural landscapes set among trees. According to researchers, the large mosque on the east wall resembles the Gümüşlü Mosque and the castle the Amasya Castle on the opposite ridges; in the band on the west wall are a river, a two-arched bridge and a gun carriage. The large mosque on the south wall is the Bayezid Complex itself. That the muvakkithane and the fountain are absent from the painting may, according to Aytekin, indicate that the building was still under construction at the time. The medallions above the windows carry the names of the four caliphs and of Hasan and Hüseyin. Aytekin notes that among Anatolian muvakkithanes this is the only example that has carried late-period wall paintings down to the present. The painter is not known. Rüçhan Arık wrote that the painter was Mehmet Emin Kutsal, but Renda says this man merely repaired some of the paint. The paintings of the fountain in the same complex, on the other hand, were made in 1289 (October 1872), according to an inscription found in the restoration of 2006, and show an affinity with the style of Zileli Emin. The paintings were worked on in the 1960s and again in the restoration of 2016-2019; examinations in 2022-2023 recorded that these interventions had damaged their originality.

Aytekin gives the order of use as muvakkithane, library and masjid; elsewhere she writes that the building was first a library and was later made into a muvakkithane. Today it is used as the mosque attendants' room.

The Pinecone Sundial

In front of the muvakkithane there once stood a marble sundial. According to Celal Özdemir, director of the Amasya Museum, this piece, with its three bases, conical body and a form resembling a pine (oak) cone, is unique in the world in terms of shape. As the director relates it, the dial was first in the garden of the complex, in front of the muvakkithane, was taken to the garden of the Officers' Club after an earthquake in 1936, and was moved to the museum garden in 2006. These dates and this chain of relocation should be read as the museum's own statement; we have not seen a document for them.

Its way of working is that of the classic sundial. A metal rod is fixed at the top of the conical body, and the time is read from the movement of the rod's shadow. Only half of the body is worked. On the worked half are reliefs showing a period of eleven hours, and in five of them long grooves have been cut to mark the half hour. The other half is blank, because that half corresponds to the sunless parts of the day, evening and night. The museum's account does not say when the dial was made or by whose hand.

The Coming of the Mechanical Clock

The mechanical clock was developed in Europe around 1300, inspired by water clocks and as a tower clock. The first known name in the Islamic world to take an interest in these clocks is Takiyyüddin er-Râsıd, who founded the Istanbul Observatory in 1577; he learned clockmaking from foreign clockmakers in Galata and also set it down in a book. From the end of the eighteenth century, large pendulum clocks began to be placed in the muvakkithanes of Istanbul's great mosques; but it became clear that these clocks did not replace the traditional instruments that find the hour from the altitude of the sun, and it was still necessary to determine the time with the quadrant board and set the clock by it.

The lateness of the clock tower in the Ottoman world is a subject historians have dwelt on. It is known that in Europe towers had spread by the early fifteenth century. The TDV entry attributes the delay in building towers, which came onto the agenda in the Ottoman state only in the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876-1909), to the fact that the concept of time was closely bound to prayer times and could not at first be reconciled with the mechanical clock. Other readings exist: Abdülhak Adnan Adıvar points to the fear that muezzins, muvakkits and custodians would lose their importance, Bernard Lewis argues that, like the printing press, the clock was feared as something that could open cracks in the social fabric, and Şule Gürbüz says that the occasional failure of mechanical clocks to show the right time delayed the spread of towers. The tower erected at Safranbolu in 1797 is cited as the first clock tower in Anatolia. The decrees issued on the twenty-fifth and thirtieth anniversaries of Abdülhamid's accession are regarded as a threshold in tower building; the same source records that before Abdülhamid, Ziya Paşa had many towers built during his governorships of Adana and Amasya.

Within this frame, Amasya's tower of 1865 counts as early by the general picture. The tower itself, its place at the head of the Hükümet Bridge and the story of its fire and destruction are told in the separate article; here it can only be said that the tower added, beside the tradition of the muvakkithane that kept the hour by looking at the sun, a means of showing the same hour to the whole city on a dial. The sound of its bell is said to have settled into the city's daily life. No document supports this account; however, the TDV entry writes that all of the more than fifty Ottoman towers worked on a weight system and had a striking mechanism. The loss of importance of the muvakkithanes is also seen as tied to the spread of the mechanical clock and of towers; even so, in Istanbul people long kept trusting the accuracy of the muvakkithane clocks and kept calling there to set their own.

Other Towers Around Amasya

Within the borders of Amasya province there are several more towers from the time of Ziya Paşa and after. The tower at Merzifon stands above the entrance gate of the Çelebi Mehmed Madrasa. The sources give its date of construction as 1865 or 1866 and name Ziya Paşa; some describe the structure as "renewed" by him. Its cylindrical brick body is enlivened by three rings, its corners are prismatic, and each face carries a round-faced clock. The tower is said to resemble a minaret, and a round-arched window is recorded on each side so that the sound of the bell could be heard well. The clock, which runs on a weight system, is recorded as still showing the time today. The tower of the American College at Merzifon appears in the lists with the date 1919 and is integrated with the school building from which it rises.

The story of the Gümüşhacıköy tower is woven of collapses, much like that of the one in Amasya's center. The first tower was erected in 1900 and fell in the earthquake of 1943; a wooden tower was built in its place in 1948, and that was demolished in 1971 during road works; the tower built again also fell, and the present tower was erected in 2009. The TDV entry writes that the more than fifty Ottoman clock towers, most of them today in Central and Northern Anatolia, were generally built through the contributions of benevolent citizens and by local administrators. In Amasya's center, meanwhile, there is a second tower of cut stone east of the Bedesten; that building is treated in a separate article.

The End of the Old Order

Alaturka and alafranga time lived side by side for a long while. As commercial, military and political relations with the West intensified in Ottoman lands, the zevâlî hour entered first the government and then the life of society. A circular of the Ministry of the Interior (Dahiliye Nezâreti) of April 1912 listed the problems caused by using the two systems together and made the use of alafranga time compulsory in the army and in the official offices of all the provinces. After the proclamation of the Republic, by Law No. 697 of 26 December 1925 the day began at midnight and was counted from 0.00 to 24.00, and the meridian passing near İzmit, at 30 degrees by Greenwich, was taken as the standard. With this law the alaturka hour was abandoned; the text of the law came into force at the beginning of 1926. From then on, the era of the clock reset each day by the sunset was closed.

The formal closing of the muvakkithanes came later. When the last chief astrologer, Hüseyin Hilmi Efendi, died in 1924, the office of müneccimbaşı was abolished; in the same year a new institution called the Başmuvakkitlik (Chief Timekeepership) was founded and Ahmet Ziya (Akbulut) was put at its head. The muvakkithanes transferred to the Başmuvakkitlik were closed on 20 September 1952. In Amasya, however, the real outcome had been seen before that. When the tower at the bridge head was demolished in February 1940, alafranga time had been the only standard for fourteen years. The muvakkithane had been used as a library and a masjid, and the sundial in front of it had, according to the museum's account, been moved from the garden of the complex to the Officers' Club and from there to the museum. Today time in Amasya is read by the zevâlî hour; the adhan goes on announcing the hour to the city.

Chronology

330-30 BC: In the Hellenistic period the day begins to be divided into twenty-four equal hours.

1470: The Fatih Mosque muvakkithane is recorded as the first muvakkithane in Istanbul.

1486: The Bayezid II Mosque and Complex is completed in Amasya.

1496: The endowment deed of the complex is written.

1577: Takiyyüddin founds the Istanbul Observatory.

1797: The first clock tower in Anatolia is erected at Safranbolu.

1840: According to the inscription (Hijri 1256), Hacı Hüseyin Zeki Efendi has a muvakkithane and library built in the Bayezid II Complex; other sources give 1842.

1865: The clock tower built in Amasya by the governor Ziya Paşa.

1866: The Merzifon Clock Tower (1865 also appears in the sources).

1872: Date of the paintings of the fountain in the Bayezid II Complex (Hijri 1289).

1900: The first clock tower at Gümüşhacıköy is erected.

April 1912: By circular of the Ministry of the Interior, alafranga time becomes compulsory in official offices.

1919: Recorded date of the Merzifon American College Clock Tower.

26 December 1925: Law No. 697 makes the zevâlî hour compulsory throughout the country.

February 1940: The Amasya Clock Tower is demolished.

20 September 1952: The muvakkithanes are closed.

2002: The Amasya Clock Tower is rebuilt.

Sources

Academic studies

Other sources

Online sources