In the old commercial quarter of Amasya, between the Taşhan and the bedesten and facing Pazar Street, stands the Kilâri Süleyman Ağa Mosque, a small Ottoman building that is still open for worship in the middle of the daily life of the market. The word "kilâri" in its name refers to a person who served in the pantry; the full title used by Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn is "ser-kilârî", that is, chief of the pantry. The founder of the mosque, Süleyman Ağa, was a courtier who had been raised in the household of Bayezid II while Bayezid was still a prince, and who stayed on in Amasya after Bayezid's accession to run the pantry in the palace of his son, Şehzade (Prince) Ahmed. Square in plan, with a single minaret and walls of cut stone, the mosque remains modest in scale beside the great complexes of the city. It is nevertheless a good example for understanding the commercial order of Amasya in the years when it was a princely sanjak, the palace officials who invested in that order, the administrators of its endowment in later centuries, and the long history of earthquakes and fires that the city has lived through. The difference between the name in the inscription over its door and the name in the endowment records has also added a debate of its own to the building's history.

Location and Surroundings

Today the mosque lies within the Dere neighbourhood of Amasya's central district. Its address in the cultural inventory is on Mustafa Kemal Paşa Street, opposite the bedesten; in tourism publications the same road is called Pazar Street. An academic entry on the Taşhan records that the Kilâri Süleyman Ağa Mosque stands to the north of the caravanserai and the Burmalı Minareli Mosque to its south. The mosque therefore sits on the axis that links the commercial buildings of the city, with a han, a bedesten and another mosque around it.

In the neighbourhood order of the Ottoman period, however, this part of town was known by other names. Hüsâmeddîn places the site of the mosque within the Kazancı quarter. Recorded in old registers as the "Kazancı Doğan quarter", it lay above the Saraçhane quarter and was bounded by the Kocacık quarter to the east, Bozahane to the west, Hoca Süleyman to the south and Saraçhane to the north. The same passage explains that the "Şehinşah Garden" had once stood there, that the quarter took the name of Kazancı Doğan, who was dismissed from the post of sekbanbaşı in 856 (1452), sent to Amasya and settled here, and that its still older name was the "Kaya Paşa quarter". In the quarter stood a bath and a school built by Kaya Paşa in 805 (1402-03), and above the bath the mescid of Molla Bahşî Halife, whose endowment deed was drawn up in 823 (1420). In Hüsâmeddîn's day both the bath and the mescid were in ruins. Süleyman Ağa's mosque was thus added to an old part of the Amasya market that had been built up since the beginning of the fifteenth century.

Hüsâmeddîn's biographical entry in the tenth volume gives yet another name for the site. According to it, Süleyman Ağa built his mosque "in front of the Bedesten of Yâkût Paşa, in the Sipâhî Market". The description of the quarter in the first volume, on the other hand, says that in 890 the Great Gate Agha Hüseyin Ağa built a large bedesten, that the Agha of the Girls, Fîrûz Ağa, built another bedesten beside it, and that the mosque stood "to the south of this". It appears that there was more than one bedesten in this part of the market and that the mosque stood immediately in front of these covered markets, in a market place where the sipahis did their shopping. Today the same spot is the busy street between the bedesten and the Taşhan.

The Taşhan was commissioned in 1699 by Rahtvan Hacı Mehmed Paşa, governor of Amasya and guardian of Jeddah, from the architect Mehmed Kalfa. As the inscription over its main gate shows, Hacı Mehmed Paşa endowed the han to his descendants in January 1700, and after serving for a little over two hundred years it was ruined in the fire of 1915. Süleyman Ağa's mosque therefore belongs to an earlier phase of the market, more than two centuries before the construction of the han that is now its neighbour. The bedesten, by contrast, was founded at almost the same time as the mosque, in the reign of Bayezid II.

The Founder, Süleyman Ağa

The most detailed information about the founder of the mosque comes from the entry "Süleyman Ağa-Ser-Kilârî" in the tenth volume of Hüsâmeddîn's History of Amasya. According to it, Süleyman Ağa was one of the Bosnian devşirme recruits. As one of Bayezid II's servants, he received a good upbringing in Bayezid's household during the years when Bayezid was in Amasya as a prince. When Bayezid left Amasya in 886 (1481) to ascend the throne on the death of his father Mehmed II (the Conqueror), Süleyman Ağa did not go with him to Istanbul; he stayed in the city and became chief of the pantry to the new sanjak governor, Şehzade Ahmed. He built the mosque while holding this post, then remained in Şehzade Ahmed's retinue for the rest of his life and died in 912 (1506-07). Hüsâmeddîn describes him as "the prince's most trusted man, devout, a doer of good works, a convert"; that is, someone in whom the prince placed great trust, a pious man with charitable foundations to his name, who had come to Islam later in life.

This information slightly corrects the phrase commonly found in publications about the building. In tourism publications and some descriptions the founder is called "the palace pantry steward of Bayezid II". According to Hüsâmeddîn's account, however, Süleyman Ağa did not serve as chief of the pantry in the sultan's palace in Istanbul; he held the post in the prince's palace in Amasya, and his tie to Bayezid II came from having been raised in Bayezid's household when the latter was a prince. The two statements do not entirely exclude each other, since Süleyman Ağa served first Bayezid and then his son. Yet in the years when the mosque was built its founder's post was in Amasya, and this shows that the mosque was a charitable work born within the city, in the circle of the prince's palace.

Şehzade Ahmed was appointed governor of the sanjak of Amasya on 12 Rebiülevvel 886 (11 May 1481) and held the post until his death in 1513. This period of more than thirty years was one of Amasya's most brilliant as a city of princes. The prince lived in the palace in the inner citadel, known among the people as the "Beyler Sarayı" or "Saraydüzü". According to a study based on Hüsâmeddîn, this palace had a large harem apartment, a selamlık section, three large apartments built for the aghas in front of its gate, two baths, two kitchens and two broad gardens with marble pools in their midst. The pantry for which Süleyman Ağa was responsible was the department that supplied the kitchens of this palace. After Bayezid's accession part of his former retinue had gone to Istanbul and part had been left in Amasya to assist the new governor; Süleyman Ağa belonged to the second group.

The Pantry and the Chief of the Pantry

In the organisation of the Ottoman palace the kiler, or pantry, was the place where provisions arriving for the kitchen were stored and kept under lock and key. In the case of the Topkapı Palace there were two separate pantries. In the smaller inner pantry, directly supervised by the chief of the pantry, valuable goods such as sugar and spices were kept. The outer pantry beside the kitchens was run by the pantry agha, under whom served a steward, an expenses clerk, a pantry sergeant and a purveyor. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century some two hundred pantrymen and sixty-four apprentices are recorded as answering to the chief of the pantry. The expenses of the pantry were met by the kitchen administration.

Service in the pantry was also one of the stages of the Enderun education. Training in the Enderun was built on seven stages: the Great and Small Chambers, the Falconers' Ward, the Campaign Ward, the Pantry Chamber, the Treasury Chamber and the Privy Chamber. The Pantry Ward had been founded in the time of Mehmed II, and its head was called the "serkilârî-i hâssa". The thirty or so pages of this ward prepared and looked after every kind of food and drink for the sovereign and the harem, from bread and meat to fruit, sweets and sherbets, and also supplied the candles for the chambers and mescids of the palace. Those who left the ward entered the cavalry divisions of the sultan's household troops. The title "ser-kilârî" that Hüsâmeddîn uses for Süleyman Ağa derives from this organisation.

Since princely palaces were arranged as smaller counterparts of the sultan's palace, the chief of the pantry of the Beyler Sarayı in Amasya was likewise an official close to the prince, responsible for his table and for the provisions of the palace. Such a post was given to the most trusted men of the household, and the epithet "mu'temed" (trusted) that Hüsâmeddîn chose for Süleyman Ağa confirms this. Other chiefs of the pantry also came from Amasya. Hüsâmeddîn mentions natives of the city who in the seventeenth century entered the Enderun at a young age, rose there to become chief of the pantry, and then left the palace for the provinces with the rank of chief gatekeeper. These examples show that the post of chief of the pantry was a step in palace service that opened the way outward, to higher appointments.

The Inscription, the Name and the Date of Construction

Above the small arched entrance door is a three-line inscription concerning the building's construction. Hüsâmeddîn quotes its Arabic verses in both the first and the tenth volumes. Their meaning is as follows: "O mescid, may God bless you; reason is powerless to count your virtues. You were built by His Excellency Selim Ağa, whose goodness belongs to God. God the Merciful granted such a date: God has exalted the dignity of your owner." The last phrase, "Rafa'a Allâhu sha'na sâhibik", is a chronogram composed so that, by the abjad reckoning, it yields the year in which the building was completed.

The appearance of the founder's name as "Selim Ağa" in the inscription is the source of the debate over the mosque's name. Some descriptions follow the inscription, write that the mosque was built by Selim Ağa and give 1483 as the year of construction. In the cultural inventory and in other records based on the provincial directorate of culture, however, the builder is Kilari Süleyman Ağa and the year of construction is 1489. Hüsâmeddîn discusses this discrepancy in detail. In the first volume, recalling that the building was known among the people and in most registers as the "Kilârî Süleyman Ağa Mosque", he suggests as a possibility that "Selim" was used in the inscription because the name "Süleyman" would not fit the metre of the line. In the tenth volume he speaks more firmly: there can be no doubt that it was a requirement of the metre, because the endowment deed names Süleyman Ağa and in all official records the building appears as the "Ser-Kilârî Süleyman Ağa Mosque". Although this explanation seems sound, there is no document that shows conclusively why a different name was chosen for the inscription; Hüsâmeddîn's view remains an inference.

On the date of construction, too, Hüsâmeddîn corrected what he himself had written. In the first volume he had derived the year 890 (1485) from the chronogram, writing that the mosque was finished in that year and that its endowment deed was drawn up, according to the Islamic court registers, in 900 (1494-95). In the tenth volume he states that the deed was drawn up in 888 (1483), and in a footnote he notes that the date of completion had been given in error as 890 in the first volume and corrects it. When the letters of the chronogram are added up by their abjad values they give 888, which agrees with the year 1483 found in some descriptions. Completion of the mosque in 888, that is in 1483, thus emerges as the strongest possibility. The record in the cultural inventory does not state on which document its year of 1489 is based. Nor has the difference between 888 and 900 for the endowment deed in Hüsâmeddîn's two volumes been resolved; the later date may belong to an enlargement of the endowment or to a second registration in the court records, but no document showing this has been seen.

The Endowment and Its Administrators

According to Hüsâmeddîn, by the deed drawn up in 888 Süleyman Ağa endowed his mosque with "a good many villages and farms". The names of the villages and the amount of the revenues do not appear in the available sources. That a palace official should set aside the income of villages and farms for a small mosque in the middle of the market shows an intention to tie the salaries of the mosque's staff, such as the imam, the muezzin and the caretaker, and the upkeep of the building to a secure income. The bedestens nearby, for their part, brought revenue to other endowments through the rents of their shops.

One small detail of the contents of the deed that has come down to us is connected with Amasya's tradition of calligraphy. Hüsâmeddîn notes in two separate places that the person named "Yûsuf bin el-Mar'aşî" in the endowment deed of Ser-kilârî Süleyman Ağa is Sinaneddin Yusuf Çelebi, son of Hayreddin Halil bin Hasan Mar'aşî, the celebrated calligrapher of Amasya. Hayreddin Mar'aşî was a calligrapher who had come to Amasya from Maraş in his youth, served as divan secretary to Şehzade Alaeddin and died around 876. Şeyh Hamdullah, regarded as the founder of the Ottoman school of calligraphy, studied the six scripts with this master in Amasya and received his diploma from him. His son Sinaneddin Yusuf Çelebi received the succession from the Halveti sheikh Gümüşlüzâde Pîr Hayreddin Hızır and was known as "Sinan Halife". Hüsâmeddîn also records that in 887 he sold the share of a farm he had inherited from his father to the gate agha Fîrûz Ağa. The capacity in which his name appears in the deed is not stated, but it is clear that a well-known figure from the city's circle of learning and the dervish orders was present at the foundation of the endowment.

The endowment was still functioning a century and a half after its founder's death. According to an entry in Hüsâmeddîn's sixth volume, the Amasya scholar Yeğenzâde Ebussuud Efendi became professor of the Sultan Bayezid Madrasa and mufti of Amasya in 1070 (1660), and when he was dismissed from his teaching and fatwa duties in 1072 (1661-62) he became administrator (mütevelli) of the "Kilârî Süleyman Ağa endowment". Ebussuud Efendi became mufti again in 1076 (1666), then moved on to the muftiship of Sofia and the senior judgeships of Cyprus and Tripoli in Syria, and died in Tripoli in 1089 (1678). That a dismissed mufti was placed at the head of this endowment suggests that its administration was a respected and remunerative post for the city's learned class. The fact that the endowment is named in this entry as "Süleyman" and not as "Selîm" also gives support, from Hüsâmeddîn's own records, to his argument about the name in the first volume. The available sources give no information about the working of the endowment in later centuries or the fate of its revenues.

Bayezid II's Amasya

To understand the urban fabric surrounding the mosque, one has to look at the principal building of the period. Bayezid II governed the sanjak of Amasya as a prince and, after ascending the throne, had a great complex built in the city. According to its three-part building inscription, the mosque of the complex was completed in Receb 891 (July 1486). Hüsâmeddîn maintains that construction began in September 1481, immediately after Bayezid's accession, and, relying on İdris-i Bitlisî, reports that the supervision of the work was entrusted to Şehzade Ahmed. The endowment deed is dated January 1496, and the complex consists of a mosque, a soup kitchen, a madrasa and a primary school. Hüsâmeddîn names Emin Mimar Süleyman Çelebi, son of İbrahim of Amasya, as the architect and building supervisor of the complex, and writes that the same master also built the works of Hızır Paşazâde Mehmed Paşa and the mosques, madrasas and bedesten of the aghas Hüseyin and Ayas. The architect of the Kilâri mosque, however, is not named in any source.

The year 1483, when Süleyman Ağa's mosque was completed, and the 1480s, when the bedestens and the complex rose, were a period in which both the sultan and palace officials invested in the city. Defterdar Ahmed Bey's rebuilding of the Gümüşlü Mosque, the mosque of Hızır Paşazâde Mehmed Paşa and the hadith school of Abdullah Paşa also belong to these years. Thanks to these investments the market area of Amasya and the complex on the bank of the Yeşilırmak acquired a new order. Süleyman Ağa's mosque takes its place within this general movement as the contribution of an official of the prince's palace.

Architecture

The mosque is a square building of cut stone. The inventory describes it as a masonry mosque with a single dome and a single minaret; Hüsâmeddîn too calls it "a lofty masonry mosque and a fine minaret". The main prayer hall is covered by a dome on an octagonal drum; the transition from the walls to the dome is made by squinches in the corners. The minaret rises on the right side of the mosque and has a single balcony.

The building is entered through the main door at the north-west corner, which opens directly onto the portico. The door is of cut stone, framed by two rows of mouldings, and an inscription sits above a small segmental arch. The portico is the most striking part of the mosque. It is covered by two domes carried on pointed arches, with the transition to the domes made by flat pendentives. Three round columns support the arches; brick and stone are used together in the arches, so that the façade shows an alternating rhythm of the two materials. Some accounts call the mosque "two-domed"; the detailed description in the inventory shows that these two domes cover the portico, while the main dome belongs to the prayer hall. The part of the portico farthest from the door is also set aside for prayer.

The windows opening into the prayer hall are rectangular, with pointed-arched pediments. The mihrab in the qibla wall takes the form of a five-sided niche and is capped with muqarnas. The decoration is confined to this mihrab and the arrangement of materials in the arches; the building is shaped more by function than by display.

Its Role as a Market Mosque

In Ottoman cities, mosques built close to the market allowed tradesmen to pray within their working hours. Süleyman Ağa's mosque likewise lies within the busy area between the bedesten and the han. The neighbouring bedesten, as a covered market, was where valuable and durable goods were sold. The Amasya Bedesten was built in 1483 by Hüseyin Ağa, one of Bayezid II's gate aghas, to provide income for his endowments. Hüsâmeddîn writes that there was an inscription dated 888 on Hüseyin Ağa's bedesten and that the bedesten was among the endowments of the madrasa known among the people as the Büyük Ağa Madrasa and among scholars as the Medrese-i Hüseyniyye; in his description of the quarter, on the other hand, he places the construction of the bedesten in the year 890. In later centuries shops inside the bedesten also provided income for other endowments; some eight shops inside the bedesten were attached to the endowment of the Kapısı Kıble Mescid in the Eski Kethüda quarter. In this way persons connected with the palace left, side by side and in the same period, a commercial building and a place of worship in the centre of Amasya.

This part of the market was still the commercial heart of the city at the end of the nineteenth century. Osman Fevzi Olcay, born in 1887, describing the surroundings of the Taşhan in his Amasya Memoirs, writes that along both sides of the street leading from the han's Saraçhane side up to the "Kileri Süleyman Ağa Camii Şerifi" there were drapers' and tailors' shops; some twenty of them were kept mostly by Greek and Armenian tradesmen and three or five by Turkish and Muslim tradesmen. He also lists the owners of the shops inside the han one by one. The scene Olcay describes shows the mosque still standing in the middle of the same market life four hundred years later. Olcay also notes that after 1915 these shops changed hands and the market went through a rapid transformation.

Earthquakes, Fires and Repairs

Over time the mosque was damaged by earthquakes and repaired many times. The sources do not give details of which repair was carried out when; the repairs section of the inventory has been left blank. The history of the surrounding buildings gives some idea. The neighbouring bedesten was badly damaged in the earthquake of 1668; in 1865, during the improvement works launched by the governor of Amasya Ziya Bey (the poet Ziya Paşa), its lead covering was stripped and its domes demolished, the roof built in their place soon collapsed, a section facing the Yeşilırmak was pulled down in the 1950s to make way for an office building, and in 1971 a restoration by the General Directorate of Foundations gave it its present form. This long series of damage and repair shows that the market area in which the mosque stands has been one of the most frequently renewed parts of the city.

The dates of the great earthquakes that struck Amasya are also known. The Bayezid II Mosque was badly damaged in the earthquake of November 1590, when its domes and arches collapsed, and it was repaired at once. The destruction in the earthquake of 1668-69 was greater: domes fell and minarets leaned, but its administrator, İbrahim Ağa of Merzifon, made good all the damage within a year. Hüsâmeddîn's chronicle describes this earthquake as a shock that began on a Friday morning in Rebiülevvel 1079 (August 1668) and continued at intervals for days. The walls of the citadel, the domes of the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, masonry houses, "the domes of most of the mosques" and "many parts of the bedesten" collapsed, and the people were forced to live in tents pitched in the open squares. It hardly seems possible that the small domed mosque in front of the bedesten escaped this shock unaffected, but there is no separate record concerning it. In another earthquake, on the twenty-seventh of Cemaziyelevvel 1147 (October 1734), the Bey Mosque in the Upper Citadel, the minaret of the Ayas Ağa Mosque, the Hüseyin Ağa Madrasa and the "bedesten of Yâkût Paşa" were partly destroyed. In 1939 a very violent earthquake again caused great destruction in Amasya, bringing down some of the arches and domes in the portico of the Bayezid II Mosque. Although there is no separate record of how much damage the Süleyman Ağa Mosque suffered in which of these earthquakes, the sources' statement that it "was damaged by earthquakes and repaired many times" is consistent with these dates.

The Dere neighbourhood was one of those affected by the great fire that broke out in Amasya on 22 July 1915. The fire destroyed the surroundings of the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, the Jewellers' Market, the Kethüda, Fethiye, Şehirüstü and Devehane quarters, part of the Dere neighbourhood and a wide area stretching as far as Selağzı. The Taşhan was also ruined in this fire; photographs dated 1930 in Olcay's book show the inner and outer façades of the han still awaiting repair. We have no document showing to what extent the Süleyman Ağa Mosque was damaged in the fire.

Protection and Use

The mosque is registered in the cultural inventory as a monument, and the body responsible for its upkeep is the General Directorate of Foundations. In the inventory the original, present and proposed use of the building are all entered as mosque; in other words, the building has not changed its function over the centuries. The publication cited as describing the building in detail is the book Türkiye'de Vakıf Abideler ve Eski Eserler, published in Ankara in 1972 by the General Directorate of Foundations.

Today the mosque is open for worship in the middle of the market and can be visited during the day outside prayer times. It is a natural stop on the walking route around the Taşhan and the bedesten. Its cut-stone walls, the brick-and-stone arches of its portico and its single-balcony minaret offer a restrained example of late fifteenth-century architecture in Amasya. The dated verse over its door remains in place as a written document from the Amasya of Şehzade Ahmed, bearing the name of its founder and the year of the building.

Chronology

1402-03: Kaya Paşa, who gave the quarter its old name, builds his bath and school (805 according to Hüsâmeddîn).

1481: Accession of Bayezid II; Şehzade Ahmed is appointed governor of the sanjak of Amasya on 11 May, and Süleyman Ağa becomes his chief of the pantry.

1483: Completion of the mosque and drawing up of its endowment deed according to the abjad value of the chronogram over the door and to Hüsâmeddîn's tenth volume (888). This year is also given for the construction of the Amasya Bedesten.

1485: Year of completion given by Hüsâmeddîn in the first volume and later corrected by him (890).

1486: Completion of the mosque of the Bayezid II Complex (according to its inscription).

1489: Year of construction of the mosque in the cultural inventory and in records based on the provincial directorate of culture.

1494-95: Year of the endowment deed given by Hüsâmeddîn in the first volume on the basis of the Islamic court registers (900).

1506-07: Death of Süleyman Ağa while in the retinue of Şehzade Ahmed (912).

1513: Death of Şehzade Ahmed and end of his governorship of Amasya.

1661-62: Yeğenzâde Ebussuud Efendi, dismissed from the muftiship, becomes administrator of the Kilârî Süleyman Ağa endowment (1072).

1668: In the August earthquake the domes of most of Amasya's mosques and a large part of the bedesten collapse.

1699: Construction of the neighbouring Taşhan.

1734: The bedesten of Yâkût Paşa is partly destroyed in the October earthquake.

1865: The domes of the bedesten are demolished during Ziya Bey's improvement works.

1915: The great fire of Amasya; part of the Dere neighbourhood and the Taşhan are damaged.

1971: Restoration of the bedesten by the General Directorate of Foundations.

1972: The mosque is included in the General Directorate of Foundations' book Türkiye'de Vakıf Abideler ve Eski Eserler.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

  • İnan Demirtaş, "Şehzade Ahmed'in Amasya Sancak Beyliği", in Hasan Yerkazan and Önder Eryılmaz (eds.), Sosyal Bilimler Araştırmaları-13, Amasya University Publications, Amasya 2024, pp. 133 ff.

Official sources

  • Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Kültür Portalı, Kilari Süleyman Ağa Cami (Amasya cultural inventory, monument record). kulturportali.gov.tr
  • Amasya Bedesteni, Kültür Portalı, record of the Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism.

Other sources

  • Mehmet İpşirli, "Enderun", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 11, Istanbul 1995, pp. 185-187. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Muhittin Serin, "Hamdullah Efendi, Şeyh", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 15, Istanbul 1997, pp. 449-452. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Tarih Gezisi, Kilari Süleyman Ağa Camii, Amasya.
  • Selim Özcan, Amasya Taşhan, Online Türkiye Turizm Ansiklopedisi, 2019.
  • Matbah-ı Âmire, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi.
  • Semavi Eyice, Beyazıt II Camii ve Külliyesi (Amasya), TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, 1992.
  • Türkiye'de Vakıf Abideler ve Eski Eserler, General Directorate of Foundations Publications, Ankara 1972, pp. 236-239.