Standing in the Bayezid Paşa quarter of Amasya, on the bank of the Yeşilırmak and in line with the Künç Bridge, the Kumacık Hamam is one of the Ottoman bathhouses that have come down to the present from the close of the fifteenth century. Its entrance, now below street level and reached by a flight of steps, and its tile-covered domes blend quietly into the street pattern of the quarter. What sets the building apart from the other baths of Amasya becomes clear inside: the passage to the great dome of the changing hall by means of Turkish triangles, and the mature layout of the hot room with four iwans and corner private cells, make it an accomplished representative of Ottoman bathhouse architecture. Yet the real story of the hamam is kept as much in the endowment records as in its stones, for the building was erected as a revenue-producing property to support a mosque, a madrasa and a primary school on the far bank of the river.

Construction and Founder

The hamam has no building inscription; its date and founder are known from the endowment records. According to the register entry of the Ayas Ağa endowment, the Kumacık Hamam was built in 1495 by Ayas Ağa, one of the gate aghas of Bayezid II. Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar's Amasya Tarihi gives the same date as the Hijri year 900; because that year ran from the autumn of 1494 to the autumn of 1495, the building is dated 1494 in some texts and 1495 in others. Its founder appears in the sources as "Küçük Kapı Ağası Ayas Ağa" (Ayas Ağa, the Lesser Gate Agha), "Kapıağası Ayas Ağa" or, written as one word, "Ayasağa"; at one point Hüsameddin also calls him "Ayas Paşa". Ayas Ağa had been one of the gate aghas in the service of Bayezid II during the prince's years as governor of Amasya, and together with Hüseyin Ağa, known from the same circle as the "Greater Gate Agha", he was among the palace men who left their mark on the city. This is why Amasya remembers one of them as "Büyük Ağa" and the other as "Küçük Ağa".

The plot on which the hamam was built was property purchased by Ayas Ağa. According to Hüsameddin, it was bought from Hoca Mehmed Çelebi, son of Hoca Ahmed Çelebi, who was known by the nickname "Kocacık". The wording of the endowment entry confirms this: the hamam was raised on property bought from Hoca Mehmed and Hoca Ahmed, known as "Kocacık veledi". The name of the architect appears in no document. The last quarter of the fifteenth century was a period of intense building in Amasya, when statesmen from the palace circle commissioned mosques, madrasas, schools and baths one after another; the works of founders such as Bayezid Paşa, Yörgüç Paşa, Mehmed Paşa son of Hızır Paşa, Hüseyin Ağa and Ayas Ağa changed the face of the city in these years. The Kumacık Hamam was added to the city as part of this great wave of investment, which turned Amasya into a centre of learning and trade.

The Origin of the Name: From Kocacık to Kumacık

To those hearing it for the first time, the present name of the hamam may suggest sand (kum) or cloth (kumaş); in fact the name comes from the former owner of the plot. Hüsameddin states plainly that because the building stood on the "Kocacık plot" it was first called the "Kocacık Hamam", and that later, corrupted in popular speech, it came to be known as the "Kumacık Hamam". In the chronological sections of his work, when narrating sixteenth-century events, the same author still refers to the building as the "Kocacık Hamam". The form "Komacık" also appears in some records, while certain older sources name the building after its founder as the "Ayas Ağa Hamam".

The nickname Kocacık left other traces in Amasya. The Kocacık quarter, which appears in Hüsameddin's list of quarters, takes its name from Hoca el-Hâc Ahmed Çelebi, nicknamed "Kocacık", who lived there and in 871 (1466-67) built a small mosque, a school and a fountain. This quarter, separate from the Bayezid Paşa quarter where the hamam stands, lies on the market side of town, neighbouring the Sarachane and Kazancı quarters. Hoca Ahmed Çelebi's family, in other words, owned property in different parts of the city, and the plot bought by Ayas Ağa was one of these holdings. The name of the hamam thus carries the memory of an Amasya family forgotten for more than five hundred years.

Revenue for an Endowment: The Ayas Ağa Complex

The Kumacık Hamam was conceived less as a charitable work in its own right than as a source of income for a mosque complex. In the Şamlar quarter on the northern bank of the Yeşilırmak, on the site of the ruined mosque and tomb of the Danishmendid Melik Gazi, Ayas Ağa had in the same year built his complex (külliye) of a mosque, a madrasa and a primary school. The hamam was built apart from this complex, on the opposite bank of the river, to generate revenue. The section of the endowment entry listing the endowed properties first names the whole of the hamam built at the head of the bridge known as "Hunc köprü", on the property bought from the Kocacık family, and then the eight rooms on the eastern side of the hamam. The founder dedicated these, with their boundaries, rights and appurtenances, together with the channel bringing the water, the course of the water flowing into the hamam and from the hamam to the "nehr-i kebîr", that is the Yeşilırmak, and the garden through which this water ran, to the upkeep of his mosque and school in the Şamlılar quarter.

Hüsameddin's account adds a mill to this list. According to him, in the year 900 Ayas Ağa endowed the hamam, the eight houses he had built to its east, the mill in front of the gate of the Bayezid Paşa buildings and a garden beside it, assigning their revenues to his mosque, madrasa and school in the Şamlar quarter. The rent from the hamam thus went towards the livelihood of the madrasa students across the river, of the children in the school and of those who served in the mosque. In this arrangement, common in Ottoman towns, a bathhouse met the cleanliness needs of its neighbourhood while also securing the continuity of a distant educational institution.

The complex the hamam supported still stands. The building known as the Şamlar Mosque or the Ayas Ağa Mosque is a square, single-domed mosque with rubble-stone walls; to its north is a three-bay late-comers' portico, and only the hexagonal base of its minaret is original. The madrasa follows a U-shaped plan enclosing the courtyard north of the mosque on three sides: behind porticoes covered by thirteen domes carried on twelve columns stand the students' rooms, each with a hearth and a cupboard; there is no separate lecture hall. The somewhat wider unit at the eastern end of the rooms is the primary school. Hüsameddin writes that the madrasa was also called the "Küçük Ağa Madrasa" or the "Medrese-i Ayasiye", that it held the rank of "hamsîn" in the hierarchy of madrasas, and that it was still in good order in his own day. The school had been converted into a state primary school in 1327 (1909). The minaret of the Ayas Ağa Mosque is recorded among the structures that collapsed in the great earthquake of the Hijri year 1147 (1734-35). The complex was restored in keeping with its original form by the General Directorate of Pious Foundations in 1978.

Among the madrasa's teachers are names well known in the scholarly life of Amasya. Hüsameddin gives as the first teacher Seyyid Tâceddin İbrahim Efendi, whom he calls Şamlızade in one place and Horasanlıoğlu in another. He was followed by Şemseddin Ahmed Efendi, a close pupil of the mufti known as "Emîr Kulu", who moved to Istanbul in 918 (1512). In later centuries no small number of scholars rose from the Ayas Ağa professorship to the office of mufti of Amasya; in the eighteenth century Hocazade Mehmed Efendi and Hacı Ali Efendi of Çorum were among them. The revenue of the Kumacık Hamam contributed to keeping alive the institution in which these generations were trained.

Location and Surroundings

The hamam stands in the Bayezid Paşa quarter, on the southern bank of the Yeşilırmak. According to Hüsameddin this quarter occupies the site of the former Foka quarter and takes its name from the vizier Yahşi Beyzade Bayezid Paşa, who completed his mosque on the riverbank here in 1414. The sources that describe the location of the hamam all take this bridge and the Bayezid Paşa buildings as their reference, but they differ in detail: Hüsameddin places the hamam east of the Bayezid Paşa soup kitchen, in line with the "Kuş Köprü", whereas a recent architectural study of the building places it opposite the Kunç Bridge and on the western side of the Bayezid Paşa Mosque. The hamam's present address is on Mehmet Paşa Street.

The bridge opposite the hamam is referred to in the sources by various names, among them Künç, Kunç, Hunc and Kuş Köprü. This Seljuk bridge, which links the Bayezid Paşa and Şamlar quarters across the Yeşilırmak, is held to have been built by Hundi Hatun, who according to some sources was the daughter and according to others the mother of Sultan Mesud II. The name is said to have changed over time from Hundi to Kundi and then to Kunç and Künç; Hüsameddin also notes that in old records dated 768 (1366-67) the bridge appears as the "Hundi Bridge" and later as the "Kondı Bridge". The placing of the hamam at the head of the "Hunc köprü" in Ayas Ağa's endowment entry shows that the bridge was known by the same name at the end of the fifteenth century. Since the bridge was the shortest route between the hamam and the complex it supported in Şamlar, the two parts of the endowment were joined to each other by this very structure.

Hüsameddin's book also offers other clues about what went on around the hamam over the centuries. He writes that the empty plot on the western side of the hamam was the site of a caravanserai built by one of the Hacı Beyzades, among the leading families of the Hakala district, and endowed to his madrasa there; in the chronological section he records that this inn was built "on the road to the west of the Kocacık Hamam" by Mirza Beyzade Mehmed Bey in 990 (1582). A piece of information from a much later period is also of interest: in 1300 (1882-83) a French Jesuit mission built a church, a school and a large building at a spot between the Mir Hamza Nigârî Mosque and the Kumacık Hamam, and began its activities there. At the end of the nineteenth century, therefore, the hamam stood in the middle of one of the busiest and most mixed parts of Amasya.

Architecture

The Kumacık Hamam has a nearly square plan aligned southeast to northwest and follows the classic Ottoman bathhouse arrangement of changing hall, warm room, hot room and furnace. The main walls are of rubble stone and have been pointed at a later date; dressed stone is used at the corners. In the drums of the domes stone and brick are combined in alternating courses, with two bands of brick, one of them thick. A brick saw-tooth cornice runs around the base of the domes, and all the domes are covered externally with Turkish-style roof tiles. Because the building now lies below road level, the entrance is reached by descending a few steps.

The Changing Hall

Entering through the depressed-arch doorway on the northwest, one passes through a narrow space and reaches the square changing hall by a second door. The most striking feature of this room is its covering. Turkish triangles formed on the inner face of the tall octagonal drum carry the transition from the square body to the round dome. The Turkish triangle is a covering element favoured in Anatolian Turkish architecture that resolves the passage from square to circle through a series of faceted surfaces at the corners, and its use at Kumacık has become the building's most frequently cited feature. The octagonal opening at the centre of the dome indicates that there was once a lantern here; today the opening is simply closed with flat glass. In the middle of the room is a later octagonal pool with a fountain. Wooden changing cubicles line the walls with a marble-faced platform in front of them, and the wooden stair to the right of the entrance leads up to the gallery above the cubicles.

The Warm Room

A pointed-arched doorway leads from the changing hall into the warm room. The hole above the door must be the place of a flue opened to expel the humidity of the cool section. The warm room takes the form of a narrow, flat-ceilinged corridor running northeast to southwest; it is lit by four round openings in the ceiling, and a zigzag decorative band runs around the foot of the ceiling on all four sides. At the southwestern end of the corridor is a rectangular space covered by a star vault and reached by seven steps; now used as a pool, it is lit by five openings in the vault and by a slit window. In the northeastern corner a small vaulted toilet has been partitioned off.

The Hot Room and Private Cells

The hot room is entered through a narrow round-arched opening in the middle of the warm room. Here four iwans in a cruciform arrangement surround an irregular octagonal central space. The iwans are covered by half-domes and open onto the central space through pointed arches given the appearance of ogee arches; at their corners are squinches filled with muqarnas. The dome of the central space rises from a two-stepped circular drum on pendentives, and a large octagonal heated platform stone (göbek taşı) has been set in the floor. In the iwans there are marble-faced platforms on three sides with basins (kurna) set into them, and a rectangular window in the wall of the southeastern iwan opens onto the water tank. The private cells (halvet) are entered through round-arched openings formed by chamfering the corners; above the doors, zigzag mouldings narrowing upwards give movement to the surfaces. The eastern cell, with its dome rising on lobed squinches over an octagonal drum and its small glazed light openings, still serves its original purpose; the two original stone basins that survive in the building are also in this cell. The southern cell, however, has been fitted out as a sauna, and the cell in the northern corner has been turned into a shaving room.

The number of private cells in the hot room is given differently in the sources. The promotional texts of the provincial directorate of culture and tourism describe the hot room as an arrangement of a main dome, four iwans and two private cells. Türkiye'de Vakıf Abideleri ve Eski Eserler, which publishes Albert Gabriel's plan, likewise speaks of two corner cells. In his book Amasya'da Türk Devri Hamamları, Sultan Murat Topçu describes the building as having four iwans and three corner cells, and regards the section now used as a pool as having belonged to the warm room from the outset, since its covering continues the ceiling of the warm room. Sibel Yarar, by contrast, shows that in its dimensions and corner chamfers this section is the exact counterpart of the private cell to the north, and that the four chamfered faces at the corners of the iwans are identical, and argues that the hamam was originally designed with four corner cells.

The Furnace and the Exterior

The walls of the furnace at the southeastern end of the hot room are of rubble stone, its roof is a timber frame, and it is entered from the street to the northeast. Immediately in front of the boiler is a brick hypocaust chamber with an arched entrance, and above it a brick chimney. On the exterior, the pointed-arched windows with brick pediments opened in the walls of the cool section can be seen to have been filled in with brick at a later date. Water pipes run along the southwestern wall of the hot room, and there is a gargoyle on each of the northeastern and southwestern façades. The decoration of the building is extremely restrained: outside, apart from the movement created by the alternating masonry, there is only an hourglass motif carved in relief on the keystone of the entrance arch. Inside, decoration grows out of the structure itself; through the Turkish triangles, the zigzag band of the warm-room ceiling, the blind ogee arches over the doors, the framed arches of the iwans, the muqarnas squinches and the lobed squinches of the private cell, the interior gains a look as lively as it is plain.

Later Alterations and the Original Plan

There is no written information about repairs to the Kumacık Hamam during its first four hundred years. The earliest known plan of the building is the work of Albert Gabriel, the French architect and art historian who travelled through Anatolia between 1927 and 1930 documenting the monuments of Amasya, Tokat and Sivas. In the second volume of his Monuments turcs d'Anatolie, published in 1934, Gabriel marked the position of the hamam with the number 16 on his map of Amasya, but gave no further description. A photograph taken in 1957 shows the western façade of the building; the changing hall has as yet no windows at all, and there is no lantern over the octagonal opening of the dome. The hamam was registered as a listed building in 1979. In an old photograph on the 1992 registration record, a niche for an oil lamp above door level to the left of the entrance and an annex built against the northeastern wall attract attention.

In 1990 a restoration project was prepared by the Tokat Regional Directorate of Pious Foundations, and the work went on for several years. The project drew an octagonal lantern at the centre of the changing-hall dome, but this lantern was never built. The windows in the walls of the changing hall were opened during this repair; in later interventions all of them except the one to the right of the entrance were closed again. The reason for this closure must have been that the windows fell right in the middle of the gallery inside the changing hall. The marble facings inside, the non-original basins, the ceramic tiling, the wooden cubicles and cupboards, the wooden and PVC doors, and outside the cement screeds, the mosaic facings and the sheet-metal roofs of the adjoining storerooms are likewise the work of later periods. According to Sibel Yarar's study published in 2020, the hamam was standing at that date and was closed for the repair of some of its worn sections; the provincial promotional texts, for their part, count it among the historic baths of Amasya still in operation.

Comparing Gabriel's plan with the present state, Yarar puts forward a proposal concerning the original plan of the hamam. In her view, the private cell at the western corner of the hot room was joined to the warm room by opening the wall between them, which produced the present rectangular space with its pool; in Gabriel's plan this section is still shown as domed. The entrance of the cell in the northern corner is the same as today, but Gabriel also drew this cell as domed; the square cell was later turned into a rectangle and made into a shaving room. The storeroom in the northeastern corner of the changing hall must also be a later addition. The unusual narrowness of the warm room compared with other baths is likewise attributed to repairs carried out after the building's construction. On the other hand, the fact that the changing hall is not centred on the mass of the building may well be original, as in many Anatolian baths. Yarar's conclusion is that the Kumacık Hamam was designed at its first construction with a cruciform hot room with four iwans and four corner private cells. She also notes that detailed examination of the walls and removal of later plaster will reveal the traces of different periods more clearly.

Its Place among Anatolian Baths

Various criteria have been proposed for classifying Turkish baths; purpose of use, number of private cells, period and massing are among them. Semavi Eyice was the first scholar to argue that baths should be classified according to the plan of the hot room, and he grouped them into six types; Yılmaz Önge adopts the same criterion. In Eyice's classification, the star-shaped (radial) plan and the "cruciform, four-iwan, corner-cell" plan are the two most widespread types, applied in Anatolia in the Seljuk and Beylik periods and adopted and developed in the Ottoman period.

The cruciform hot room with four iwans and four corner cells seen in Kumacık's original plan is a type used without interruption from the twelfth century to the twentieth. Its early examples include the two Seljuk baths at Ani, the Sahip Ata (Sultan) Hamam in Konya in the thirteenth century, the men's section of the Orhan Bey Hamam in Bursa and the Süleyman Bey Hamam in Karaman in the fourteenth century. The same scheme appears later in the Eski Paşa Hamam and the Kurşunlu Hamam (1576) in Sivas, the Sultan Hamam in Tokat, and the Tuzpazarı (1677) and Karamustafa Paşa (1678) baths in Merzifon. There are parallels in neighbouring towns as well. Many baths in Tokat and Kastamonu are close to those of Amasya in both plan and external appearance; the Yeni Hamam in Zile and the Tacettin İbrahim Paşa Hamam, built in 1494 in the same years as Kumacık, are examples of this kinship.

Within Amasya's Bathhouse Tradition

Thanks to the abundance of the Yeşilırmak, Amasya has always been a city generous in water, and this abundance has made it as rich in baths as in fountains. Some of the monumental baths surviving from the Roman, Seljuk and Ottoman periods are still in use in the provincial centre and the districts. Before Kumacık, the hamam built in 1436 in the Mehmet Paşa quarter by Mustafa Bey, son of Yörgüç Paşa, was already standing; shortly after it, the Yıldız Hamam attached to the complex of Bülbül Hatun, consort of Bayezid II, would be completed in 1510. Between these two buildings, the Kumacık Hamam is one of the works that best show the influence on the city of the founders from the palace circle at the end of the fifteenth century.

These baths played a central role in the daily life of the city for centuries. A neighbourhood hamam was never merely a place for washing; it also served as a space where neighbours met, news circulated, and part of the rites of passage such as birth, circumcision and marriage was lived out. The importance Islam attaches to cleanliness had also made the hamam one of the spiritual spaces of purification. The Kumacık Hamam held a place in this shared memory of the Bayezid Paşa quarter for more than five hundred years, and through its endowment revenues it helped keep alive the madrasa on the far bank of the river.

Today, someone walking from the streets of the Bayezid Paşa quarter towards the Künç Bridge can take in the tiled domes of the hamam, the bridge and, beyond the bridge, the Ayas Ağa Complex in Şamlar in a single walk. The Turkish triangles in the transition to the changing-hall dome, the four-iwan layout of the hot room and the lobed squinches of the eastern private cell are the most instructive details of the building for those who wish to see the refinements of Ottoman bathhouse architecture at close range. Visiting the hamam and the complex together also makes it clear how, five hundred years ago, an endowment bound the two banks of the river to each other.

Chronology

Around the 12th century: The Künç (Hundi, Kuş) Bridge opposite the hamam is held to have been built by Hundi Hatun.

871 (1466-67): Hoca Ahmed Çelebi, nicknamed "Kocacık", builds a small mosque, a school and a fountain in the quarter that bears his name.

890 (1485): According to Hüsameddin's chronology, the madrasas of Hüseyin Ağa and Ayas Ağa in the Şamlılar quarter and the mosque of Ayas Ağa are completed; in other sections the same author gives the year 900 for these buildings.

900 (1494-95): Ayas Ağa builds the hamam on the plot bought from the Kocacık family and endows it to his mosque, madrasa and school in Şamlar.

918 (1512): Emîr Kulu Şemseddin Ahmed Efendi, teacher at the Ayas Ağa Madrasa, moves to Istanbul.

990 (1582): Mirza Beyzade Mehmed Bey builds an inn on the road west of the hamam.

1147 (1734-35): The minaret of the Ayas Ağa Mosque collapses in a great earthquake.

1300 (1882-83): French Jesuits build a church, a school and a building at a spot between the Mir Hamza Nigârî Mosque and the hamam.

1934: Albert Gabriel marks the hamam with the number 16 on his map of Amasya.

1957: The known photograph of the western façade of the hamam is taken.

1978: The Ayas Ağa Complex is restored by the General Directorate of Pious Foundations.

1979: The hamam is registered as a listed building.

1990: The Tokat Regional Directorate of Pious Foundations prepares the restoration project; the work lasts several years.

2020: Sibel Yarar's study of the original plan of the hamam is published.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Abdizade Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar, Amasya Tarihi, vols. I-IV (published by Amasya Municipality). amasya.gov.tr

Academic studies

  • Sibel Yarar, "Amasya Kumacık Hamamının İlk İnşasındaki Planına Dair Bir Değerlendirme", Vakıflar Dergisi, 54 (December 2020), 185-200: https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/vakiflar/issue/57986/687583
  • Seçkin Tan, Ayas Ağa Külliyesinin Koruma-Kullanma Sorunlarının Saptanması ve Restorasyon Önerisi, master's thesis, Gazi University, 2007 (cited from Yarar).

Official sources

Books

  • Sultan Murat Topçu, Amasya'da Türk Devri Hamamları, Kayseri 2018 (cited from Yarar).
  • Albert Gabriel, Monuments turcs d'Anatolie, II: Amasya, Tokat, Sivas, Paris 1934 (cited from Yarar).

Other sources

Online sources