Nearly all of Amasya's libraries, museums and performance venues occupy historic buildings. A mosque-complex madrasa has become a manuscript library, the barracks where the Amasya Circular was drafted has been rebuilt and now houses the public library, a hospital has become a museum of medicine, and several mansions on the Yeşilırmak have become ethnography and prince museums. To understand the city's cultural institutions one has to know the history of these buildings, because their present functions rest on it.

From the Madrasa Tradition to Republican Institutions

In the Ottoman period Amasya's scholarly life was organised around its madrasas. According to an assessment found in provincial records, in the seventeenth century the city had thirty-six madrasas, seven schools for Qur'an reciters (dârülkurrâ), five schools of hadith (dârülhadis) and two schools of Mesnevi studies (dârülmesnevî). The Sultaniye Madrasa in the Sultan Bayezid II Complex was among the most prestigious of them. As Hüsameddin Bey reports, its professorship was reserved for the muftis of Amasya, and its first teacher was the shaykh al-Islam Zenbilli Ali Efendi; the names of the professors who served until the end of the nineteenth century are listed separately in Cahit Baltacı's Osmanlı Medreseleri.

In the first years of the Republic this order changed radically. When the Law on the Unification of Education closed the madrasas, dervish lodges and tombs, the books and manuscripts they held were at risk of being scattered. In Amasya some of them were gathered in the madrasa of the Bayezid Complex; the premises of the old scholarly institution thus became the new era's public institution for reading and preservation. Another consequence of the same process was the city's museum tradition: the archaeological museum, too, first took shape in two rooms of this madrasa, as a small depot of objects.

The Library in the Bayezid Complex

The building that houses the library was commissioned in 1485-1486 by Prince Ahmed, the sanjak governor of Amasya, on the instruction of Bayezid II. According to its inscriptions the mosque of the complex was completed in Rajab 891, that is, July 1486. The mosque stands at the centre of a group of buildings spread over a wide area along the riverbank; the madrasa lies to its right, the soup kitchen with its imaret and guesthouse to its left. Directly opposite the madrasa entrance is a square domed classroom-mosque (dershane-mescit). Colonnaded arcades vaulted with domes enclose the courtyard, which has a fountain at its centre, and behind the arcades are eighteen domed cells with fireplaces. The building covers an area of about one thousand five hundred square metres.

The complex is one of the structures of Amasya that have been tested by earthquakes and by floods of the Yeşilırmak. In the earthquake of Muharram 999 (November 1590) the mosque was badly damaged, its domes and arches fell and the domes of the imaret partly collapsed, but the building was repaired at once. The damage in the earthquake of 1668-1669 was heavier: the domes fell, the minarets were bent, and the domes of the imaret and guesthouse collapsed. The complex's administrator, Merzifonî İbrahim Ağa, repaired all the damage within a year.

According to official records, after the proclamation of the Republic, in 1922 and on Atatürk's instruction, the written and archaeological works here were collected and the building began to be used entirely as a library. An earlier text states that the library consolidated its official status in 1960 with the founding of the General Directorate of Libraries; this date could not be confirmed against another document. In encyclopedia entries drawing on the Amasya provincial yearbooks, the madrasa is described as having been "saved by good repair" and as having served for years as the provincial public library.

In recent years the library's function has changed. When the provincial public library moved to another building in 2022 because its physical conditions were inadequate, the madrasa building, whose ownership belongs to the General Directorate of Foundations, was set aside for manuscripts. On 10 September 2021 the Foundations allocated the building to the Turkish Manuscripts Institution Presidency until 10 September 2031; simple repairs were carried out in 2022, and a comprehensive restoration was then completed with funding from the Manuscripts Institution and contributions from the Provincial Special Administration. The Bayezid Manuscript Library reopened on 16 June 2023, after the Friday prayer, in a ceremony at which sweet lokma was offered to the public in the mosque garden. According to the figures Governor Mustafa Masatlı gave at the opening, the collection held 2,503 manuscripts and 19,145 printed works. The detailed history of the complex and the library is told separately in the site's article on the Bayezid Complex.

The Saraydüzü Barracks: Library and National Struggle Museum

Amasya's present provincial public library operates in the Saraydüzü Barracks building on the bank of the Yeşilırmak. For about three and a half centuries the Saraydüzü locality was the site of the palace where Ottoman princes resided; after standing empty for many years the palace disappeared in 1883 through neglect and earthquakes. On the same site a rüştiye school was built first, and then, in 1892-1897, an idadi school. The barracks were built at the end of the nineteenth century; some sources give the construction years as 1898-1900, others a completion date of 5 April 1901.

The barracks' real fame begins with Mustafa Kemal Pasha's arrival in Amasya on 12 June 1919. The Pasha and his companions stayed here, and the Amasya Circular was drafted and issued here on 21-22 June 1919. In 1922 the building became the headquarters of the Central Army and after 1930 it lost its importance; it was partly demolished in 1935 and completely in 1944 because of a landslide. A military residence and officers' club were built in its place, and that structure was in turn vacated and demolished in 1986 because of landslide danger. The only known photograph of the barracks was taken in 1944 by Abdülkadir Ziyagül. In 1997 a decision was taken to rebuild it faithfully; because of the landslide risk the building was constructed in 2006-2007 on the bank of the Yeşilırmak, away from its old site, and with the contribution of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism it opened on 9 June 2007 as the Saraydüzü Barracks National Struggle Museum and Congress Centre.

In the National Struggle Hall on the museum's ground floor, Mustafa Kemal Pasha's arrival in Amasya and his reception, as well as the drafting of the Amasya Circular by Mustafa Kemal Pasha, Hüseyin Rauf and Ali Fuat Bey, are recreated with wax figures. The National Sovereignty, Amasya Circular and Hüseyin Rauf halls display old and new copies of the circular, documents of the period, firearms and swords. The amphitheatre-type hall, meeting rooms and exhibition halls in the building have also served as a cultural centre, and programmes such as theatre, poetry recitals and the Republic Day reception have been held in the amphitheatre hall.

In 2021 the building was taken up again. With roughly three million liras of support from the Middle Black Sea Development Agency and the Provincial Special Administration and roughly one and a half million liras from the General Directorate of Libraries, the three-storey building was renovated: its top floor was kept as a museum and the lower floors were given over to a library for children, young people and adults. Governor Masatlı said that the city lacked a modern provincial public library and that they wanted to remedy this by using a historic building. According to what was announced at the opening, the library has 52,000 books, adult and children's sections, two quiet study areas, a book café and a conference hall seating 336, and it was planned to serve seven days a week until midnight. Ahmet Misbah Demircan, then Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism, who attended the opening, said that a library should host, alongside its books, meetings on poetry, theatre, music and cinema.

The Amasya Museum

The history of the Amasya Museum, the city's central museum, goes back to 1925. In two rooms of the madrasa of the Sultan Bayezid II Complex a small number of archaeological objects and Islamic-period mummies were brought together, forming a museum depot. The museum was officially founded in June 1958. When the objects multiplied and exhibition space was needed, they were moved in 1962 to the Gökmedrese, a Seljuk building of the thirteenth century. The museum moved to its present modern building on Mustafa Kemal Paşa Avenue on 22 March 1977, and after the objects had been rearranged chronologically it opened to visitors on 14 June 1980.

The size of the collection and the number of civilisations it covers vary by source. The museum's own presentation speaks of 23,476 objects, while another count lists 5,574 archaeological, 17,287 ethnographic and 1,247 study objects. The number of civilisations is given as anywhere from eleven to thirteen. This difference is probably due to inventories made at different times. The scope is nonetheless clear: objects from the Late Neolithic and Early Chalcolithic ages onward, through the Bronze Age, Hittite, Urartian, Phrygian, Scythian, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman periods, are displayed under the headings of archaeology, ethnography, coins, seals, manuscripts and mummies. The museum is run in three units together with the Hazeranlar Mansion and the Rock Tombs of the Pontic Kings archaeological site.

The museum's most frequently cited object is the bronze statuette of the Hittite Storm God Teshub. Found in 1962 at a depth of four metres below the surface at Mesken Höyük in what is now the village of Doğantepe, ancient Hakmiş, the statuette is 21.5 centimetres high and weighs 1,340 grams. Its arms and legs and the part below the skirt are missing; on its head is a conical, pointed divine headdress, and the eye sockets are thought to have been filled originally with precious stones such as lapis lazuli. The piece is also known in the archaeological literature as the Amasya Statuette and is interpreted as possibly belonging to a cult centre of the Hittites in the Upper Land. Doğantepe is known to have been a frontier centre about one hundred and fifty kilometres from the Hittite capital Boğazköy, exposed to attacks by the Kaska.

Among the museum's other notable pieces is the Aktarla Sarcophagus. Beneath the lid of this sarcophagus of cream-coloured limestone is a five-line Greek inscription cursing anyone who would rob the tomb; to protect the grave, the eyes of the Gorgon figures were also painted red. The Elmalı Mosaic, uncovered in a rescue excavation at Küpderesi in the village of Yavru in 2013, comes from a building that was a rural villa in the Roman period and from the late fourth century onward was converted into a chapel and then a church; it is cited in particular because it shows that the Amasya misket apple was already known some 1,700 years ago. The Ottoman sundial, a three-footed piece shaped like a pine cone, is regarded as unique for the reliefs showing an eleven-hour division of time. The window shutters of the Bayezid Mosque, dated 1486, were brought to the museum in 2000; the Kayı tribal mark on them is cited as the only example in the Ottoman lands, and the Persian couplet on the shutters came from the pen of Molla Camii.

In the museum garden, in the tomb of the Seljuk sultan Mesud I, mummies of the Ilkhanid period are displayed, and this is the section that draws the most visitor interest. According to the museum's presentation there are eight mummies, thought to belong to İşbuğa Nuyin and Cumudar İzzeddin Mehmed Pervane Bey, who served as vizier and emir in Amasya in the fourteenth century during Ilkhanid rule in Anatolia, together with his concubine and his daughters and sons. In another count the number of mummies is given as six; they are said to have been transferred here from two mosque cemeteries in Amasya.

The Hazeranlar Mansion

The Hazeranlar Mansion, standing in the Hatuniye quarter on the bank of the Yeşilırmak on top of the old city walls, is Amasya's ethnography museum. According to the Ministry, the mansion was built in 1865 by Hasan Talat Efendi, bookkeeper to the Amasya mutasarrıf Ziya Pasha; another account dates the building to the late nineteenth century. It takes its name from Hazeran Hanım, who lived there for many years. The mansion, which changed hands from time to time through inheritance, was taken under public protection by the Ministry of Culture; 1976 and 1979 are given for its expropriation and 1983 and 1984 for its opening as a museum. The most common account is that restoration began in 1979 and lasted four years, and that the mansion opened as a museum house in 1984.

The three-storey mansion consists of two sections, haremlik and selamlık; a plan with a central hall and four iwans is combined with a closed inner courtyard. The lower floor is used as a conference hall and picture gallery, and the two upper floors are given over to the museum. Every room has a wooden bench (sedir) in front of its windows. The selamlık head room, that is, the pasha's room, is the widest and most imposing space in the mansion; it looks out over the Yeşilırmak, the Hatuniye Mosque and the city on the opposite bank, and its ceiling is counted among the most original in the house. The dowry room, the parents' bedroom, the chamberlain's room and the servants' rooms show the arrangement of nineteenth-century life. Examples of objects from Amasya's other museums are also displayed here.

The Şehzadeler Museum

The Şehzadeler (Princes) Museum, at the left end of the Alçak Bridge at the entrance to Hatuniye, tells of the city's history as a princely seat. The building was erected in 2007 by the Amasya Governorate, faithful to the original, in place of one of the 67 registered mansions known as the Yalıboyu houses, built in the 1800s and demolished by its owner in 1986. The museum, which belongs to the Provincial Special Administration, opened in 2008. In the lower floor of the two-storey timber building, which stands on the old city walls, are wax figures of the princes who served as governors in Amasya but did not become sultan, and in the upper floor those who served as sanjak governors in Amasya and later became sultan.

The interior was designed on the decorative taste of the roughly one hundred and fifty years in which these princes lived. Pencil-work patterns over plaster, tile panels on the walls, ceiling medallions, calligraphy, illumination, miniature and marbling reflect the taste of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. In the 150-piece tile panel of 20x20 centimetres on the lower floor, the cypresses of paradise among the rumi patterns express that the princes, many of whom died young, have gone to paradise; the 160-piece panel on the upper floor shows a tree of life among tulip motifs. All the carpets in the museum are hand-woven wool carpets dyed with natural roots.

The Sabuncuoğlu Museum and the Darüşşifa

The Darüşşifa, one of Amasya's oldest cultural buildings, has been turned into a museum of the city's medical history. From the Arabic inscription that wraps around the door niche on three sides we learn that the building was commissioned in 1308 by Anber bin Abdullah on behalf of the Ilkhanid ruler Sultan Olcaytu Mehmed Han and his wife İlduz Hatun; its architect is unknown, and its endowment deed of 1312 has not survived. The building is cited as the only work to reach Anatolia from the Ilkhanid period. With its courtyard and two-iwan plan, its arcade capitals and its portal it continues the tradition of Anatolian Seljuk architecture; the keystone of the door bears a relief of a kneeling person, a feature peculiar to this hospital. Sources also note that the building is known as the first hospital in Anatolia to use music in treatment.

Since 2011 the building has been run by Amasya Municipality as the Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin Museum of Medicine and Surgical History. Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin belonged to a famous family of physicians; he was the grandson of Sabuncuoğlu Hacı İlyas Çelebi, chief physician to Çelebi Sultan Mehmed. After practising for fourteen years at the Amasya Darüşşifa he presented his work Cerrahiyyetü'l-Haniyye to Mehmed the Conqueror. The museum contains the Sabuncuoğlu Hall, where medical and surgical instruments in ten branches, produced from the drawings in that work, are displayed; the Sabuncuoğlu Clinic, where operations and treatments are re-enacted; and the Music Therapy Hall, which presents the instruments used in music therapy and the makams of Turkish music.

The Şeyh Hamdullah Museum of Writing History and Calligraphy

This museum, in a three-storey building with the nostalgic look of an Amasya house in Hatuniye, was opened in 2018 by Amasya Municipality. Şeyh Hamdullah, whose name it bears, was raised in Amasya, was close enough to the palace to hold Bayezid II's inkwell, and is known as the calligrapher who founded the Ottoman school of calligraphy. His practising calligraphy and archery together led him quickly to be called Kıbletü'l-Küttâp and Şeyhü'r-Râmiyân; his name appears with these titles on a range stone dated 911 AH. The museum displays 182 works by a hundred calligraphers, 169 of them calligraphic panels. The development of writing, beginning with Egyptian, Sumerian and Hittite scripts, is presented together with practical demonstrations of ancillary arts such as bookbinding, marbling and illumination. Speaking at the opening ceremony, the calligrapher Uğur Derman said that this was the first museum in the world founded in the name of a calligrapher; it was also noted at the opening that an inscription written in abjad reckoning had been placed on the building for the first time in a hundred years.

Small Museums That Narrate the City

The Miniature Amasya Museum was begun in 2008 by the Amasya Governorate and Provincial Special Administration, working from a photograph taken in 1914, and opened in 2010 after two years of work. In a hall of the imaret of the Bayezid Complex, on 80 square metres, a 1/150-scale model of the city is displayed; the model contains 1,860 buildings, moving figures, the Yeşilırmak, a train and city lighting, and the presentation is in Turkish and English. The model of Mount Harşena was produced from data obtained by scanning 125 million points. It is cited as the largest city model in Turkey in terms of scale.

The Ferhat and Şirin Lovers' Museum was built by Amasya Municipality and opened in 2013. In the garden of the museum, near the water channel in the area known as Ferhat Arası, are the symbolic graves of Ferhat and Şirin; inside, the legend is told with three- and two-dimensional silicone models, reliefs, period accessories, and lighting and music. Other love stories, such as Leyla and Mecnun and Kerem and Aslı, and the divine-love outlook of Mevlana, Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli and Yunus Emre, have been added to the narrative.

Cultural Centres and the Stage

Alongside the museums, the city's stage and meeting venues have also diversified. The Şehzade Hall in the Amasya Municipality Cultural Centre, on Mehmet Varinli Avenue in Ellibeşevler, hosts festivals, concerts and theatre performances. The İmaret Science, Culture and Art Centre, set up by Amasya University in the imaret building of the Bayezid Complex, opened in the summer of 2024; calligraphic works and a hilye-i şerif are displayed there, and programmes of religious music are held. In Merzifon, the madrasa built in 1414-1415 by Çelebi Sultan Mehmed was likewise given a new function after restoration by Amasya University as a Science, Culture and Art Centre; the protocol signed between the Tokat Regional Directorate of Foundations and the university was the basis of this transfer.

Among the works Governor Masatlı listed in 2023 was the restoration of the Kılıçarslan Primary School and its conversion into a Traditional Turkish Arts Centre. For the same building a city museum project had also been prepared with the Middle Black Sea Development Agency's 2018 feasibility support; this museum was conceived as an educational environment telling the life story of Amasya to people of every age. Which of the two plans is the building's final function is not clear from the sources.

The People's Houses

The people's houses (halkevleri), the most widespread institution of the Republic's cultural mobilisation, were opened across the country from 1932, and in Amasya too they became the centre of the city's cultural life through activities such as a library, theatre, music, folk dance and literacy courses. Lectures, exhibitions and performances were the daily work of this institution. The detailed story of the Halkevi is told in a separate article on the site.

Chronology

1308: Construction of the Darüşşifa on behalf of Olcaytu (according to its inscription).

1414-1415: Building of the Çelebi Sultan Mehmed Madrasa in Merzifon.

1485-1486: Building of the Bayezid Complex; the mosque was completed in July 1486.

1883: Disappearance of the princes' palace at Saraydüzü.

12 June 1919: Mustafa Kemal Pasha's arrival in Amasya; the Circular was drafted on 21-22 June.

1922: Start of library activity in the madrasa of the Bayezid Complex.

1925: Formation of the museum depot in two rooms of the madrasa.

1932: Opening of the people's houses begins.

June 1958: Official founding of the Amasya Museum.

14 June 1980: The museum opens to visitors in its present building.

1984: Opening of the Hazeranlar Mansion as a museum house (1983 in another account).

9 June 2007: Opening of the Saraydüzü Barracks National Struggle Museum.

2008: Opening of the Şehzadeler Museum.

2010: Opening of the Miniature Amasya Museum.

2011: Conversion of the Darüşşifa into a museum of medicine.

2013: Opening of the Ferhat and Şirin Lovers' Museum.

2018: Opening of the Şeyh Hamdullah Museum of Writing History and Calligraphy.

2021-2022: Conversion of Saraydüzü into a library; the provincial public library moves there.

16 June 2023: The Bayezid Manuscript Library reopens after restoration.

Sources

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources