In the middle of the Merzifon bazaar, on the sloping ground of the Gazi Mahbup quarter, rises a group of buildings in yellowish cut stone. They are the parts of the mosque complex (külliye) that Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha, one of the most powerful statesmen of the seventeenth century, left to the land of his birth. Made up of a mosque, a library, a primary school, a stone khan, a bedesten, rows of shops and two bathhouses, the ensemble reads less as a single building than as a small charitable town founded by a grand vizier for his home. Water channels, fountains and a sewage network covering the whole town accompanied the complex. Anyone walking through the centre of Merzifon today moves, whether aware of it or not, within an order that this pious endowment (waqf) laid out three and a half centuries ago.

The complex is among the foremost examples of how the Ottoman endowment tradition could reshape a provincial town from the ground up. Institutions serving worship, education, trade and hygiene were tied to the revenues of a single endowment, and the rents of the commercial buildings paid for the upkeep of the religious and educational ones. To understand the complex, therefore, one has to look both at the life of the man who built it and at the commercial life of seventeenth-century Merzifon.

The Founder, Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha

Kara Mustafa Pasha was born in 1044 (1634-35) in the Merzifon village known as Marınca or Narince; the village now bears his name and is called Karamustafapaşa. His father was a timariot cavalryman (sipahi) named Oruç Bey. When Oruç Bey fell at the siege of Baghdad under Murad IV, the four-year-old Mustafa was left an orphan and came under the protection of his father's friend Köprülü Mehmed Bey, then sanjak governor of Amasya. He received a sound madrasa education together with Köprülü's sons, above all Fazıl Ahmed Pasha, the future grand vizier. According to another account, he was the son of a sipahi named Derviş, born in 1036 (1626-27), and entered Köprülü's household at the age of eighteen. His mother's name, Abide Hatun, is known from his endowment deed and from the inscription of the mosque he built in her name in his village.

By marrying a daughter of Köprülü Mehmed Pasha he became a son-in-law of that powerful family; some researchers give his wife's name as Saliha Hanım. During his father-in-law's grand vizierate he served first as his sword-bearer (silahdar) and then as his secretary for petitions (telhisçi). In 1658 he was appointed second master of the horse, two years later beylerbey (governor-general) of Silistra, and then, with the rank of vizier, beylerbey of Diyarbekir. Between 1661 and 1666 he was grand admiral (kapudan pasha), and during Fazıl Ahmed Pasha's campaigns to Uyvar and Crete he acted as the grand vizier's deputy (kaymakam) in Istanbul. He took part in the Kamaniçe campaign and in 1672 conducted the negotiations for the Treaty of Buczacz with Poland. On the death of Fazıl Ahmed Pasha he was appointed grand vizier on 5 November 1676.

As grand vizier he captured the fortress of Chyhyryn (Çehrin) in 1678; the real turning point, however, was the siege of Vienna in 1683. When the siege ended in rout on 12 September 1683, Mehmed IV, swayed in part by the Pasha's rivals at court, issued an order for his execution, and Kara Mustafa Pasha was put to death in Belgrade on 25 December 1683. Contemporary sources describe him as intelligent, dignified, brave and an able soldier, but also as proud, obstinate and hungry for fame. After his death he was also known by the epithet "Maktul", the executed. The mosque complex he began at Çarşıkapı in Istanbul was completed by his son Ali Pasha.

The Pasha's building activity was not confined to Istanbul. According to the endowment records he also had pious foundations in Kayseri, Edirne, Kamaniçe, Çorum, Tokat, İzmir, Aleppo and Jeddah, and in the town of İncesu near Kayseri he built another complex comprising a mosque, a madrasa, a library, a bathhouse and a caravanserai. The art historian Sultan Murat Topçu believes that, had it not been for the defeat at Vienna and the execution that followed, Kara Mustafa Pasha might have ranked first among the most prolific builders of the Ottoman period. Within this wide network, Merzifon, as the Pasha's home town, holds a place of its own.

Merzifon in the Seventeenth Century

Merzifon lay at the point where the middle and left branches of the Ottoman road network across Anatolia parted. This position gave the town a lively commercial life from an early date, and sultans as well as high-ranking statesmen, Mehmed I (Çelebi Mehmed) and Mehmed II (the Conqueror) foremost among them, had built there. Fifteenth-century buildings such as the Çelebi Sultan Madrasa, the Çifte Hamam and the Eski Hamam had long since defined the surroundings of the bazaar district where Kara Mustafa Pasha's endowment would settle.

When Evliya Çelebi passed through Merzifon in the late 1640s, he recorded that the town's trade was well developed. He drew particular attention to its commercial ties with Crimea, to the large number of dyers' shops and to the yellow morocco leather produced in its tanneries, and he mentioned that felt was made in the Çelebi Mehmed Hamam and the Çifte Hamam. Kara Mustafa Pasha's complex should be seen as an investment that both drew on and enlarged this commercial potential. As Topçu points out, the predominance of commercial over social buildings among the Pasha's works in Merzifon shows that the endowment aimed to draw an income from the town's economic vitality.

Foundation and History of the Complex

Two inscriptions give the clearest account of the complex's history. According to the two-line Arabic inscription in thuluth script above the mosque's portal, construction began in 1077 (1666-67), while the inscription above the door of the Paşa Hamamı, likewise two lines of Arabic thuluth, records that the ensemble was completed in 1090 (1679). The other buildings, which carry no inscription, appear to have been built between these two dates, over a span of roughly thirteen years. Kara Mustafa Pasha undertook the complex in the years when he was third vizier, and the work was largely completed during his grand vizierate. The architect of the buildings is unknown.

Archival documents push this general picture back on some points. According to a document in the Archives of the General Directorate of Foundations, the Pasha bought the plot on which the bedesten now stands, together with the shops on it, in 1075 (1664), and had the bedesten and the surrounding shops built there. On the basis of this document Topçu accepts that the bedesten was built in 1664; other researchers think it too was built in 1666-67, the date in the mosque inscription. A court certificate (hüccet) in the same archive shows that the stone khan had been finished before 1082 (1671). In short, the complex was less a group of buildings raised in a single campaign than the product of a planned building programme spread over fifteen years.

The core of the complex was established in the Gazi Mahbub quarter at the centre of the town. Because the ground slopes, a very high retaining wall was built along the east side of the mosque on a north-south line, creating a terrace on which the mosque and its courtyard were set. The stone khan and the bedesten stand on the level ground below the terrace. No enclosure wall surrounds the buildings, yet their proximity to one another produces a clear sense of a unified complex. Shops set facing each other along the outer façades of the buildings form an open-air arasta between them. Topçu stresses that the mosque, the bedesten and the khan were placed right in the middle of the buildings erected by two Ottoman sultans, and that they went on to determine the main physical layout of Merzifon in later periods.

The same material was used in all the buildings of the complex. The yellowish cut stone seen in every work Kara Mustafa Pasha built in Merzifon gives the centre of the town a colour of its own. In the stone khan and the bedesten, the lower levels are entirely of cut stone, while the upper levels use alternating courses of one row of cut stone and three rows of brick.

The Endowment Deeds and the Scope of the Waqf

Two endowment deeds (vakfiye) of the complex are known, both copied from the original register. The first is dated 23 Safer 1089 (16 April 1678) and is kept in the Archives of the General Directorate of Foundations, in endowment register no. 641. The second is in the Archives of the General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre, among the Kayseri survey registers, under no. 136. The deed also lists the endowed buildings Kara Mustafa Pasha erected outside Merzifon, in Istanbul, Kayseri, Edirne, Kamaniçe, Çorum, Tokat, İzmir, Aleppo and Jeddah.

The details of the deed contain rich information on how an Ottoman endowment worked. It sets out one by one the list of staff, the qualifications expected of them and their wages, the sums to be paid to the Pasha's descendants and to the trustees, the physical state of the complex, the instruction of students, and the list of books to be kept in the library. The deed also stipulates that the imam of the mosque built by the Pasha's mother Abide Hatun in the village of Narince be paid four akçe a day. As Abdülbaki Yeşil has shown, the physical descriptions in the deed also make it possible to trace buildings and shops that have since disappeared.

According to the descriptions in the deed, there should be forty shops around the mosque, whereas twenty-eight survive today; twelve have vanished over time, and the vault traces of some can still be made out. When the road west of the mosque was opened, the shops there ended up below road level and were filled with earth. For the surroundings of the stone khan, the deed records thirty-five shops outside the khan, a tahmis, that is a coffee shop, and two bakers' ovens.

The Kara Mustafa Pasha Mosque

Standing in a position that commands the complex and its surroundings, the mosque is popularly known as the "Paşa Camii" and, being the largest mosque in town, as the "Cami-i Kebir" (Great Mosque). The two-line marble inscription above the depressed-arched door into the prayer hall states that the mosque was built in the year 1077 in the time of Sultan Mehmed Han son of Sultan İbrahim, that is Mehmed IV, by order of the benefactor, the exalted vizier Mustafa Pasha of Merzifon. It is noteworthy that the inscription names its founder with the nisba "el-Merzifonî". According to Topçu, by referring to his home town in his inscriptions, the Pasha wished to show strangers coming here that he was from Merzifon and to be remembered for the good works he did for it.

The mosque's plan shows a rectangular scheme in which a single-domed prayer hall is extended northwards by three units. The square space on the south is covered by a dome 14 metres in diameter; it rests on an octagonal drum, at whose corners octagonal weight turrets are placed. The section added to the north is divided into three units by pointed arches carried on two piers, the central unit roofed with a dome and the side units with mirror vaults. Topçu regards this plan as a developed version of the single-space plan type common in Ottoman mosque architecture and sees the northward extension of the prayer hall as a repetition of the arrangement in the Green Mosque at İznik. The Pasha's mosques in Istanbul and İncesu are single-space buildings; the enlargement at Merzifon was probably related to the size of the congregation.

The outer walls are built throughout of smooth cut stone. The prayer hall is lit by two small windows on each face of the dome drum and by windows ranged below and above in the body walls. The single-balcony minaret rises at the north-west corner, where the main space meets the portico. Built entirely of cut stone with a cylindrical shaft, the minaret was renewed from the balcony upwards during the 1975 repairs by the General Directorate of Foundations. In front of the mosque is a three-bay portico showing nineteenth-century features. It is reached from the courtyard by five steps; the central bay is covered by a dome and the side bays by flat wooden ceilings, and the inside of the central dome is decorated with painted work in a wheel-of-fortune pattern.

The interior of the mosque has undergone heavy alterations in recent times. The original mihrab, minbar, the preaching chair set into the wall and the muezzins' platform on the north wall were made of monolithic stone blocks and showed rough workmanship. In an ill-advised repair commissioned by the mosque association before August 1997, the mihrab was plastered over, the stone minbar was removed and replaced with a wooden one, the muezzins' platform was taken out and the window there was enlarged. The wooden gallery dating from the nineteenth-century repair was also dismantled and renewed. The dome, the areas above the doors and windows, and the surroundings of the preaching chair carried painted decoration bearing the dates 1842 and 1875; these were destroyed in the same repair, plastered over and replaced with new designs unrelated to the originals. The mosque, which belongs to the General Directorate of Foundations, was restored again in later years and reopened for worship in September 2005.

The Courtyard and Its Gates

To the north of the mosque lies a broad courtyard enclosed by a wall. It is entered from the east, west and north through depressed-arched gates. Those coming from the khan and the bedesten climb to the courtyard through a gate of nine steps covered by a barrel vault. The entrance on the side of the stone khan is notable for its deep arch, with a small chamber above it; the arch is built of coloured stones. Two lavatories stand in the north-east of the courtyard. Two old plane trees in the courtyard, with trunks nearly three metres across, are monumental trees that keep company with the age of the building.

The Ablution Fountain and the Paintings of Zileli Emin

In the centre of the courtyard stands the ablution fountain (şadırvan), raised two steps above the ground. Its basin is sixteen-sided and faced with marble, and an octagonal marble-clad jet rises in its centre. Apart from the basin, the fountain was entirely renewed in the nineteenth century. The superstructure rests on eight wooden posts; it is covered inside by a dome of lath-and-plaster (bağdadi) construction and outside by a pointed pyramidal copper cap. Together with its timekeeper's room (muvakkithane), the courtyard served as a gathering place where the congregation performed ablutions and where prayer times were kept.

What sets this fountain apart from others in Anatolia are the paintings inside its dome. As the name and date worked into the decoration show, these painted works were made by Zileli Emin Usta in 1292 (1875). The same master is known to have worked on the decoration inside the mosque and on many buildings around Amasya and Tokat. The paintings depict views of Istanbul and Anatolia with lively imagination and skill, and they are counted among the rare examples of late Turkish painting. In a detailed study published in 1993, Baha Tanman examined the "Ottoman world" Zileli Emin created in this dome and the personality reflected in it, and Rüçhan Arık also gave the paintings ample space in his work on Anatolian pictorial art of the Westernisation period.

Three different places are believed to be depicted in the dome. The first is Istanbul. Looking closely, one can pick out the skyline between the Galata and Beyazıt towers, the Golden Horn and the Galata Bridge, the Sultanahmet, Hagia Sophia and Süleymaniye mosques, and the Çemberlitaş column. The second scene is likened to Amasya; a citadel, water mills on the Yeşilırmak and buildings resembling the Bayezid Mosque can be seen. The third scene is thought to show the Ottoman army before Vienna. In keeping with the conventions of the time, the scene contains no human figures but shows tents, firing cannon and weapons. That this scene should appear at the mosque of a grand vizier who paid with his life for the defeat before Vienna lends the painting a particular resonance.

The painted field is bounded at the base of the dome by an inscription band of six cartouches. Within the cartouches, whose rectangular ends become oval and are linked by stepped knots, a hadith is written in Arabic thuluth among almond-green floral motifs on a black ground: "Accilû bi's-salâti kable'l-fevt ve accilû bi't-tevbeti kable'l-mevt", that is, hasten to prayer before its time passes, and hasten to repentance before death comes. Topçu recalls that Merzifon, at the junction of the middle and left Anatolian routes, was a herald of the capital for the merchants and travellers using that road, and he likens the Ottoman panorama in the fountain dome to a promotional brochure introducing the Ottoman world to travellers heading west to Istanbul.

The Library and the Primary School

The library was built as an upper storey above the eastern entrance of the mosque courtyard, an eyvan-shaped gateway forming a deep passage. It is a square room of 5.30 by 5.30 metres with a flat wooden ceiling under a hipped roof. It is reached through a completely renewed door in the east wall of the portico and has no significant decoration apart from the central medallion of its wooden ceiling. Its materials, decoration and technique show late nineteenth-century characteristics. It is difficult today to establish where the small library mentioned in the endowment deed originally stood or what became of its books. Locally and in some publications this room is called the "muvakkithane"; the building may well have taken on the function of a timekeeper's room later on.

The building thought to be the primary school (sıbyan mektebi) stands in the north-west corner of the courtyard, against its north and west walls. Because it served for many years as the office of the mufti in the Republican period, it is locally called the "fetvahane" and sometimes the "dergâh". The deed's reference to a school whose location cannot be determined today strengthens the possibility that this was the primary school. The corner where its east and south walls meet has been softened into a rounded form, harmonising with the fountain in the courtyard. Inside, wooden columns of circular section joined by wooden ogee arches form an octagonal plan. The wooden roof, which starts from the walls with the curve of a dome, turns into a flat ceiling over the central octagon; the interlaced ornament of triangles, hexagons, octagons, stars and lozenges in the ceiling medallion points to the late nineteenth century.

The Stone Khan (Taşhan)

Recorded in the Islamic court registers of Merzifon as the "Taş Han" and known locally as the "Paşa Hanı", the building stands east of the mosque courtyard, on the level ground below the terrace, immediately north of the bedesten. It bears no building inscription, but it is known to have been completed before 1082 (1671). The endowment deed describes the khan as a building bounded on three sides by roads and on one side by the rooms of Veli Efendi, with sixty-two rooms on its lower and upper floors and four shops inside. Researchers agree that, in its features, architectural design and functions, the Taşhan holds an important place not only among seventeenth-century khans but in Ottoman khan architecture as a whole. Of the urban khans the Pasha built in many cities, above all Istanbul, Aleppo and İzmir, this is the largest.

The khan is a rectangular building made up of cells arranged around a single courtyard, and it belongs to the group of urban khans whose façades are lined with shops. On the outer façades ten shops open outwards on the east, seven on the west, eight on the south and nine on the north. The main entrance is the door with an oriel above it in the middle of the south façade; passing through its depressed arch one enters a cross-vaulted passage that leads to the courtyard. The east, west and south wings of the courtyard have two storeys. The north wing, however, has three, because of the stable set half a storey below the courtyard, taking advantage of the slope. Abdülbaki Yeşil notes that a third storey was tried here for the first time.

The lower floors held storerooms, the stable and shops, and the upper floors the rooms where merchants and travellers stayed; nearly all of these rooms have fireplaces and niches. Some researchers state that the bachelor rooms on the upper floor were set aside for guests and unemployed levends, while the rooms above the stable were given to travellers, and they emphasise that the khan combined the functions of a caravanserai, an urban khan and a staging-post khan. The central corridor arrangement seen in the south and north sections of the upper floors recalls the Taşhan in Amasya. Among the details that distinguish the building from other khans are the ablution room and lavatory units in its north-west corner and the small mosque (mescit) on the third floor of the north section. Taking advantage of the sloping ground, water was brought to these units through pipes inside the walls; in the north of the courtyard there are two fountains built of cut stone.

Each floor shows a symmetrical arrangement along its north-south and east-west axes, but the wide angle the west wall makes towards the north breaks this symmetry. The walls are built entirely of yellowish cut stone up to the first-floor level, and above that of one row of cut stone and three rows of brick; the domes and vaults are of brick and were plastered later. Comparison with the room and shop figures in the deed shows that, apart from minor changes, the building has not undergone any major intervention. Following a comprehensive restoration, the Taşhan has been in use since 2018 as a boutique hotel and restaurant. The basement holds a restaurant, the ground floor commercial premises and the first floor hotel rooms, so that the building lives on in the modern equivalent of its original function of lodging.

The Bedesten

The bedesten stands east of the mosque and south of the khan. This covered market, where valuable goods were bought and sold and where tradesmen entrusted their strongboxes and account books, was regarded as the heart of the commercial district in Ottoman towns. Covering a nearly square area of about 30 by 28 metres, the building belongs to the group of medium-sized, nine-domed Ottoman bedestens surrounded on all four sides by rows of shops. It bears no building inscription.

Four massive piers set in the middle of the interior divide the space into nine equal bays; the piers are linked to one another and to the walls by pointed arches, and each bay is covered by a dome on pendentives. Today there are no cellars or shop partitions inside, but according to the deed the interior must have contained shops formed of wooden partitions. Lanterns at the crowns of the domes and nine splayed windows high in the walls give the interior ample light. Within the vaulted unit at the centre of each façade is a depressed-arched door in a rectangular frame, and the arches of these doors are built of alternating coloured stones. The building is fully symmetrical on its east-west and north-south axes.

Thirty-two shops surround the bedesten on the outside. The shops are barrel-vaulted, with cross vaults at the corners and on either side of the doors; today a tiled roof covers these shops on all four sides. The bedesten was repaired by the General Directorate of Foundations in 1971-72 and was afterwards used for a long time by Tekel, the state monopoly, as a tobacco depot. During this period the interior in particular suffered damage, and the building stood derelict for some time. Restored close to its original form in work begun in 2006, the bedesten still carries on its commercial role in the shops around its outer ring, while its interior is used as a restaurant. According to Topçu, although the bedesten stands in the khan's shadow in terms of size, together with the khan it forms the main axis of Merzifon's trade.

The Paşa Hamamı and the Tuzpazarı Hamamı

The building popularly known as the Paşa Hamamı was built north of the complex and well away from its other buildings, against the old town walls. The quarter in which it stands is given in some sources as Hacı Bâlî and in others as Hoca Süleyman. The sources also differ on its date: Abdülbaki Yeşil reads the inscription above the door as 1090 (1679) and takes it as the completion date of the complex, which would mean the bathhouse was finished after the endowment deed was drawn up on 16 April 1678. Topçu, on the other hand, reads the two-line inscription in monumental thuluth above the west entrance as 1092 (1681). According to an archival document cited by Topçu, when the two bathhouses built in the town by Sultan Mehmed no longer met the people's needs, the inhabitants asked for a new one, and the Kara Mustafa Pasha endowment answered their request. The presence of two bathhouses in the bazaar district already is seen as the reason the Paşa Hamamı was built far from the centre of the complex.

The bathhouse plan repeats that of the traditional Turkish hamam. Because it was built against the old walls, the hot section and the furnace were shifted westwards, producing an L-shaped plan. The changing hall, square at its base and about 11 metres wide, is covered by a dome on squinches and has a sixteen-sided marble basin with a jet in its centre. The hot room has four eyvans with private cubicles (halvet) at the corners, and an octagonal marble-clad heated platform (göbek taşı) in the middle. The broad, high platforms in the cool and warm rooms suggest that felt was made in the bathhouse. Stone gargoyles at the eaves and a door arch built of coloured stones enliven the plain façades. The Paşa Hamamı still operates as a bathhouse today.

The Tuzpazarı Hamamı, about a hundred metres south of the complex, is also linked to the Kara Mustafa Pasha endowment. Although no document survives about this bathhouse, which takes its name from the salt sold in the square beside it, researchers maintain that it too belonged to the endowment and was built in 1087 (1676); some sources give the date as 1677. In its materials, construction technique and plan it resembles the Paşa Hamamı and the other buildings of the complex. It is a medium-sized bathhouse of classical layout, still draws its water from the Kara Mustafa Pasha endowment, and is run by a tenant as property of the General Directorate of Foundations.

Water Channels, Fountains and Sewerage

Water was among the most lasting services Kara Mustafa Pasha left to Merzifon. An imperial decree of 1086 (1675) in the Archives of the General Directorate of Foundations states that fourteen quarters of the town had no fountain at all and records that the Pasha had fountains built in them. To relieve the town's acute shortage of water, it was brought by channels from Mount Tavşan, locally called Taşan, about ten kilometres away. According to Yusuf Akyurt's observations in 1947, these channels were 0.75 metres wide and 1.05 metres high. The water was distributed to the quarters through some thirty fountains.

These channels, cisterns, distribution chambers and fountains were in use until recently but are today largely derelict, and most of the Pasha's fountains have not survived. During the same building programme the town's sewage problem was also tackled, and a sewerage system centred on the complex and covering the whole town was built. That this network was still in use in the early 2000s shows that the endowment did not content itself with monumental buildings but also invested in the town's everyday infrastructure.

The Abide Hatun Mosque at Narince

A building that may be counted as an extension of the complex stands in the village where the Pasha was born. According to its two-line building inscription, the mosque in the centre of Karamustafapaşa, formerly Narince, a few kilometres east of Merzifon, was built by Kara Mustafa Pasha in 1091 (1680) in the name of his mother Abide Hatun. The mosque is listed among the Pasha's endowments in Merzifon in the deed of 16 April 1678. The village appears in the 1928 records as Mirince or Marınca and in the 1960 records as Bahçekent.

Set on sloping ground, the mosque consists of a rectangular prayer hall and a three-bay portico to its north. The façades use alternating courses of three rows of brick and one row of stone, with cut stone at the corners; outside, the building is covered by a hipped roof. A flat wooden ceiling carried on wooden beams covers the prayer hall, and the faces of the beams are decorated with painted floral work of leaves linked by stems; only part of this is original, the rest having been faithfully renewed. The plaster mihrab with its shell-shaped niche and fine borders, the wooden women's gallery and the muezzins' gallery are the building's notable features. Topçu counts this mosque among the finest examples of the tradition of wooden-ceilinged mosques that spread after the seventeenth century. While the Pasha is named with the nisba "Merzifonî" in the inscriptions of the mosque and bathhouse in Merzifon, the absence of this phrase from the inscription of the mosque he built in his mother's name is also worth noting.

The Complex Today

Over three and a half centuries the buildings of the complex have met different fates. The mosque, the Taşhan and the bedesten have come down to us largely preserving their original character. The mosque's portico, the ablution fountain, the timekeeper's room, the primary school and the Paşa Hamamı, by contrast, have lost many of their original features as a result of the repairs they underwent. Three separate inscriptions evidently connected with these repairs are found among the decoration inside the mosque and above the fountain at its south-east corner.

The Kara Mustafa Pasha Mosque, the Taşhan, the bedesten and the Tuzpazarı Hamamı today form the core of Merzifon's registered urban conservation area. Along Cumhuriyet Caddesi, this area makes up the town's historic bazaar together with fifteenth-century buildings such as the Çifte Hamam, the Eski Hamam and the Taceddin İbrahim Paşa, Dönertaş and Bozacı mosques. The mosque and the bathhouses keep their original functions; the Taşhan is used as a hotel and restaurant and the interior of the bedesten as a restaurant, while the rows of shops are still in the hands of tradesmen. On certain days a market for dairy and preserved foods (katık pazarı) is set up in the low-lying area between the Taşhan and the Taceddin İbrahim Paşa Mosque.

Although the elements of the complex are spread across the town centre, they lie within walking distance of one another; only the Paşa Hamamı is somewhat further away. Merzifon is about 45 kilometres from the centre of Amasya, and the mosque stands on Çarşı Sokak in the Gazimahbup quarter. A walk that begins in the mosque courtyard, continues through the bazaar streets around the Taşhan and the bedesten and then follows Cumhuriyet Caddesi to the other historic buildings allows one to see as a whole how closely the commercial and religious life of seventeenth-century Merzifon was interwoven. This order, still felt at the heart of the town today, is the most tangible trace of Kara Mustafa Pasha's attachment to his homeland.

Chronology

1634-35 (1044): Kara Mustafa Pasha is born in the village of Marınca (Narince) near Merzifon; according to another account he was born in 1626-27.

1661-1666: Kara Mustafa Pasha serves as grand admiral.

1664 (1075): The Pasha buys the plot where the bedesten stands, together with the shops on it.

1666-67 (1077): Construction of the mosque begins (portal inscription).

Before 1671 (1082): The Taşhan has been completed.

1675 (1086): Decree noting that fourteen quarters lack fountains; water channels and fountains are built.

5 November 1676: Kara Mustafa Pasha becomes grand vizier.

1676-77 (1087): Date proposed for the construction of the Tuzpazarı Hamamı.

16 April 1678 (23 Safer 1089): The endowment deed of the complex is drawn up.

1679 (1090): The complex is completed according to the Paşa Hamamı inscription; Topçu reads the inscription as 1092 (1681).

1680 (1091): The Abide Hatun Mosque is built in the village of Narince.

25 December 1683: After the defeat at Vienna, Kara Mustafa Pasha is executed in Belgrade.

1842 and 1875: Dates of the painted decoration inside the mosque.

1875 (1292): Zileli Emin Usta paints the dome of the ablution fountain.

1971-72: The bedesten is repaired by the General Directorate of Foundations.

1975: The minaret above the balcony is renewed in repairs by the General Directorate of Foundations.

1997: The mihrab, minbar and painted decoration are destroyed in a repair by the mosque association.

2005: The restored mosque reopens for worship in September.

2006: Restoration work begins on the bedesten.

2018: The restored Taşhan opens as a boutique hotel and restaurant.

Bibliography

Academic studies

  • Sultan Murat Topçu, "Kara Mustafa Paşa'nın Merzifon'daki İmar Faaliyetleri", Kamu Yönetimi Enstitüsü Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2/2 (2022), pp. 87-122.
  • Hicran Hanım Halaç - Büşra Saatci İzci, "Merzifon Kentsel Sit Alanının Analizi ve Taşhan'ın Yeni İşlevinin Yapıya ve Çevresine Etkileri", Tarih Okulu Dergisi, 13/46 (2020), pp. 2029-2056.
  • Murat Çerkez, Merzifon'da Türk Devri Mimari Eserleri, doctoral thesis, Ankara University Institute of Social Sciences, 2005.
  • Abdülbaki Yeşil, Merzifon Kara Mustafa Paşa Külliyesi, master's thesis, Ankara University Institute of Social Sciences, 1992.
  • Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa Uluslararası Sempozyumu Bildirileri, Merzifon Vakfı Publications, 2001.

Official sources

Other sources

  • Abdülbaki Yeşil, "Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa Külliyesi", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 29, Ankara 2004, pp. 252-254. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Abdülkadir Özcan, "Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 29, Ankara 2004, pp. 246-249. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Baha Tanman, "Merzifon Kara Mustafa Paşa Camii Şadırvanının Kubbesinde Zileli Emin'in Yarattığı Osmanlı Dünyası ve Bu Dünyaya Yansıyan Kişiliği", Sanat Tarihinde İkonografik Araştırmalar: Güner İnal'a Armağan, Ankara 1993, pp. 491-522.
  • Rüçhan Arık, Batılılaşma Dönemi Anadolu Tasvir Sanatı, Ankara 1988.
  • Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, introductory texts "Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa Camii" and "Merzifon Bedesten".

Online sources