To understand the guild culture of Merzifon's historic market, one has to look first at how the market came into being and then at the rules that bound the people working in it. The town's commercial life took shape in the seventeenth century around the complex built by Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha. The streets lined up trade by trade, the craft discipline passed from master to apprentice, and the mutual help among neighbours can all be read as traces of the Ottoman guild order in an Anatolian town. Most of the Merzifon-specific details of this order are known not from documents but from the habits the market has carried down to the present; where no documentation exists, this is stated plainly. Even so, the information Hüseyin Hüsameddin gives in his History of Amasya on the town's endowments, its neighbourhoods and the people it produced shows the people and institutions behind the market more clearly than one might expect.

The Concept of the Guild and Ottoman Craft Organization

The word lonca (guild) comes from the Italian loggia and originally meant a room, a space set aside for a particular purpose. The name given to the storage rooms used in Galata by Venetian, Genoese and Ragusan merchants eventually became the name of an Istanbul neighbourhood. At the end of the fifteenth century the word still denoted a specific place of trade; from the seventeenth century on it began to be used for the organized craftsmen themselves. The earliest archival document containing the term for Istanbul craftsmen dates to 1697, while for Bursa the year 1632-33 has been identified. The word became common in documents only in the eighteenth century. When the word "lonca" came into use for Merzifon's craftsmen is not known; however, the organization of people practising the same trade long predates the term and is regarded as a continuation of the craft associations of the Seljuk period.

In the Ottoman Empire, free craft associations were founded on mutual oversight and mutual aid rather than on competition. People of the same trade worked side by side and kept watch over one another's work. At the head of an association stood the guild sheikh. He was usually a literate, elderly craftsman who handled ceremonial matters, and his selection was reported to the government through the judge (kadi) and confirmed. From the eighteenth century the kethüda (guild warden) began to replace the sheikh. The kethüda managed the association's financial and administrative affairs, resolved disputes among craftsmen and, when necessary, took matters to the judge or to the Imperial Council. The craftsmen elected him and the judge entered him in the register; in later periods it became customary to obtain a berat (patent) from the government for this office.

The third member of the leadership was the yiğitbaşı. His duties included seeing that apprentices were well trained, handling disciplinary matters and punishments, girding new masters with the ceremonial sash (şed), and managing the association's common fund. His assistant, the işçibaşı, dealt with quality control and prevented defective goods from reaching the market. The last two members of the board were called ehl-i hibre or ehl-i vukuf. They were people who knew the craft thoroughly and were respected by their fellows; they arbitrated disputes between craftsmen and merchants and set the price of goods and services according to their quality. The rules of an association lay partly in written regulations and partly in custom, and craftsmen were granted a certain autonomy over production rules. The state, for its part, exercised its main oversight through the narh, the official fixing of prices.

The Growth of the Town and the First Traces of Its Craftsmen

From the Danishmendid period onward, Merzifon had acquired the look of a typical Turkish-Islamic town. Hüsameddin writes that its condition before the Seljuks is unknown, but that the names and organization of its neighbourhoods show the town grew after the hijri year 670 (1271-72). In his view Merzifon was the largest of the towns attached to Amasya. Among the old neighbourhood names he lists, alongside names tied to people or buildings such as Alaca Minare, Erzincânî, Hacı Ahmed, Hüsâm-ı Cedîd, Harmanlı, Sofular and Kadı Mahbûb, there are names that carry the trace of everyday trade, such as Südçü (milkman), Tuz (salt) and Ali Bozacı (Ali the boza-maker). Bozacı Ali Çelebi, who gave his name to the Ali Bozacı neighbourhood, built a mosque and a school in his own neighbourhood in 900 (1494-95), according to Hüsameddin. That a man who took his byname from a trade should give his name to a neighbourhood and leave pious works there suggests that people of craft and commerce had gained a respected place in the town by the end of the fifteenth century.

The first major investments to raise the town's commercial importance were made in the fifteenth century. According to Hüsameddin, Çelebi Sultan Mehmed (Mehmed I) came to Merzifon during the years he ruled in Amasya, built a palace here and, in 818 (1415), had a large madrasa and a bath built and set up their endowment. His mother Devlet Hatun built a mosque, a lodge and a soup kitchen in 822 (1419); Murad II a mosque and a bath in 830 (1426-27); and Mehmed II (the Conqueror) a bath in 878 (1473-74). Baths, lodges and soup kitchens were institutions living on endowment revenue, and a large part of their income came from the shops and inns around them. Known for its fifteenth-century madrasas, soup kitchens and mosques, the town also held a significant position in trade through its Bedesten (covered market) and Taşhan. At the end of the sixteenth century its population is estimated at about five to six thousand, and roughly 82,000 akçe of the annual revenue from commercial and industrial taxes was assigned to the sultan's personal estates. The figure suggests a small but functioning market town.

The name of the Ahi tradition also appears in Merzifon in this period, in a family name. Ahmed Çelebi, the chief scribe (reisülküttab) under Mehmed II, was, as Hüsameddin reports from his own signature, the son of Ahi Toy bin Ahmed el-Merzifonî. A scribe of the Imperial Council under Murad II, Ahmed Çelebi signed a book he wrote in 851 (1447-48) as "Ahmed bin Âhi Toy el-kâtibü's-Sultânî" and became chief scribe in 858 (1454) under the grand vizierate of Mahmud Pasha. The title "Ahi" in his father's name is the same as the one given in the Anatolian craft associations to the most honest and respected master of a trade, which conferred on him an influence like a sheikh's. It has been suggested that Ahi Toy may have been a craft leader in Merzifon; but there is no document on which trade he followed or whether he headed an association. Later generations of the family produced scholars and judges and were known as the Bedreddinzâdes.

The Kara Mustafa Pasha Complex and the Birth of the Market

The group of buildings that chiefly determined the layout of the market is the Kara Mustafa Pasha complex, reported to have been founded in 1666-67. Consisting of a mosque, library, inn, bath and bedesten, the complex was, according to some records, under construction until 1679. The dates Hüsameddin gives also point to this last year: in 1087 (1676-77) the pasha enlarged the masjid his mother Âbide Hatun had built in his native village of Marınca into a mosque and school, and in 1090 (1679) he built in the middle of Merzifon a solid masonry mosque with a timekeeper's room, a library, a classroom and an ablution fountain in front of it. According to the same source he had conduits laid from Taşan Dağı, two kilometres away, brought water to the town and built some thirty masonry fountains, in effect reviving the town. The waterways included among his endowments, alongside the complex, are accepted to have brought significant changes to Merzifon's social and economic life.

Kara Mustafa Pasha, who founded the complex, was born in 1634-35 in the village of Marınca in Merzifon, today's Karamustafapaşa. His father was a timar-holding cavalryman; orphaned at an early age, he grew up under the protection of Köprülü Mehmed Bey, the sanjak governor of Amasya, and later rose to the grand vizierate. The pasha, who also founded endowments in Kamaniçe, Çorum, Tokat, İzmir and Aleppo, shaped the market order of Merzifon through his complex in the town of his birth. The role of these endowments continued in later centuries. In this respect the craftsmen of the bedesten and the arasta were part not merely of a marketplace but of an endowment order.

The name of the man who oversaw the construction of the complex on the spot is also known thanks to Hüsameddin. Ahmed Ağa, son of Kürd Sefer Ağa of the village of Dövenci in the district of Gümüş, entered Kara Mustafa Pasha's household as a cavalryman, won his trust and in 1072 (1661-62) became his agent in Merzifon and then voyvoda (district steward) of Merzifon. According to Hüsameddin, Ahmed Ağa was charged with building the pasha's pious works in Merzifon and with arranging and purchasing the properties and rental buildings to be endowed, and he had the mosque and the bedesten built "in a perfect manner". In 1086 (1675-76) Ahmed Ağa went to Istanbul and became steward to the grand vizier, but was dismissed three months later and sent back to Merzifon; he afterwards served as voyvoda of Tokat and as treasury officer of Amasya. This record matters because it names the man who took on the building of the bedesten; some sources do not state with certainty who had the bedesten built or in which year, and date it to the seventeenth century on the basis of its building technique alone. Hüsameddin's account, by contrast, plainly counts the building among the pasha's pious works and ties its construction to the voyvoda's supervision. As the bedesten has no inscription, its exact date of construction still cannot be documented.

The Bedesten

The bedesten rises on the left side of the mosque, in the hollow between the Taşhan and the bath. Its plan is square, measuring roughly 30 × 30 metres. Four massive piers divide the four-gated interior into nine bays, each covered by a dome on an octagonal drum. On the outer faces run vaulted shops; there is an entrance at the centre of each of the four sides, and thirty-two shops in all between them. That it forms part of the complex's endowment shows that it belonged to the Kara Mustafa Pasha Foundation. The shops along the outer faces were let, and their rent was spent on the foundation's services; the secure space inside was where valuable goods were kept and sold.

The word bedesten derives from bezzâzistan or bezistan and denotes a place where cloth is sold. These buildings were originally secure masonry structures in which jewels, precious stones, weapons, ornamented harness and fine fabrics were sold. Rising in stone among the lightweight wooden shops around it, this mass formed the core of the commercial district in Turkish urbanism, and trade revolved around it. Once it had lost its original function, the large interior of the Merzifon bedesten was for a time used as a weaving workshop by the Merzifon Weavers' Cooperative. That one of the town's oldest crafts took refuge in this building for a while creates a natural link between the "bez" (cloth) in the bedesten's name and Merzifon's weaving past. In works begun by the General Directorate of Foundations in 2006, the building was restored close to its original form.

The Taşhan and the Arasta

The Taşhan, right beside the bedesten, was the building where merchants from distant roads lodged, unloaded their goods and stabled their animals. Because its inscription is lost, the year of its construction is unknown; on the basis of its architectural features it is dated to the seventeenth century. Built of cut stone and brick, rectangular in plan and two storeys high, the inn is entered through a round-arched doorway on the south façade. In the middle is an open courtyard. The ground-floor shops are separated from one another by pointed arches, forming small arcades facing the courtyard; behind the stone-columned portico on the north side, beneath platforms resting on corbels, are the stables for the animals. The upper floor too is lined with arcades and single-windowed domed rooms, and two fountains in front of the north wall lend the courtyard a liveliness of its own. Taken together, the inn, the bedesten and the mosque reveal a trading order in which goods arriving by caravan were unloaded at the inn, the valuable ones sold in the bedesten, and everyday needs met in the arasta around them.

The arasta was the name given to a market built near a mosque or complex to bring income to a foundation and to draw the congregation there. In Merzifon the bedesten, the arasta, the inn and the complex are intertwined as parts of the same endowment order. The mosque's congregation did their shopping as they came out from prayer, and the craftsmen's rent went back into the upkeep of the mosque, the library and the fountains. This arrangement also explains why the Merzifon market has stayed in the same place for centuries.

Trade by Trade, Street by Street

The historic market surrounding the bedesten is still divided into sections such as the streets of shoemakers, tailors, butchers and pide makers. These streets, which separate trade by trade, are the guild order made visible in space, where people doing the same work laboured together and checked one another. A customer looking for a certain good went to the right street and could compare price and quality in shops standing side by side. For the craftsmen, too, the same proximity made it easier to apply common rules.

An idea of the market's size can be given from recent times. It is said that about three hundred craftsmen work in the arasta, serving in many fields from clothing to food and from household goods to restaurants. The market's past is cited as more than four hundred years; the mayor of the time speaks of a history of roughly five hundred years, with its barbers, tailors, shoemakers and restaurateurs. Neither figure is an exact date; both are oral tradition. That it was a town market where caravans often stopped and where the economy was kept alive in the Ottoman period is explained by Merzifon's position at the junction of the roads linking the interior to the Black Sea, Istanbul and Ankara.

Merzifon's Craft and Population Structure

Who made up the craft culture can also be read from the town's population structure. In the middle of the seventeenth century twenty-eight neighbourhoods were registered in Merzifon, and four of them were home to non-Muslims who had come from elsewhere. According to the avarız register the town consisted of 925 households in all, of which 625 were counted as Muslim and 300 as Christian. Figures given by Evliya Çelebi for Merzifon, such as forty-four neighbourhoods and four thousand houses, look exaggerated when compared with these counts. Hüsameddin, for his part, writes that in his own day the district held some thirty-eight thousand people, with twenty neighbourhoods, about four thousand households and some forty-five villages; this figure covers the whole district, not the town alone.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the temettuat census of the 1840s records 929 taxpaying households in thirteen neighbourhoods. When the occupations listed in these records are examined, it becomes clear that a significant part of the population worked in trades and crafts that can be described as the textile sector. By the end of the century the town's population had reached about twenty thousand. Vital Cuinet reports 13,380 Muslims, 5,820 Armenians and about 800 Greeks. This mixed, multi-faith structure suggests that trade and craft relations in the market had the same diversity; but no document can be cited here on which trade was in the hands of which community.

Weaving

The weight of textiles in the temettuat records shows that Merzifon was for a long time a weaving town. Weaving was a craft carried on in homes rather than in the market's shops. According to older masters, there was once a loom in every house, and women made their living from this work. Memduh Dülger, a master who says his family has a three-hundred-year history of weaving in Merzifon, relates that before 1900 there were four thousand five hundred looms in the town. This number rests on knowledge handed down among masters from generation to generation and has not been verified by any archival record; still, it is consistent with the weight of textiles in the temettuat records.

What sets Merzifon weaving apart are its sheets and peştamals (bath and waist cloths), famous for their tied patterns. The place of the peştamal in the Ottoman craft tradition is also worth noting; a journeyman passing to mastery was ceremonially girded with a şed or peştamal. According to Dülger, weaving continued intensively in the town until 1960 and then began to fade because it could not keep pace with technology. The continuation of the weaving industry in the town through factories in the Republican period shows that the shift from hand loom to machine took place in Merzifon too. In 2018, in courses opened at the Merzifon Public Education Centre with ten looms, women aged between thirty and seventy began once more to produce goods from tablecloths to wedding and henna dresses under the label "Merzifon weaving". That same year Dülger said that no one but himself still knew the work.

From Apprentice to Master

In the Ottoman craft organization, knowledge of a trade was passed on through the stages of apprenticeship, journeymanship and mastery. A person who entered a master's workshop as an apprentice had to obey him fully and follow the customs of the trade. Apprentices were not considered bound to a single master, but they could not leave the master they worked for without the association's permission. During apprenticeship the candidate received a wage according to need, and after working for a set period and proving himself he was promoted to journeyman. The journeyman's pay rose; he produced under his master's direction and supervised the apprentices.

The passage to mastery took place with a ceremony. The yiğitbaşı, with prayers, girded the new master with the şed or peştamal. The journeyman's works were shown to the masters and bought by masters and wealthy craftsmen. The money collected became the new master's capital. Thus mastery was, beyond a title, a support given by the community in the form of capital and standing. Each trade also had a patron figure (pîr); for example, the patron of blacksmiths and armourers was the Prophet David, and that of tanners was Ahi Evran.

The Ahi tradition set this structure within an ethical frame. There are documents showing that the sheikhs of the Ahi Evran Lodge, as sheikhs of all craftsmen, had the authority to appoint the prayer leader, the ahi baba, the kethüda and the yiğitbaşı, and to grant certificates of mastery and journeymanship. Craftsmen paid dues towards the upkeep of this lodge and the hosting of its guests. The ahi baba stood above all the associations organized in a given place; chosen by the craftsmen, he received a berat on the judge's notification. This relationship lasted until the first half of the nineteenth century. Honesty, accuracy in weights and measures, loyalty to the work and responsibility toward the apprentice are described as the values of this frame. The craftsmen of Merzifon are said to have handed this outlook on from generation to generation, but there is no Merzifon-specific record of this in the local sources. Apart from the name of Ahi Toy in the fifteenth century, no document is known in the town concerning an Ahi lodge or an ahi baba.

The liveliest accounts of how apprenticeship was lived in the twentieth century again come from the masters. Hamit Bozalı, one of Merzifon's last coppersmiths, relates that he learned the trade at the age of twelve beside his elder brothers, acquiring both coppersmithing and tinning "step by step, from apprentice to master". He himself trained many masters, some of whom opened shops in Amasya and Suluova. He says that apprentices who worked with him to pay their school expenses later became non-commissioned officers, police officers, lawyers and doctors, and that they now and then come to ask after him. That the bond between master and apprentice lasts beyond the work itself may be counted the everyday counterpart of the old guild discipline.

The Coppersmithing Tradition

One of the prominent elements of Merzifon's cultural identity is coppersmithing. According to local tradition, coppersmithing was once among the important branches of the town's economy. Coppersmiths in workshops on the market's narrow streets beat the red-hot metal into everyday goods such as pots, trays, jugs and round dining trays. Pieces were shaped by hand, and teaching between master and apprentice lasted for years. The hammering that began in the early hours of the morning set the daily rhythm of the market.

Coppersmithing also held a place as a separate trade among the Ottoman palace craftsmen. Among the groups supplying the needs of the palace and the Janissaries were classes working copper, such as the jug makers and the kettle makers, and each group had its own master, journeyman and apprentices called şâkird. This example shows that coppersmithing in the Ottoman world was a respected craft serving not only the popular market but also the needs of the state. As to a direct link between Merzifon's coppersmiths and the palace, there is no information.

The story of coppersmithing in recent times is known in more detail. According to Hamit Bozalı, his elder brothers came to Merzifon with their masters from Trabzon in the 1950s and began to work there, after which the family settled in the town. Some time later a coppersmiths' arasta was set up around the old bath, and some thirty craftsmen practised the trade there. Every kind of vessel was made, from ewers to round trays and from basins to pots, and on request the coppersmiths went out to the villages to tin the villagers' pots. The artillery regiment in the town and the old state hospital also placed bulk orders; in the master's words, there was a great deal of work and there were days when they worked until morning. In tinning, the vessels were heated in a forge fanned with air, washed with sand, straightened with a wooden mallet and then coated with sal ammoniac and tin.

Bozalı says the decline began in 1984. As aluminium, Teflon and steel pots spread and interest in copper waned, the coppersmiths were asked to silence their hammers on the grounds of noise in the town centre, and the workshops were moved to the industrial estate outside the town. Bozalı carried on his trade in a shop of thirty-five square metres. He relates that because the trade was considered "rather dirty" no one wanted to send a son to it as an apprentice, that his colleagues had either died or given up for lack of work, and that he was the last coppersmith left. With the end of coppersmithing, tinning too has neared the same fate. It is reported that today craftsmen in Merzifon's market are trying to keep alive trades facing oblivion, such as coppersmithing and saddlery. These branches have lost their former weight, but the tradition has not died out entirely.

Craft Solidarity and the Law of Neighbourliness

The rules of the market do not consist only of written regulations. One custom still told in Merzifon today is the sharing of the first sale of the day (siftah). A shopkeeper who has made his first sale points to a neighbour who has not yet had a customer and directs the shopping to him. The mayor of the time described this practice as an example of how trade in the market proceeds within "the law of trade and neighbourliness". The old guild outlook, which put mutual oversight and mutual aid in the place of competition, seems to live on in this small custom. Whether the behaviour comes directly from the guilds or from a general upbringing of the town cannot be said with certainty.

On special occasions such as weddings, henna nights, births and religious festivals, people of the region still turn to the arasta. Local foods and traditional handicrafts are also sold there. A master who has worked as a tailor in the market for sixty years has said that the market is, for them, a source of peace as well as a livelihood, and that their only wish is for this culture to continue.

The Market at the End of the Nineteenth Century

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Merzifon was large enough to serve as a centre for all the districts of the sanjak of Amasya. According to Hüsameddin, within the school the Americans opened in the town, known as "the College", a darüssınaa, that is, a workshop for craftsmen, had been set up alongside lessons at the level of the middle and high schools. The same author relates that, in response to the school's political influence among Armenian youths, the Muslim inhabitants turned to reforming their own madrasas and opening new schools. No information has been found on any relationship between the College's workshop and the craftsmen of the market.

One of the events that determined the market's present appearance was the fire that broke out during the disturbances of 1311 (1893-94). According to Hüsameddin, the government house and the centre of the town burned in these events, and the notables and people of the district raised contributions to build a new government house, municipal offices and barracks. A bath, a hotel, a coffee-reading house and commercial shops were built with their revenues assigned to education, and Tatar immigrants were settled in the town. Hüsameddin writes that with these developments the town's size, beauty, trade and wealth increased extraordinarily. The assignment of the revenues of the shops built after the fire to education shows that the endowment habit of tying the market economy to public service continued in a new form.

The Dissolution of the Guild Order

From the second half of the eighteenth century the craft organization began to produce problems. Craftsmen relying on monopoly rights pushed prices above the narh; in 1794, under Selim III, the state issued a decree abolishing the craft monopolies other than those on essential foodstuffs. Then the Treaty of Balta Limanı in 1838 ended all monopoly rights. From the nineteenth century, faced with competition from European factory production, the craft associations, which mostly served the domestic market and the nearby region, gradually broke up. After the Tanzimat, new regulations were drawn up and attempts were made to reorganize the craftsmen; in 1913 the gedik and guild system was abolished.

In the Republican period the craft order continued through a structure of chambers and associations. The Chamber of Commerce and Industry Law was issued in 1924, and today craft associations are gathered under the Confederation of Turkish Tradesmen and Craftsmen. In this process Merzifon became a town where small and medium-scale manufacturing developed, weaving and food industries above all. While handicrafts such as coppersmithing and saddlery receded, trades serving everyday needs, such as shoemaking, tailoring, butchery and catering, remained a lasting part of the market.

Chronology

1265: Date of the inscription of the Muînüddin Pervâne Süleyman Mosque, the oldest monument in Merzifon.

1415: Çelebi Sultan Mehmed has a madrasa and a bath built in Merzifon and sets up their endowment (818).

1447-48: Book signed "Ahmed bin Âhi Toy el-kâtibü's-Sultânî" by Ahmed Çelebi, son of Ahi Toy (851).

1494-95: Bozacı Ali Çelebi builds a mosque and a school in his own neighbourhood (900).

1632-33: Year in which the term lonca has been identified for the craftsmen of Bursa.

1661-62: Ahmed Ağa, son of Kürd Sefer Ağa, becomes Kara Mustafa Pasha's agent and then voyvoda in Merzifon (1072).

1666-67: Foundation of Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha's complex, consisting of a mosque, library, inn, bath and bedesten.

1679: According to Hüsameddin, construction of the mosque in the town centre and the buildings around it; waterways and some thirty fountains (1090).

1697: Earliest archival document in which the term lonca appears for the craftsmen of Istanbul.

1794: Decree of Selim III abolishing craft monopolies other than those on essential foodstuffs.

1838: End of monopoly rights with the Treaty of Balta Limanı.

1893-94: The town centre burns during the disturbances; a government house, hotel, coffee-reading house and commercial shops are built afterwards (1311).

1913: Abolition of the gedik and guild system.

1950s: Coppersmiths from Trabzon come to Merzifon; a coppersmiths' arasta is set up around the old bath.

1984: Coppersmiths' workshops are moved from the town centre to the industrial estate.

2006: Restoration of the Merzifon Bedesten close to its original form through the General Directorate of Foundations.

2018: Courses are opened at the Merzifon Public Education Centre to keep Merzifon weaving alive.

Bibliography

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