Amasya's name is usually mentioned together with its princes, with Strabo and with Sheikh Hamdullah. Yet the city produced and sheltered a far larger cast around these familiar names: Seljuk frontier warriors, women poets of the princely court, a fifteenth-century historian writing in Persian, a dissident governor of the Tanzimat era, and a sculptor, a historian and a filmmaker of the Republic. The scholars, statesmen, natives of Merzifon, Sheikh Hamdullah, Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin and the princes are treated in separate articles on this site, so the people discussed here are those who fall outside them.

Halifet Gazi and His Madrasa

The name that people commonly pronounce Hilfet Gazi is properly Halîfet Gazi. A Danishmendid emir, he entered Anatolian Seljuk service after the Danishmendid principality came to an end. After Izzeddin Keykavus I conquered Sinop in 1215, Halifet Gazi was appointed commander of the Black Sea coastal defense. Under Alâeddin Keykubad I he became governor of Amasya in 619 (1222). He took part in Keykubad's campaign against the Mengujekids and was rewarded with the governorship of Erzurum after the victory. In 1232 he fell as a martyr in a campaign against the Georgians, and his body was buried in his tomb in Amasya.

The inscription of the madrasa, which stands in the Şamice quarter on Torumtay Street, bears the date 606 (1209-10). Its founder's endowment deed, dated 622 (1225), has also survived. Of the building, the south wall and part of the east section still stand. After the earthquake of 1647 the madrasa teacher Hasan Efendi had the collapsed parts rebuilt in timber, and in 1888 the mufti of Amasya, Hacı Osman Hilmi Efendi, had the whole building thoroughly repaired. According to the Danişmendname the structure was converted from a church into a madrasa. Albert Gabriel shared this opinion, while Metin Sözen thinks that the arched section may have been the facade of an earlier Byzantine building. Reused spolia visible in the rubble fill support these views.

The tomb attached to the madrasa has a square base, an octagonal body, a pyramidal cone roof and two storeys. Its facades are clad in regular ashlar, and the portal and window frames are decorated with geometric motifs, palmettes and rumi arabesques. The marble sarcophagus in the middle of the interior is a Roman-period sarcophagus of a woman, decorated with winged Medusas and erotes, so the coffin, like the building, is a reuse of older material. The date of the tomb is disputed. The common view places it in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, Doğan Kuban proposes the middle of the twelfth century, and Gabriel and Oktay Aslanapa suggest the year 1145-46. According to Tanju Cantay, the embalming chamber on the lower floor indicates that the building rests on a church crypt or burial chapel.

Halifet Gazi's name is not remembered through stone alone. A medical book was translated from Persian into Turkish in his name (Hekim Bereket's Lübâbü'n-nühab, whose Persian original is the Tuhfe-i Mübârizî), and a work on the sports practiced in Anatolia was written in the early thirteenth century.

Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar and the History of Amasya

Hüseyin Hüsameddin was born in November 1869 in the Çeribaşı quarter of Amasya. His father was Abdîzâde Hacı Mehmed Ağa. He began school in 1879 at the neighbourhood Balcı Mektebi, where he memorised the Quran, and in 1883 entered the rüştiye, which he finished in 1887. While at the rüştiye he took private lessons in Persian language and literature, made use of the books in a local library and began collecting his first information on the history of Amasya. In 1889 he went to Istanbul and settled in the Kalenderhâne Madrasa, becoming a pupil of Tokadîzâde Ahmed Nûreddin Efendi. He recounts that during holidays he went around all the libraries of Istanbul. In 1894 he travelled to Crete, in 1895 to Damascus and from there to the Hijaz, and he worked in the libraries of Chania and Damascus. In 1899 he received his teaching licence from his teacher.

His official career followed the usual path of an Ottoman scholar. In 1898 he was made assistant to his inheritance-law teacher Perşembeli Ahmed Remzi Efendi, and he used this post to examine the Islamic court registers around Istanbul. In 1901, with the approval of Shaykh al-Islam Cemâleddin Efendi, he was appointed to the legal deputyship of the imperial surre caravan, and he saw Damascus and the Hijaz a second time. On his return he served as a judge in Vezirköprü (1903), Osmancık (1905), Niksar and Refahiye (1911). His last post was as translator of old records at the Ministry of Pious Foundations. He was a member of the Ottoman Historical Society from its foundation. As a child he had already compiled the lives of famous Amasyans and written verse under the pen name "Asrî". In later years he concentrated all his work on Turkish language and history. After the Surname Law he took the name Yasar, died on 10 February 1939 at his home in Şişli and was buried in Feriköy Cemetery. Some sources also mention membership of the Turkish Language Association and the Turkish Historical Society, whereas the encyclopedia entry records only his membership of the Society.

His principal work, the History of Amasya, was planned in twelve volumes. Four volumes were printed in Istanbul between 1912 and 1928, followed in 1935 by the remainder of the fourth. The first volume covers the founding of the city, its districts, fortresses, caves, quarters, mosques and tombs, its writers and calligraphers, dervish orders and lodges, scholars and madrasas, and its sub-districts, counties and towns. The second volume is devoted to general Turkish history, including the descent of the Turks, the Turkmen tribes, their ancient religions, the Hittites in Anatolia, and the history of Amasya from Danishmend Gazi to the Ottomans, ending with the death of the Amasya governor Şehabeddin Şâdi Bey in 1335 and the close of Ilkhanid rule. The third volume runs from 1306 to 1608, when Kuyucu Murad Pasha cleared the region of bandits, and the fourth volume and its remainder cover the scholars, sheikhs and governors who lived or served in Amasya between 1608 and 1688. The work is regarded as one of the pioneering examples of urban historiography.

The fate of the remaining volumes is a sad detail. The fifth volume is lost. The manuscript volumes six to twelve were bought by the Amasya Municipality in 1979 and are now kept on deposit in the Süleymaniye Library. The first volume was partly simplified and published in the new alphabet in 1986 (Ali Yılmaz and Mehmet Akkuş). Opinions on the value of the work differ. Yasar did not cite most of his sources and in places resorted to excessive etymological analogies, so some researchers doubt its scholarly worth. Franz Babinger, on the other hand, calls the work a "real treasure" on certain subjects and recommends that at least part of it be translated into a Western language. Some of the court records, endowment deeds, inscriptions and gravestones that Yasar consulted no longer exist, which makes the History of Amasya the only source on many topics. Although he had received a strong Islamic education, he declared the aim of his life to be "researching Turkish history and language" and wrote books such as Temel (1926), on the origin and word formation of the Turkish language, and Paşa Armağanı. With İbnülemin Mahmud Kemal he wrote the history of the Ministry of Pious Foundations, and he distributed a poem in the aruz metre in praise of Amasya across the first volumes of his work.

The Literary Circle Around the Princely Court

During the governorships of Bayezid II and then of his son Prince Ahmed in Amasya, a community of poets, scholars and calligraphers formed around the princely palace. The three most frequently mentioned names of this circle are Mihrî Hatun, Zeyneb Hatun and Münîrî, two of them women.

Mihrî Hatun was born in Amasya and spent her life there; in her divan she alludes to this with the line "Alas that Mihrî's life has passed in Amasya." Her birth year is estimated at between 1456 and 1461. Her father was Kadı Hasan Amasyevî, who wrote poetry under the pen name Belâyî, and her grandfather was the Halvetî sheikh Pîr İlyas. According to Âşık Çelebi her real name was, like her pen name, Mihrî, while Evliya Çelebi records it as Mihrimah. Names such as Fahrünnisâ and Mihrünnisâ rest on no source. The biographical dictionaries give almost all their information about her through incidents with poets around the princely palace. They speak of an emotional bond with İskender Çelebi, son of Sinan Pasha, and of a closeness to Müeyyedzâde Abdurrahman Efendi. The same authors, while praising her beauty, write that no one doubted her chastity. In poetry she took Necâtî as her model and wrote replies to his poems, which Necâtî did not much appreciate. According to Latîfî, Necâtî answered her question about his opinion with a veiled reply meaning, roughly, that he liked her allusiveness and envied her conversation.

The most concrete document for Mihrî's poetic career is a gratuity register of the reign of Bayezid II covering the years 909-917 (1503-1511). It shows that she regularly sent odes to the sultan, whom she had met in Amasya. An entry dated 2 Cemâziyelevvel 914 (29 August 1508) records that she sent him her divan and received 3,000 akçe. The last entry, dated 27 Zilhicce 917 (16 March 1512), shows that she died after that date. The copy bearing Bayezid II's seal at its end is in the Süleymaniye Library. The biographers' assessment of her poetry is cautious. Sehî calls her a "pleasing-natured lady," and Âşık Çelebi considers her poetry mediocre as a whole. Her verse shows plain Turkish and a natural, effortless expression. She was buried in the cemetery of her grandfather's lodge in Amasya. Her divan was published in Moscow in 1967 by Maštakova and in Turkey in 2007, prepared by Mehmet Arslan, in the cultural publications of the Amasya Governorship. In 1985 a crater on Venus was named after her.

Zeyneb Hatun's (Zeynünnisâ's) Amasya origin is less certain than Mihrî's. Most sources count her as born in Amasya, while Latîfî describes her as the daughter of a learned man from Kastamonu; both biographical dictionaries were written after the poet's death, between 1546 and 1556. The sources agree that her father was a judge but differ on his name. Her husband is said to have been the Amasya judge İshâk Fehmî Çelebi. She learned Arabic and Persian, knew Persian well enough to write poetry in it, and was also interested in music. What carried her into history is the divan she compiled for Mehmed the Conqueror from her Turkish and Persian poems and presented to him. Gelibolulu Âlî says she received a reward for it. The divan does not survive today. Although Bursalı Mehmed Tâhir wrote that a copy was in the Ayasofya Library, research has found no copy. Only three poems of hers remain: a gazel of seven couplets, a quatrain and a Persian couplet. The biographers praise her poetry, but the praise often rests on the formula "despite being a woman." Beyânî says: "It is not a girl's embroidery, it is manly." According to Kınalızâde Hasan Çelebi, her only fault was being a woman.

Münîrî-i Amâsî is the third name of this circle. The author of the "Mihr ü Müşterî" of 1487 is Münîrî, not an illuminator called "İbrahim of Amasya," as some sources have it. The work is a verse translation of 6,011 couplets of Assâr-ı Tebrîzî's Persian mesnevi of the same name, and one of its two known manuscripts is the author's autograph, completed on 9 Şevval 892 (28 September 1487). The poet's name appears in his own hand as Münîrî b. Mehmed, and the name "İbrâhim Çelebi" in the sources has been shown to be wrong. His father served as chancery official (nişancı) in the Imperial Council under Bayezid II, and Münîrî himself served for a time as a cavalryman before becoming a companion of the sultan and of Prince Ahmed. Since he says that he wrote in all styles of calligraphy, he was probably one of Sheikh Hamdullah's students. He completed his divan in 1502. It contains twenty-nine odes and 330 Turkish and 150 Persian gazels. Because he wrote replies to sixty-four poets in the Mecmau'n-nezâ'ir and to fifty-one poets in the Pervâne Bey Mecmuası, he is also regarded as a poet of nazires. His fame rests mainly on the Manzum Siyer-i Nebî, in seven volumes, 866 folios and 32,475 couplets, the longest known versified biography of the Prophet in Turkish literature. It was dedicated to no one, and the poet says that he wrote it only for God's approval and the Prophet's intercession. Its only known copy is in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library. Evliya Çelebi lists Münîrî's tomb among the shrines he saw in Amasya. His date of death is uncertain: one record says he died in Sofia in 1521, and the other sources give no information. In an elegy in his divan the poet tells how in 1482 he lost two children, Ali and Ferah, within a week of each other during a plague.

Şükrullah and the Behcetü't-tevârîh

Little is known about Şükrullah's life. His father's name was Şehâbeddin Ahmed and his grandfather's Zeynüddin Zeki. According to statements in his own work he was born in 790 (1388) and entered Ottoman service in 812 (1409). Many sources show him as born in Amasya, and Hüseyin Hüsameddin speaks of him in the History of Amasya under the description "Şükrullah Çelebi of Amasya." After his adult years he left the city because of his scholarly journeys and duties and spent the main part of his life in Bursa, Edirne and on diplomatic missions. No building, endowment or tomb of his in Amasya is known. He is often confused with other scholars of the same name, and it is disputed whether Ahmedoğlu Şükrullah, the author of a treatise on music, is the same person.

He is known for two embassies under Murad II. In the 1440s he was sent to the Karaman side; the sources give the date and the other party differently, with dates between 1442-43 and 1444. In 852 (1448) he went as envoy to the Kara Koyunlu ruler Jahan Shah, who had defeated the Ak Koyunlu and taken Baghdad. By his own account, Jahan Shah there had a book in Uyghur script brought and read him the history of the Oghuz, and so the information that links the Ottoman dynasty to Gök Alp, the son of Oghuz Khan, entered his work; the book in question is unknown. He remained close to the palace under Mehmed the Conqueror too. In 1457, at the circumcision feast of the princes Bayezid and Mustafa in Edirne, he sat facing the sultan together with Hızır Çelebi, the judge of Istanbul.

He began the Behcetü't-tevârîh, which he wrote in Persian, at the end of 1456 and completed it in his last years in Bursa, between 1456 and 1459, dedicating it to the grand vizier Mahmud Pasha. Mahmud Pasha gave him 1,000 akçe in return. The first eight of the thirteen chapters constitute a history of Islam. The later chapters deal with the Greek philosophers, the Iranian shahs, the Umayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid dynasties, the Seljuks and the Mongol invasion. The last chapter, fifteen folios long, is devoted to the Ottomans. It is one of the earliest Persian prose works to mention the Ottomans. The parts in which he writes about his own time, the reigns of Çelebi Mehmed, Murad II and Mehmed the Conqueror, are the most original. In 1530-31 the work was translated into Turkish by Mustafa Fârisî under the title Mahbûbü kulûbi'l-ârifîn. Its Ottoman section was published in 1925 by Theodor Seif with a German translation, and Nihal Atsız rendered its Turkish and Ottoman sections into Turkish in 1939.

A Pen Devoted to the Upbringing of Children

Alâeddin Ali el-Amâsî was an ordinary teacher at a primary school in the fifteenth century, and his dates of birth and death are unknown. His only surviving work is the Tarîku'l-Edeb, written in 1453 and also known as Tâcü'l-Edeb. The prose work consists of twenty-five chapters and explains in plain language the rules of good conduct that a person should follow from birth to death. It covers a wide field, from the duties owed to parents to family upbringing, from the rights of children to the qualities a teacher should have, and from reading and writing instruction to everyday courtesy. This is why it is counted among the early examples of Ottoman educational thought.

Ziya Pasha's Governorship of Amasya

The poet and Tanzimat official Ziya Pasha served as governor (mutasarrıf) of Amasya between 1863 and 1865. After posts in Cyprus, Bosnia and the Council of State, Âlî Pasha had him appointed to Amasya in order to keep him away from Istanbul. The city was then in the grip of an economic crisis. Ziya Pasha's two years as governor passed with a building programme known as the "Amasya Reform." According to the encyclopedia of Islam published by the Turkish Religious Foundation, he had six government mansions, six schools, a secondary school, six clock towers, a prison building, a covered market and shops built for the centre and the five districts, and had new roads opened in the city centre. Halil İnalcık, summarising Kenan Akyüz's study based on archival documents, gives a narrower list: a bridge, a market, a covered market, a government mansion, six primary schools, a secondary school, a prison and roads. The difference may arise from some of the numbers covering the district towns together with the centre.

The Amasya Clock Tower was built in 1865 during his term. Designed with a square base, a cylindrical body of ashlar and a timber honeycomb-shaped top in the form of a minaret, the tower soon caught fire, was demolished in 1940 and was rebuilt in 2002 according to its original design. The central treasury could not pay for these works. Ziya Pasha, like earlier governors, resorted to local levies and imposed financial burdens on the notables and the ulema of the region. Those who opposed him were led by Lütfullah, who had served as mufti of Zile for twenty-two years (the encyclopedia gives the name as Feyzullah), and by Hacı Hasan Ağa from among the notables of Zile. Behind them stood the leading families and merchants of Amasya. Ziya Pasha considered their fortunes to have been acquired by illegitimate means, pressed them and sent some to prison. They in turn accused the governor of imposing unlawful financial burdens on the people and embezzling the money collected. They informed the Sublime Porte that unrest might break out among the people, and in 1865 Ziya Pasha was transferred to the governorship of Canik. İnalcık does not read the episode as a one-sided story of good against evil. In his view it was a clash of orders: the influence of the local notables had been strengthened by the arbitrary conduct of governors, and there were governors who did useful work, like Ziya, as well as those who worked for their own gain. Ziya Pasha later fled to Europe and, together with Namık Kemal, published the newspaper Hürriyet.

Men of the Spirit and the Pen in the Nineteenth Century

Figures who came from elsewhere also left their mark on nineteenth-century Amasya. İsmail Sıracüddin of Shirvan was a Naqshbandi-Khalidi sheikh who had attached himself to Mawlana Khalid al-Baghdadi. The sources state that he was born in Shirvan in 1782, settled in Amasya in 1828 because of the disturbances in the Caucasus, and died in the plague epidemic of 1848. The people regarded him as a "martyr of the plague." He is named as the spiritual guide of another Shirvani sheikh, Mîr Hamza Nigârî. Born in Karabakh, Nigârî has a birth year that varies in the sources between 1798 and 1805. He was exiled to Harput, died there in September or October 1886, and at his own request his body was brought to Amasya and buried in the Beyazıt Paşa quarter beside his son Sirâcî. In 1894-95, with help from émigrés and disciples from Shirvan, Karabakh and Kazakh, the complex of tomb, mosque, fountain and school known as the Shirvanlılar (Azerbaijanis') Mosque was built.

Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi of Amasya was a scholar born in 1850 who died on 31 December 1941. His family had migrated from Crimea and were known in Amasya as the Mecdîzâdes. He completed his memorisation of the Quran in 1861, received his teaching licence in 1879 and became a madrasa teacher at the Bekir Paşa Madrasa. It is recorded that there, over twenty-seven years in three periods, he granted licences to sixty-five students. In May 1900 he was appointed mufti of Amasya and preacher for the Sivas and Black Sea region, and in 1915 he left the muftiship because of his age. In June 1919 he was the preacher of the Beyazıt Mosque. After Mustafa Kemal Pasha's arrival in Amasya on 12 June, he addressed the congregation on the Friday that most sources give as 13 June and described the situation of the homeland. He was one of the seventeen members of the Amasya Association for the Defence of Rights, founded the next day. In July 1922 he was again appointed mufti of Amasya and remained in the post until his death. An old recollection says that he gave his five gold coins to the National Struggle; the sources differ on the amount of the donation.

Alişanzâde İsmail Hakkı (1871-1944) was a poet, translator and bureaucrat of Amasyan origin; his birthplace is given as Istanbul. He belonged to the "intermediate generation" of poets around Recâizâde Mahmud Ekrem. After 1895 he devoted himself entirely to translation. He brought Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal into Turkish under the title Elem Çiçekleri, which the sources describe as the first complete Turkish translation, printed in 1928 in the old script. He also translated works by Lamartine, Maurois, Bourget, Shakespeare, Flaubert and Tolstoy, and began a series entitled "Turkish Writers of the Fourteenth Century."

Art and Scholarship in the Republican Period

Nijat Sirel was a sculptor born in Amasya in 1897 or 1898; the sources give both years. His father was İbrahim Şazi Bey. His sister Harika Sirel was also a painter, married to the painter Hüseyin Avni Lifij. After finishing the Istanbul Sultani school he went to Germany in 1915 for sculpture training and worked in Hermann Kahn's studio at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. In 1922 he returned and started work as a drawing teacher at İzmir Lycée, and in 1927 he was appointed sculpture teacher at the School of Fine Arts. He left in 1932 because of a disagreement with the school's director, returned in 1937 and was appointed director of the Academy on 22 November 1952. While in that post he died of a heart attack in Istanbul on 18 June 1959. He is known for his busts; the portraits of Abdülhak Hamit Tarhan, Midhat Pasha, Ahmet Haşim and Avni Lifij are in the Istanbul Painting and Sculpture Museum. Among his monumental works, the Equestrian Atatürk Monument in Bursa, which he made in 1931 together with Mahir Tomruk, is one of the best known. The Atatürk monuments in Çanakkale, Bolu (1940), Malatya and Kocaeli are also attributed to him. He is one of the people who took part in the transfer of monument-making to Turkish artists in the early years of the Republic, when monuments were still made by foreign sculptors. No work of his made in Amasya and no other link with the city appears in the sources.

Mustafa Cezar was born in Amasya in 1920. He lost his father in middle school and continued his education by working. In 1938 he finished the Sivas Teachers' School and became a primary-school teacher, and in 1946 he graduated from the History-Geography department of the Gazi Institute of Education. In 1959 he moved to the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul as a teacher. When the Academy gained university status he became an associate professor in 1969 and a full professor in 1978, and after retiring in 1987 he continued to teach until 2002. He wrote more than a hundred and sixty articles, papers and books. His illustrated and mapped Mufassal Osmanlı Tarihi (four volumes, 1957-1960) made his name known to a wide readership. Sanatta Batıya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi (1971) is one of the basic books on the Westernisation of Ottoman art. Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler (1965), Tipik Yapılarıyla Osmanlı Şehirciliğinde Çarşı ve Klasik Dönem İmar Sistemi (1985) and his last major work, Osmanlı Başkenti İstanbul (2002), are among his other titles. He died in Istanbul on 3 December 2009.

In politics one can mention Kemal Eren (1910 to 3 November 1993). A graduate of the Mülkiye school, Eren served as district governor (kaymakam) in Suşehri, Çumra, Patnos, Kemah, Dörtyol and Vezirköprü. In the elections of 1950, 1954 and 1957 he was elected to parliament for Amasya on the Democrat Party list. In the debates on the new Village Law on 13 May 1953, he argued for abolishing the salma levy on villages. The parliamentary records also contain a written question on the tenure status of vocational and technical school teachers, submitted jointly with other Amasya deputies.

Muharrem Gürses was born in Amasya on 15 August 1913. He lost his father in the First World War and his mother to tuberculosis, and grew up with his grandfather. He graduated from the Istanbul Teachers' School and became a drawing teacher. In 1931 he joined the City Theatre, in 1943 he founded the Gürses Theatre, and in 1945 he moved into cinema as assistant director on the film Köroğlu. In 1965 he set up his own film company and turned to producing, directing and screenwriting. He built his own line in the melodrama genre and made twenty-seven films with Muhterem Nur. He became lodged in the memory of wide audiences with the role of the school principal Muharrem Gür in Hababam Sınıfı. He died in Istanbul on 7 April 1999. His sons Atilla Arcan and Kemal Gökhan Gürses are also filmmakers.

Perihan Altındağ Sözeri was born in Amasya on 5 May 1925; she was born in the city because her father, Nurettin Behiç Bey, was posted there. In 1939, although under age, she began her career at Ankara Radio with a special permit. In 1945 she married Emin Sözeri, in 1947 she came to Istanbul to work in the music halls, and she appeared on stage at the Perihan Gazino, which bore her own name and was later renamed Casablanca. When Istanbul Radio opened in 1949 she worked there until the 1960s. She became known through songs such as Estergon Kalesi, Sevmediklerinle Gönül Avutma, Güzel Bir Göz Beni Attı and Aman Avcı Vurma Beni, and she is also remembered for her correct Turkish. In 1982 she gave up independent stage work of her own will and died at her home in Erenköy on 7 April 2008.

Sadık Gürbüz, born in 1950 in Keçiköy in Gümüşhacıköy, graduated from the Istanbul University Faculty of Law and worked at the City Theatres until 1976. In that year he was removed from his post for political reasons. He is known for his polyphonic work in folk music and has composed incidental music for the theatre and film scores.

The generations of Amasya scholars, its viziers and grand viziers, Sadun Aksüt and others raised in Merzifon, Sheikh Hamdullah and the calligraphy school, Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin and the tradition of illustrated surgery, Prince Mustafa and the other princes are discussed in separate articles on this site. The people here are the Amasyans outside them.

Chronology

1209-10: Date on the inscription of the Halifet Gazi Madrasa.

1215: Conquest of Sinop by Izzeddin Keykavus I; Halifet Gazi becomes commander of the Black Sea coastal defense.

1222: Halifet Gazi becomes governor of Amasya.

1225: Endowment deed of the Halifet Gazi Madrasa.

1232: Halifet Gazi falls as a martyr in the Georgian campaign.

1388: Birth of Şükrullah (according to his own statement).

1453: Alâeddin Ali el-Amâsî's Tarîku'l-Edeb.

1456-1459: Şükrullah writes the Behcetü't-tevârîh.

28 September 1487: Completion of the autograph manuscript of Münîrî's Mihr ü Müşterî.

1508: Record of Mihrî Hatun sending her divan to Bayezid II and receiving 3,000 akçe.

1863-1865: Ziya Pasha's governorship of Amasya.

1869: Birth of Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar.

1912-1928: Four volumes of the History of Amasya printed in Istanbul.

1931: Equestrian Atatürk Monument in Bursa (Nijat Sirel and Mahir Tomruk).

1939: Death of Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar.

Sources

Primary sources

  • TDV Encyclopedia of Islam: entries "Hilfet Gazi Medresesi ve Türbesi", "Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar", "Amasya Tarihi", "Mihrî Hatun", "Münîrî-i Amâsî", "Mihr ü Müşterî".

Academic studies

  • Halil İnalcık's review in Belleten of Kenan Akyüz's study of Ziya Pasha's governorship of Amasya.
  • Derya Uzun Aydın, "Cumhuriyet Dönemine Işık Tutan İki Heykeltıraş; Mahir Tomruk ve Ali Nijat Sirel", İstanbul Journal of Social Sciences, 2013.

Other sources

  • Turkish Literature Dictionary of Names and related articles: entries on Zeyneb Hatun and Şükrullah.
  • Mevhibe Savaş's article on Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi; TBMM Album and parliamentary records (Kemal Eren).
  • ÇEKÜL Foundation memorial article: Mustafa Cezar.

Online sources