In the Şamlar quarter of Amasya, on the southern bank of the Yeşilırmak, stands a small single-domed mosque flanked on three sides by a row of madrasa cells. Together these buildings are known as the Ayas Ağa Complex (külliye). The mosque is called the Şamlar Mosque after its quarter and the Ayas Ağa Mosque after its founder, while the madrasa is known as the Küçük Ağa Madrasa. The complex is not the work of a sultan or a vizier. It is a modest charitable foundation left to his neighbourhood by a man who served as a chief gate eunuch (kapı ağası) in the palace of Bayezid II, in a city where Ottoman princes were raised. It is small, but it is a telling example of how the pre-Ottoman mosque-and-madrasa tradition continued at the end of the fifteenth century, and of the older foundations on which Amasya's religious buildings rose.

Names and Location

The sources give the group of buildings several slightly different names. The mosque is called "Şamlar Mosque" (the quarter's name is sometimes spelled Şamlılar), "Ayas Ağa Mosque" and "Küçük Ağa Mosque". The madrasa appears as "Medrese-i Ayasiyye", "Küçük Kapı Ağası" and "Küçük Ağa Madrasa". The word "küçük" (small) was not chosen at random. In the same quarter, on the riverbank, there is a larger madrasa, also built by a kapı ağası, and it is known as the "Büyük Ağa Madrasa". The distinction arises from two different kapı ağas, Ayas Ağa and Hüseyin Ağa, having each given the same district a madrasa within a few years of one another.

The complex lies on the plot between Zübeyde Hanım Avenue and Türbedar Street. Şamlar belongs to the part of the city south of the Yeşilırmak, where the main settlement lies. The northern bank, overshadowed by the rock-cut royal tombs and the citadel, is very narrow, so the town grew on the southern side of the river throughout its history, and most of its Seljuk and Ottoman monuments are concentrated there. The complex is within walking distance of the centre, and the mosque is open for prayer.

Ayas Ağa, the Founder

Ayas Ağa, who founded the complex, was one of the kapı ağas of the reign of Bayezid II. In the Ottoman palace organisation the kapı ağası was one of the officials with the title of ağa who served close to the sultan. The sources contain no detailed information on Ayas Ağa's life; his birthplace, the length of his service in the palace and the date of his death are unknown. The only firm fact we have is that his name was given to this complex and its madrasa.

In the years when the complex was built, Amasya still looked like a city close to the palace. Bayezid II had served as sanjak governor here for about twenty-seven years during his princehood, and the city remained, until the middle of the sixteenth century, one of the main centres to which Ottoman princes were sent to gain administrative experience. The buildings of the period bear traces of this interest: the Bayezid II Complex was completed in 1486, the mosque of Vezir Mehmed Pasha, the lala (tutor) of Prince Ahmed, in the same year, the madrasa of Kapı Ağası Hüseyin Ağa in 1488-89, and the Ayas Ağa Complex in 1494-95. That palace officials close to the sultan and the tutor of a prince founded pious endowments in Amasya within the same decades also reflects the position the city held in those years.

Date of Construction and the Earlier Mosque

Because the complex has no known inscription, its date of construction is given indirectly. The Amasya historian Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin reports that the complex was built in the Hijri year 900, that is, in 1494-95. For this reason some publications write 1494-95 and others the single year 1495; the two dates express the same information in different calendars. Although some inventory records mark an inscription and a foundation deed (vakfiye) as present, the encyclopedia entries state that the complex has no inscription. The date therefore rests not on a building inscription but on the information relayed by the historian.

Another interesting aspect of the complex is that it was built on the site of an older mosque. According to tradition, the Şamlar Mosque, one of the pious works of the Danishmendid Emîr (Melik) Gazi, once stood on the same spot. The encyclopedia article on Amasya likewise says that the oldest Turkish building in the city was the mosque built by Danishmendoğlu Melik Gazi on the site of today's Şamlar Mosque, just east of the citadel. When this mosque collapsed, Ayas Ağa built a complex of a mosque, a madrasa and a children's school (sıbyan mektebi) on the same site in 1495. The word "tradition" is used deliberately: there is no document about the plan of the Danishmendid mosque or the date and cause of its destruction, only the memory of the place and accounts in the sources. Even so, some elements preserved in the complex support the link with the earlier building. The minaret's base, which projects outward in the shape of a half hexagon with alternating courses, and its cut-stone footing are regarded as surviving from the first structure; the shaft has been renewed. In the arch field of the window to the left of the minaret there is a single inscription fragment that cannot be fully read, and it is thought to belong probably to the Danishmendid period.

The Mosque

The mosque at the south of the complex consists of a square-plan, single-domed prayer hall enclosed by walls of rubble stone and brick. The dome rests on a diamond-patterned band inside and, outside, on a tall twelve-sided drum pierced by three small windows. The hall is lit on every side by two rows of windows, one above the other. The lower windows are rectangular, with cut limestone (küfeki) frames and pointed relieving arches of brick. The upper windows have pointed arches and are fitted with plaster window grilles (revzen). The mihrab sits in a rectangular niche and the minbar is of wood; both are plain and unassuming. The dome is covered today with lead.

North of the mosque, facing the courtyard, extends a three-unit last congregation porch (son cemaat yeri). Closed to the east and the west, this section opens to the north through three arches resting on two piers. The central unit is narrower than the side ones, is covered with a mirror vault, and forms the entrance to the mosque. The side units are square in plan and covered with domes on pendentives; the arches that open onto them are pointed. The central unit, in contrast, is rectangular, closed with a barrel vault, and its opening is spanned by a Bursa arch. The surface of the gable wall above the brick arches is decorated with a pattern of cut stones framed by brick hexagons. This controlled combination of stone and brick gives an otherwise plain building its one conspicuous decorative zone.

The minaret rises at the northeast corner of the prayer hall. The round-section brick shaft and the stone balcony were built later; the hexagonal base survives from the first building. The dates of the repairs that shaped the mosque's present appearance are not known individually. The sources report only that it has undergone various repairs over time and that the complex as a whole received repair and restoration in 2007.

The Madrasa

The madrasa consists of nine cells enclosing the courtyard north of the mosque on the west and north. Six lie on the north side and three on the west, and the cells are covered with barrel vaults. In front of them runs a portico with mirror vaults resting on marble columns and round arches. One source describes this portico as thirteen domes carried by twelve cylindrical columns with plain capitals. The cells and the portico are placed under a common timber roof. Each cell has a hearth and a cupboard recess; this equipment shows that the rooms were small living units in which students both lodged and studied. The cells face the courtyard on three sides and end at the porch of the mosque, so that teaching, lodging and prayer gather around the same courtyard.

The plan follows the classic Ottoman madrasa layout, a U shape with one shorter arm. The sources differ on the lecture hall (dershane). The encyclopedia entry takes a section attached to the western end of the mosque porch to be a lecture hall; according to another description, the madrasa has no separate lecture hall at all. This difference suggests a small-scale madrasa, but there is no document to settle it. How many pâye (grades) the madrasa held, how many students it taught and who its professor was are unknown.

A comparison with the Büyük Ağa Madrasa in the same quarter conveys the scale of this one better. According to its inscription, that madrasa, built by Kapı Ağası Hüseyin Ağa in 894 (1489), has an octagonal plan of a kind rarely found in Ottoman madrasa architecture. In the years it was built it ranked at thirty pâye, and in 1556 it was among the forty-pâye madrasas. The plan of the Büyük Ağa arose both from a concern for form and from the topography of the site, which is why its gate and lecture hall are not on the same axis. Ayas Ağa's madrasa made no such planning experiment and stayed with a plain arrangement of cells around a courtyard. Considered together, the two madrasas reveal an educational nucleus founded in the same quarter within less than twenty years through the endowments of two different kapı ağas.

The Children's School and the Graveyard

The third unit of the complex is the sıbyan mektebi, placed at the east end of the row of cells on the north. It consists of two spaces closed with barrel vaults. The eastern one contains the entrance, the western one a hearth and two cupboard recesses. Sıbyan mektebs were primary-level institutions in the Ottoman world; children learned to read and write there, along with basic religious knowledge. The complex thus offered a small educational chain running from a neighbourhood child's first lessons to a madrasa student's higher studies. The sıbyan mektebi is used as a library today.

Between the mosque and the sıbyan mektebi lies a small graveyard (hazire). It holds eight graves of simple workmanship, most of them damaged over time. The graves have no inscriptions; some examples are decorated with geometric patterns and with flower and sword figures. Since it is not known to whom they belong, it is not possible to attach these graves to Ayas Ağa or to the staff of the complex.

The Place of the Complex

The complex is a late example of the building groups founded in Anatolia to serve the public. The earliest known examples of the külliye in Anatolia go back to the Artukid period. Such groups were built by state officials, their families, officeholders and wealthy benefactors, and usually took shape around a mosque; a madrasa, a tomb or a commercial building could also form the core. In the Ayas Ağa Complex the buildings are arranged around a shared courtyard, and this layout is seen as a continuation of the mosque-and-madrasa tradition of pre-Ottoman Anatolian Turkish architecture.

It is worth remembering how full of such buildings Amasya was. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the city counted nine mosques, ten madrasas, four zawiyas, six soup kitchens (imaret) and fifteen baths. In 1525 there were fifty-five quarters, five of them non-Muslim, and the population was about 8,000. Dernschwam, who came to the city in 1555 with the Austrian embassy, records eleven mosques; according to him the city was set in a narrow valley, with mostly two-storey mud-brick houses seemingly piled upon one another. Within this dense fabric the small complex in Şamlar functioned as an institution at the scale of a neighbourhood. G. Perrot, who visited Amasya in 1861, called the city the "Oxford of Anatolia" and wrote that nearly two thousand students were studying in its madrasas. Ayas Ağa's nine-room madrasa was only a small part of that total, but the figure shows how dense the city's madrasa culture had become.

There is no firm information on the number of students, the endowment revenues or the staff of the complex. The text of the foundation deed is not given in the publications at hand, so it remains unclear from which revenues Ayas Ağa sustained the foundation or what the professor and the imam were paid. This gap applies to many medium-sized endowment buildings in Amasya and can be filled only by searching the Islamic court registers (şer'iyye sicilleri) and the endowment ledgers.

Research History

One of the works that introduced the complex to scholarship is A. Gabriel's Monuments Turcs d'Anatolie, published in Paris in 1934. The plan of the complex, taken from this work, is also published in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi entry. In Turkish literature, Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin's Amasya Tarihi is the basic source for the date of construction. Cahid Baltacı's study of Ottoman madrasas of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, A. Demiray's Resimli Amasya and the series Türkiye'de Vakıf Abideler ve Eski Eserler are also among the main publications on the building. The TDV entry on the complex was written by M. Baha Tanman and published in 1991 in the fourth volume of the encyclopedia.

The information on the condition of the building in these publications largely corroborates one another; the points of divergence are limited to the inscription and lecture-hall questions mentioned above. There is also a confusion of names. On the Amasya Governorship's page introducing the madrasas, it is written that the madrasa adjoining the Şamlar-Ayas Ağa Mosque was built by Melik Gazi as a small complex consisting of a mosque, a school and a madrasa, and that when it collapsed it was repaired in 1495 by the kapı ağası of Bayezid II, "Hüseyin Ağa". Ayas Ağa's name does not appear in this account. It is possible that Ayas Ağa was confused with Hüseyin Ağa of the same quarter, but no document confirms this. The encyclopedia and inventory records all name Ayas Ağa as the founder, and their account is followed here.

Present Condition

The complex received repair and restoration in 2007 and the mosque is still open for prayer. In the inventory record of the General Directorate of Foundations (Vakıflar), the conservation state of the building is marked A, the highest grade, for the load-bearing system, the superstructure and the exterior; only dampness is graded B. This suggests that the building is sound and that the main problem is moisture in the walls. The sıbyan mektebi has been turned into a library, while the madrasa cells largely preserve their old arrangement with their hearths and cupboard recesses.

Beside the great monuments of the city, the complex is easily overlooked. Yet the measured order of the courtyard, and the calm rhythm set by the colonnaded portico and the common timber roof, show how madrasa life in the age of the princes was lived at the scale of a neighbourhood in Amasya. Read together with the Büyük Ağa Madrasa in the same district, the complex is a reminder that Amasya's endowment architecture consists not only of monumental examples but also of buildings made for the everyday needs of a quarter.

Chronology

1486: Given as the construction date of the Bayezid II Complex and of the mosque of Vezir Mehmed Pasha, lala of Prince Ahmed.

1488-89 (Hijri 894): Kapı Ağası Hüseyin Ağa has the Büyük Ağa (Kapı Ağası) Madrasa built in the same quarter.

1494-95 (Hijri 900): According to Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin, the Ayas Ağa Complex is built; commonly written as 1495.

1525: Amasya has fifty-five quarters; the population is about 8,000.

1555: Dernschwam records eleven mosques in the city.

1861: Perrot calls Amasya the "Oxford of Anatolia".

1934: Gabriel publishes the complex with its plan in Monuments Turcs d'Anatolie.

1991: The Ayas Ağa Complex entry appears in volume four of the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi.

2007: The complex undergoes repair and restoration.

Bibliography

Official sources

  • Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Kültür Portalı: Küçük Ağa Külliyesi / Şamlar-Ayas Ağa Külliyesi; inventory record of the Ayas Ağa (Küçük Ağa) Madrasa. kulturportali.gov.tr
  • Amasya Governorship, pages on mosques and madrasas. amasya.gov.tr

Other sources

  • M. Baha Tanman, "Ayas Ağa Külliyesi", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 4, Istanbul 1991, pp. 201-202. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Gülay Burgaz, "Kapı Ağası Medresesi", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Amasya" entry, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Handan Aytekin, "Küçük Ağa Külliyesi", Online Türkiye Turizm Ansiklopedisi, 2020. turkiyeturizmansiklopedisi.com
  • A. Gabriel, Monuments Turcs d'Anatolie, Paris 1934, II, 56-57.
  • Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar, Amasya Târihi (ed. Ali Yılmaz, Mehmet Akkuş), Ankara 1986, I, 120, 214, 249.
  • Cahid Baltacı, XV-XVI. Asırlarda Osmanlı Medreseleri, Istanbul 1976, p. 84.
  • A. Demiray, Resimli Amasya, Ankara 1954, p. 86.