Gümüşhacıköy is the westernmost district of Amasya, and its history is usually told through its mines, that is, the argentiferous lead workings of the town of Gümüş. As in every settlement that grew up around a mine, a spiritual life developed here too, and dervish lodges, madrasas and tombs rose alongside the market. The district's graves, its madrasa and the stories attached to them, all open to visitors today, make it possible to follow this thread from the period of Anatolia's Turkification and Islamization down to recent times. Some of these accounts rest on documents and some are only traditions passed around among the people, and the text keeps the two apart.

The Dervishes and Lodges of Gümüş

In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries Anatolia was passing through a period in which Seljuk authority was dissolving, Ilkhanid rule made itself felt and the principalities were taking shape. In that uncertainty, dervishes, zawiyas and dervish lodges served not only as places of worship but also as centres where travellers found shelter, the hungry were fed, and merchants and villagers exchanged news. A mining town, being a gathering point for merchants and craftsmen, was a natural stop on this network.

The clearest document we have on this is the account of the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who passed through the region in 1333. He describes Amasya as a city with the Yeşilırmak flowing through its middle and surrounded by orchards and vegetable gardens, then says he stayed at a Rifai zawiya in a town called Sûnusâ and went on from there to Gümüş. He describes Gümüş as a large, well kept and crowded settlement known for its mines, and notes that merchants came there from Iraq and Syria. He stayed three nights at the Ahi Mecdüddîn Lodge in the town, where he met the deputy of the Eretna bey, received travel money from him and accepted his hospitality. His remark, "we were received as we had been at the other lodges", shows that he was pleased with the generosity of the Turkish dervishes. The fact that the same traveller also recorded the region's agricultural produce, the physical and demographic structure of its towns, and its religious and customary life helps us understand the weight Gümüş carried on this route at the time.

In those years Gümüş lay within the borders of the Eretnid Principality and was also known as Gümüş Pazarı. The Eretnids ruled the region from 1327 to 1380; the rule of Kadı Burhaneddin followed, and in 1398 Yıldırım Bayezid annexed the region to Ottoman lands. We have no document on the present location or remains of the Ahi Mecdüddîn Lodge.

Çukur Dede and the Barak Sultan Tradition

In the Tekke Mahallesi of the town of Gümüş stands a tomb known among the people as Çukur Dede. According to local tradition the tomb belongs to Barak Sultan, the teacher of Tapduk Emre, who was in turn the teacher of Yunus Emre. This information appears in local compilations on the saints of Gümüşhacıköy, and no inscription or archival document is known that shows the tomb really belongs to this figure. Identifying Çukur Dede with Barak Baba is therefore an attribution living in popular memory more than a documented finding.

The identity of the person named, on the other hand, is described in some detail in the sources. Barak Baba was a Turkmen baba of the Qalandari-Haydari line who emerged from the circles of the Babai movement. According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, his original name is unknown, but he was born in a village near Tokat, became a disciple of Sarı Saltuk at a young age and received the nickname Barak (dog) from his master. That some sources call him Barak el-Kırîmî suggests that he attached himself to Sarı Saltuk in Crimea. After taking up the dervish life he travelled through almost all of Anatolia and went to Iran, and his fame reached the Ilkhanid court at Sultaniyya. Ghazan Khan summoned him to the court and, after putting him through various tests, showed him esteem. He kept his standing under Öljeitü, who came to the throne after Ghazan Khan, and took part in diplomatic missions. In 1305-1306 he was sent with his dervishes to Damascus, to the Mamluk Sultan al-Malik al-Nasir.

Barak Baba's dress and conduct drew a hostile reaction in Damascus. The Arabic sources write that the hundred or so dervishes travelling with him wore felt caps with horns on either side, shaved their hair and beards while keeping thick moustaches, and wore around their necks small bells and necklaces of dyed knucklebones. It is related that Barak Baba danced to the tempo of the drums his dervishes beat. These practices led to his being accused of heresy; his moustache was trimmed in accordance with the sunna and his horned caps were taken away. He met with no favour in Damascus and was expelled from Egypt as well. The same sources also report, on the other hand, that he and his disciples performed the five daily prayers and that he even appointed a market inspector to punish those who neglected them. From these contradictory records Ahmet Yaşar Ocak concludes that Barak Baba was a Haydari sheikh of Shiite leanings who bore some shamanic influences but was scrupulous in worship wherever Sunnism was well established.

Öljeitü sent Barak Baba to the region of Gilan to spread Imami Shiism. Topaç, the chief of the Gilanis, had Barak Baba, then about forty years old, killed together with his disciples. Öljeitü thereupon sent troops and punished Topaç, had a tomb and a zawiya built in Sultaniyya in Barak Baba's memory, distributed money to the poor and assigned his dervishes fifty dinars a day. The TDV gives his date of death as 1307. The local chronology of Gümüşhacıköy, by contrast, states that Barak Baba, a disciple of Saru Saltuk, died in 1308. This one-year gap is an example of the sources disagreeing, and the TDV's date has been followed here.

Barak Baba's traces are scattered across Anatolia. Tombs, lodges and place names bearing his name exist in Balıkesir, Adana, Karaisalı, Sandıklı and Gümüşhacıköy. Some accounts also say that he has a tomb in Sandıklı, where he is remembered together with Sarı Saltuk and Tapduk Emre. The TDV, for its part, reports that disciples known as the Barakiyyun (Barak followers) were present in Anatolia in the mid-fourteenth century, as understood from a gravestone inscription of 1352 published by Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı. It is also very likely that some of the villages in Anatolia that bear the name Barak today preserve the memory of these once widespread dervishes. The treatise attributed to Barak Baba, the Kelimât-ı Barak Baba, was copied in Amasya in 1449.

A couplet by Yunus Emre mentions these names side by side: "Yunus'a Tapduk'tan oldı hem Barak'tan Saltık'a". In the TDV's list of related entries Sarı Saltuk appears as Barak Baba's sheikh and Tapduk Emre as his disciple. The phrase "Barak Sultan, the teacher of Tapduk Emre" in the Çukur Dede tradition is in keeping with this chain. Even so, the claim that the tomb belongs to Barak Baba is undocumented; it is known that his death took place in Iran and that a tomb was built for him in Sultaniyya. The belief that has formed around the tomb, however, is a reality of local life.

The Haliliye Madrasa and Garip Hâfız

The best known spiritual site of Gümüş is the Haliliye Madrasa, built by Hacı Halil Pasha. Construction began in 1413 and was completed in 1415. It is a square-plan building with an enclosed courtyard, and the domed covering of that courtyard is what sets it apart. It is noted that only two madrasas in Turkey have this arrangement, one being the Lala Şahin Pasha Madrasa in Bursa and the other the building in Gümüş. The madrasa was restored in 2009 by the General Directorate of Foundations. The building also has a history reaching into the twentieth century, for a man of the heart lived here and was buried in the madrasa when he died.

This man was Garip Hâfız (İbrahim Hakkı Güloğlu), born in Erzurum in 1903 and died in Ankara in 1976. Those who wrote about him describe him as courteous, gentle and never hurtful; if he saw someone's mistake, he warned the person by another route without throwing it in his face. He performed his worship in secret and avoided anything that drew attention. It is told that he never wearied anyone in conversation, that he spent his whole life sitting on his knees, and that he acted with love and tolerance. Accounts of his miracles are passed on with the remark that the witnesses are still alive; these are records of a hagiographic nature and it has not been possible to verify them with an independent document. In 1986 the Council for the Protection of Immovable Cultural and Natural Assets decided that his grave should be preserved in place.

A banner bearing the mark of the period was also kept inside the madrasa. Made of green and claret-red satin, with the Ottoman coat of arms in the centre, the inscription "Long live my sultan" and the date 1324 (1906), it was transferred to the Amasya Museum together with Garip Hâfız's belongings. From the band of writing one learns that it was made in Skopje by the 89th regiment, and the band mentions the Köprülüoğlu Mehmed Pasha Mosque in Gümüş. It was decided in 1985 that the madrasa's registration should continue and that the archaeological and ethnographic items inside should be moved to the museum.

The Name of Hacıköy and the Köprülü Complex

Hacıköy, today's district centre, was for a long time a subdistrict attached to Gümüş. According to Hüseyin Hüsamettin, the author of the Amasya Tarihi, the settlement was first called Gemari because of the Gimri Turks. Sadrettin Artuk of the Gimri tribe kept the place prosperous until 1378 and had educational institutions such as a mosque and a school built. The name Artıkabat remains from this activity and still designates a neighbourhood today; Gemari, for its part, became Cemare and later Cumara and lives on in the name of another neighbourhood. Hüsamettin writes that the name Hacıköy goes back to the son of Hacı Mehmed Çelebi, who from 1491 lived here for a long time as the overseer of the Gümüş mine. When this man died here the place became Hacı Nazır Köyü, in the popular tongue Hacı Nadir Köyü, and finally Hacıköy.

The real rise of Hacıköy begins with the granting of the Gümüş mine to Köprülü Mehmed Pasha as a personal stipend. The pasha was ordered to reside here, and he had a masonry caravanserai, a covered market, a large mosque to the north of them and the Ördekli Hamam beside it built, endowing all of them as a waqf in 1661. The mosque was destroyed in the earthquake of 1943 and rebuilt in 1948. A clock tower built in 1898 by Ali Rıza Bey, son of Yanyalı Mustafa Pasha, was added to the mosque, and the tower was itself demolished and rebuilt in 1948. Abdülbaki Bey, son of Hafız Ahmed Pasha, one of the Köprülü grandsons, had the Great Bath and the arasta beside the Tomb of Hacı Nadir Baba built in 1756. A tomb standing right beside commercial buildings shows that in this town mining, the market and spiritual life developed together.

The Yörgüç Pasha Mosque in Gümüş is also among the buildings of the same line. Built of wood in 1429, it was rebuilt in masonry in 1560 and repaired in 1946. Through the efforts of its own notables Hacıköy grew by 1863 into a town of eight neighbourhoods named Cemare, Artıkabat, Saray, Hacıyahya, Adatepe, Beylikçınarı, Ermeni Kilisesi and Çay, and in 1881 it became the district centre. Gümüş remained a subdistrict centre from that date.

Other Tombs and Shrines in the District

The records listing Gümüşhacıköy's historic structures also mention several shrines besides Çukur Dede. In the Artıkabat Mahallesi, in the Kesikbaş locality around Ayşe Pınarı, lies the Kesikbaş Grave. The place known as Dedeoğlu is behind the Forestry Department and the old gendarmerie post. The tomb of Mehmet Efendi, who came from Plovdiv, is inside the Kırmızıların Hanı. The Tomb of Ali Pir Civan in the village of Sarayözü belongs to one of the Alevi pirs. Kurt Baba is a locality near Bulak Castle, between Eymir and Keçiköy. For most of these sites the written sources contain no detailed biography or deed of endowment; the preservation of their names and places is the work of local memory.

One of the historical figures whose grave is known is Hüseyin Cafer, the Janissary Agha. Born in Hacıköy in 1782, he received his first education at the madrasa and was taken into the Enderun for his ability. He left the palace as a Janissary agha and took part in campaigns such as Palestine, Jerusalem and the defence of Wallachia and Moldavia. On a visit to Hacıköy, as he came out from visiting a grave, he was shot in the back and died in the Zölpoğlu Mansion. His first grave was beside the qibla wall of the Kemal Pasha School; in 1947, on a district governor's circular, the leading members of the Zölpoğulları family moved it to its present place.

Scholars and Poets

Spiritual life lived in the madrasa and the circles of the pen as much as in the tombs. One of the poets who served as mine overseer in Gümüş is Gevheri, who is accepted to have died in the first half of the eighteenth century. Prof. Dr. Nihad M. Çetin, who was born in Gümüşhacıköy, says that Gevheri served as mine overseer in Gümüş, that the Saray mansion bearing his name stood in the district until recently, and that his own grandfather Gevherizâde Abdülvehhâb Efendi was the poet's grandson. Çetin also claims that the poet's name was definitely Mustafa and states that the divan passed to his grandfather and was later sold in Sivas. One of the seals he published bears the date 1260 (1844); since this date cannot belong to Gevheri, who died in the eighteenth century, the existence of a second Gevheri has been suggested. The matter has not yet been settled conclusively.

In studies introducing Ottoman authors, Ali Efendi of Gümüşhacıköy is also mentioned as the author of a work of the biographical genre called Cevâibü'l-Menâkıb. This information is brief, but it shows that the town had people who devoted themselves to learning and literature as well as dervishes.

Legends and the Tradition of Visiting

Legends handed down from generation to generation circulate around these sites. A person with a wish, or one in trouble, goes to the tomb, prays and makes a vow. The miracles attributed to the tombs are stories belonging to the people's oral culture more than to historical documents. Their value for historical study lies in showing the identity of the place and the form of local belief. The legends the elders tell pass to the young as well, and visiting the tomb is the chief occasion by which this transmission continues.

What is distinctive about Gümüşhacıköy is that the silver coming from beneath the ground and the learning left by the dervishes exist together in the same town. The complex of Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, the Great Bath beside the Tomb of Hacı Nadir Baba, the domed courtyard of the Haliliye Madrasa and the plain grave of Çukur Dede bear, on one side of the district, the mark of the state and the mine overseers and, on the other, that of the dervishes and the people of the heart. For many of the shrines written information is limited, and this gap leaves an open field for local historical research.

Chronology

1307: Barak Baba is killed in the region of Gilan (1308 in Gümüşhacıköy's local records).

1333: Ibn Battuta stays three nights at the Ahi Mecdüddîn Lodge in Gümüş.

1378: Sadrettin Artuk keeps Artıkabat prosperous until this date and has a mosque and a school built.

1413-1415: The Haliliye Madrasa is built by Hacı Halil Pasha.

1429: The Yörgüç Pasha Mosque is built of wood; it is rebuilt in masonry in 1560.

1449: The Kelimât-ı Barak Baba is copied in Amasya.

1661: Köprülü Mehmed Pasha endows the mosque, caravanserai, covered market and bath in Hacıköy as a waqf.

1881: Hacıköy becomes the district centre.

1943: The Köprülü Mehmed Pasha Mosque is destroyed in an earthquake; it is rebuilt in 1948.

1976: Garip Hâfız dies in Ankara and is buried in the Haliliye Madrasa.

2009: The Haliliye Madrasa is restored.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Abdizade Hüseyin Hüsamettin, Amasya Tarihi.
  • Gümüşhacıköy Evliyaları; Evliyalar Şehri Amasya (2003). gumushacikoy.gov.tr

Official sources

Other sources

  • Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, "Barak Baba", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 5, Istanbul 1992, pp. 61-62. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Muzaffer Doğanbaş, "Amasya Müzesindeki Genç Devir Osmanlı Sancakları", Kubaba, no. 7, June 2006.

Online sources