Merzifon lies in the Central Black Sea region, on the southern slope of Mount Tavşan (Taşan), at the edge of a fertile plain. Its position on the road that links Istanbul and Ankara to the port of Samsun made it a place of passage and a market town for centuries. The buildings that best convey its commercial life in the Ottoman period stand side by side in the Gazi Mahbup quarter: the Bedesten, the Taşhan and the historic bazaar that surrounds them. All three belong to the complex that Kara Mustafa Pasha, the grand vizier born in Merzifon, gave to his hometown in the middle of the seventeenth century, and after three and a half centuries they are still part of everyday life. The deeds of purchase preserved in the endowment archives make it possible today to follow, year by year, which bazaar these buildings replaced, which shops were bought and pulled down to make room for them, and by whose hands they were raised.

The Kara Mustafa Pasha Complex and Its Surroundings

Merzifon's entry into history goes back to the Roman period, when the settlement of Phazemon was declared a city under the name Neapolis. After the conquest by the Danishmendid emir İltegin Gazi, the town passed through Seljuk, Ilkhanid and Eretnid rule. It came under Ottoman control when Yıldırım Bayezid took it in 1393, and in the early fifteenth century it gained its first institutional core through pious endowments such as the Çelebi Sultan Mehmed Madrasa (1414) and the imaret of Devlet Hatun (1419). In the 1520 survey the town had thirty-four quarters and a population of perhaps five or six thousand, and an annual income of 82,000 akçe from its commercial and industrial taxes was assigned to the sultan's own estates. The figure shows that Merzifon was already a market town of some standing. Until the middle of the seventeenth century, however, its bazaar stood largely on land belonging to the endowment of Çelebi Sultan Mehmed; the shopkeepers owned their buildings but paid ground rent to this sultanic waqf.

What truly changed the face of the town was the building campaign of the second half of the seventeenth century. Kara Mustafa Pasha, said to have been born in 1634-35 in the village of Marınca (today Karamustafapaşa) at the foot of Mount Tavşan, lost his father early and grew up under the protection of Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, then sanjak governor of Amasya. He was appointed deputy grand vizier (sadaret kaymakamı) on 9 May 1666 and became grand vizier on 5 November 1676. Among the works he left to his hometown were a mosque, a library, a primary school, a han, bathhouses and a bedesten. According to the inscription over the mosque's portal, construction began in 1077 (1666-67), and the date 1090 (1679) on the inscription of the Pasha Bath has usually been taken as the year the complex was completed; the buildings without inscriptions are thought to have gone up between the two dates. Ramazan Pantık, who studied the pasha's endowments from archival documents, shows that this frame is too narrow: building in Merzifon began in 1664, went on for about sixteen years, and some structures were finished after the pasha's death by his son Maktulzâde Ali Pasha. Seen this way, the bedesten was the first building to be completed, before the mosque.

Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar, in the part of his Amasya Tarihi devoted to the district of Merzifon, lists the pasha's works in his own order. According to him, the pasha first enlarged the small mosque built by his mother Âbide Hatun in the village of Marınca and turned it into a congregational mosque, and then in 1090 built in the middle of the town of Merzifon a "solid, masonry" mosque, with a timekeeper's room, library, lecture room and ablution fountain before it. The same author records that water was brought to the town from Mount Taşan through conduits two kilometres long and that some thirty masonry fountains were built, so that the town was "truly revived." Hüsâmeddin's date of 1090 for the mosque seems to contradict the starting date of the inscription; it is possible to read one date as the beginning and the other as the end, but this is an inference.

The Founding of the Bedesten

Endowment register no. 641 in the Archives of the General Directorate of Foundations shows that the work in Merzifon began with a bedesten. In large endowments it was a principle to establish first the source of income that would keep the charitable buildings alive, and Kara Mustafa Pasha too took up the bedesten first as the building that would finance his complex in Merzifon. In 1664, while at Edirne with Mehmed IV, the pasha sent his steward Ali Ağa bin Abdurrahman to Merzifon as his agent, and after inspection the Merzifon bazaar was chosen as the best site for a bedesten. The ground under the shops there, however, belonged to the Çelebi Sultan Mehmed endowment. In an ordinary waqf the approval of the judge and the consent of the trustee might have been enough, but in sultanic endowments the powers of the trustee and the local judge were limited. The pasha therefore had an imperial decree issued from Edirne addressed to the judge of Merzifon, and only then, in November 1664, could the purchases and demolition begin.

The first deed of purchase is dated 15 November 1664. Drawn up by the judge of Merzifon, Ahmed bin Şeyh Mehmed, and confirmed by the judge of Istanbul, İbrahim bin Abdülhay, it records the pasha's purchase of 45 shops in the bazaar in order to build a large bedesten on their site for his own endowment. The shops belonged to 35 people living in nineteen different quarters of Merzifon. Mehmed Ağa bin Mahmud, trustee of the Çelebi Sultan Mehmed endowment, approved the sale on condition that a ground rent of 12.5 akçe a year be paid to that endowment for every shop in the new bedesten. The deed states that permission was sought to demolish the shops and build on their plots "a masonry bezistân with shops around it," and a note in red ink at the head of the document identifies it as the "deed of the bezzâsitan and shops" built in Merzifon.

Demolition began immediately after the purchase, and the bedesten was finished by the end of 1665 at the latest. A record dated 20 January 1666 describes this 117-room bedesten in the Merzifon bazaar as having a zaviye to the north, the Grocers' Market to the south, the Cloth Market to the east and the Cotton Market to the west. The building was thus set in the very middle of the town's textile and grocery trade. The pasha's first endowment deed, bearing the same date, attaches this bedesten to the waqf together with the mosque built in his mother's name at Marınca. The deed appointed Qur'an reciters for the mosque to be built in Merzifon, but since the mosque was not yet finished it stipulated that they carry out their duties in a room of the bedesten while construction went on. This detail, which shows the Qur'an being recited for a time in a domed building made for trade, is also evidence that the bedesten stood before the other units of the complex.

The sources differ on the date of the bedesten. The encyclopaedia article on the bedesten states that the complex was founded in 1077 (1666-67) and assigns the bedesten to that date, while general accounts of Merzifon spread the construction of the complex over the years 1666 to 1679. Since the archival documents show that the bedesten was built before these dates, in 1664-65, it appears that 1666-67 marks the start of work on the mosque. The complex is also known to have included two bathhouses, shops and endowed water channels, and these channels are generally held to have brought significant changes to the social and economic life of the town.

The Men Who Carried Out the Work

In all of the pasha's purchases in Merzifon he was represented in court by his stewards; the documents name Ali Ağa and Ahmed Ağa in this role. Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar's Amasya Tarihi gives a detailed account of who Ahmed Ağa was. The son of Kürt Sefer Ağa from the village of Dövenci in the district of Gümüş, Ahmed Ağa entered Kara Mustafa Pasha's household while serving as a sipahi and won his trust. In 1072 (1661-62) he became the pasha's agent in Merzifon and was later appointed voyvoda of Merzifon. Charged with building the pasha's charitable works in Merzifon and with arranging and purchasing the properties and income-producing buildings to be endowed, Ahmed Ağa, in Yasar's words, had the mosque and the bedesten built "in a perfect manner."

The rest of Ahmed Ağa's life can be followed in the same work. He went to Istanbul in 1086, became steward of the grand vizier in Shaban 1087 (autumn 1676), but was dismissed three months later as unsuccessful in his administration and sent back to Merzifon. In 1090 he became voyvoda of Tokat and superintendent of the public treasury of Amasya, and when he died in 1099 (1687-88) he left charitable works and endowments in Tokat as well. It is worth noting that his appointment as steward fell in the same year that the pasha became grand vizier. The record is a concrete example of how the endowed buildings that great grand viziers raised in their hometowns were often carried out by a trusted agent or building superintendent.

The Shops Purchased and the Tradesmen of the Bazaar

Kara Mustafa Pasha made forty separate purchases in Merzifon and bought 76 shops in the bazaar. Evliya Çelebi wrote in 1648 that the town had 600 shops, but since the household figures in the tax surveys are about a quarter of those he gives, Pantık estimates the number of shops in the bazaar at around 150. On that basis the shops bought by the pasha made up nearly half of all the shops in town. Of the 73 shops whose prices are known, 69 were in the bazaar; 16 of these were cotton dealers' shops (penbeci), 13 cloth dealers' (bezzâz), 9 grocers', two were bread ovens and one an apothecary's. The boundary descriptions suggest that most of the 32 shops whose use is not recorded also belonged to cloth and cotton dealers.

Most of the shops sold for between 90 and 115 kuruş. The cloth dealers' shops bought in a single transaction in November 1664 went for 12,500 akçe (104 kuruş) each, the cotton dealers' shops for between 8,175 and 11,875 akçe, and the grocers' shops for between 7,250 and 8,750 akçe. The two most expensive properties were bread ovens, and both belonged to women: the 300-kuruş oven beside the Old Bath was sold in July 1672 by Hatice Hatun of the Hoca Süleyman quarter, and the 150-kuruş oven in the bazaar in July 1673 by İsmihan Hatun of the Hacı Bahşi quarter. Ninety-two per cent of the properties sold belonged to Muslims and eight per cent to non-Muslims, and members of both communities sold cloth, cotton or groceries in similar shops in the same bazaar. The picture shows that at the end of the seventeenth century the wealth of Merzifon's property owners rested on weaving.

Whether the sales were voluntary cannot be answered with certainty, since no Merzifon court registers survive for the period. Pantık points out that most of the shops sold were dilapidated and that none stood inside a covered bedesten or a protected han, and he holds that the sales were made by mutual consent. In his view the tradesmen gained, in place of old and unprotected shops, a roomier and safer place of business in the bedesten and the han, while the pasha found ready tenants for his endowment. The interpretation is the researcher's own, an assessment made where the documents fall silent.

The Architecture of the Bedesten

The bedesten stands at the centre of the complex, on low ground east of the mosque and south of the han. Because the complex was built on a slope, a high retaining wall was run north to south on the east side of the mosque, the mosque was placed on the terrace this wall created, and the Taşhan and the bedesten were left on the level ground below. There is no enclosure wall around the buildings, but their closeness gives the group the unity of a complex. No inscription survives to say for whom or in which year it was built; the records of the culture and tourism directorate content themselves with dating it to the seventeenth century on the strength of its architectural features. Descriptions of its plan differ. Some texts call it rectangular, the article on the bedesten speaks of a square building of 30 by 30 metres, while Abdülbaki Yeşil, who studied the complex, gives its dimensions as 30 by 28 metres and notes that it covers an area close to a square.

The building is entered from four sides. In the middle of each facade a vaulted unit projects outward, and doors with flattened arches and rectangular openings are set inside these units. Within, pointed arches carried by four thick piers divide the space into nine equal bays, each covered by a dome on an octagonal drum. The walls are further strengthened with relieving arches. Lanterns opening at the crowns of the domes and windows at second-storey level in the walls give the interior sufficient light. The building is fully symmetrical on both the east-west and the north-south axes. Yeşil counts the bedesten among the medium-sized Ottoman bedestens with nine domes whose four facades are lined with rows of shops.

The walls are built of yellowish cut stone up to first-storey level, and above that of one course of cut stone alternating with three courses of brick, while brick alone was used for the roofing. The same yellowish stone appears in all the buildings the pasha raised in Merzifon and gives the complex a common colour. Today there are no cellars or shop partitions inside, but according to Yeşil the endowment deed indicates that there were shops divided by timber partitions within. The description of the bedesten in the archival documents as having "117 rooms" should be considered alongside this; it may be thought that the figure covered both the timber cubicles inside and the shops on the outer facades, but this is an inference. That the bedesten counts among the well-preserved examples of its type owes much to the care taken over workmanship and material.

Outside the bedesten, an arasta surrounds the facades between the four gates. Vaulted bays, attached to the main building in a symmetrical arrangement, form a row of shops, which together with the secondary elements of the entrance units at the centres of the four facades make up thirty-two shop spaces. That the arasta was kept separate from the bedesten may seem a minor detail at first, but it explains the logic of Ottoman commercial architecture. An arasta is a bazaar laid out together with a mosque to bring income to an endowed building and to draw worshippers toward it, while the bedesten is the most solid, most secure core of the same bazaar, the place that holds the most valuable goods. In Merzifon both were conceived within a single plan, and shops set facing one another on the outer facades of the complex buildings produced an open arasta.

The Function of the Bedesten

The word bedesten is said to derive from Arabic bezzaz, "cloth seller," or from Persian bezistan. That the Merzifon documents spell the building "bezistân" and "bezzâsitan" shows that this origin was still alive; and the fact that the Cloth Market lay immediately east of the bedesten suggests that the name found its literal meaning here. In the beginning it was the place where precious fabrics, weapons, ornamented harness and jewellery were sold. Over time the narrow meaning widened, and the bedesten came to act as a masonry inner fortress at the very centre of a city's commercial district. Most of the bazaar consisted of small shops of light timber that could easily be lost in a fire; the bedesten, built of solid stone, domed and with doors that could be locked, served to protect the merchant's valuable goods, his strongbox, ledgers and papers. The documents of artisan and trade guilds were also kept in bedestens until recent times.

This protective role of the Merzifon Bedesten applied to the endowment's own money as well. A petition submitted to the sultan in 1733 by the trustee of the endowment, Ahmed Bey, recalls that under the terms of the endowment deed the waqf's budget surplus was to be kept in the bedesten. The petition complains that the previous trustee, Maktulzâde Ali Pasha, had ignored this condition and repeatedly taken the endowment's money as loans. The record shows that besides bringing income to the endowment through its rented shops, the bedesten was also intended as the waqf's cash vault.

Hans and caravanserais were another link in the same commercial network. A city might have many hans for merchants and craftsmen but ordinarily had only one bedesten, Istanbul being the exception. The same pattern appears in Merzifon. The bedesten stands at the centre of the town as the heart of the bazaar, while the Taşhan immediately to its north was conceived as a lodging place where merchants bringing goods from elsewhere left their wares and animals. The adjacency of the two buildings is not an accident. A merchant who put up at the Taşhan, carried his load to the nearby bedesten, secured valuable goods under its domes and sold them in the surrounding arasta was following an ordinary course of trade in an Ottoman city.

The Taşhan

The Taşhan lies northeast of the Kara Mustafa Pasha Mosque and north of the bedesten. Because it has no building inscription, its date was long given on the basis of the mosque's inscription of 1666, and its architectural features and the endowment records pointed to the third quarter of the seventeenth century. The archival documents narrow this down. An exchange deed (istibdal) dated 13 June 1671, drawn up by Nurullah, judge of Merzifon, records that a privately owned han the pasha had recently built in the bazaar was exchanged, on the grounds that it lay too far from his other buildings, for a ruined han belonging to the Çelebi Sultan Mehmed endowment. In waqf law istibdal meant the exchange of an endowed property for another property on condition that it served the endowment's interest, and it could be approved only after the judge had experts assess the values.

The court had an inspection made on site by experts: Master Hasan of Amasya, Master Aslan of Merzifon and a non-Muslim named Karacaoğlu. The endowment's han, on a plot of 174.5 zira with fifteen burnt rooms and a ruined stable, was valued at 500 esedi kuruş; the private han, newly built on a plot of 129.5 zira with twenty-four rooms, a stable and a hayloft, at 1,700 esedi kuruş. Since the private han was found to be worth 1,200 kuruş more, the exchange was accepted as being to the endowment's benefit and approved with the consent of the trustee, İsmail Çavuş bin Yusuf. The present Taşhan is not that building. A month after the exchange the pasha bought the 28 shops around the han, and a year later the remaining 5, then had the decrepit han and shops pulled down and the present han built in their place. Since a sale document dated 28 July 1673 mentions the han as already built, the Taşhan must have been constructed in 1672-73. The thirty-three shops purchased match in number the thirty-three shops that open outward on the han's ground floor today; it may be thought that the shops were rebuilt on their old sites, but this is an inference.

The han's rectangular plan belongs to the type of Ottoman urban han built in storeys around a single courtyard, with shops lining its facades. The walls combine cut stone and brick, and the interior is entered through a large round-arched gate in the south facade. On the outside of the ground floor, shops separated into small pointed-arched units line the walls, and these shops allowed a building made for travellers to bring income from the street. Up to first-storey level the walls are entirely of yellowish cut stone, while on the upper floors one course of cut stone alternates with three courses of brick. The domes and vaults were built of brick and plastered in later years. Stone ornament is almost absent; the projecting bays on curved corbels above the entrance and the brick bonding courses between the rows of stone are familiar features of seventeenth-century building.

The interior is an open courtyard. On the north side, pointed arches on stone columns form a portico. Behind it are rooms in the form of bay windows resting on large stone corbels, and below them stables for pack animals and mounts. The arrangement of the basement beneath the courtyard as a stable, reached from the courtyard by a ramp, is described as a solution with no other known example among Ottoman hans. Rooms opening onto the courtyard also lie along the east and west sides. The upper floor is arcaded as well; on the east and west sides stone columns carry brick arches, and the arcades are covered with cross vaults. Behind the arcades lie domed rooms, each with its own window and door; the rooms have hearths and niches, and in some of them the cupboards contain compartments set aside for travellers to wash. The arches of the north and south arcades were filled in with stone walls and turned into dovecotes. Two fountains placed directly in front of the north arcade add a further grace to the courtyard.

The number of storeys and rooms is given differently in the sources. According to Yeşil and Pantık, the Taşhan is the building in which a third storey was first applied in Ottoman han architecture; Pantık describes it as "three-storeyed with 62 rooms." Selda Fındıklı, who wrote the entry on the han for a tourism encyclopaedia, describes it instead as a building of basement, ground floor and first floor, and gives the number of rooms on the first floor as forty, thirty-five facing outward and five facing the courtyard. The difference may arise from whether the basement is counted. Yeşil notes that the central corridor arrangement in the south and north sections of the upper floors recalls the Taşhan of Amasya, and that the washroom and latrine units in the northwest corner, together with a prayer room on the top floor of the north section, distinguish this building from other hans. Because the endowment deed records the han's location, its number of rooms and the number of shops around it, Yeşil concludes that apart from minor changes the building has come down to us without major alteration.

The sources also differ on the prayer room inside the han. Fındıklı writes that the han has no separate masjid, while Yeşil describes a masjid unit on the top floor of the north section. A record in Amasya Tarihi supports the second view: the notable Rahtuvan Paşazade Hacı Ali Bey went to the Hijaz and died in Mecca, and his freedman Hacı Yusuf Ağa became his executor; the endowment deed for the masjid he had built inside the Taşhan was drawn up around 1180 (1766-67). The record shows that the han was still a lively commercial and social space about a century after it was built, and that the travellers' need for prayer was met inside it. Whether the masjid was designed together with the han, or an existing room was turned into a masjid in the eighteenth century, cannot be clearly determined from the documents.

Water, Endowment and the Later Life of the Waqf

The bedesten, the han and the mosque could not function without water. An imperial decree dated 27 August 1675, sent from Edirne to the judge of Merzifon and the trustee of the Çelebi Sultan Mehmed endowment, records that fourteen quarters of the town had no fountain at all and that there was a serious shortage of water. The pasha intended to collect the water he brought by channels from Mount Tavşan first in a distribution tank he had built in the garden of his own pavilion in the Sofular quarter, and from there to distribute it to the fourteen fountains he had built, to the complex, the bath and the han. Because part of the water line crossed vacant fields of the Çelebi Sultan Mehmed endowment, the permission of its overseer, Yusuf Ağa, Chief Black Eunuch of the palace, was obtained. The difference between the fourteen fountains of the decree and the thirty or so given by Hüsâmeddin may be explained by later additions; but this is an inference. A sewer system centred on the complex and covering the whole town is also reported to have been built in the same campaign.

The arrangement that was to keep all these buildings standing was set up, once the building work other than the baths was finished, by the great endowment deed of 23 Safar 1089 (16 April 1678). The deed also records the pasha's endowed buildings outside Merzifon, in Istanbul, Kayseri, Edirne, Kamaniçe, Çorum, Tokat, İzmir, Aleppo and Jeddah; it lists the staff, their qualifications and wages, the sums to be paid to his descendants and to the trustees, the physical condition of the complex and the books held in the library. By Pantık's calculation the pasha spent 27.5 million akçe between 1665 and 1682 on revenue-producing properties and building plots alone, a figure that reaches 100 million akçe when all his endowed works are included. The endowment's affairs in Merzifon were run by a deputy trustee. His responsibilities covered the complex, the bedesten, the han, the bath, a coffee-roasting house and many shops, as well as the mosque at Marınca and a weighing han and shops in Çorum, 65 kilometres away.

The execution of Kara Mustafa Pasha in Belgrade on 25 December 1683, after the siege of Vienna that year, shook part of his endowments. According to a document studied by Ömer Aslan, the cash endowment of 36,500 kuruş that the pasha founded in 1680 for the Celvetî lodges of Üsküdar was confiscated in 1684, together with its balance, which had reached 38,854 kuruş, and transferred to the treasury. The endowment in Merzifon, however, lived on. Amasya Tarihi often mentions trustees and deputy trustees of the pasha's endowment. Gürcü Şahin Ağa, one of the pasha's aides, was sent to Merzifon after his death and served as deputy trustee of the endowment; in another record a native of the Harmanlar quarter of Merzifon appears as deputy trustee in 1129 (1717) and as voyvoda of Merzifon in 1130.

His son Maktulzâde Ali Pasha, who served as trustee from 1689 to 1722, added new works to his father's. According to the endowment's account books he built a han called the Tahtahan beside the Taşhan, and a bath known as the New Bath (hamam-ı cedid). An inquiry in 1733, however, revealed that Ali Pasha had borrowed more than 7,812,000 akçe from the endowment's coffers and for some thirty years had not forwarded the income of the Merzifon properties to the centre; part of the debt was found to have been spent on building a han, a bath, shops, vineyards and gardens in Merzifon. Throughout the eighteenth century no large-scale destruction is seen in the commercial buildings of Merzifon; hans, baths and shops damaged here and there by fires were renewed as far as the endowment's budget allowed.

The state of the endowment in the nineteenth century can be followed in the Merzifon accounts for 1855. That year a total of 9,014 kuruş was collected from the endowment's two baths, its tile works, the Suluhan, the Taşhan, the Bedesten, the rents of the shops and stalls around the mosque, bedesten and baths, and the weighing dues in Çorum. Against this, 13,761 kuruş was spent, 5,917 of it on repairs, and the account closed with a deficit of 4,748 kuruş. The register was signed on 5 October 1855 by the local members, the district director and the deputy judge and sent to the Ministry of Pious Foundations. The figures show that after nearly two centuries the bedesten and the han were still among the endowment's main sources of income, but that maintenance costs had begun to exceed revenue.

From Weaving Workshop to Dining Table

In time the bedesten lost its original function. Used until fairly recently by the state monopoly Tekel as a tobacco warehouse, the building suffered damage especially to its interior in this period, and the encyclopaedia article published in 2004 describes it as derelict. Apart from the shop units that have survived in worn condition, its large interior was also used for a time as a weaving workshop by the Merzifon Weavers' Cooperative. The use fits the textile history of the town; in the tax-assessment surveys of the 1840s about a third of Merzifon's households are recorded as working in textiles and related crafts. For a period the large domed space served as storage, while trade in the shops along its outer walls was never interrupted.

A restoration in the early 2000s put the worn building back in order, and the interior was converted into a restaurant serving dishes from Ottoman cuisine. Turning the domed stone hall into a dining space can be counted as a use that has kept the building standing. The bedesten is reached from the town centre, about five hundred metres away, along Cumhuriyet Caddesi. The Taşhan lies about four hundred metres from the centre. The General Directorate of Foundations had survey and repair reports prepared on the han in 1975, 1978 and 1985; a comprehensive restoration, tendered in 2007, was completed in 2018. The restored han now operates as a historic hotel and also serves as a restaurant offering local dishes. Its courtyard, columned arcades and domed rooms keep their original layout to a large extent under the new use.

The Historic Bazaar

The Merzifon Arasta around the bedesten is described as more than four hundred years old and remains the centre of the town's commercial life today. Documents from the last quarter of the seventeenth century show four markets active in the central bazaar, chief among them the grocers', cloth dealers' and cotton dealers' markets. Today's bazaar still keeps the traditional Ottoman arrangement in which trades are gathered in their own streets. Sections such as the street of the shoemakers, the street of the tailors, the street of the butchers and the street of the pide makers turn the bazaar into a map of trades. The arrangement made production and supervision easier and also allowed a customer to find what he wanted without wandering. In nearly three hundred shops, tradesmen work in fields ranging from clothing and food to household goods and catering, and some of them try to keep alive crafts that are fading from memory, such as coppersmithing and saddlery.

The shops around the mosque, by contrast, have dwindled over time. According to the description in the endowment deed there should be forty shops around the mosque, but twenty-eight stand today; traces of the vaults of some of the twelve that have disappeared can still be made out. When the road west of the mosque was built, the shops there were left below ground level and filled with earth. The religious buildings around the bazaar were also kept alive by local notables. According to Amasya Tarihi, Müslim Hacı Hasan Ağa, one of the notables of Merzifon, who became known for his financial and personal sacrifices in the Russian wars and rose to be a notable and deputy governor of Merzifon, restored the Arasta Mosque in 1207 (1792-93), appointed a lecturer there and endowed a large sum of money for it.

The living character of the bazaar stems from Merzifon's position. The town lies where roads to the Black Sea in the north, the Anatolian interior in the south and Istanbul in the west cross, and this position, which brought caravans often, kept the economy lively in the Ottoman period. Local people still come to the bazaar to prepare for special occasions such as henna nights, weddings, births and holidays, and regional foods and traditional handicrafts are found there. Shops passed from grandfather to grandson and trades handed from master to apprentice are spoken of as the bazaar's unseen capital.

Merzifon in the History of Trade

When Evliya Çelebi stopped at Merzifon in Muharram 1058 (February 1648), he wrote that he counted forty-four quarters and four thousand houses. A hearth-tax register compiled toward the middle of the seventeenth century records twenty-eight quarters and about 925 households. The difference shows that Evliya's figures were exaggerated, but his interest in Merzifon as a market town was real. His claim that the cloaks worn by the people of Crimea were made of Merzifon cloth cannot be verified, but the archival documents confirm that the town had intensive cotton working and weaving. Kara Mustafa Pasha's complex was added to this picture later and fixed the commercial centre of gravity of the town. In the fifteen years between 1664 and 1680 the appearance of the bazaar changed completely, and the Merzifon that Evliya had seen gave way to a new town centre with a domed bedesten, a three-storey han and a great mosque.

The mosque of the complex is the largest in the district. It is built of cut stone on a rectangular plan, its main prayer hall is covered by a single dome 14 metres in diameter, and it is lit by three rows of windows. The inside of the dome over the ablution fountain in its courtyard is decorated with views of Istanbul and Anatolia bearing the signature of Emin Usta of Zile and the date 1292 (1875). A walk that begins with the yellowish stone of the mosque extends down to the bedesten and the han on the level ground below and takes in the whole historic core of Merzifon.

In the nineteenth century the town's population rose from about 10,000 to 20,000, and the clock tower built in 1866 by Ziya Pasha, governor of Amasya, over the gate of the madrasa, together with the American College founded in 1876, changed the skyline. Hüsâmeddin writes that during the disturbances of 1311 (1893-94) the government building and the centre of the town burned, and that afterwards, with the contributions of the district's people, a government building, a municipal office and a barracks were built, along with a bath, a hotel, a coffeehouse and commercial stores whose income was to go to education. In his view this rebuilding and the settlement of Tatar immigrants increased the town's trade and wealth "extraordinarily." Amid these developments the Bedesten and the Taşhan kept their place as the commercial core.

Chronology

1414: The Çelebi Sultan Mehmed Madrasa is founded in the Cami-i Cedid quarter of Merzifon. 1520: A total of thirty-four quarters and 1,025 households are recorded in the town of Merzifon.

1648: Evliya Çelebi visits Merzifon. 15 November 1664: The first deed is drawn up for the purchase of 45 shops in the bazaar for the bedesten. End of 1665: The bedesten is complete.

20 January 1666: The pasha's first endowment deed attaches the mosque at Marınca and the bedesten to the waqf. 9 May 1666: Kara Mustafa Pasha is appointed deputy grand vizier. 1666-67 (1077): According to its inscription, work on the mosque begins; construction of the complex continues until 1679.

13 June 1671: The han newly built by the pasha is exchanged for the ruined han of the Çelebi Sultan Mehmed endowment. 1672-73: The present Taşhan is built; a document of 28 July 1673 mentions it as complete. 27 August 1675: A decree permitting the water channels is issued.

5 November 1676: Kara Mustafa Pasha becomes grand vizier. 16 April 1678 (23 Safar 1089): The great endowment deed is drawn up. 25 December 1683: After the defeat at Vienna he is executed in Belgrade. 1684: The cash endowment he founded for the lodges of Üsküdar is confiscated.

1689-1722: Maktulzâde Ali Pasha serves as trustee and builds the Tahtahan beside the Taşhan. 1733: An inquiry is held into Ali Pasha's borrowings from the endowment. About 1766-67 (1180): The endowment deed is drawn up for the masjid of Rahtuvan Paşazade Hacı Ali Bey inside the Taşhan.

1792-93 (1207): Müslim Hacı Hasan Ağa restores the Arasta Mosque. 5 October 1855: The endowment's Merzifon account closes with a deficit. 1893-94 (1311): The town centre burns and is then rebuilt with commercial buildings.

Early 2000s: The bedesten is restored and begins to operate as a restaurant. 2007-2018: The Taşhan is restored and comes into use as a hotel.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar, Amasya Tarihi, vol. 1, p. 207 (the district of Merzifon and the works of Kara Mustafa Pasha); vol. 4, p. 662 (the masjid in the Taşhan); vol. 6, p. 179 (Kürt Sefer Ağazâde Ahmed Ağa); vol. 8, p. 625 (Müslim Hacı Hasan Ağa); together with records on the trustees of the Merzifon endowment. amasya.bel.tr

Academic studies

  • Ömer Aslan, "İhyadan Müsadereye: Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa'nın Celveti Tekkeleri İçin Kurduğu Para Vakfının Yükselişi ve Çöküşü", Niğde Ömer Halisdemir Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi, 8/1, 2026, pp. 215-223.

Official sources

  • Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Kültür Portalı, entries "Merzifon Bedesteni" and "Merzifon Taşhan" (based on the Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism). kulturportali.gov.tr

Other sources

  • Mehmet Öz, "Merzifon", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 29, Ankara 2004, pp. 243-245.
  • Entry "Bedesten", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 5, Istanbul 1992 (section on the Merzifon Bedesten).
  • "Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi.
  • Ramazan Pantık, Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa Vakıfları: Yönetimi, Kentsel Gelişime Katkıları ve İktisadi Yapısı, doctoral dissertation, Hacettepe University Institute of Social Sciences, Ankara 2021, pp. 42-43, 65, 95, 111, 120-132, 351. openaccess.hacettepe.edu.tr
  • Selda Fındıklı, "Merzifon Taşhan", Online Türkiye Turizm Ansiklopedisi (ed. N. Kozak), 2019. turkiyeturizmansiklopedisi.com
  • Turkey Outdoor, "Amasya Merzifon Bedesteni ve Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa Cami Tanıtımı" (information on the bazaar and shops).