Leaving Amasya's narrow, steep-sided valley and heading northwest, the land suddenly loosens and a plain opens out as far as the eye can see. Merzifon sits at its edge, on the southern skirts of Mount Taşan. Where the provincial capital is hemmed in, Merzifon is open, flat and airy, and it is the largest settlement in the province after Amasya itself. The highway running from Istanbul and Ankara to the port of Samsun, the old trade routes descending from Çorum to the Black Sea, and the passes linking inland Anatolia to the coast all cross here. The town's history is largely the history of this crossroads: every power that held the plain cared about the security and the tax revenue of the road, and each of those who passed through left behind a building, an endowment or a name.

A visitor to Merzifon today finds, within the same street network, a complex built by a grand vizier to repay a debt to his birthplace, a madrasa that an Ottoman prince had built after the Interregnum, and the New England-style buildings that American missionaries raised for their college. The town's role in the Turkish War of Independence, the Pontus debates, the fate of the American College, its aviation history and the life of Kara Mustafa Pasha are treated at length in separate articles on this site. Here they are brought together, with the points on which the sources disagree marked as such.

Merzifon at a Glance

  • Location: In the interior of the Central Black Sea section, northwest of the city of Amasya. The distance to the provincial centre is about 45-49 km.
  • Elevation: According to the sources, between 740 and 750 m.
  • Area: Official records give 971 km², some compilations 888 km². The figures do not match.
  • Neighbours: Suluova to the east, the central district of Amasya and Mecitözü (attached to Çorum) to the south, Gümüşhacıköy to the west, Vezirköprü (attached to Samsun) to the north, Havza to the northeast.
  • Population: 72,277 in 2019 (centre 58,235, villages 14,042). According to TÜİK data, 76,854 at the end of 2024. Seventy villages belong to the district.

Geography and Climate

The Merzifon Plain is watered by the Tersakan Stream, which joins the Yeşilırmak near Amasya, and by its tributaries, the Gümüşsuyu and the Solhan Stream; it forms the district's main agricultural land. The north and west of the district are mountainous, while the centre and east are plain. Mount Taşan, rising to 1,905 metres in the north, Akdağ in the east and the spurs of Çakır Dağı in the south frame the plain.

The climate is a transition between the Black Sea and Central Anatolia. Summers are dry and rainless, winters and spring months wet; average annual precipitation has been recorded as 350 kg/m². This balance has for centuries made the plain well suited to grain and pulse production.

Origin of the Name

Where the name Merzifon comes from is disputed. Local sources relate two traditions. According to the first, in the 700s BC the regional governor Barsevinç built a town bearing his own name on the site of today's Marınca village; the name gradually became Marsevinç, Mersuvan and Merzifon. According to the second, in 222 BC the regional governor Mithridates V had a fortress called Merzpond built here, and the name was interpreted as "Pontus headquarters", with "merz" meaning "border" in Persian and "fon" taken as a changed form of "Pont".

Mehmet Öz treats both explanations with caution. The Barsevinç claim has no basis, and the reading "border city of the Pontic state" is also doubtful. According to Öz, the town was founded on the site of Phazemon, at the point where the fertile plain of Chiliokomon (Binköy) begins. The name that Stephanos of Byzantium recorded in the fifth century as Phamidzon (Famizon) first became Famezon, then Mazifon, Marsovan and Mersivan; it appears as "Bâzimûn" in Seljuk sources, as "Merzubân" in Persian sources and with the spelling "Merzifon" in Ottoman documents. The form Mersivan, still used among the local people, is one of the last links in this chain.

Layers of History

Settlement on the plain goes back to the Chalcolithic age, to about 5500 BC. The mounds of Onhoroz and the Great and Small Küllük at the village of Ortaova, together with the mounds at the village of Hayrettin, are the most important Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age settlements. The sheer number of villages founded around the lakes known as the Seven and the fertile soil is considered the reason why the ancient geographer Strabo called the region the "Thousand Villages". In the Hittite period (1700-700 BC), the region, a neighbour of Hattusa, was crossed by two natural roads: the Çorum-Merzifon-Havza-Kavak-Samsun line, ancestor of today's highway, and the Çorum-Merzifon-Havza-Vezirköprü-Oymaağaç route. A small fortress built to protect the Hittite trade road and the frontier against Kaska raids is regarded as the core of today's town.

The sources part ways over the later fate of this fortress. The TDV (Turkish Religious Foundation) encyclopaedia writes that the Phrygian, Cimmerian and Scythian attacks that dominated the area in the eighth century BC destroyed it. The local account, by contrast, says that the Phrygians repaired and used the Merzifon fortress and the surrounding Hittite settlements, and that Phrygian political rule ended with the Cimmerian and Scythian incursions in the 600s BC. A trace of brief Scythian dominance is seen in finds from a tomb at İmirler village near Gümüşhacıköy, which are displayed in the Amasya Museum. No excavation evidence yet reconciles the two accounts. After the Phrygian age came Persian rule, from the sixth to the fourth centuries BC, which ended with the Battle of Issus in 333 BC.

The Kingdom of Pontus, with Amasya as its capital, lasted about two centuries, and during that time Merzifon became a place of importance for the security of the trade road. The kingdom's power weakened in 47 BC when Caesar defeated Pharnaces II near Zela, and Roman rule took hold from that date. According to the TDV, when Pompey defeated Mithridates III in 64 BC there was already a settlement here called Phazemonitis. Pompey declared it a city and gave it the name Neapolis, and in time it was known as Phazemon Neapolis. The emperor Hadrian toured the region in the autumn of 131 and ordered the rebuilding of cities ruined by war and the repair of old temples. The column capitals and the altar inscription from the temple he had built for Zeus Stratios in today's village of Karşıyaka (Neopolis) stand in the garden of the Amasya Museum. A sarcophagus of the third century AD, with acroteria and ornament, excavated by the museum in 1994 at the village of Aktarla (Nureni), likewise points to the density of settlement in the same period.

When Rome split in two in 395, Merzifon remained within the borders of Eastern Rome. According to the TDV, the Huns who entered Byzantine territory from the Caucasus in 395-396 plundered the town. At the start of the eighth century there was a brief Umayyad raid, and the town remained for a while under Arab control before returning to Byzantium. The fortress of Bulak, which watched over the trade road across the plain, is said to have been built in this period to secure the road.

After Malazgirt (1071) the town was taken by İltegin Gazi, one of the Danishmendid emirs. His son Sihâmeddevle Hüseyin Gazi lived here for a long time; the place where he stayed is today the town's Samadolu (more recently Buğdaylı) quarter, which appears as Samadola in the survey registers and as Sehmüddevle in the avarız register of 1642. When Kılıçarslan II ended the Danishmendid presence, the town was attached to the Anatolian Seljuk State. The tradition is that, with Islamic rule, some of the Byzantine structures in the town were converted into mosques and madrasas. From the end of the thirteenth century Ilkhanid and then Eretnid rule followed. It is related that the Ilkhanid ruler Abu Said Bahadur Khan gave the administration of the region to Emir Çobanoğlu Demirtaş, and that between 1335 and 1341 the Eretnid bey Şadgeldi Pasha held the area around Amasya and Merzifon. The region then became the scene of struggles between Şadgeldi's son Emir Ahmed and Kadı Burhâneddin. Kadı Burhâneddin plundered Merzifon, came again in 1393, set up camp and sent troops to Amasya. Bayezid the Thunderbolt, drawn into the affair, reached Merzifon with a large army and took the town (the TDV relies on Esterâbâdî here). According to local sources the region was in the hands of the Türkmen Taşanoğulları dynasty between 1353 and 1396, and Bayezid's Amasya campaign of 1393 ended in Ottoman rule after a struggle of about three years. After the defeat by Timur, Çelebi Mehmed, who ended the Interregnum, had been prince of Amasya before taking the throne, and that tie lent the town added weight.

A Provincial Town under the Ottomans

In the Ottoman period Merzifon was a district (kaza) of the sanjak of Amasya, attached to the province of Sivas. The survey registers cited by the TDV give the measure of the town. In 1520 there were thirty-four quarters; Muslims lived in twenty-eight and non-Muslims in six. A total of 1,025 households (786 Muslim, 239 non-Muslim) points to a population estimated at 5,000-6,000. Quarter names have been carried down to the present: Câmi-i Atîk (Eskicami), Câmi-i Cedîd (Camicedit), Hacı Balı, Harmanlı Mescidi (Atpazarı, today's Harmanlar), Kadı Mahbub (Gazimahbup), Mahzen, Neccar, Sofular. The quarters in which non-Muslims were numerous were Bozahâne, Erzincani, Kaplan and Kilise. Trade and industry taxes in the town yielded an estimated 82,000 akçe a year, assigned to the sultan's personal revenues. The population, which reached 1,783 adult males at the end of the sixteenth century, had kept the same overall size, but the number of households had fallen and the number of bachelors had risen.

The avarız survey of the mid-seventeenth century counted twenty-eight quarters in the town; the presence of outside-born Christians in four of them shows a movement of non-Muslims toward the town in the first half of the century. The register lists 957 adults, 137 of whom were tax-exempt. Calculations give Merzifon in fact 925 households, 625 Muslim and 300 Christian. Set against this register, the figure "forty-four quarters, four thousand houses" that Evliya Çelebi recorded when he visited in February 1648 looks exaggerated. On the same trip Evliya also described the lodge of Pîrî Baba. The eighteenth century continued the order of the previous one, with no major events worth recording.

At the start of the Tanzimat, in the temettuat survey of the 1840s, Merzifon was recorded with 929 taxpaying households in thirteen quarters. The quarters of Alaca Minare and Harmanlar were places where Muslims and Christians lived mixed, though the register wrote the two groups separately under the same quarter name. Looking at occupations, it becomes clear that a considerable part of the population worked in weaving and related crafts. Through the nineteenth century both population and physical fabric kept growing: the town's population, about 10,000 in the middle of the century, reached 20,000 toward its end. Vital Cuinet records 13,380 Muslims, 5,820 Armenians and about 800 Greeks. According to the 1860 count the district had more than 160 villages and a population that had reached 25,105, of whom 18,786 were Muslim; later this figure rose to about 30,000. The administrative structure changed as well. At the start of the sixteenth century only eight villages belonged to the district; in the seventeenth century the district of Merzifonâbâd was formed from some villages of the nahiye of Argoma, and this unit, centred on the village of Bulak, was abolished in 1880 and its villages divided between Merzifon and Gümüş.

In the Republic, Merzifon kept growing. Its position at the junction of the roads linking inland Anatolia to the Black Sea, Istanbul and Ankara raised its importance, and its role as market for the produce of the fertile plain also enlarged small-scale manufacturing. In 1927 the town's population was 11,352 and the district's 28,141. In 1930 the municipal council merged quarters and reduced their number from twenty-four to twelve; in 1957, when the western village of Samandolu was turned into a quarter, the number rose to thirteen, and by 2004 it was eighteen. The town's population was 22,096 in 1960, and in the 2000 census the district reached 45,613. In the censuses of 1935, 1945, 1950 and 1955 Merzifon had overtaken even Amasya, the provincial centre to which it belonged. In 1987 an Organized Industrial Zone initiative was launched.

A Turkish-Islamic Townscape

From the Danishmendids onward Merzifon took on the look of a typical Turkish-Islamic town. With its madrasas, mosques, small mosques, lodges and tombs, the town was also a commercial centre with its bedesten and its khan. The ancient inner fortress stood on the hilly ground in the middle of the town, while the outer fortress lay on the slopes of the hill and has not survived. The oldest known monument is the Muînüddin Pervâne Süleyman Mosque (Ulucami), of which the inscription, two door leaves and the minbar remain. This building, with an inscription dated 663 (1265), burned in 1904 and is thought to have stood at the head of Eskicami street in today's Yokuşbaşı district.

The first half of the fifteenth century is the age of the endowments that determined the town's physical appearance. Besides the Çelebi Sultan Mehmed Madrasa (817/1414) in the Camicedit quarter, the sixteenth-century registers mention the soup kitchen (imaret) that Çelebi Mehmed's mother Devlet Hatun built in 822 (1419) in the İmaret quarter together with a mosque and a zawiya, the Medreseönü Mosque (830/1427), known as the Çelebi Sultan Mehmed Mosque but actually built by Murad II, and the Tâceddin İbrâhim Pasha Mosque (Çukur Şadırvan Mosque, probably 828/1425). In later centuries the town's skyline was completed by the Double Bath (Çifte Hamam, from the time of Murad I), the Alaca Minare Mosque (906/1501), the Sofular Mosque (sixteenth century), the Tomb of the Beylerbey Abdullah Pasha (sixteenth century), the Bozacı Mosque (seventeenth century), the Tuzpazarı Bath (1087/1676), the Çay Mosque (eighteenth century) and the Hacı Hasan Mosque (1126/1714).

A Grand Vizier's Legacy

The name of Merzifon is bound up with one of the best-known grand viziers in Ottoman history, Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha. According to the TDV he was born in 1634-35 in the village of Marınca (today's Karamustafapaşa) in Merzifon. His father Oruç Bey was a timar-holding sipahi; when he fell as a martyr at Murad IV's siege of Baghdad the child was orphaned at the age of four, and he received a madrasa education under the protection of Köprülü Mehmed Bey, a friend of his father and then sanjak governor of Amasya, together with the latter's sons. Another account makes him the son of a sipahi called Derviş and places his birth in 1626-27. A son-in-law of Köprülü, Mustafa Pasha served as silahdar, telhisçi and second master of the horse, then as governor-general of Silistre, governor-general of Diyarbekir and, between 1661 and 1666, as grand admiral, and he acted several times as deputy grand vizier. When Fâzıl Ahmed Pasha died he became grand vizier on 5 November 1676.

The first great task of his grand vizierate was the tension with Poland and Russia over the Ukrainian Cossacks. The fortress of Chyhyryn was besieged and taken in 1678, after which it was demolished and two new fortresses were built on the Dnieper; in 1681 peace terms were fixed at Bakhchysarai. The real turning point was the Siege of Vienna in 1683. The TDV writes that Kara Mustafa Pasha tied his survival in office to a great victory on the scale of his predecessors' and intended to break Habsburg power. Reaching Vienna with the army on 14 July 1683, the pasha had not brought the great siege guns with him and was forced to prolong the siege. On 12 September the allied army under Jan Sobieski, descending from the Kahlenberg, broke the Ottoman line, and the army withdrew, leaving behind a great many cannon, tents and supplies. Executed in Belgrade on 25 December 1683 on the order of Mehmed IV, the pasha was buried in Belgrade, while his head, or the flayed skin of his head, was buried in Edirne, in the graveyard of the Saruca Pasha Mosque. The claim that a skull in a Vienna museum belongs to him is contradicted by Silâhdar and Cantemir, who write that the head was buried in his complex in Istanbul. He is known as "Kara" (Black) in the West, as "Merzifonlu" in Turkey, and after his execution by the epithet "Maktul" (the Slain).

He was a statesman who knew how to repay his debt to his homeland. The TDV writes that in Merzifon he had a mosque, library, primary school, khan, bath and bedesten built, and that he also left a complex at Çarşıkapı in Istanbul, a small mosque and khan at Hocapaşa, a mosque at Galata, a complex at İncesu in Kayseri, a khan, bath and mosque at Jeddah, and a palace and fountains at Edirne, and founded endowments at Kamaniçe, Çorum, Tokat, İzmir and Aleppo. The Merzifon complex rose between 1666 and 1679. Sultan Murat Topçu's DergiPark article, relying on the endowment deeds, reports that the pasha had two mosques, a khan, a bedesten and a bath built in Merzifon, and brought water to the town from Mount Taşan and set up many fountains along the road. Most of the fountains have vanished, while the other buildings have survived. The TDV notes that these water channels changed the social and economic life of the town, and that the endowments continued this role in later centuries. The mosque built for his mother Abide Hatun in the village of Bahçekent (Narince) is also part of this network. After his execution most of his property was confiscated, and what remained went to his son Vizier Ali Pasha ("Maktulzâde") and his daughter Fatma Hanım.

Kara Mustafa Pasha Mosque. One source writes that the building was commissioned in 1666; another, relying on the inscription, reports that construction began in 1666-67 and was completed in 1679. The rectangular building, with its large dome and octagonal drum, is Merzifon's largest mosque and is also known as the "Pasha Mosque" and "Cami-i Kebir". The dome of the ablution fountain in the middle of the courtyard bears the painted decoration of Zileli Emin, dated 1875. The pictures include views of Istanbul and scenes read as resembling Amasya and the army before Vienna; the sources do not treat these readings as certain and say only that they are "thought" so.

Bedesten and Taşhan. Although the builder and date of the bedesten in the Gazimahbup quarter are not known with certainty, its architecture points to the seventeenth century. The rectangular building has projecting cut-stone doors on its four sides and, inside, a nine-domed section carried by piers joined with pointed arches; shops line the spaces between the doors, and an arasta bazaar surrounds the bedesten. The General Directorate of Foundations restored the bedesten in 2006 close to its original form. The neighbouring Taşhan also has no inscription. The two-storey khan, with arcades and a courtyard, is built of cut stone and brick, and two fountains were set in front of the northern arcades. Since its restoration it has been used as a hotel. The Kara Mustafa Pasha Bath was built in 1678; its L-shaped plan holds a cold room and a hot room with an octagonal central dome.

The Çelebi Sultan Mehmed Madrasa

The Çelebi Sultan Mehmed (Sultaniye) Madrasa in the Camicedit quarter is one of Merzifon's most valuable historic buildings. According to the records it was built in 1414 by Çelebi Mehmed, with the name Ebubekir Mehmed bin Hamza appearing in the endowment deed; the TDV also gives the date 817 (1414). The madrasa of the ruler who emerged from the chaos of the Interregnum and put the Ottoman state back together follows the plan of Seljuk madrasas: a square plan, four iwans, an open courtyard.

The monumental crown portal in the east is decorated with courses of red and white cut stone and with marble; above the door is a one-line inscription in three sections. The ceiling is ornamented with eight-pointed stars. The original of the carved wooden door, counted among the finest examples of its type, is displayed in the Ankara Ethnography Museum. In the courtyard of this rubble-stone and brick building classrooms line three sides; the main classrooms with iwans are covered by domes, a vaulted arcade extends on either side of the iwans, and red-and-white stone is used in all the arches. The cylindrical brick clock tower above the entrance is attributed by one source to Ziya Pasha, governor of Amasya, in 1865, and by the TDV to Ziya Pasha, the mutasarrıf, in 1866. In the cylindrical part of the tower, which resembles a minaret, there are three rings, above them a walkway recalling a minaret balcony, higher up the dials facing four directions, and a second storey holding the bell. So that the bell's sound carries easily, small round-arched windows have been opened on the four sides of this storey. The first professor (müderris) is reported to have been Ferîdüddîn-i Dîvânî.

The American College

The American College (Anatolia College) is among the institutions that made Merzifon's name known. Its founding date is given differently in the sources. According to one account, the theological school that American Board missionaries had opened at Bebek in Istanbul was moved to Merzifon in the early 1860s, and in 1886, under Charles Tracy as president, a four-year college programme for adults began under the name Anatolia College; the students were mainly Greek and Armenian, and the girls' school opened in 1893. The TDV, for its part, gives 1876 as the first founding date of the campus, comprising hospital, school, library, laboratory and observatory and standing on the highest point in the north of the town. No source has been found that settles these differences with a definite document.

According to some sources there were 425 students in 1913-14, and among more than forty New England-style buildings there stood an orphanage for 2,000 and one of the largest hospitals in Asia Minor. In 1920 there were 218 students, a girls' school of nearly the same size, and, besides the main school, a school for deaf children. The Hospital Building (Science College) and the Girls' School are today stops on the Merzifon Municipality's Culture Route.

The college's history also contains contested pages. The TDV describes the Pontic movement of the Greeks organized within the college at the beginning of the twentieth century; beginning as clubs, the organization took the name Pontus Society in 1904 and spread over an area covering Amasya, Samsun, Ordu, Giresun, Gümüşhane and Trabzon. A study published in the Atatürk Research Center Journal writes that a search of the college during the War of Independence turned up papers in keeping with the Pontus aim, and that as a result activities other than the girls' school were stopped. Western sources, for their part, state that in the 1915 deportation of the Armenian community of Merzifon the college's Armenian teachers and students were seized and that the president of the time, George White, described this to the New York Times in 1917; that several former teachers and students tried by the Amasya courts in 1921 were executed is likewise recorded in the same sources. These accounts rest on very different viewpoints and should be read keeping their sources apart.

The college reopened in Thessaloniki in 1924 with Venizelos's support and still operates there today. On the Merzifon campus, the Merzifon American Girls' Life School was founded on 8 January 1924; it closed in 1938 for economic reasons. Although the People's House wanted to buy it as a boarding school, the Ministry of Education could not find the money, and the Ministry of National Defence took the buildings and turned them into barracks. Some sources report that a Non-Commissioned Officers' Preparatory School was housed here between 1941 and 1962 and that the buildings passed to the municipality after 1962. The exact year of the purchase could not be verified.

Aviation in Merzifon

Aviation activities in Merzifon began in 1935-1936. According to Serap Taşdemir's article in the journal Belgi, while the Air Gunnery School moved to Adana in 1943, the 4th Air Gunnery Regiment, which had been at Çorlu until 1941, came to Merzifon in 1942 and in 1951 took the name 4th Air Base Command. By orders of the General Staff dated 1 November 1961 and of the Air Force Command dated 14 November 1961, the 5th Air Base Command was established; the 5th Main Jet Base, responsible for the air defence of the Black Sea region, is known under this roof. On 16 November 1986 the base was opened to civil air traffic as well, by a protocol signed between the General Staff and the Ministry of Transport. Amasya-Merzifon Airport is recorded as opening to domestic civil traffic in 2008; it lies about 5 km from the town. The two dates do not conflict: civil use was permitted in 1986, and domestic passenger service began in 2008.

Merzifon in the War of Independence

According to the common account of the sources, the British occupied Merzifon on 15 March 1919. At a large rally held in the town on 16 June 1919 the occupation of İzmir was protested; Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who was in Amasya at the time, reported the rally to the Ministry of War by telegram. On Mustafa Kemal's instructions the Merzifon Association for the Defence of Rights was founded under the chairmanship of Mufti Vehbi Efendi; mayor Hacı Ömer, the lawyer Sadık Bey, Ganizade Hacı Hafız, municipal doctor Hakkı and Rıza Efendi of Siryal are named among its members. British forces left the town on 27 September 1919. The TDV gives the date of withdrawal as 28 September; the one-day difference has to be left as a disagreement between the sources.

The TDV writes that even after the withdrawal most of the incidents that broke out until the end of 1920 were organized by Greek bands, and that the local Muslim population organized and neutralized these activities. It is also said that the region's security problems were one of the reasons behind Mustafa Kemal's move from Samsun to Havza; this claim could not be verified from an independent source. The detailed account is in a separate article on the site.

Saints and Scholars

In Merzifon's spiritual history Pîrî Baba holds a place of his own. According to the legend he was a dervish who came to Anatolia with the permission of Ahmed Yesevî; the TDV estimates that in reality he lived in the second half of the fifteenth century. Information about his life rests on Hoca İbrâhim's Menâkıb-ı Pîrî Baba and on Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatnâme. Hoca İbrâhim says that he himself had built the Pîrî Baba Zawiya mentioned in the survey register of 1520. According to the Menâkıbnâme, he was from the village of Narince; at seven or eight he was apprenticed to a cobbler in Merzifon, performed the noon prayers in the Kaaba, and when his master asked for water brought it from Zamzam. Because he lived in the furnace room of the bath, which was opened at separate hours for men and women, he drew the objection of Merzifon's ulema and was denounced to the sultan. In the Menâkıbnâme the sultan is Mehmed the Conqueror, in Evliya Çelebi it is Murad II; in both accounts the ruler, seeing the miracles, calms down, and Pîrî Baba gives him the glad tidings of a conquest. Evliya reports that 366 villages and the town of Merzifon were endowed to the lodge. The TDV notes that this motif can be read as a reaction to Mehmed the Conqueror's unfavourable policy toward dervishes, and also that the legend points to the fact that Pîrî Baba, because of his kalenderî temperament, was not much liked by the ulema.

The date of Pîrî Baba's death is unknown. From the registers it appears that the lodge was under the sheikhship of Şahkulu Baba b. Bâyezîd in 1520 and again in 1574-75. In 1647 Evliya Çelebi describes the Pîrî Baba Zawiya as a Bektashi lodge; according to Suraiya Faroqhi the lodge was in Bektashi hands in the seventeenth century, but it is hard to say that it was founded as a Bektashi lodge. Evliya writes that many visitors came to the bath and the lodge, and that the sick who bathed in the bath were believed to be healed. His tomb is in the Tekke quarter; it has been repaired several times, most recently in 1977 by the General Directorate of Foundations.

Merzifonlu Sheikh Abdürrahîm-i Rûmî (fifteenth century) was, according to the TDV, the son of a man known as Sarı Dânişmend. After his first schooling in his hometown he went to Egypt, attached himself to Zeynüddin el-Hâfî, founder of the Zeyniyye branch of the Suhrawardiyya, went with his sheikh to Khorasan, and on his orders returned to Anatolia and settled in Merzifon. The text of the licence (icazetname) that Zeynüddin el-Hâfî gave him is in the Nefehât Tercümesi and is dated 832. Using the pen name Rûmî in his poems, the sheikh became known for the couplet "Tövbe yâ rabbi hatâ râhına gittiklerime / Bilip ettiklerime bilmeyip ettiklerime". He probably died in 850 (1446). Of his four works only the Işknâme has come down to us. His tomb is shown on the Merzifon Culture Route. Among mystics whose tombs still stand the TDV also lists Kılıç Baba, İsmâil Dede, Topçu Baba, Pehlivan Dede, Fevzi Baba, Fîruz Dede and Dâvud Dede, and as nineteenth-century poets Hilmi Dede, Hıfzî, Eyüb Sabri and Muallim Cûdî Efendi.

It is related that Ferîdüddîn-i Dîvânî, Seydî Şemseddin Ahmed-i Kırîmî and Nizâmeddin Abdurrahman-ı Âftâbî, who taught at the Çelebi Sultan Mehmed Madrasa, made the town a centre of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the details of these three names could not be verified in an independent source.

The Plain's Economy and Cuisine

Agriculture holds an important place in the district's economy. Wheat, sugar beet, barley, sunflower, lentils, vine and garden produce, cherries and apples are the main crops. The TDV writes that the private sector runs small and medium-sized factories in weaving and food processing. The Organized Industrial Zone launched in 1987 has in recent years developed considerably and given the town the look of an industrial city.

The emblem of the cuisine is Merzifon Keşkek. It was registered as a designation of origin by the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office on 30 December 2014; the application was made by the Merzifon Municipality on 6 December 2011. According to the registration, keşkek is served on holiday mornings, at weddings and to special guests. It is cooked for about twelve hours over a wood fire in stone pots with beef, chickpeas and whole wheat grains of the type used for ashure, beaten in the pot with a wooden ladle until it reaches a porridge consistency, topped with a buttered tomato-paste sauce and served hot.

Visiting Merzifon

  • Getting there: Merzifon is about 45-49 km from central Amasya; the highway lies on the main route linking Istanbul and Ankara to Samsun. The airport is about 5 km from the town.
  • Merzifon Culture Route: The Merzifon Municipality's Culture Route map lists 24 stops. They include the Clock Tower, the Kara Mustafa Pasha Mosque, the Bedesten, the Priest's House (Papazın Evi), the Asım Bey Mansion, the Painter Sami Baydar Culture House, the Alaca Minare Mosque, the Pasha Bath, the Ulukuşlar Mansion, the Basmacı Mansion, the Tomb of Pîrî Baba, the Hospital Building and Girls' School of the American College, the Taşhan, the Tomb of Sheikh Abdürrahim Rumi, the Armenian Protestant Church and the Sultaniye Madrasa.
  • Buildings in the centre: The Kara Mustafa Pasha Mosque, the Bedesten and the Taşhan stand together around Gazimahbup and can be seen on foot.
  • Other buildings: The Alaca Minare Mosque (906/1501), the Sofular Mosque (sixteenth century), the Tomb of Abdullah Pasha (sixteenth century) and the Tuzpazarı Bath (1087/1676) are the centre's other historic buildings.
  • Opening hours: The mosque is open for worship; visiting hours and fees for the madrasa and the Culture Route stops can change and should be checked with the Merzifon Municipality or the District Governorate.
  • Surroundings: Merzifon can be combined in a one-day programme with Harşena Castle and the Rock Tombs of the Kings in central Amasya.

Sources

Academic studies

  • Mehmet Öz, "Merzifon", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, c. 29, Ankara 2004, s. 243-245 (islamansiklopedisi.org.tr). islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Sultan Murat Topçu, "Kara Mustafa Paşa'nın Merzifon'daki İmar Faaliyetleri", TÜRKAV Kamu Yönetimi Enstitüsü Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2/2 (2022), DergiPark.
  • Study on Merzifon in the Single-Party Period, Atatürk Araştırma Merkezi Dergisi (atamdergi.gov.tr).

Official sources

  • Republic of Türkiye Amasya Governorship, "Merzifon" (amasya.gov.tr). amasya.gov.tr
  • Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, "Merzifon" (amasya.ktb.gov.tr).
  • Türkiye Kültür Portalı, pages on the Çelebi Mehmet Madrasa, Merzifon Bedesten, Merzifon Taşhan, Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa Mosque, Kara Mustafa Paşa Bath and Merzifon Keşkeği (kulturportali.gov.tr). kulturportali.gov.tr
  • Merzifon Municipality, Merzifon Culture Route Map (merzifon.bel.tr).

Other sources

  • Abdülkadir Özcan, "Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, c. 29, Ankara 2004, s. 246-249. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Pîrî Baba" and "Abdürrahîm-i Rûmî" entries, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Turkish Patent and Trademark Institute, Geographical Indications Portal, "Merzifon Keşkeği".
  • Serap Taşdemir, "Türk Havacılık Tarihinde Merzifon", Belgi, S. 29 (Kış 2025/I), 217-238.
  • Türkiye Turizm Ansiklopedisi, "Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa Camii" (turkiyeturizmansiklopedisi.com).
  • Suraiya Faroqhi, "The Life Story of an Urban Saint in the Ottoman Empire: Piri Baba of Merzifon", Turcica, 32 (1979), s. 653-678.
  • Wikipedia, "Merzifon", "Anatolia College in Merzifon" and "Anatolia College" entries (auxiliary source).

Online sources