Merzifon lies on the southern foothills of Mount Taşan (Tavşan), about 750 metres above sea level, at the edge of the plain that bears its name. The mountain rises to 1,905 metres to the north, and the plain, watered by the Tersakan Stream and its tributaries, which joins the Yeşilırmak near Amasya, is the main agricultural area of the region. Hüsameddin describes the town as standing "on a most pleasant hill, gently sloping towards the level ground, on the southern skirts of Mount Taşan"; it was ringed with vineyards, and before it stretched an open plain known as Yedikır. This geography gave the town fertile land, and its position on the road linking Istanbul and Ankara to the port of Samsun made it a market and a place of lodging. The abundance of the plain did not by itself solve the drinking-water problem of a settlement on a slope, and the town suffered badly from it in the second half of the seventeenth century. The man who largely resolved the problem, and who established the water system whose traces can still be followed today, was the grand vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha, a son of Merzifon; yet the town's baths, ablution fountains and neighbourhood fountains existed long before his endowment.
Water and Charity in the Ottoman City
In Ottoman cities, bringing water in and distributing it to the public through fountains ranked first among charitable works. Building a fountain tied the founder's name to a neighbourhood, and the income secured by the endowment deed kept the water flowing. The care of the water channel, the distribution chamber (maksem) and the fountain was an endowment matter in its own right, which is why large complexes often brought their own water networks with them. The story of Merzifon's water structures is likewise bound up with the story of two great pious endowments (waqfs), the Endowment of Sultan Mehmed I (Çelebi Mehmed) and the Endowment of Kara Mustafa Pasha. The first owned the land beneath the market and the old baths of the town; the second brought water down from the mountain in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and in doing so had to cross the land of the first.
Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar, listing in his Amasya Tarihi those who built charitable works in Merzifon, often mentions a fountain alongside a school and a small mosque. According to him, in 1018 (1609-10) Osman Bey, one of the emirs, built a school, a fountain and a masjid in the Âdil quarter. In the same quarter stood the lodge founded in 1035 (1625-26) by the Naqshbandi sheikh Sırrî Ali Efendi, known among the people as the Sırrı Baba Tekke. Hüsameddin also writes that Kara Mütesellim Hüseyin Ağa and another deputy governor, Hacı Süleyman Ağa, each built a fountain and a school. In the biographical part of his work he introduces separately Hacı Süleyman Ağa, nicknamed Kara Müslim: a son of Ali Ağa of Merzifon, Süleyman Ağa had been sword-bearer to another Kara Mustafa Pasha of Merzifon, a namesake of the grand vizier, who was killed in 1148 while governor of Trabzon; after his master's death he returned to Merzifon, served for a long time as revenue-farm superintendent and voyvoda of Merzifon and several times as deputy governor of Samsun, and died around 1178. Hüsameddin says of him that "he built a fountain there"; the context suggests the fountain was in Merzifon, but its site is not given. These are brief records of charitable giving at the level of the neighbourhood, and none of these fountains can now be matched with a surviving structure.
Before the Pasha: the Old Bath and the Endowment of Mehmed I
The first great wave of building in Ottoman Merzifon is linked to the years when Mehmed I (Çelebi Mehmed) was in Amasya as prince and then as ruler. According to Hüsameddin, Çelebi Mehmed visited the town, built a palace there, and in 818 (1415-16) had a madrasa and a bath built, setting up endowments for them. Some sources give the construction date of the madrasa as 817 (1414). His mother Devlet Hatun built a mosque, a lodge and a soup kitchen in the İmaret quarter in 822 (1419), and in 830 (1427) Murad II added a mosque and a bath. Hüsameddin also records that in 878 (1473) "a fine bath" was built in the name of Mehmed II (the Conqueror). By the middle of the fifteenth century, therefore, the town had more than one bath attached to imperial endowments. The water needs of these baths suggest that spring water was already being brought regularly into Merzifon in that century; but we have no record of where this first network drew its water.
One of these baths lived on for a long time in the town's memory under the name "Old Bath". When Evliya Çelebi came to Merzifon in Muharram 1058 (February 1648), he described the double bath belonging to the Endowment of Mehmed I as the famous bath that everyone frequented, and noted that the water coming from Mount Daşan (Tavşan) was of the greatest importance to the town. The sources differ on whose bath this was: the list of monuments of Merzifon attributes the Double Bath in the Hacı Süleyman quarter to Murad I, while Evliya Çelebi ties it to the Endowment of Mehmed I. Hüsameddin's record of a bath built in 818 appears to support Evliya's statement, but it is not certain that the two records describe the same building. That the Old Bath was a landmark of the market in the seventeenth century is clear from the sale documents as well: a one-room bakery "beside the Old Bath", sold in July 1672 by Hatice Hatun of the Hoca Süleyman quarter, was at 300 kuruş the most expensive of the shops in Merzifon whose prices are known from those years.
Water structures had also left their mark on the town's place-names. The list of quarters dated 926 (1520) includes a quarter called Şatırvan, and the mosque attributed to Tâceddin İbrahim Pasha, built probably in 828 (1425), is known among the people as the Çukur Şadırvan Mosque, the "mosque of the sunken fountain". In 926 (1520) the town had thirty-four quarters in all, twenty-eight Muslim and six non-Muslim, with 1,025 households and an estimated population of 5,000-6,000. At the end of the sixteenth century, with 1,783 adult males, the figure stayed roughly the same; the extraordinary-tax survey of the mid-seventeenth century recorded twenty-eight quarters and 925 households. Compared with the survey registers, the forty-four quarters, four thousand houses and six hundred shops given by Evliya Çelebi prove to be exaggerated. His account that most of the shops belonged to dyers, and that merchants bound for the Crimea carried away Merzifon's brightly coloured cotton cloth, is nonetheless worth noting despite its exaggeration. The prevalence of a craft as dependent on water as dyeing suggests that the town's need for water was not limited to drinking water. In a market town of a few thousand people, the water consumed each day by baths, inns, madrasas, dye-works and neighbourhood mosques had to be supplied through a regular network.
Kara Mustafa Pasha and the Rebuilding of Merzifon
Kara Mustafa Pasha was born in 1044 (1634-35) in the village of Marınca (today Karamustafapaşa) near Merzifon. His father, the timar-holding cavalryman Oruç Bey, fell at Murad IV's siege of Baghdad, leaving him an orphan at the age of four; in later years he entered the patronage of Köprülü Mehmed Pasha and rose to the grand vizierate. The Pasha, who in endowment documents calls Merzifon his "original homeland", began work in his native town in the mid-1660s, while he was still deputy grand vizier in Edirne. His first endowment deed is dated 20 January 1666; with it he built a mosque in Marınca in the name of his mother Âbide Hatun and attached to the endowment the bedesten of one hundred and seventeen rooms in the Merzifon market. Hüsameddin likewise writes that the Pasha first enlarged the masjid his mother had built in Marınca into a mosque and school, and then turned to the complex in the centre of the town.
Ramazan Pantık's study, based on the endowment registers, makes it possible to follow the legal and financial preparation of this building programme step by step. In 1664 the Pasha sent his steward Ali Ağa bin Abdurrahman to Merzifon as his agent. The market was chosen as the best site for the bedesten, but the shops there stood on land belonging to the Endowment of Mehmed I, and their owners paid ground rent to it. Since altering the land of an imperial endowment lay beyond the authority of the local judge and trustee, the Pasha obtained permission through a decree sent from Edirne to the judge of Merzifon, and in November 1664 bought forty-five shops from thirty-five people living in nineteen different quarters. In 1671 he exchanged his new inn in the market for the ruined inn of the Endowment of Mehmed I, then bought the surrounding shops and built the present Taşhan. According to Pantık, Merzifon underwent its greatest transformation of the Ottoman period between 1664 and 1680, and the town's market was entirely changed within fifteen years.
According to the inscription over the mosque door, construction of the core of the complex, the mosque, library, primary school, shops, inn and bedesten, began in 1077 (1666-67), and according to the reading of the inscription over the door of the Pasha Bath in the architectural study, the whole work was completed in 1090 (1679); the date of the bath itself, however, is disputed. The great endowment deed covering all these buildings is dated 23 Safer 1089 (16 April 1678) and is kept in the Archive of the General Directorate of Foundations. The deed sets out in detail the list of staff, their qualifications and wages, the sums to be paid to the trustees and the physical state of the complex; besides Merzifon, it records endowed buildings in Istanbul, Kayseri, Edirne, Kamaniçe, Çorum, Tokat, İzmir, Aleppo and Jeddah. The water needs of this group of buildings, set on sloping ground, and of its baths and ablution fountain could be met only by water brought down from the mountain. That the Pasha also built fountains, water and sewage channels and distribution chambers in Edirne, İzmir, Istanbul and in İncesu near Kayseri shows that the work in Merzifon was part of his general approach to building.
The Water from Mount Taşan
The Decree of 1675 and the Sofular Distribution Chamber
The document that shows most clearly how the water channel was established is a decree dated 27 August 1675, addressed from Edirne to the judge of Merzifon and the trustee of the Endowment of Mehmed I. Behind the decree lies a letter of permission issued by Yusuf Ağa, Chief Black Eunuch, in his capacity as overseer of the Endowment of Mehmed I. According to the document, fourteen quarters of Merzifon had no fountain at all, and the town was suffering an extremely severe shortage of water. The Pasha wished to collect the water he would bring by channels from Mount Tavşan first in a distribution chamber 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 would build, to the complex, to the bath and to the inn. Because part of the water channels crossed empty fields belonging to the Endowment of Mehmed I, a dispute arose; Yusuf Ağa permitted water channels and distribution works to pass through these fields, and the decree communicated this permission to the court of Merzifon.
The layout of the network thus becomes clear: the water, carried from the mountain spring through underground channels, reached the distribution centre in the Sofular quarter, where it was divided into branches and distributed to the quarters, to the complex and to the endowment's commercial buildings. Relying on Murat Çerkez's doctoral thesis on the Turkish-period architecture of Merzifon, Pantık states that this distribution chamber still stands, abandoned, in the Sofular quarter. The fourteen fountains named in the decree reflect the planning stage of the network in 1675. No document has been found that explains the difference between this figure and the "some thirty" fountains given by Hüsameddin and other sources; that the number of fountains grew in later years is a reasonable possibility, but it remains an inference.
Channels, Cisterns and Thirty Fountains
Hüsameddin recounts the same event among the works of the year 1090. According to him, the Pasha built a solid masonry mosque in the middle of the town, with a timekeeper's room, library, lecture hall and ablution fountain before it; he constructed channels "over a distance of two kilometres" from Mount Taşan, bringing water to the town, built some thirty masonry fountains, and "truly revived the town". What Hüsameddin calls a "lağım" is an underground channel carrying water to the town by gravity. The encyclopaedic study of the complex likewise says that the Pasha brought water by channels from Mount Tavşan to relieve the town's extremely severe water shortage and distributed it to the quarters through some thirty fountains; its mention of cisterns and distribution chambers alongside the channels shows that the network was built on the familiar Ottoman pattern, in which the water passed reservoirs along its course and branched off from them. Another article examining the Pasha's building activity in Merzifon notes that many fountains were built along the route of this water channel.
In the course of the same building campaign the town's sewage problem was also addressed, and sewage systems centred on the complex and covering the whole town were built; these systems are reported to have remained in use until recent times. The Pasha's work in Merzifon was in this sense the creation of an urban infrastructure, bringing in clean water and carrying away used water. The income of the bedesten, the inn and the baths also depended on this infrastructure. Researchers who have written the history of Merzifon accept as a settled fact that the buildings of the complex and the water channels included in the Pasha's endowments brought important changes to the social and economic life of the town.
Details of the route of the water channel and of the individual sites of the fountains are thin in the sources available to us. Most of the Pasha's fountains have not survived, whereas his other buildings remain standing. The channels are reported to have been in use until recently, while the cisterns, distribution chambers and fountains are today abandoned. "Some thirty" is an approximate figure in every source; no document listing the fountains one by one has been reproduced in published studies.
The Waters of the Complex: Ablution Fountain, Fountain and Baths
Because the complex was built on sloping ground, a high retaining wall was raised along a north-south line to the east of the mosque, and the mosque was set with its courtyard on this terrace; the inn and the bedesten lie below the terrace, on the level ground. There is no enclosing wall surrounding the buildings, but their closeness to one another and the shops placed facing each other along their outer façades form an open-air arcade. According to the endowment deed there should be forty shops around the mosque, but twenty-eight stand today. The same yellowish cut stone was used in all the works Kara Mustafa Pasha built in Merzifon. The levels and distribution plan of the network, however, are not given in the sources.
The Courtyard Ablution Fountain
North of the mosque, in the exact centre of the courtyard entered through low-arched gates on the east, west and north, stands a sixteen-sided marble ablution fountain. It is covered on the inside by a dome of lath-and-plaster (bağdadi) construction and on the outside by a pointed pyramidal cap. The paintings and ornament decorating the inside of the dome bear the signature of Master Emin of Zile. The master also worked on the decoration inside the mosque and on many buildings in the Amasya and Tokat region. The date of the paintings is given differently in the sources: the architectural study of the complex reads the date 1292 (1875), while a news report published in 2026 places the work in 1865. The paintings depict chiefly views of Istanbul and Anatolia. One scene shows the Galata and Beyazıt towers, the Golden Horn and the Galata bridges, the Sultanahmet, Hagia Sophia and Süleymaniye mosques and the Column of Constantine; an illuminated message (mahya) hung on a mosque's minaret recalls Ramadan. A second scene, thought to represent Amasya, shows the castle, the water wheels on the Yeşilırmak and buildings resembling the Bayezid II Mosque; a third depicts the siege of Vienna by the army under Kara Mustafa Pasha's command. Thus the dome of the structure that distributed the water also portrays the heaviest defeat of the vizier who had brought it.
The corner of the primary school facing the courtyard was rounded to harmonise with the ablution fountain. At the south-eastern corner of the mosque stands a fountain bearing one of the three inscriptions associated with the repairs. The twin plane trees in the courtyard, said in local tradition to be as old as the mosque, are regarded by the congregation as part of this place.
The Pasha Bath and the Tuzpazarı Bath
The baths of the complex also ran on the water of the same endowment. The Pasha Bath, built against the old town walls in the Hacı Bâlî quarter, lies north of the complex and at a considerable distance from its buildings; Pantık gives the distance as about 400 metres. Because it adjoins the wall, the hot room and furnace were shifted to the west, giving the plan an "L" shape. The changing hall is covered by a dome on squinches 11 metres in diameter. It has been suggested that the broad, high platforms in the cool and warm rooms indicate that felt was made in the bath.
The sources differ on the date of the bath. The architectural study reads the date 1090 (1679) in the two-line inscription over the door and takes it as the year the complex was completed. Pantık, on the other hand, gives the same inscription as 1092 (1681) and supports this date with archival documents: the endowment deed of 1678 mentions no bath in Merzifon. According to a decree dated 1 August 1680, the judge of Merzifon, the trustee of the Endowment of Mehmed I and the townspeople reported that the two baths belonging to the Endowment of Mehmed I were not sufficient for the town's needs, whereupon the Pasha was permitted to build a bath at his own expense on endowment land. Pantık regards this decree as the last record the Pasha had drawn up concerning Merzifon and considers the bath thus permitted to be the Pasha Bath. In that case the bath must have been completed shortly before the Pasha's execution in 1683.
There is no document concerning the Tuzpazarı Bath, about 100 metres south of the complex. The researchers who made the architectural study suggest that it too belonged to the Kara Mustafa Pasha Endowment and was built in 1087 (1676); its materials, technique and plan resemble those of the Pasha Bath. Pantık proposes a different explanation. The endowment's account books mention two baths in Merzifon, the "old bath" (hamam-ı atîk) and the "new bath" (hamam-ı cedîd). According to a document of 1733, the Pasha's son Maktulzâde Ali Pasha, while trustee of the endowment (1689-1722), used 65,100 kuruş borrowed from the endowment to build an inn, a bath, shops, vineyards and gardens in Merzifon as sources of income for it, and a farm in Marınca, his grandmother's village. In Pantık's view the Tuzpazarı Bath, referred to as the "new bath", is this later bath. Both views are datings proposed for a building without an inscription. The bath's water is still supplied today by the Kara Mustafa Pasha Endowment.
The Taşhan and Its Fountains
The Taşhan forms the commercial wing of the complex and is treated in detail in a separate article; only its connection with water is noted here. Two fountains built just in front of the arcades on the north side of the inn add a particular grace to the inner courtyard. In the north-western corner are rooms for ritual ablution and latrines, and on the third floor of the northern section a masjid; these set the building apart from other inns. The number of storeys is given differently in the sources: some descriptions show the inn as two-storeyed, while architectural studies write that the use of a third storey was tried here for the first time in Ottoman inn architecture. According to Pantık's dating, based on sale documents, the inn must have been built between 1672 and 1673; the old inn standing on the site at the time of the exchange in 1671 had fifteen rooms, while the Pasha's new inn reached sixty-two. The courtyard fountains and ablution rooms of a lodging building of this size show that a branch of the water from Mount Taşan was led directly to the inn; the explicit statement in the decree of 1675 that water would also be given to the inn confirms this.
Endowment Water and Disputes
Running the water through an endowment created problems of its own. Zafer Karademir's study, based on the Sivas Registers of Decrees from the mid-eighteenth century, notes that the mosques, baths and fountains attached to endowments in the province of Rum depended on an uninterrupted supply of clean water, and that the mosque, bath and fountains of the Endowment of Grand Vizier Mustafa Pasha in Merzifon ran on water fed from a single source. Relying on a single source made any interference with that water all the more serious. A decree of June 1744 records that Ali, the deputy trustee of the endowment, had diverted the course of water that counted as a charitable work and tried to sell it to certain people, so that those who benefited from the endowment suffered a shortage of water. According to another record, dated January 1752, the water channels of the fountain endowments in Merzifon and Çorum had not been repaired, so that water had stopped running from some of the fountains. These two records show that the system the Pasha established required continual maintenance and supervision after the endowment deed, and that some sixty years after his death the network faced problems of this kind.
The same registers also reflect other uses of water around Merzifon. In the village of Rumcuk a spring turned the mill of three partners by day, while the villagers used the same water by night. In June 1753 the people of Merzifon claimed rights at a place where the villagers of Çobanviran, attached to Kedeğra, and of Kemeriz, attached to Havza, used the unowned water that came down from the mountain in the rainy season; failing to agree, they went to court. Karademir notes that 14 of the 66 records examined (21 per cent) concern the water problems of Amasya and Merzifon; this proportion shows that the water disputes of these two settlements were recorded more often than those of other places. The same study also highlights the efforts made by endowments in Sivas and Merzifon to keep their fountain services from failing.
The Water Channels in the Later Centuries of the Endowment
The account books of the Kara Mustafa Pasha Endowment show that the water channels of Merzifon remained among the endowment's items of expenditure in the nineteenth century as well. The endowment's revenues from Merzifon could not always be collected regularly: among the arrears that could not be collected in 1774 were 310,920 akçe due from Merzifon. In 1809 most of the repair expenditure of 20,569.5 kuruş, which made up more than half of the endowment's current spending, went to the Hocapaşa Inn in Istanbul and its fountains, while the rest was spent on repairing the Karaköy Mosque, the Yedikule water channels, the Cezayirli Inn in İzmir and the water channels of Merzifon. The years 1831-32 saw the largest budget deficit in the endowment's history; in these years 15,905.5 kuruş of the money set aside for repairs was spent on repairs in Merzifon. To close the deficit, the endowment converted its two baths and an inn in Merzifon to icâreteyn, that is, it let them for long-term use in return for a lump sum paid in advance and a small annual rent.
From 1832 the administration of the endowment passed to the Ministry of Imperial Endowments. Because under the new arrangement repairs outside Istanbul were carried out by the local endowment directorates and these records were not entered in the main accounts, the subsequent maintenance of the Merzifon water channels cannot be followed in the endowment's own books. There are, however, other records of the town's general condition in these years. In the profit-tax survey of the 1840s the town had thirteen quarters and 929 taxpaying households; a large part of the population still worked in weaving and related trades. According to Hüsameddin, when the government house and the centre of the town burned in the disturbances of 1311 (1893-94), the notables and the people contributed to the building not only of the government house but also of a municipal office, barracks, a new bath, a hotel, a coffee house and shops, the income of the bath and the other buildings being assigned to education. This record shows that water and bathing structures were still part of the town's renewal in Merzifon at the end of the nineteenth century.
The Present Day
The mosque, Taşhan and bedesten of the Kara Mustafa Pasha Complex have survived largely with their original features; the late-comers' portico, ablution fountain, timekeeper's room, primary school and Pasha Bath, on the other hand, have lost much of their character through repairs. Among the congregation it is said that Master Emin's paintings in the dome of the ablution fountain are preserved as they were first made. The channels from the mountain, the cisterns and distribution chambers, and many fountains are abandoned today; the remains of the distribution chamber in the Sofular quarter are among them. The Pasha Bath and the Tuzpazarı Bath are still in operation. That Merzifon is known for its historic mosques, bedesten, inns, baths, tombs and historic fountains shows that this heritage holds a place in the town's identity. An inventory of the fountains one by one and the route of the water channel from the mountain to the distribution chambers, however, remain a blank in the sources; comparing the fourteen fountains of the 1675 decree and the some thirty masonry fountains mentioned by Hüsameddin with the traces on the ground could fill this gap.
Chronology
818 (1415-16): According to Hüsameddin, Mehmed I (Çelebi Mehmed) builds a madrasa and a bath in Merzifon.
830 (1427): Murad II is recorded as building a mosque and a bath.
878 (1473): A bath is built in the name of Mehmed II (the Conqueror).
1018 (1609-10): Osman Bey is recorded as building a school, a fountain and a masjid in the Âdil quarter.
February 1648: Evliya Çelebi comes to Merzifon; he mentions the double bath of the Endowment of Mehmed I and the water from Mount Daşan.
November 1664: Forty-five shops on land of the Endowment of Mehmed I in the Merzifon market are bought on behalf of Kara Mustafa Pasha.
20 January 1666: The Pasha's first endowment deed concerning Merzifon is drawn up.
1077 (1666-67): Construction of the Kara Mustafa Pasha Complex begins, according to the mosque inscription.
13 June 1671: The Pasha's new inn is exchanged for the ruined inn of the Endowment of Mehmed I.
27 August 1675: A decree permits the water channels to pass through fields of the Endowment of Mehmed I; it records that fourteen quarters of Merzifon have no fountain.
1087 (1676): The Tuzpazarı Bath is suggested to have been built in this year.
16 April 1678: The great endowment deed of the complex is drawn up.
1090 (1679): The reading of the Pasha Bath inscription in the architectural study; Hüsameddin assigns the bringing of water from Mount Taşan and the some thirty fountains to this year.
1 August 1680: A decree permits the Pasha to build a bath in Merzifon.
1092 (1681): The date of the Pasha Bath inscription as read by Pantık.
1689-1722: The period in which the trustee Ali Pasha builds an inn, a bath and shops in Merzifon.
June 1744: The deputy trustee's diversion of the endowment's water becomes the subject of a complaint.
January 1752: It is recorded that water no longer runs from some fountains of the fountain endowments of Merzifon and Çorum.
1809: The endowment spends money on repairing the Merzifon water channels.
1831-32: 15,905.5 kuruş is spent on repairs in Merzifon; two baths and an inn are converted to icâreteyn.
1292 (1875): The date read in the architectural study for the dome paintings of the Pasha Mosque's ablution fountain; a news source places the paintings in 1865.
1311 (1893-94): After a fire, a new bath is built whose income is assigned to education.
Bibliography
Primary sources
- Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar, Amasya Tarihi, vols. 1-4, pp. 205-207 (Merzifon district); vols. 9-12, p. 304 (Kara Müslim Hacı Süleyman Ağa).
Academic studies
- Ramazan Pantık, Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa Vakıfları: Yönetimi, Kentsel Gelişime Katkıları ve İktisadi Yapısı, doctoral thesis, Hacettepe University Graduate School of Social Sciences, Ankara 2021, pp. 43-44, 119-132, 402-404. openaccess.hacettepe.edu.tr
- "Kara Mustafa Paşa'nın Merzifon'daki İmar Faaliyetleri", TÜRKAV Kamu Yönetimi Enstitüsü Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi. dergipark.org.tr
- Zafer Karademir, "Osmanlı Sosyo-Ekonomik Yaşamında Su: 18. Yüzyıl Eyalet-i Rum Örneği", Tarih İncelemeleri Dergisi, XXIX/1, 2014, pp. 189-211.
Official sources
- Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism / Kültür Portalı, "Merzifon Taşhan". kulturportali.gov.tr
- Amasya Governorship, introduction to the district of Merzifon.
Other sources
- Abdülbaki Yeşil, "Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa Külliyesi", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
- Mehmet Öz, "Merzifon", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 29, 2004. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
- "Cami şadırvanında 150 yıllık ayrıntı. Dikkatli bakınca fark ediliyor, ilk günkü gibi korunuyor", NTV (İHA), 21.03.2026.
Online sources
