In an Ottoman city the market was less a stretch of shops set down at random than an order governed by written and unwritten rules. At its centre stood a solidly walled bedesten, around it arastas divided by type of goods, nearby the hans, and between them mosques, baths and fountains. All of these buildings could be tied to a pious endowment (waqf), their revenue set aside for the upkeep of a mosque or madrasa. The market of Amasya is one of the clearest Anatolian examples of this order. Through the centuries the city lay on a route linking Tarsus, Kayseri, Zile and Samsun; in the Ottoman period it grew into a lively marketplace, helped both by the activity that came with its role as a seat of princes and by the silk trade.

The Commercial Life of Amasya

In the sixteenth century Amasya had a dye-house, a candle-house and a mint, and silk weaving was widespread. Because the city lay on the Azerbaijan-Bursa road, it was also an important market for the silks arriving from Iran. In 1554-1555 the amount of silk cloth that entered the city by official channels and was weighed within ten months reached 10,632 lodras, roughly fifteen tons. The figure shows that the market served more than local needs and took its share of transit trade. In the seventeenth century Evliya Çelebi wrote that Amasya had about 1,060 shops and busy, prosperous markets; at the end of the nineteenth century Vital Cuinet counted nearly 2,500 weavers in the city. In 1863 Amasya was chosen among the pilot regions for growing cotton from seed brought from Egypt, and in 1864 a fair was established that ran every year from 15 December to the end of the month.

The size of the city frames this picture. According to the 1520 survey Amasya had 52 neighbourhoods, 48 of them Muslim and 4 non-Muslim, and a population of about eight thousand including palace servants and the military class; a century and a half later Evliya Çelebi counted 48 Muslim and 5 Christian neighbourhoods. Most neighbourhood names derive from a mosque, a small mosque or a sheikh; six are named directly after markets and bazaars. This indicates that trading areas also shaped the neighbourhood layout of the city.

The Layout of the Market and Its Bazaar Areas

In Amasya the core of the market is the bedesten. The bazaar that grew around the bedesten built in 1483 by Hüseyin Ağa, one of Bayezid II's gate aghas, in the Kazancı neighbourhood south of the Helkıs Bridge, was known as the Lower Bazaar (Aşağı Pazar). The buildings that brought life to this district include the Bayram Paşa Han, the Bakırcıoğlu Han, the Menzilci Mirza Han and a bezzâzistan. Later a second marketplace, the Upper Bazaar (Yukarı Pazar), was founded around the Kapan Han. It is reported that at the start of the sixteenth century a bazaar known as İbadullah stood in the Bozahâne neighbourhood, and another called the Kağnı (Kanlı) Bazaar near the Aydın Mescidi and bath in the Devehâne neighbourhood.

This distribution accords with the general rule of the Ottoman city. The heart of trade was the bedesten with the arastas and hans around it; the marketplaces where food and animals were sold on set days of the week were founded close to this core. Depending on its size, the market district also contained a few mosques and baths. It is noted that justice in Amasya was administered in a separate court building, and that the building Evliya Çelebi called the Court Mosque (Mahkeme Camii) was the Burmalı Minare Mosque. Considering this mosque south of the Taşhan and the Kilârî Süleyman Ağa Mosque to its north, one sees that buildings of worship, justice and commerce stood very close to one another.

The Bedesten

The word bedesten is thought to derive from bezzâzistan or bezistan, that is, the place where cloth is sold. As a building type, the bedesten is a masonry, domed market found in large cities, where precious fabrics, weapons, ornamented harnesses and jewellery were bought and sold. Halil İnalcık regards the presence of a bedesten as a sign of international trade in that city; it is also reported that Evliya Çelebi divided cities into those with a bedesten and those without. The general rule is that, outside Istanbul, each city had one bedesten, whereas the number of hans was large. That Amasya had a bedesten suggests that the city ranked above mid-sized towns.

Inside the bedesten were lockable compartments, called chests, cupboards or safes. Merchants and wealthy people brought money, jewellery, and gold and silver objects here and kept them in the compartments they rented. The ledgers of the guilds and the court records were also kept here. The safes had two keys, one held by the guardian of the bedesten and the other by the renter; goods whose owner failed to appear for a long time passed to the state treasury. With its thick walls, iron-clad doors and few, high windows, the bedesten was like the inner fortress of the market. In a setting where wooden shops perished in frequent fires, it was the place where valuables could be kept safe.

The sources do not agree on the plan of the Amasya Bedesten. One account describes the building as resting on two large central piers, with four doors and six domes; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (Encyclopaedia of Islam, Turkey Religious Foundation) describes the original structure as having four piers and nine bays and states that three bays were lost. Set side by side, the two accounts imply that the surviving part today consists of six units. According to its inscription the bedesten was built by Hüseyin Ağa to provide income for his endowments; Hüseyin Ağa had many pious foundations in Amasya, Istanbul and Edirne. Badly damaged in the earthquake of 1668, the building was brought into a worse state by the public works of the poet Ziya Bey (Ziya Paşa), who was governor (mutasarrıf) of Amasya in 1864-1865. The lead was stripped from it, the domes were pulled down, the roof built in their place collapsed after a while, and the building stood open to the sky for a long time; it is also recorded that complaints were made about this undertaking and an investigation was opened. In the 1950s three units were demolished and a commercial building was put up in their place; in 1957 the same was attempted for the remaining part but prevented. The Directorate of Foundations rebuilt the domes of the surviving portion around 1970-1971 and restored the building.

The Hans and the Taşhan

Urban hans were generally two-storey masonry buildings made up of a central courtyard, the arcades surrounding it, and rooms behind the arcades. On the ground floor were stables, storerooms and shops opening outward; on the upper floor, the rooms where merchants lodged. Some hans also had a small mosque, an ablution fountain and a bath. Hans took names such as Cotton Han or Cocoon Han from their function or from the goods sold in them, received small caravans, and offered the merchant lodging as well as storage, workshop space and retail sale. This is why a city with a single bedesten could have many hans; a han was a place of business where a particular group of tradesmen or merchants settled together.

The Amasya Taşhan is one of the typical Anatolian examples of this classic scheme. From the inscription above its main gate we learn that it was built in 1699 by Rahtvan Hacı Mehmed Paşa, mutasarrıf of Amasya and guardian of Jeddah, for the architect Mimar Mehmed Kalfa; the pasha endowed the building to his descendants in January 1700. The ground floor has 29 rooms facing the courtyard and 29 vaulted shops opening outward; the upper floor has 33 rooms. In 1761 Hacı Yusuf Abdullah had an ablution fountain built in the middle of the courtyard with a small mosque above it, and the endowment deed of 1771 recorded the founder, the architect, and the numbers of rooms and shops. Damaged in the great Amasya fire of 1915, the han was used in the following years as a warehouse by merchants and by the Agricultural Equipment Institution (Ziraî Donatım Kurumu), and in some sections as a workshop for various crafts. With the restoration completed at the end of 2012 it reopened with 53 rooms and 26 shops; today its rooms serve as a hotel and its shops operate in various lines of business.

The Arasta Order and the Streets of the Trades

The order of the market is seen most clearly in the arasta. According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi the word comes from the Persian ârâsten, the verb meaning to arrange and to put in order. It is thought that it acquired the meaning of market in Turkish either from the market set up in a military camp and arranged under military discipline, or from the arrangement of shops in two facing rows. An arasta is a market formed by shops selling the same kind of goods, lined up opposite one another on both sides of a street covered with a vault or a roof. For this reason arastas were known by names such as the arasta of the slipper-makers, the arasta of the furriers, the arasta of the spice sellers. Even when other tradesmen mixed in later, the name of the market remained.

The reasons for the trade-street arrangement were practical. A customer could find what he wanted in one place and compare prices in neighbouring shops. Tradesmen in the same line watched one another and kept up a mutual check on quality and measures. There was also a convenience for administration: a trade group could be inspected in a single street. Ottoman tradesmen were divided into separate guilds at every stage of production; in leatherwork, for example, the drover who supplied the animal, the butcher who slaughtered it, the tanner who processed it, and the cobbler and saddler who made it into finished goods were organised separately. A full list of Amasya's own arasta and street names does not appear in the sources used. Neighbourhood names, however, carry a trace of the arrangement: Kazancı is the name of the district where the bedesten stands; small mosques named for trades, such as Çıkrıkçı and Kılınççı, and neighbourhoods named for workplaces, such as Bozahâne and Devehâne, hint at the occupational distribution of the city. Which trade each of these names grew out of has not been established with certainty.

Arastas were mostly built to bring income to pious foundations and were placed especially near mosques; the aim was both to draw the congregation and to bring life to the mosque's surroundings. In covered arastas there was a gate at each end of the street and sometimes in the middle, and small windows in the vaults or walls. The front of each shop was closed with a double shutter. The lower shutter, closed at night, when opened outward by day became a counter, and the upper one, when raised, became an awning protecting the goods from sun and rain. Shops were at first wooden; because of frequent fires and heavy losses they were rebuilt in masonry. The arasta resembles the bedesten architecturally; but the cellars and storage cells found in the bedesten are absent from the arasta, and the goods sold there are less valuable.

The Guild Organisation and the Tradition of Ahilik

Ottoman tradesmen, as heirs of the guilds of the Seljuk period, were organised on the principle of mutual supervision and assistance rather than competition. Ahilik was an organisation that grew out of the ethic of futuwwa (fütüvvet) as it took shape in Anatolia in the thirteenth century; the sheikhs of the Ahi Evran Lodge at Kırşehir were for a long time regarded as the sheikhs of all tradesmen and held the authority to appoint the prayer-leader (duacı), the ahi baba, the kethüda and the yiğitbaşı, and to grant licences (icazet) of mastery and journeymanship. Ahi Evran is regarded as the patron of the tanners; that every branch of trade had its patron was part of this tradition. Business ethics rested on qualities such as fidelity, honesty, generosity and humility, whose rules were written in the futuwwa books (fütüvvetnâme). Lying, cheating and backbiting were among the behaviours that called for expulsion from the trade.

At the head of a guild stood a sheikh, and beside him the kethüda, yiğitbaşı, işçibaşı, duacı and senior masters. The kethüda looked after the administrative and financial affairs of the guild, settled disputes among tradesmen and, when necessary, took them to the kadi or to the Imperial Council (Divan-ı Hümayun); he was chosen by the tradesmen and entered in the register by the kadi. The yiğitbaşı was concerned with the training of apprentices, discipline and punishment, and tied the sash (şed) on the new master. The işçibaşı worked on the technical side, inspected the quality of the goods the guild produced and prevented defective goods from reaching the market. The last two members of the guild were experts called ehl-i hibre or ehl-i vukuf; they acted as arbiters in disputes between tradesmen and merchants and took part in setting prices according to the quality of goods, that is, in the narh.

Apprenticeship, journeymanship and mastership were three stages passed through with ceremony. The apprentice obeyed his master completely and could not leave the master he worked with without the guild's permission. He could not open a shop until he had learned the trade thoroughly; after a certain time he rose to journeyman, and after working some time longer he rose by ceremony to master. For the journeyman about to become a master, the yiğitbaşı bound a sash or loincloth (şed or peştamal) with prayers, the new master's work was shown to the masters, and it was bought by masters and wealthy tradesmen to give the new master capital. The number of shops and workbenches was limited, and production was geared to need. This organisation could lead tradesmen toward monopoly and closure to outsiders, yet it also ensured the transmission of the trade and its ethic among master, journeyman and apprentice.

Supervision: The Kadi, the Muhtasib and the Ethics of the Market

The market was the kadi's responsibility. In the Ottoman lands wherever a kadi was appointed there was a muhtasib, that is, an ihtisap agha, to assist him. The muhtasib went around the market, checking weights and measures, the quality of goods and whether the narh prices were being observed. The opening of new businesses, the collection of a tax called ihtisabiyye, and the clothing of tradesmen also fell within his remit. A tradesman found guilty was often laid on the bastinado in front of everyone, as a warning to others. As for how this procedure was carried out in Amasya in documentary terms, the sources used give no specific detail; the rule of the kadi and the ihtisap, however, was the same for all Ottoman cities.

Supervision was not in the hands of the state alone. In some markets, as at the Selimiye and Payas arastas, there were prayer domes where, before opening their shops in the morning, tradesmen gathered, joined in the prayer recited by the prayer-leader, and pledged to deal honestly. No trace of such a structure in Amasya is mentioned in the sources; opening the shop with a morning prayer, however, was a widespread custom of the guild tradition. As a reflection of the same ethic, the tradesman who had made his first sale (siftah) sending the customer to the neighbouring shop is told as an example of respect for a neighbour's right; this account rests on no Amasya-specific document and is passed on as a general tradesmen's custom.

The Last Centuries of the Market

In the nineteenth century the supports of the old order gave way one by one. The terms connected with ahilik (ahi baba, yiğitbaşı, kethüda) stayed in use for a long time, but from the eighteenth century the organisation had turned into the system known as gedik, and the tradesmen's monopolies were abolished in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Ministry of Ihtisap was abolished in 1855 and its duties were passed to the city prefecture (şehremaneti), that is, the municipal system. In Amasya in the middle of the same century the domes of the bedesten were pulled down in Ziya Bey's public works, the fire of 1915 ruined the Taşhan, and in the 1950s part of the bedesten was turned into a commercial building. The buildings could be saved only by the General Directorate of Foundations' restoration of 1971 and the Taşhan restoration completed in 2012.

Chronology

1483: The gate agha Hüseyin Ağa builds the Amasya Bedesten (inscription date 888 AH).

1520: According to the survey records the city has 52 neighbourhoods and a population of about 8,000.

1554-1555: Silk cloth entering the city by official channels within ten months: 10,632 lodras (about 15 tons).

1668: Earthquake; severe damage to the bedesten.

1699-1700: Rahtvan Hacı Mehmed Paşa builds the Taşhan and endows it in January 1700.

1761: An ablution fountain and a small mosque are added to the courtyard of the Taşhan.

1771: The endowment deed of the Taşhan is drawn up.

1863-1864: Amasya is chosen among the pilot regions for growing cotton from seed; a fair is established.

1864-1865: The domes of the bedesten are pulled down in Ziya Bey's public works.

1915: The Taşhan is ruined in the great Amasya fire.

1971: The General Directorate of Foundations repairs the bedesten.

2012: The restoration of the Taşhan is completed and the han reopens.

Sources

Academic studies

  • Selim Özcan, "Amasya'da Sancak Beyliği Yapan Şehzadeler Döneminde Amasya Şehri", Amasya Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, no. 5.
  • Tuba Akar, "Osmanlı Kentinde Ticari Mekânlar: Bedesten-Han-Arasta-Çarşı Mekânları", Türkiye Araştırmaları Literatür Dergisi, 7/13 (2009).

Official sources

  • Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Kültür Portalı, "Amasya Bedesteni".

Other sources

Online sources