On the north bank of the Yeşilırmak, which divides Amasya into two halves, at the foot of the steep cliffs of Harşena Castle, lies a site where Ottoman princes resided for centuries. Known today as Saray Düzü, the Palace of the Lords (Beyler Sarayı) and the Maidens' Palace (Kızlar Sarayı), this area was where members of the dynasty who served as sanjak governors in the city lived, held their councils and gathered their retinues. The same plateau had been a seat for sultans and commanders since the Danishmendid era; the Ottomans inherited the tradition and, during Çelebi Mehmed's term as sanjak governor, enlarged the site with a great palace complex. Written sources always reported the palace's existence, but it was the archaeological excavations of recent years that revealed concrete traces of the structure beneath the soil.

The History of Saray Düzü

The place where the princes who came to Amasya resided was a group of buildings in the inner fortress area, known in the Seljuk period as the "Palace of the Lords" (Beyler Sarayı) and called by the Ottomans the "Princes' Palace" (Şehzadeler Sarayı). Among the townspeople the name eventually settled as Saraydüzü. According to the information Selim Özcan relays, the site, which had served as a residence for sultans and commanders since the Danishmendids, took its definitive form in 1396, during Çelebi Mehmed's term as sanjak governor of Amasya. The prince bought the property known as the Gümüşlüzâde Mansion from Gümüşlüzâde Hoca Celaleddin Çelebi and had a large palace built there. The names Beyler Sarayı and Saraydüzü came into use after this date. In local accounts the man who built the mansion is also given as Gümüşlüzâde Tâceddin Mahmud Çelebi, the family name linked to the Gümüşlü Mosque. Since Özcan's record gives the seller as Celaleddin Çelebi, this difference could not be settled, though both accounts agree that the mansion belonged to the Gümüşlüzâdes. In some local accounts the palace is also called "Pir İlyas"; the origin of this name has not been documented.

The building served as a palace for roughly three and a half centuries in the Ottoman period. The same source reports that Ahmed Çelebi, son of Murad II, Prince Ahmed, son of Bayezid II, and Selim I were born in this place; the basis is the record of the Amasya historian Hüseyin Hüsameddin. The same article also states that the princes' presence in Amasya lasted about 182 years. The three-and-a-half-century figure appears to describe the period during which the palace stood as a building, while the 182 years describe the time Amasya served as a princely sanjak; the two numbers seem to contradict each other at first glance, but they measure different things.

Amasya's place among the Ottoman sanjaks also explains the importance of the palace. For a settlement to become a princely sanjak, it had to lie in a border region, to have served earlier as the capital of an Anatolian principality, and to carry weight in history, culture and trade. Amasya met all three criteria. It had been the center of the Danishmendids, remained a strategic city on the Ottoman eastern frontier until the late sixteenth century, and was at the same time one of the region's centers of culture and learning. The era that began when Prince Yıldırım Bayezid was sent as the first sanjak governor continued with twelve princes, identified from historical records, being appointed to Amasya with the title "çelebi sultan"; six of them later became sultans and six remained sanjak governors.

The Princes Who Lived in the Palace

The first significant occupant of the palace was Çelebi Mehmed. During the interregnum that followed the Battle of Ankara, Mehmed made Amasya his base, and when he became sultan in 1413 he appointed his tutor Yörgüç Pasha as beylerbey of Amasya. When the Kara Tatars and the lords of Kastamonu, Canik and Erzincan stirred up unrest in the region, Prince Murad, who had been born here during his father's term as governor, was sent to Amasya at the age of twelve as sanjak governor together with his lala Yörgüç Pasha. Murad ascended the throne in 1421 on his father's death; his lala Hamza Bey was then appointed to Amasya, and a year later Yörgüç Pasha was appointed beylerbey for the second time. This picture shows that the prince was not left alone in the palace but had an experienced statesman beside him.

When Yörgüç Pasha was sent to the guardianship of Edirne in 1435, Ahmed Çelebi, the eldest son of Murad II, who had been born in Amasya in 1420, became sanjak governor. Known also as Ahmed the Elder, the prince served for about three years and died in Amasya in 1438. The sources diverge on who succeeded him. According to Hüsameddin, the eight-year-old Prince Mehmed, the future Conqueror, was appointed to the Amasya sanjak in 1438. A story relayed by Hammer also suggests that Mehmed was in Amasya; in it, the three sons of Murad II living in Amasya visit Sheikh Abdurrahman, son-in-law of the Halveti sheikh Pir İlyas, who lets two of the princes kiss his hand but kneels before Mehmed. Halil İnalcık considers the claim that Mehmed was appointed governor of Amasya at the age of six doubtful and recalls that in the spring of 1443 he was sent from Edirne to Manisa with his tutors. İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı likewise makes no mention of Mehmed's governorship of Amasya after Ahmed. The Conqueror's governorship in Amasya should therefore be cited not as an established fact but as a disputed piece of information.

In 1440 the fifteen-year-old Prince Alâeddin was brought to the sanjak. On his father's instruction he took part with the sipahis under his command in the 1443 war against the Karamanids and died in Amasya on his return. One of the later periods belongs to Bayezid II, appointed Amasya sanjak governor in 1454 at the age of seven. Bayezid joined his father Mehmed the Conqueror at the Battle of Otlukbeli in 1473 and on the return stayed in Amasya for about a month with his father. Because the district of Lâdik, attached to Amasya, was the summer seat of its sanjak governors, he went there in the summers. He made experienced statesmen such as Çandarlı İbrahim and Yahya Pasha his lalas, and took calligraphy lessons from the Amasya master Sheikh Hamdullah, obtaining a diploma (icazetname). When he left Amasya in 1481 to take the throne after his father's death, he invited his teacher Sheikh Hamdullah to Istanbul together with his family and left his eldest son Ahmed, born here, as governor in his place.

With a thirty-year term as sanjak governor, Prince Ahmed was the longest-serving prince in Amasya; his father Bayezid II follows with twenty-seven years and Çelebi Mehmed with twenty-four. Like his father, Ahmed opened his palace to poets and scholars. Among the poets in his circle was the Amasya-born woman poet Mihrî Hatun, who presented most of her qasidas to Prince Ahmed. When Ahmed received an invitation from statesmen for the throne, he left his eldest son Murad in charge of the sanjak and went to Istanbul. Meanwhile the effect of the Şahkulu rebellion and the movements of the Safavid deputies around Tokat and Sivas pushed the region into crisis. Murad joined Nur Ali, one of the Safavid deputies; when Yahşi Beyzade Ahmed Pasha drove the rebels out of Amasya, he went to Shah Ismail and died after serving as an administrator there for three or four years. Ahmed returned to Amasya after his bid for the throne failed, continued the struggle against his brother Selim, who became sultan in 1512, and was eliminated after being defeated at Yenişehir in 1514.

In 1538 Prince Mustafa, the twenty-four-year-old eldest son of Süleyman the Magnificent and at that time governor of Manisa, was appointed to the Amasya sanjak and remained in office until he was killed in 1553. With Mustafa's appointment the sanjak was separated from Sivas and became an independent province; after his death it again became a sanjak attached to the province of Rum. Mustafa's killing caused great grief among the janissaries and the people. The elegy written by Taşlıcalı Yahya and the observations of the Austrian traveler Hans Dernschwam, who passed near Amasya, show that part of the population mourned the prince's death and part grieved over the prolongation of the Iranian campaigns, and that everyone he spoke with praised the prince. Mustafa was interested in learning and literature and wrote poems under the pen name "Muhlisî".

After Mustafa, a succession dispute began among the surviving sons of Süleyman. Selim in Manisa was transferred to Konya, and Bayezid in Kütahya to Amasya. Suspicious of being removed from a place near Istanbul, Bayezid at first did not want to go; in a petition sent from Amasya to his father he asked for the sanjak of Ankara and wrote that his situation in Amasya was "grievous". After a while he set out on certain conditions and became Amasya sanjak governor in 1558. Bayezid, who wrote poetry under the pen name "Şâhî", was defeated by Selim near Konya on 30 May 1559 and withdrew to Amasya; when his pleas for pardon were rejected, in mid-August of the same year he took refuge with the Safavid Shah Tahmasb together with his four sons. Handed back in exchange for money, the prince was executed at Qazvin in 1562. The last prince sent to Amasya was Prince Murad (the future Murad III), son of Selim II, who came after his father's accession in 1566. Affected by the Celali rebellions and by disturbances caused by madrasa students, he stayed in the city about a year and a half and was then appointed to Manisa. From then on Amasya was governed by sanjak governors appointed from the center.

Palace Life and Its Surroundings

A prince's arrival in Amasya was the result of a long preparation. The education of Ottoman princes began in the palace, where nurses and female attendants looked after the child alongside the mother. When the prince was five or six a tutor was appointed, and the start of his schooling was celebrated with a ceremony called bed-i besmele, attended by the dignitaries of the state, with the sheikh al-Islam offering a prayer. The education, which lasted until about ten or twelve, included Quran recitation, Arabic, Persian, history and geography, as well as archery, javelin, hunting, literature and calligraphy. Then, following a custom that began with Prince Murad, the prince was sent with his lala to a sanjak such as Amasya to gain experience in government. This practice changed in Süleyman's time, after Prince Bayezid's rebellion: only the heir was sent to a sanjak, the other princes lived under supervision in Topkapı Palace, and Manisa alone remained as a sanjak. Mehmed III was the last prince to serve in a sanjak.

A princely palace was a state center in miniature. The prince, with his lala and retinue, ran the administration of the sanjak, and the governorship gave him real experience in government. That Murad, son of Murad II, was sent to the sanjak at twelve and Bayezid II at seven shows that this training began very early and that the weight of the work was carried by the lalas. In the young prince's education, scholars and artists around him played a part as much as the lalas. Bayezid's study of calligraphy with Sheikh Hamdullah is the best-known example; Hamdullah was later regarded as the founder of the Ottoman school of calligraphy.

Amasya's cultural life in this period largely gathered around the princely palace. Until the mid-sixteenth century the palace was the scene of lively cultural activity; the historian Şükrullah, the calligrapher Sheikh Hamdullah, Tâcî Bey and his sons Câfer and Sâdî Çelebi, the scholar Müeyyedzâde Abdurrahman Çelebi, Zenbilli Ali Efendi and the physician Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin were figures who were raised in, or associated with, this environment. Mihrî Hatun's presentation of her qasidas to Prince Ahmed is one of the most concrete documents for the palace's poetry gatherings. The fact that Prince Mustafa and Prince Bayezid wrote poetry themselves confirms the circle's closeness to literature.

The most striking testimony on the palace's physical appearance belongs to Hans Dernschwam, who came to Amasya in 1555. According to Dernschwam, the princely palace was a plain single-storey brick building with a garden around it, standing at the foot of the mountain; Süleyman was staying there at the time. At first glance this description conflicts with accounts of the palace as a magnificent structure. To reconcile a traveler's plain impression with the tile and gold finds, one must take into account both the scale of Ottoman palace architecture and the possibility that the building changed over different periods. The city had also suffered a fire that year: Dernschwam writes that houses burned in the great fire of 14 April 1555 were rebuilt in a short time, and adds that he counted eleven mosques in the city.

Süleyman stopped at Amasya on his way to the Iranian campaign of 1553 and came again on his return, receiving the embassies of Ferdinand, the Austrian ruler, and of the Safavid Shah Tahmasb; on 29 May 1555 he signed the Peace of Amasya with the Safavids. These events show that the site of the princely palace was also used as a headquarters in the sultan's eastern campaigns. Evliya Çelebi's description of the fortress points the same way: in the fortress there were an old-style palace, the Yıldırım Bayezid Mosque, powder magazines, a granary and cisterns. Hüseyin Hüsameddin writes that the fortress was two neighborhoods wide and had two towers, two gates, a palace, a mosque, a madrasa, a lodge, a soup kitchen and two baths.

The Fall of the Palace and the Saraydüzü Barracks

With the departure of the princes, the palace's political function came to an end. From the mid-sixteenth century Amasya lost this status as princely sanjaks closer to Istanbul came to the fore, and Manisa gained importance as the sole princely sanjak. The palace building wore down over the following centuries and, according to local accounts, collapsed in 1883 from earthquake damage and neglect. On the ruins, between 1898 and 1900, a barracks of five buildings was built for the Caucasus Division of the Third Army. The barracks lost its importance from 1930; in 1944 it was completely demolished and replaced by military housing and an officers' club, and because of the risk of landslide these buildings in turn were evacuated and demolished in 1986.

The Saraydüzü Barracks has one more claim on history. After landing at Samsun on 19 May 1919, Mustafa Kemal Pasha moved from Havza to Amasya and on 12 June 1919 was greeted at Cülustepe by the mufti Hacı Tevfik Efendi and the people of Amasya. It is reported that the talks on the Amasya Circular, begun on 21 June, continued in this barracks until the morning of 22 June and that the circular was dictated to his aide Cevat Abbas Bey. The text, which forms the foundation of the Turkish War of Independence, mentioned national sovereignty for the first time and envisaged congresses in Sivas and Erzurum attended by provincial and regional representatives. The ground where princes had lived for centuries thus also came to be remembered as the place where one of the first texts of the process leading to the Republic was written.

The present Saraydüzü Barracks was rebuilt faithfully in 2007 at its current position on the bank of the Yeşilırmak, based on a photograph taken in 1944, because its former site was at risk of landslide. The rectangular building has two storeys and four doors: two at the north and south ends and two at the center of the east and west facades. The central section is covered by an onion dome on a tower, and the east door has a balcony resting on two posts. The ground-floor windows are arched, those of the second floor flat and rectangular. In the hall upstairs, the reception of Mustafa Kemal Pasha at Cülustepe by the Amasya delegation led by the mufti Hacı Tevfik Efendi is recreated with twelve wax figures; photographs of the delegation members and posters with the articles of the Amasya Circular hang on the walls. Today the building serves as a museum and the provincial public library.

The Harşena Castle and Maidens' Palace Excavations

The work aimed at determining archaeologically the location and nature of the palaces known from historical sources is the Harşena Castle and Maidens' Palace excavation led by E. Emine Dönmez of Istanbul University. By summer 2016 the excavations had reached their eighth year; academics and students from Istanbul and Mimar Sinan universities took part, and Zeynep Göçer of the Tekirdağ Museum served as ministry representative. According to Dönmez's statement, finds emerging at the Maidens' Palace location had begun to show traces of Ottoman palaces, and the identity of these palaces, known from sources, was for the first time proven with architectural data.

The work in the upper fortress section uncovered an Ottoman-period stone-paved street and the architectural structures around it. An important structure on the bedrock, pointing to a Roman Imperial temple or a rampart foundation, was found to have been destroyed by later settlers. Four gold Mamluk coins found on a monumental wall during the 2015 season gave important data for both Anatolian and Ottoman archaeology and helped to date correctly the architectural remains of the fifteenth century. In 2016 a large number of Iznik-made "Golden Horn" tile ceramics and an Ottoman-period gold coin were found, together with metal belt buckles and armor ornaments. These finds reflect both the taste and the military identity of those who lived in the palace. Dönmez also noted that the excavations have allowed Iron Age, Danishmendid, Seljuk and Ottoman archaeology to be understood better.

In the same statement Dönmez recalled that, besides five princes who could not take the throne, including Prince Mustafa, the sultans Yıldırım Bayezid, Çelebi Mehmed, Murad II, Mehmed the Conqueror and Bayezid II served as governors in Amasya, that Selim the Grim was born in this city, and that Süleyman the Magnificent governed the state from Amasya for one winter. Excavation data and written sources complement each other at this point. Hüsameddin and the traveler records say the palace existed; the tile fragments, coins and stone-paved street coming out of the ground suggest that the structure was no ordinary mansion.

Chronology

1074: Danishmend Gazi founds the Danishmendid state with Amasya as its center; the group of buildings in the inner fortress becomes the residence of sultans and commanders.

1396: Çelebi Mehmed buys the Gümüşlüzâde Mansion and has a large palace built in its place; the structure begins to be called Beyler Sarayı and Saraydüzü.

1413: Çelebi Mehmed becomes sultan and appoints his tutor Yörgüç Pasha beylerbey of Amasya.

1421: Murad II leaves the Amasya governorship and ascends the throne.

1438: Ahmed Çelebi the Elder dies in Amasya; some sources say Prince Mehmed (the Conqueror) was appointed to the sanjak, a claim İnalcık finds doubtful.

1440: Prince Alâeddin is appointed Amasya sanjak governor.

1454: Bayezid II becomes Amasya sanjak governor at the age of seven.

1481: Bayezid II leaves Amasya to take the throne, leaving his son Ahmed in his place.

1514: Prince Ahmed is defeated at Yenişehir by his brother Selim I.

1538: Prince Mustafa becomes Amasya sanjak governor.

1553: Prince Mustafa is killed.

1555: Hans Dernschwam comes to Amasya; the Peace of Amasya is signed on 29 May.

1558: Prince Bayezid becomes Amasya sanjak governor.

1566: Prince Murad, the last prince appointed to Amasya, takes up his post.

1883: The palace building collapses from earthquake damage and neglect.

1898-1900: The Saraydüzü Barracks is built on the ruins.

1919: The talks on the Amasya Circular are held at the Saraydüzü Barracks.

1944: The barracks is demolished and military housing and an officers' club are built in its place.

1986: These buildings are evacuated and demolished because of the landslide risk.

2007: The Saraydüzü Barracks is rebuilt on the bank of the Yeşilırmak based on the 1944 photograph.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Abdi-Zade Hüseyin Hüsameddin, Amasya Tarihi, Amasya Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları, 2007. amasya.gov.tr

Academic studies

  • Selim Özcan, "Amasya'da Sancak Beyliği Yapan Şehzadeler Döneminde Amasya Şehri", Amasya Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, issue 5 (DergiPark).
  • "Osmanlı'da Şehzade Eğitimi", Hüma Dergisi. humadergisi.com

Official sources

  • "Osmanlı Dönemi", Amasya Governorship official website.
  • Hans Dernschwam, İstanbul ve Anadolu'ya Seyahat Günlüğü, trans. Yaşar Önen, Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1992.

Other sources

  • İlhan Şahin, Feridun Emecen, "Amasya", TDV Encyclopedia of Islam (TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi). islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Şehzade Mustafa'nın Sarayını Buldular", Milliyet Amasya News, 25 August 2016 (E. Emine Dönmez's excavation statement). milliyet.com.tr
  • "Saraydüzü Kışlası, Amasya", Ayak İzlerim, 31 January 2024.

Online sources