In the garden of the Amasya Museum, among the stone artifacts, stands a rectangular building that is one of the city's surviving Seljuk-era tombs. The Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism lists it as the Tomb of Sultan Mesud (Sultan Mesud Türbesi), counts it among the eyvan-type Seljuk tombs, and notes that it was long used as the Mummy Museum. Today the building is discussed in connection with two separate questions. The first is whether it has any real link to the sultan whose name it bears. The second is whose bodies were displayed inside it for many years and how they came to be there. The answers to both lead beyond the stonework to a wider story: the traces of the Seljuk sultans in Amasya, the political turmoil of the city at the end of the thirteenth century, and a mummification practice rarely seen in Anatolia.

Location and the Narlı Bahçe Cemetery

The tomb stands in the garden of the Amasya Museum on Atatürk Avenue, to the west of the museum building. Because it lies in the city center right beside the museum, visitors reach it as a continuation of the museum visit. The garden holds an open-air display of stone works from the Hittite, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Ilkhanid, Seljuk and Ottoman periods; within this collection the tomb is both an exhibit in its own right and a space that shelters other exhibits. International architectural records likewise place the building today at the back of a cemetery adjoining the museum. The footprint of the structure is a rectangle of roughly 14.5 by 10 meters.

The source that describes the surroundings before the museum in the greatest detail is the Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya) of Abdîzâde Hüseyin Hüsameddin. Hüsameddin places the tomb to the west of the Upper Market, on the southern side of the cemetery known as Narlı Bahçe ("the Pomegranate Garden"), which lay in front of the Receb and Üçler quarters. The cemetery took its name from a nearby madrasa. According to Hüsameddin, the city steward (kethüda) Türedizâde Hâfız Süleyman Ağa built a wooden madrasa with eleven cells and a lecture hall in 1167 (1753-54) and set up its endowments. Because the madrasa's large garden was called Narlı Bahçe, both the madrasa and the cemetery around it came to be known by that name. The madrasa was largely demolished in 1281 (1864-65), when Ziya Paşa, governor (mutasarrıf) of Amasya, had the highway built and the building stood squarely in its path. The statement in local publications that the tomb lies within the Narlıbahçe Cemetery preserves the memory of this older arrangement. Hüsameddin also writes that the great Seljuk building in this cemetery was popularly taken for a madrasa. This common belief raises the possibility that a madrasa or a complex once stood around the tomb, but no document has been produced to confirm it.

History and the Question of Identity

The date of construction and the patron of the tomb are not known with certainty. The provincial directorate of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism says the building was erected in the twelfth century; local studies, relying on architectural features, suggest a date between the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century. Albert Gabriel, by contrast, placed the building with reservations in the fourteenth century in his Monuments turcs d'Anatolie. Most sources agree in attaching the structure to the Seljuk period, but the proposed date shifts by nearly two hundred years from one author to another.

Vâzıh Efendi and Hüsameddin's View

The information that gave the building its name comes from Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi, an eighteenth-century historian of Amasya. Vâzıh Efendi stated that the tomb belonged to the Anatolian Seljuk Sultan Mesud I; later researchers adopted this view, and the building has been known by this name for centuries. The same historian's account of the Amasya mummies, however, complicates the picture. Vâzıh Efendi writes that the mummies were known among the people as "the martyrs" (şehitler) and links them to Muînüddin Pervâne, an Arab concubine named Ümmüveled, and two sons. In Hüsameddin's later Amasya Tarihi the names change: two of the mummies are assigned to İşboğa Noyin, one of the governors of the Ilkhanid period, and to Cumudar, a grandson of Hülâgû Khan, while the others are attributed to Fetih Gazi of the Danishmendid dynasty, his son Mahmud Gazi and their families. In short, the accounts disagree both on who owns the tomb and on who lies within it.

Hüsameddin is the author who argues most forcefully that the tomb belonged to Mesud I. In his view it is "certain" that the sultan is buried here, and he bases this conviction on old records concerning a city called Simre. Hüsameddin quotes three Ottoman historians. According to Şükrullah Çelebi's Behcetü't-Tevârîh, Sultan Mesud settled in Amasya, founded a new city named Simre, built a mosque and a madrasa there, and was buried in the tomb he himself had built. Mustafa Cenâbî Efendi's el-Aylemü'z-Zâhir gives the same information, adding that Simre now lay in ruins and that the sultan had founded another town nearby called Kedeğra. Dervîş Ahmed Efendi's Câmiu'd-Düvel writes that the sultan built a han, a public kitchen and other charitable works in Simre, established large endowments, and died in 558 (1162-63), being buried in his tomb at Simre. This last date falls several years after 1155 or 1156, the year now accepted for the sultan's death.

Starting from these records, Hüsameddin argues that Simre was not a distant place separate from Amasya but the name given to all the quarters rebuilt on the southern bank of the Yeşilırmak, opposite the Inner Citadel. In his account, the attacks of the Crusaders on Amasya from 491 (1097-98) onward left the southern side of the river in ruins, and the city's name came to be confined to the walled northern bank, that is, the Inner Citadel. When Amasya passed under Seljuk rule around 538 (1143-44), Sultan Mesud founded a new city on the ruined side and called it Sîmûre, or Simre for short, in the sense of "a place for growing strong, for regaining health." As evidence Hüsameddin cites the formula "Dârü's-saltanat-ı Simre" (seat of the sultanate of Simre) found in the signatures of old judges, and the fact that in the registers kept down to 857 (1453) the name Simre was given to the Üçler, Hacı İlyas, Receb, Şâmîce, Küpceğiz and Gök Medrese quarters. Since the Narlı Bahçe Cemetery lay among these quarters, he concludes that the "tomb in Simre" mentioned in the records and this building are one and the same. The author also writes that the sultan built a palace and a bath inside the Inner Citadel, in what was called the Kurşunlu quarter in his own day.

Another of Hüsameddin's arguments rests on endowment records. According to him, villages endowed on condition that sections of the Qur'an be recited at the graves of "the First Sultan Mesud," buried in the Simre of Amasya, and "the Second Sultan Mesud," buried in the Simre of Havza, are on record: Aydoğdu, Efte, Kocaoğlan and Tatar in Amasya, and Şeyh Savcı, Kapaklar and Konac in Havza. As his most decisive proof the author points to the intricate Kufic script on the side columns of the façade, which many people took for floral ornament, and says that the name and the date of death of "the First Sultan Mesud" are carved in it. In the same passage, however, he admits that roughly the lower two-tenths of the lettering lay buried in the ground and that it was very difficult to read.

The Life of Mesud I and Amasya

The life of Mesud I provides the context needed to weigh the attribution of the tomb to him. The son of Kılıcarslan, Mesud took the throne in 1116 by overthrowing his elder brother Melikşah with the support of the Danishmendid Emir Gazi, and went on to enjoy one of the longest reigns in Anatolian Seljuk history. After Emir Gazi's death in 1134, when the Danishmendid realm split into three, Mesud gained a say over all three branches and married one of his daughters to Yağıbasan, ruler of Sivas, Niksar, Tokat and Amasya. In 1152, on hearing that Yağıbasan had told his nephew, the ruler of Malatya, not to submit to Mesud, he marched against him and forced Yağıbasan into obedience. The sultan's name being linked with Amasya is therefore not without meaning; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi entry on Mesud also records that he founded a mosque in Aksaray and a city called Simre near Amasya. Yet the same entry reports that the sultan died in 1155 or 1156 and was buried in the tomb in the courtyard of the Alâeddin Mosque in Konya, and it states plainly that the claim that Mesud's tomb lies near Amasya is not correct.

Mesud's reign is also instructive for understanding the political balance around Amasya. In 1146 the sultan clashed before Konya with the army of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos, inflicting heavy losses on it through ambushes and raids and pursuing it as far as the banks of the Büyük Menderes. He gave his four daughters in marriage to Nûreddin Mahmud Zengî, ruler of Aleppo, to the Danishmendid Zünnûn, to Yağıbasan, and to Ioannes, the Byzantine emperor's nephew who had converted to Islam; he had three sons named Kılıcarslan, Melikşah and Dolat. This web of marriages shows how close the relationship with the Danishmendid principalities was and explains the historical ground on which Amasya could carry a name from Mesud's circle. Still, the record of the encyclopedia entry makes clear that this closeness does not amount to a burial place. The same entry notes that the sultan spent little time in Konya and built the inner citadel there, along with its palace and mosque; Hüsameddin's treatment of Amasya as Mesud's seat of rule does not fully match this information.

The Second Sultan Mesud and Havza

The ruler Hüsameddin calls "the Second Sultan Mesud" is Gıyâseddin Mesud II, one of the last Anatolian Seljuk sultans. According to the author, this sultan was buried in the village of Tatar Kalesi in the Simre district of Havza. Relying on the endowment deed of his son Tâceddin Altunbaş, dated 765 (1363-64), Hüsameddin writes that the official records list a tomb, a madrasa and a mosque in Sultan Mesud's name at Tatar Kalesi; when he visited the village himself, however, he could find only a heap of stones called the "Sultan's Tomb." The author prefers 704 (1304-05) as the date of the sultan's death. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi entry on Mesud II, by contrast, reports that the sultan died in Kayseri in 708 (1308) after a long illness. This divergence shows that Hüsameddin's findings on Seljuk graves around Amasya, as in the case of Mesud I, do not always agree with the general sources.

The Problem of the Inscription

The crux of the identity debate is whether any inscription exists on the columns of the façade. Hüsameddin does not give the text of the Kufic inscription he says he read. The description based on Gabriel's survey, on the other hand, states plainly that there are no inscriptions on or inside the tomb, so that its identification as the "Tomb of Sultan Mesud" is not supported by any evidence on the monument itself. It may be supposed that what Hüsameddin took for an inscription was the intricate ornament on the columns itself; this is an inference and cannot be settled without a detailed on-site examination of the columns. This verdict does not deny that the building belongs to the Seljuk period or that it was built for a member of a dynasty; it shows only that it cannot be proven to be the grave of Sultan Mesud I. Since the true owner of the building is unknown today, the name "Tomb of Sultan Mesud" survives largely as a tradition. Among the basic studies of Seljuk-period tombs in Amasya is Hakkı Önkal's article "Selçuklular Devri Amasya Türbeleri"; Zehra Efe also cites Önkal's work on Seljuk tombs in her article introducing the mummies.

Architecture

The building has the two-story arrangement common in the Seljuk tomb tradition. The lower story was set aside as the burial chamber, that is, the mummy chamber, while the upper story was arranged as the place of visitation. The records describe it as a rectangular, eyvan-type tomb. The north-facing front façade is built of finely dressed ashlar, while rubble stone was used for the other parts. Moldings separating the two stories on the outer walls are thought to have once run around the entire building. The stonework is concentrated on the façade; the rest of the building is kept plain, and the effect is left largely to the even surface of the cut stone and the balance of its proportions.

According to the description based on Gabriel, the façade follows an arrangement with few parallels in Islamic architecture. The stone façade rises markedly above the roof of the building, ends at the top in a cornice, and is framed by an angular braid border carved into the stone. The door and the two windows flanking it sit in the middle of the façade on a plain surface set back by about a meter. This recess is enclosed by a large, shallow arch resting on engaged columns at either side. Within the recess, the door is framed again by a porch that projects forward to the line of the façade; the panel on the porch lintel bears a geometric pattern of stars and polygons. One enters through an arched doorway set within nested profiles that narrow from the edges toward the center. The arch of the door is described in some accounts as a round arch and in others as a depressed arch; the difference may come from the viewpoint of those describing it or from repairs the building underwent later.

The interior consists of two bays, one in front and one behind, separated by an arch. The tomb is covered by a barrel vault, and this roofing system is reinforced by the large arch in the middle of the interior. The mummy chamber on the lower story is entered from the west side of the tomb. The description based on Gabriel notes that the underground chamber, reached by a staircase on the west side, is no longer accessible. Keeping the burial chamber below and the commemorative space above is a typical reflection of the Seljuk arrangement that separates the grave from the place of visitation, and the Amasya example follows this scheme.

The Tomb as Hüsameddin Saw It

The description Hüsameddin wrote in the early twentieth century is the only detailed testimony to the building's condition before it became part of the museum garden. The author describes the tomb as a large, entirely stone-built, exceptionally solid structure of a nearly square rectangular shape. He writes that it stretched from north to south, that there was an arch in the middle of the interior, that it had two domes, and that from the outside the tops of the domes looked flat; present-day descriptions, however, speak of a barrel vault. His statement that the façade faced west does not agree with the north façade mentioned in today's descriptions; the reason for this difference is not clear. According to Hüsameddin, nothing remained inside the tomb of a cenotaph or a grille, while at its far end two daughters of Yörgüç Paşa were buried. He also notes that the building had sunk about a meter into the ground, that the blackening of its façade showed it had been through several fires, and that the cenotaph may have been lost in those fires.

From the fact that the whole lower part was a crypt, the author suggests that several Seljuk princes might lie here together with the sultan, but he immediately admits that there is no sign of this. In a footnote he says he has no doubt that more graves would be found if excavations were carried out at the Tomb of Sultan Mesud, as at the Tomb of Şâdgeldi Paşa. The mummy chamber reached today from the west side corresponds to the part Hüsameddin described when he wrote that "the lower part is entirely a crypt."

Present Condition

The building no longer fully reflects its original plan. Interventions over time have partly disrupted the plan, and its function as a place of visitation was maintained through a single-room space added inside at a later date. Although some walls retain their original state, it is known that repairs were made in the interior with materials such as brick and concrete block and that surfaces were plastered with cement. These interventions altered the original fabric of the building, yet its overall form and the stonework of the front façade survive as a valuable example of Seljuk-period tomb architecture.

The Mummies

The tomb is known because for many years it sheltered a collection rarely found in Anatolia. The figures vary from source to source. Some publications speak of six mummies; the museum administration reports eight and, according to the museum director's statement, four of them are adults and four are children. A statement made in 2011, however, specified that the eight mummies were displayed in the tomb in six sarcophagi; it may be supposed that the figure of six derives from the number of sarcophagi. The academic study based on the inventory register counts five entries: İşbuğa Noyin, Cumudar, İzzeddin Mehmed Pervâne, Pervâne's concubine and his daughter, plus a separate number for his son. The sources do not explain the reason for the discrepancy in numbers.

The individuals named in the museum records belong to the fourteenth century, when the Ilkhanids dominated Anatolia. They are Prince Cumudar, grandson of Hülâgû and nâzır (governor-general) of Anatolia; İşbuğa Noyin, emir of Amasya; İzzeddin Mehmed Pervâne, who ruled in Amasya; and his concubine and children. The inventory record for İşbuğa Noyin states that he died in 1320, served as nâzır of Anatolia for more than twenty years, and acted independently from 1316; Hüsameddin likewise places his death in the month of Safer 720, that is, in the spring of 1320. Cumudar is said to have been appointed nâzır of Anatolia in the time of Gâzân Khan and to have died a tragic death while living in Amasya in 1297. In Hüsameddin's biographical volumes Cumudar's lineage is given as "Cumudar Noyin bin Yeşmut bin Hülâgû Khan," and we are told that Argun Bay, one of his retinue, entered the service of İşboğa Noyin after his master's death and for a time served in Amasya as candar, that is, chief of police.

Pervâne's identity is somewhat more tangled. The museum records mention two men named İzzeddin Mehmed Pervâne who served in Amasya. One was the son of Kutbeddin Osman, brother of Muînüddin Süleyman Pervâne, and governed Amasya before 1292. The other was the son of Muînüddin Süleyman Pervâne and was appointed governor of Amasya by Gâzân Khan in 1296. In the assessment based on Osman Turan's account, the mummy is thought to belong to the second man, Muînüddin's son Mehmed Pervâne. According to this account, Mehmed Pervâne first served at Sinop on his father's behalf, declared his independence, then came to terms with the Mongols and became governor of Amasya, but the Mongols accused him of plotting against them and executed him; his concubine and children did not escape the same fate. The same academic study ties the event to the year 1297 and to Abaka Khan, although Abaka Khan died in 1282 and Pervâne's term began in the time of Gâzân Khan. This inconsistency shows that the sources cannot speak with certainty about the date of the event or its perpetrator. The same study, relying on a newspaper article of 1983, also reports that the bodies were mummified by the people of Amasya, who held them in great affection; no document supporting this account is cited. A study based on the endowment deed in the archive of the General Directorate of Foundations, meanwhile, reports that Pervâne established an endowment dated 1299-1300 and died around 1300.

Hüsameddin's biographical volumes add one more detail to this picture. The author names the son of Muînüddin Süleyman Pervâne as Azîzeddin Mehmed Bey and writes that he was killed in the month of Cemaziyelahir 699, that is, early in 1300, and that his son Nâsıreddin Ahmed Bey came to Amasya with his father's body. Nâsıreddin Ahmed Bey himself died in Amasya in the month of Muharrem 717 (1317) and, according to Hüsameddin, was buried inside the Burmalı Minare Mosque in the tomb of his father and grandfather. This record agrees in its date of death with the study based on the endowment deed and shows that members of the Pervâne family were buried around the Burmalı Minare. The same author's argument, in the first volume of the Amasya Tarihi, that dead from the Pervâne family could not have been placed in this tomb rests on the death of Muînüddin Süleyman Pervâne in 675 (1276-77); it may be supposed that this objection does not cover the grandsons' generation, but this is an inference.

Pervâne is the figure who set up the endowment of the Burmalı Minare Mosque in Amasya. The mosque was built in 1242 by Ferruh Bey, one of the viziers of Gıyaseddin Keyhüsrev II, and his brother, the treasurer Yusuf Bey, and it is still open for worship today. That Hüsameddin's biographical volumes also call the mosque the "Pervâne Bey Mosque" preserves the memory of this endowment link. The fact that the mummies of Cumudar and İşbuğa were brought from the tomb adjoining this mosque suggests a connection between the Mongol-era rulers of Amasya and this setting.

The Coffins in the Tomb of Cumudar

The records state where the mummies were brought from. According to the inventory information, the mummies of Cumudar and İşbuğa Noyin were taken from the building adjoining the Burmalı Minare Mosque, popularly known as the Tomb of the Martyrs (Şehitler Türbesi), and the others from the Fethiye Mosque, which was originally a church. In his Seyahatnâme, Evliya Çelebi relates that he saw the mummies in the tomb inside coffins, but gives no information about who they were. According to local accounts, the mummies of Pervâne's family were taken out of the crypt of the Fethiye Mosque in 1855 and moved to the nearby Tomb of Cumudar; according to the museum directorate's statement of 2011, the mummies were found by chance in the basement of the Fethiye Mosque.

Hüsameddin describes in detail the state of the mummies before they were taken into the museum. According to him, the Tomb of Cumudar is a hexagonal building of dark, almost black stone standing in front of the Burmalı Minare Mosque, in line with the minaret, with a quarter of it outside the mosque. Inside are two small stone chambers, one below and one above; the upper one is used as a library. In the lower chamber lie eight coffins, some stacked on top of one another, covered with green cloths. The two coffins in front hold two complete bodies thought to be Arabs; the limbs of the others are not complete, and their bones lie in their original arrangement. Hüsameddin says that people who knew the front coffins and two others had earlier been in the crypt beneath the Fethiye Mosque, and had been moved here around 1271 (1854-55), were still alive in his day. This date agrees with the year 1855 in the local account.

The author regards as mere guesswork both Vâzıh Efendi's view that the mummies were Pervâne Bey's slaves and concubines and the view of European researchers who took them for mummified bodies from antiquity. On the basis of the records he states that the tomb belonged to Prince Cumudar, grandson of Hülâgû Khan and nâzır of Anatolia, and that Abuşkay İşboğa Noyin, emir of Amasya, lay beside him. He finds it more plausible that the coffins from Fethiye belonged to Fetih Gazi, who converted the church into a mosque, to his son Mahmud Gazi, and to their wives or daughters. Today's identification follows Hüsameddin with regard to Cumudar and İşboğa, while for the dead from Fethiye it counts Pervâne's family among the mummies.

Transfer to the Museum and Display in the Tomb

In 1928 the mummies were removed from the tombs where they lay and put on display in the lecture eyvan of the Bayezid II Madrasa on the bank of the Yeşilırmak, which was then used as the museum clerkship. The flooding of the Yeşilırmak in 1952 left this space under water and damaged the mummies; the mummy of İşbuğa Noyin suffered less because it was on the upper shelf of the display case. The mummies were later moved to the Gökmedrese Mosque, which was being used as a museum. The sources give the date of this move in two different ways, as 1962 and as 1966. According to the museum directorate's account of 2011, the mummies were brought to the new museum building in 1980 and, after being displayed for a few years in the basement of the building, were placed in the Tomb of Sultan Mesud in the garden. A news report of 2009, on the other hand, writes that the tomb was arranged as a mummy chamber when the new museum entered service in 1976. The year in which the mummies were placed in the tomb therefore cannot be fixed with certainty, but it is clear that the arrangement took place after the new museum building was constructed.

The tomb was used for many years as the place where the mummies were displayed. In May 2011 the museum director Celal Özdemir announced that the eight mummies displayed in the tomb in six sarcophagi had been moved, for their better protection, to a special section on the second floor of the museum building fitted with climate-control equipment and cameras. Each mummy began to be kept in a protected glass case in which temperature and humidity are held constant, and it was announced that Ottoman-period marble cenotaphs would be displayed in the Tomb of Sultan Mesud, from which the mummies had been removed. The mummies are still preserved today in this special section with controlled humidity and temperature and are periodically maintained by officials of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Mummification Technique and Examinations

The technical side of the mummies has also attracted interest. According to Efe's article, unlike ancient Egyptian examples, these mummies were prepared by combining drying and embalming without removing the internal organs, and they are regarded as the first Turkish and Muslim mummies to have been mummified without removal of the internal organs. The museum director has also stressed that the bodies were not wrapped in linen like Egyptian mummies but were left uncovered. According to the museum inventory notes quoted in the same study, the mummy of İşbuğa Noyin is about 1.83 meters long, its head is detached from the body, and a hole made by a piercing instrument can be seen on its left temple. Cumudar's is about 1.73 meters long and is one of the best-preserved mummies in the museum; the dropped jaw suggests that he was killed by hanging or strangling, and it can also be seen that he was circumcised. Pervâne's mummy measures 1.63 meters and his concubine's 1.55 meters.

According to the museum director, an examination and endoscopy carried out in 2003 by National Geographic's mummy specialists showed that the children had died of illness, while İşbuğa and Cumudar had been strangled. Local press reports add that İşbuğa died at around the age of thirty and suffered from arthritis, that Pervâne was between fifty and fifty-five, and that the concubine was between fifty and sixty and had lost all her teeth; no scientific publication is cited for these findings. It may be supposed that the claim that İşbuğa died at around thirty is hard to reconcile with the more than twenty years of service as nâzır in the inventory record; this is an inference.

Among the Turkish Mummies of Anatolia

The Amasya mummies are among the largest in number of the few groups of mummies in Anatolia that date from the Turkish and Muslim period. Efe states that museums and tombs in Turkey hold some forty-one human and two animal mummies, very few of which have been well preserved. Examples from the Seljuk and principalities periods include the mummy in the burial story of the Tomb of Melik Mengücek Gazi at Kemah, the mummy of the Arap Baba Tomb at Harput, the six bodies, now reduced to skeletons, in the tomb beneath the Taş Mescit built at Çankırı by Atabey Cemâleddin Ferruh in 1235, and the mummies of the Melik Gazi Tomb in the Pınarbaşı district of Kayseri. In most of these examples, as in Amasya, the body was preserved in the burial chamber on the lower story of a two-story tomb. The same study also stresses that most mummies were moved to museums very late, were damaged in floods and earthquakes, or were reburied as soon as they were found.

In a statement made in 2009, Muzaffer Doğanbaş, one of the researchers of the Amasya Museum, said that Turkish mummies, unlike Egyptian ones, have no linen wrappings, that some forty substances used in mummification appear in a work written in the fourteenth century by the Konya physician Hacı Paşa, and that salt and onion were among them. The same statement also claims that the Ottoman palace had officials charged with embalming and that almost all the sultans other than Osman Gazi, Orhan Gazi, Bayezid II and Selim I (Selim the Grim) were mummified. This information does not directly explain the method by which the bodies in Amasya were prepared, but it shows that the tradition to which the mummies belong was not an isolated case in Anatolia.

Relationship with the Amasya Museum

The history of the museum goes back to a museum depot established in 1925 in two rooms of the madrasa building of the Bayezid II Complex, where a small number of archaeological works were gathered together with mummies from the Islamic period. The depot was run by an honorary official until 1958 and became a museum directorate in June of that year. The collection was moved to the Gökmedrese Mosque in 1962; the museum moved into its new building on 22 March 1977 and, after being arranged, opened to visitors on 14 June 1980. The museum holds around twenty-three thousand works belonging to twelve civilizations, from the Chalcolithic Age to the Ottoman period; the Hittite statue of the Storm God Teshub and the Roman-period Elmalı Taban Mosaic are among them. The museum directorate stresses that many museums in Turkey hold mummies but most of them are Christian mummies, whereas those in Amasya belong to Muslims. The tomb has remained part of the garden display even after the mummies were taken into the museum building.

Chronology

1116: Mesud I takes the Anatolian Seljuk throne with the support of the Danishmendid Emir Gazi.

1143-44: According to Hüsameddin, Amasya passes under Seljuk rule and Sultan Mesud founds Simre.

1152: Mesud forces Yağıbasan, ruler of Amasya, to submit.

1155 or 1156: Mesud dies and is buried in the tomb in the courtyard of the Alâeddin Mosque in Konya.

1242: The Burmalı Minare Mosque is built.

1297: Cumudar is recorded as having been killed in Amasya.

1299-1300: Mehmed Pervâne establishes an endowment for the Burmalı Minare Mosque; according to Hüsameddin, he is killed in the year 699.

1308: Mesud II dies in Kayseri.

1320: The death of İşbuğa Noyin is dated to this year according to the inventory record.

1753-54: Türedizâde Hâfız Süleyman Ağa builds the Narlı Bahçe Madrasa, which gives the cemetery its name.

1855: According to local accounts, the mummies of Pervâne's family are moved to the Tomb of Cumudar.

1864-65: The Narlı Bahçe Madrasa is largely demolished when the highway is built.

1925: The Amasya museum depot is established in the Bayezid II Madrasa.

1928: The mummies are removed from the tombs where they lay and transferred to the museum clerkship.

1931: Albert Gabriel publishes the tomb in Monuments turcs d'Anatolie.

1952: A flood of the Yeşilırmak damages the mummies.

1977-1980: The museum moves into its new building and opens to visitors.

2003: National Geographic specialists carry out an examination and endoscopy of the mummies.

2011: The mummies are moved from the tomb to the climate-controlled special section in the museum building.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

  • Efe, Zehra, "Türkiye Müze ve Türbelerindeki Mumyaların Tarihi ve Bugünkü Durumları", SDÜ Fen Edebiyat Fakültesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, no. 34, 2015, pp. 279-292.
  • "İzzeddin Mehmet Pervâne Bey (Ö. 1300) ve Amasya Burmalı Minare Camii Vakfı", Selçuklu Araştırmaları Dergisi.
  • Kesik, Muharrem, "Mesud II", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi. https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/mesud-ii
  • Önkal, Hakkı, "Selçuklular Devri Amasya Türbeleri", A.Ü. İslâmi İlimler Fakültesi Dergisi, no. 4, Erzurum 1980.

Official sources

  • Kültür Portalı, Sultan Mesud Türbesi, record of the Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism.

Books

Other sources

Online sources