Fleet K. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 1, Byzantium to Turkey, 1071-1453

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He had Minnet Bey brought before him and ordered him [Minnet Bey] to

leave the land. And he transported all these people to the district of Filibe

and gave them the land around the castle of Konus¸ as residence. Minnet’s son

Mehmed Bey erected in Konus¸animaret and a caravansaray as well, and there

they settled and took this [lowland] district as their residence.

Mevlana Nes¸ri

and the Anonymous-Giese have almost exactly the same story.

Konus¸ and its caravansary is mentioned by a long list of sixteenth-century west-

ern travellers. Minnet Bey’s son, Minneto

glu Mehmed Bey, became the ﬁrst

Ottoman governor of Bosnia (1463). The Anonymous-Giese has an interesting

remark on the people of Rumeli, stating that:

When Timur Han entered this country [Anatolia] he spread such terror that

nobody dared to stand against him and the majority of the people of those

districts he entered ﬂed and crossed the sea and spilled out over Rumeli.

Yes, many Arabs, Kurds, Turkoman and Anatolians ﬂed and went over to

Rumeli.People who lived in these times havereported:we saw in Rumeli many

people who said, ‘We are Arabs, others Turkoman or Kurds or of Anatolian

origin. Others said we come from C¸ agatay.’ They all had ﬂed and came to

Rumeli. And they are the real reason that the greater part of Rumeli became

populated.

The account is impressionistic and certainly exaggerated. When, however, we

accept the vague term ‘land of the Romans’ as largely being identical with

Thrace in its widest sense, then the remark is pretty much correct, and is

strongly supported by the situation as shown by the 1521 tahrir.

The Byzantine historian Laonikos Chalkokondyles also mentions a number

of deportations from Asia Minor to the Balkans. In Thrace, he adds (apart

from Filibe) Turkish settlement in the Zagora, the land around the modern

cities of Stara Zagora and Nova Zagora, which is lacking in the Ottoman

sources. Chalkokondyles also mentions deportations to the districts of Serres

and

Usk

up. Serres, the key to eastern Macedonia, was taken by the Ottomans

under C¸ andarlı Hayreddin. After the conquest of Verria (Ottoman Karaferya)

in May 1387,

Gazi Evrenos Bey, until then residing in G

ulcine, received

36 As¸ıkpas¸azade, Vom Hirtenzelt, tr. Kreutel, p. 129; ed. Ali, p. 91.

37 Nes¸ri, Kit

ab-ı Cih

an-n

a, ii,p.543.

38 Friedrich Giese (ed.), Die Altosmanischen Anonymen Chroniken in Text und

Ubersetzung,

2 vols. (Leipzig, 1922–5), ii,p.62.

39 For the date of the conquest of Verria see Peter Schreiner (ed.), Chronica byzantina

breviora. Die byzantinische Kleinchroniken, 3 vols. (Vienna, 1975–9), ii,p.334. Laonikos

Chalkokondyles, Historiarum Libri Decem, ed. I. Bekker, 2 vols. (Bonn, 1843), i,p.19–20.

As¸ıkpas¸azade, Vom Hirtenzelt, tr. Kreutel, p. 93; ed. Ali, pp. 61–2, connects the date of

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Ottoman expansion into the Balkans

Serres as his seat. As¸ıkpas¸azade, the Anonymous-Giese and Nes¸ri mention

that the important cities of this part of Macedonia, Kavala, Drama, Zichne and

Serres, were all taken by treaty. After these events it had become useless to keep

ulcine as an advanced base on the border (uc) because it nowlay more than

200 kilometres inland. We have to understand that Gazi Evrenos organised the

deportation of y

uks from Saruhan in western Anatolia in 1385, as mentioned

by As¸ıkpas¸azade and Chalkokondyles, and to the

Usk

up region in or shortly

after 1390, when the principalities of Saruhan and Aydın were annexed by

Bayezid I.

Chalkokondyles even gives some details: ‘After this he brought his

affairs in order. First of all he [the sultan] took the Greeks into his friendship and

as allies. He made peace with the princes of Macedonia and dispatched a great

number of real Turks [no converts] from Asia as well as from Europe with their

families to live in the city of the Scopians’.

Usk

up and its plain is one of the focal

points of the southern Balkans, where at least six important roads converge.

Turks, mainly craftsmen, were settled outside the cramped Byzantino-Slavic

fortiﬁed town, where an important section of the local Christian population

continued to live. The oldest preserved Ottoman register containing

Usk

and its district is tt 12 from 1454.

It describes 23 Muslim mahalles (quarters,

districts) with 444 households and 72 male Muslim individuals (nefer), as well as

286 Christian households and another 26 households headed by widows. With

3,500–3,700 inhabitants,

Usk

up had become one of the largest urban centres

of the Balkan interior. The number of Muslims (two-thirds of the town’s total

population) shows the magnitude of the change. It is interesting to see that

among the Muslim mahalles of the town there is one called Ali Mentes¸el

pointing to settlers from that south-west Anatolian district annexed by the

Ottomans around 1390. The conquest of

Usk

up, beginning January 1392,is

mentioned as a marginal note in an old Serbian church book.

Almost all

Ottoman sources mention only that Pas¸a Yi

git Bey was sent against

Usk

by Bayezid I some time after his accession to the throne (June 1389). Only

Kemalpas¸azade describes the conquest in some detail, but the part of his

chronicle mentioning it only became available recently in published form.

787/1385–6 with these events. Only after the spring of 1387, when Thessalonike was

ﬁnally taken, was the situation stable enough to start the reorganisation of the land.

40 As¸ıkpas¸azade, Vom Hirtenzelt, tr. Kreutel, p. 97;Nes¸ri, Kit

ab-ı Cih

an-n

a, i,pp.312–13.

41 Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Historiarum Demonstrationes, ed. E. Dark

o, vol. I (Budapest,

1922–3), p. 94.

42 Published in Macedonian translation by Metodija Sokoloski, Turski Dokumenti za Istori-

jata na Makedonskiot Narod, 4 vols. (Skopje, 1963–72), iii,pp.143–283.

43 Published by Ljubomir Stojanovi

c, Stari Stpski Zapisi I Nadpisi (Belgrade, 1908).

Ibn Kemal (Kemalpas¸azade), Tevarih-i At-i Osman, IV Defter, ed. Koji Imazava (Ankara,

2000), pp. 27–37.

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machiel kiel

The settlement of Turks in

Usk

up was largely conﬁned to the town itself. The

1454 register lists ten small villages with Turkish place names and 123 Muslim

households in the great triangular plain of

Usk

up.

Of the whole of the Muslim

population of the

Usk

up district, four-ﬁfths lived in the town. It was only in

later times, particularly in the course of the sixteenth century, that a dozen or

more Turkish villages came into being in the plain, and the population of the

old villages trebled. Yet the predominance of the town as the principal Turkish

centre remained.

There is another account of Turkish settlement in the Balkans recorded in

the narrative sources. The lost Ottoman chronicle known as Codex Hanival-

danus, preserved in Leunclavius’s Historiae Musulmanae Turcorum, mentions

that in the mid-ﬁfteenth century Turkish colonists moved to the land between

S¸umnu (

Sumen) and Silistra in north-eastern Bulgaria and worked small plots

of land, and, at the same time, served in the army as akıncıs (raiders). A note

from the time of Sultan Selim I preserved in the ‘proto-statistic’ of the empire

from 1528–30 seems to refer to this group of settlers.

It says that before 1516–

17, 1,280 households, or perhaps 6,000–6,500 people, had come ‘from Anatolia

to the Dobrudja in the time of the sultans of bygone ages as a result of s

urg

(deportation)’, and enjoyed certain tax beneﬁts. This wave of settlers must have

arrived shortly after the crusade of Varna, 1444, when the north-east Bulgarian

lowlands suffered heavy devastation at the hands of the crusaders. An indica-

tion of this is the Ottoman name of the old castle of Petri

c near Varna, which,

like the other castles in the area (Galata, Ma

gli

s, Madara, Kavarna, Kalliakra),

was destroyed by the crusaders and not later rebuilt. The Ottomans after 1444

resettled the entire empty plateau south of Lake Devnja with twenty villages

of Turks. One of them was Ak Viran, so called after the ruins of the castle of

Petri

c, which was built of the soft whitish limestone characteristic of north-

eastern Bulgaria. The incoming settlers gave a new name (White Ruin) to the

place, but the 1516–17 register still adds ‘also known as Petri

c’. Ak Viran was

later corrupted to Avren and became the name of the entire plateau. In 1935

its name was changed to Momino.

A good guide for reconstructing the history of the Turkish colonisation

of the eastern Balkans could have been that faithful mirror of history, the

toponomy. Yet it was precisely this source of history that was ruthlessly

destroyed on the orders of the nationalist Bulgarian government in 1934–5,

45 tt 4 published in Aleksandar Stojanovski and Mihailo Apostolski (eds.), Turski Dokumenti

za Istorija na Makedonskiot Narod (Skopje, 1972), pp. 434–9.

46 BOA, tt 367.

152

Ottoman expansion into the Balkans

and in Greece in a more piecemeal fashion.

An indication of the importance

of the Turkish toponyms in Bulgaria is given by Min

cev and Koledarov. Turk-

ish toponyms totalled 43 per cent of all place names in the country. Indicative

also are the old village names in eastern Bulgaria, still to be seen on the Aus-

trian, German and Russian 1:200.000 military maps of the Balkans, pointing

to districts in Anatolia where the settlers originated, like Germiyanlı (near

Aydos, Karnobat and near Yambol), Mentes¸eli (near Yenice Kızıla

gac¸/Elhovo

and Doyran in Macedonia) or Saruhanlı (near Silistra and Rusokastro), or

even more drastic ones like Anadolulu (near Rusokastro, Karnobat, Hirsovo

and Yambol) or Anadolu H

useyin, east of

Sumen. Others point more directly

to the town of origin, like Geredel

u near Kızıla

gac¸/Elhovo, and near Aydos,

Ahlatl

u (near Karnobat), Kastamonlular (near Veliko Tirnovo), Karahisarl

(near Hask

oy/Haskovo) or Tokatlu (near Yambol). There are also indica-

tions of the resettlement of colonists inside the Balkans (to which the note of

Chalkokondyles about

Usk

up also points); examples of this are the villages of

Great and Small Filebel

uler near Razgrad and near Varna, or Za

gralı near Eski

Cuma/T

argovi

ste.

The Ottoman colonisation of the great eastern plain of Thessaly, with

Yenis¸ehir Larissa as its centre, was not noted by the chroniclers. Apart from

some legendary stories recorded by Urquhard and Fallmerayer at the begin-

ning of the nineteenth century, our best guide is the 1455 register, defter Maliye

udever No. 10, the oldest preserved for that part of Greece.

Eastern Thes-

saly was practically deserted when the Ottomans came (1388–9), its former

capital Larissa had been a heap of ruins since the 1330s and its bishop’s church

was a retreat for bandits, as Archbishop Antonius of Larissa assures us in 1360.

He therefore resided in Trikkala in the western plain, which was in a good

condition and relatively well settled. The Ottomans under Evrenos Bey and his

son Barak Bey founded their ‘New Town’ (Yenis¸ehir) outside the ruins of old

Larissa, where a few Christians had survived. Eastern Thessaly was destroyed

in the ﬁrst three decades of the fourteenth century during the endless local

wars, by the Catalan invasion and especially by the Albanians. According to

the 1455 register the new town had 355 Muslim households and 66 of Christians.

It is illustrative of the resettlement of this town that the vast majority of the

47 A complete survey of the changes of the toponyms in Bulgaria is given by Nikolaj Min

cev

and Peter Koledarov, Promenite na imenate i statute and seli

stata na B

algarija, 1878–1971

(Soﬁa, 1972).

48 BOA, Maliyeden M

udevver [henceforth mad] 10 is now available in transcription and in

the original script: Melek Delilbas¸ı and Muzaffer Arıkan, Hicr

ı 85 9 Tarihli S

uret-i Sancak-ı

Tirhala, 2 vols. (Ankara, 2001).

153

machiel kiel

inhabitants were craftsmen,such as weavers, tanners, tailors and coppersmiths.

The names of the villages east of the town read like a geographical textbook:

Aydınlı, Germiyanlı, Mentes¸eli, Saruhanlı, all of the major provinces of west-

ern Anatolia are present. Further, some village names point to tribal groups

from western Anatolia, such as the Cullular, known in the Aydın district, or

the Sarucalar from the Kocaeli district east of Bursa.

The later numerous Turkish population of parts of the former Yugoslav

Macedonia was also present at a very early date, although still in minor groups.

The district was annexed without great upheaval after its Christian lords,

‘King’ Marko and Constantin Dejanovi

cofVelbu

zd (K

ostendil), had perished

in the battle of Rovine (1395) ﬁghting for Sultan Bayezid whose vassals they

were. The oldest preserved Ottoman register is tt 237, a fragment from the

short ﬁrst reign of Mehmed II (1445).

In 1445, according to this register,

the kaza of K

opr

u (Veles) along the Vardar river had six settlements with

a Muslim population. The town of K

opr

u itself had 190 households, of

which only nine were Muslim (not counting the kadı and a garrison of twenty

Muslim soldiers). Slowly, in the course of time, through more settlement

and through a slow process of conversion to Islam, the number of Muslims

in K

opr

u went up to one-third of the whole population (19,700 in 1900,

according to K

cov’s ﬁgures). In 1445, there were ﬁve villages with Turkish

place names and Muslim inhabitants (C¸ elt

ukciler, Hisar Beyli, Karasılar, Koc¸ı

and Suyakları), mostly y

uks, of which one group evidently came from the

land of Karası. In time these villages also grew, and more were founded in the

earlysixteenth century. Theareato the east of the Vardaris still knownlocallyas

‘Yurukluk’.

Another nucleus of the Turkish settlement was in the great Pelagonian

plain in west Macedonia, between Prilep and Manastır (Monastir, Bitola), and

further southwards into today’s northern Greece. The register tt 4, part of

a series which Ursinus has convincingly dated to 1454–5, has the villages of

49 For the sources and for more details see M. Kiel, ‘Das t

urkische Thessalien, etabliertes

geschichtsbild versus osmanische quellen. Ein beitrag zur entmythologisierung der

geschichte Griechenlands’, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in

ottingen, Phil. Hist. Klasse, Dritte Folge No. 212, 1996, 153–65.

50 BOA, tt 237.

51 The 1445 register has been published in Sokoloski, Turski Dokumenti, ii,pp.23–67. Vasil

cov’s work Makedonija, Etnograﬁja, Statistika (Soﬁa, 1900) (reprint 1973)isregardedas

containing the most reliable population statistics on late Ottoman Greater Macedonia.

They arebetter also than the numbers contained in the various Ottoman salnames,which

were made for public use and often inﬂate the number of Muslims and slightly reduce

those of the Christians. The Ottoman n

ufus defters (population registers), however, made

for government use, were largely correct, as K

cov discovered.

154

Ottoman expansion into the Balkans

Dedebalı, Timur, S¸eleverci and Ali Obası with the explicit remark that they

were y

uks, were free of most taxes but in return had to serve in the army

as es¸kinci (irregular cavalrymen).

In the kaza of Manastır, very near the four

villages mentioned (of which three still exist), was the village of Kanatlar.

However, the great mass of Turkish colonists in the southern part of the

Pelagonian plain, around Kayalar and Cuma Pazarı, had evidently not yet

arrived. They were to come in the second quarter of the sixteenth century,

when unrest and heterodoxy fomented rebellion (the Kalendero

glu revolt)

and drove many tribal groups to settle in the peaceful plains of the southern

Balkans. The same is also partly true for the three dozen y

uk villages east

of the Vardar, in the

Stip area: the Ofc¸ebolu Y

ukleri. Some of these groups

had settled before the 1519 census was taken, many others came afterwards, in

the 1520s and 1530s.

The sources mentioned here give a variegated picture of the Ottoman

settlement and colonisation of the Balkans. It seems that, at ﬁrst, there was

a spontaneous push of nomad settlers from western Anatolia, where there

were many Turkoman nomads, to lands largely empty of population, that is,

the greater part of Thrace; then the second wave, caused by refugees ﬂeeing

Timur’s aggression;and, third, government-ordereddeportations. These three

categories are reﬂected in the sources. The fourth category, the slow and

unorganised movement of peoples from Anatolia to the eastern Balkans, and,

from there, deeper inland to Macedonia, stretched over the whole ﬁfteenth,

and also the ﬁrst half of the sixteenth century, but remained unrecorded in

the chronicles. We only ﬁnd them in the Ottoman tahrir defters, which, for

many districts, allow us to see the intensity of the Turkish colonisation. They

also show us which areas were not affected by it, namely, where the bulk

of the native Slav, Greek or Albanian population remained where it always

had been.

For decades the Turkish colonisation has been forcefully denied in Bulgarian

historiography. The reason behind this is political, not scientiﬁc. Moreover,

Bulgarian historians and Ottomanists were unable to make use of the rich

source materials preserved in the Turkish archives, having to work with a few

disconnected fragments in the Soﬁa National Library. The emphasis was on the

aspect of conversion to Islam, which is indeed clearly visible in the sources but

gained momentum only in the seventeenth century. Yugoslav historiography,

doubtless the brightest of the entire Balkans, relied heavily on the Ottoman

52 BOA, tt 4,ff.61–2. Michael Ursinus, ‘An Ottoman Census Register for the Area of Serres

of 859 (1454/55)’, S

udost-Forschungen 45 (1986), 25–36.

155

machiel kiel

tahrirs, of which complete sets of microﬁlms were available from the early

1950s. This has led to the publication of long series of sources as well as studies

based on them. Here both aspects are stressed, colonisation and conversion.

It was only in 1994, after the great political changes in eastern Europe, that

Turks and Bulgarians reached an agreement for mutual exchangeof microﬁlms

of Ottoman source material, a process which continues and will ultimately

change the entire Bulgarian historiography. The ﬁrst tahrir register of Albania,

the oldest of the entire Balkans, from 1432, was published in 1954 by Halil

Inalcık.

The Albanians have produced excellent publications of some entire

tahrirs, but in Albanian historiography Turkish colonisation was not dealt with

because it never took place. Almost three-quarters of the population of Albania

converted to Islam, but this process stretched over a full four centuries.

Turkish colonisation and settlement in Greece is not a popular topic. More-

over, this neglected subject suffers from the fact that, disregarding two or three

rare exceptions, Greece had no scholars able to read the Ottoman adminstra-

tive scripts and most historians are hardly aware of what a wealth of sources

is available. In spite of this, a promising new approach to the whole Turkish

period in Greece is discernible, mostly the work of young scholars trained in

western universities. Finally, some good work on the topic has been done by

Turkish scholars, but here the accent has been heavily on colonisation, leaving

the Islamisation of the native Balkan population underexposed. To sum up, the

comprehensive work on how much of the Balkans became truly Turkish will

take a long time to be written; yet we can at least conclude for now that the

land to the east of the line from Nikopol (Nikopolis, Ni

gbolu) on the Danube

to Kavala on the Aegean, and most of the southern half of Macedonia was,

until 1912, at least as ‘Turkish’ as most of Anatolia.

Early Ottoman architecture in the Balkans

Ottoman architecture in the Balkans largely followed the pattern of the settle-

ment of Turks as outlined above. As the incorporation of the southern Balkans,

Thrace and Macedonia took place at a time when the young state was still in

its formative stage, these provinces fully participated in the formation of the

new Islamic art. It is not generally known that in the southern Balkans today

there are still standing at least a dozen buildings dating from the very ﬁrst

53 Halil

Inalcık, Suret-i Defter-i Sancak-i Arvanid (Ankara, 1954).

54 Selami Pulaha, Le cadastre de l’an 1485 du sandjak de Shkoder. Presentation, introduction,

translit

eration, traduction et commentaire, 2 vols. (Tirana, 1974).

156

Ottoman expansion into the Balkans

decades of Ottoman rule, that is, from before the year 1400. These are not

converted Byzantino-Slavic structures, but genuine Ottoman ones, including

mosques, zaviyes (dervish lodges), hamams and hans (caranvansarys). As they

remain very little known, they will be introduced here brieﬂy. The line of

development will also be described beyond the fourteenth century, bringing

the story to 1453.

Problems of conservation

The value and the beauty of the Ottoman architectural legacy in south-

eastern Europe has long been unappreciated in the nation-states succeeding

the empire. After 1878, and especially after 1912, the Ottoman monuments

became the victims of mass destruction, being memories of a past which had

no place in the nationalist ideology and education of the successor states.

Because of the tendency to ‘correct the mistake of history’ (the emergence

and existence of the Ottoman Empire) objects directly recalling that time had

to be removed. In fact, this process went on until the 1990s: the Cultural Revo-

lution in Albania in 1967, the anti-Turkish and Islamic campaign of the

Zivkov

regime in Bulgaria, 1984–5, the mass destruction, with the help of dynamite,

of a long list of many-centuries-old Ottoman buildings in Bosnia-Hercegovina

by the nationalist Serbs as well as Croats, and most recently the destruction

of whole old town centres by Serbian incendiary squads during the Kosovo

crisis of 1998–9 (Djakovica, Vu

citrn, Pe

c). The events in the summer of 2001 in

the Republic of Macedonia, which led to the wanton destruction of scores of

historical mosques by Macedonian extremists, show how fragile the situation

still is.

On the other hand, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, the

more enlightened part of Balkan society has raised its voice against these acts

of destruction, and succeeded in saving individual buildings here and there.

Illustrative of this is the case of the monumental, late ﬁfteenth-century

bedestan (covered market) in the city centre of Serres in Greek Macedonia,

which in the Second World War was under Bulgarian occupation. In the

process of being demolished, the bedestan was saved by the direct personal

intervention of the art historian Bogdan Filov, prime minister of the fascist

government of Bulgaria, and later carefully restored by the Greek Service for

Ancient Monuments. It now serves as the city’s Archaeological Museum.

different case is that of the similarly late ﬁfteenth-century bedestan of Yambol

55 The role of Bogdan Filov in the saving of the Serres bedestan was communicated to us

by a participant of the Bulgarian occupation of Macedonia in the Second World War,

Nikola Mushanov.

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machiel kiel

in Bulgarian Thrace, the only Bulgarian example of its kind surviving to our

time. When in the 1960s the town centre of Yambol was reconstructed, the

city council wanted to demolish the, admittedly ugly, ruin of the building.

Others wanted to preserve it as a relic in a steel and glass ‘aquarium’; and

the gifted architect Nikola Mushanov made a model showing a total recon-

struction of the building. The city council pressed for a solution. Finally the

party secretary, himself a poet, chose the Mushanov plan, and made available

the huge amount of money needed. As the town and the whole district of

Yambol had no other historical buildings, it was later decided to restore also

the ugly-looking Old Mosque nearby. Since the 1980s both buildings, but in

particular the bedestan, have become much appreciated beauty spots locally.

When much money became available for restoration after the destructive

Thessalonike earthquake of 20 June 1978, some Ottoman buildings in the city

were restored with great care and attention by architects and specialists of the

Greek National Service for Historical Monuments. The restorations of two

very large, richly decorated and monumental ﬁfteenth-century hamams, the

Bey Hamamı and the Pazar Hamamı, are among the best of their type ever

undertaken.

The dichotomy in attitude towards the Ottoman legacy in the Balkans is

made very clear in the case of Skopje, the capital of the former Yugoslav Mace-

donia. After the catastrophic earthquake of 1963 ten of the largest Ottoman

buildings, almost all from the ﬁfteenth century, were excellently restored or

even reconstructed. They all stand together around the bazaar area, in what

was to become an architectural preserve, a protected cityscape. However,

everything else, including more than a dozen historical mosques, a number of

the ﬁfteenth-century hamams, t

urbes (tombs) and tekkes (dervish lodges), was

mercilessly destroyed so that the modern socialist capital of the Macedonian

Slav state could be constructed.

Skopje as it looks today is the outcome of

the long struggle between two antagonistic forces.

The aspect of the wholesale destruction of the Ottoman architectural legacy,

amounting to 98 per cent of all historical public and religious buildings, should

constantly be kept in mind when evaluating the place this art once occupied

in the formation and ﬂourishing of Ottoman art as a whole.

56 These actions were, according to a communication made to us by the post-communist

prime minister of Macedonia, Branko

Cervenkovski, pushed forward by the inﬂuential

headof thecity’sInstitutefor Historical Monuments,the betonkopf communistAlexander

Kanev, who more than anyone else is responsible for the disappearance of scores of

Ottoman monuments in this singularly rich city.

158

Ottoman expansion into the Balkans

The fourteenth century

The needs of the early conquerors and settlers for places of prayer must at

ﬁrst have been satisﬁed by conﬁscating Christian churches, which at the same

time became the symbols of the victory of Islam. Early examples are the

uleyman Pas¸a Camii in Ferecik (Ferai) and the Fatih Camii in Vize, both in

Thrace and both sizeable middle-Byzantine buildings. In the capital of the

Ottoman Balkans, Edirne (Adrianople), conquered around 1369, at least two

churches were converted into mosques, the Kilise Cami and the Fatih Camii.

They served as the chief mosques of the city until the construction of the

ﬁrst Great Mosque (now known as Eski Cami), begun shortly after 1403 by

Emir S

uleyman. The two church/mosques of Edirne disappeared long ago

as a consequence of earthquake and ﬁre. In towns taken without violence,

such as Komotini, or the great city of Serres, and in newly founded towns the

Ottomans had to construct their own buildings themselves.

The oldest Ottoman buildings still standing in the Balkans are very prob-

ably the Gazi Evrenos

Imareti (soup kitchen) and the nearby Eski Cami of

ulcine (Komotini) in Greek Thrace. The hamam, which had an Arabic

inscription and was blown up in the early 1960s, was part of the same foun-

dation. From the surviving buildings, the Eski Cami is a building which has

no preserved inscription but can be dated by historical evidence. G

ulcine,

a very small Byzantine fortiﬁed town, was taken by Gazi Evrenos, presum-

ably in 1361, and became the seat of his uc facing Serbian-controlled Aegean

Macedonia. It is not very likely that the early Ottoman warlords started

to invest in building before the battle on the Maritsa (Meric¸) in 1371 had

removed the Serbian threat. In 1383, when Serres, the key of Aegean Macedo-

nia, was conquered,

Evrenos moved the seat of his uc to that important place

130 kilometres to the west, and closer to the main ﬁeld of operations. In

Serres he is known to have constructed another imaret/zaviye.Thevakﬁye

(endowment deed of a vakıf) of this foundation is dated 818 (13 March 1415–end

February 1416),

but the building is evidently older (Evrenos Bey died at a great

age in 1416). It is interesting to see that in the vakﬁye the person who ran the

Serres institution is explicitely called ‘Ahi’. In the early 1390s Evrenos Bey moved

westward again, this time to the new town of Yenice-i Vardar, 50 kilometres

west of Thessalonike, after the latter had been taken by the Ottomans in 1387.

Yenice-i Vardar is a creation of Gazi Evrenos. It is the town where he erected

57 For the date of the conquest of these two cities see George Ostrogorski, ‘La prise de

Serres par les Turcs’, Byzantion 35 (1965), 302–19; G. T. Dennis, The Reign of Manuel II

Paleologus in Thessalonica, 1382–1387 (Rome, 1960); and Imber, Ottoman Empire,pp.33–4.

58 Ankara Vakiﬂar Genel M

url

uArs¸ivi, Defter 2108,ff.72–7.

159