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the hamam still stand (as of 2006), both in an incredible state of ruin and

decay. The main building, now a mosque, was wrecked by an earthquake and

drastically restored and partly reconstructed in the 1970s. The main building

of the group shows an interesting variant of the T-plan type. A central, domed

room is ﬂanked by two smaller domed rooms, accessible only through doors

leading from the main hall. The latter has a separate section for prayer, reached

by several steps and covered by a stilted dome. Its most speciﬁc feature is the

mihrab wall in the form of an apse, covered by a melon-shaped half-dome. This

is perhaps the ﬁrst example of the application of the half-dome in Ottoman

architecture, an element which was to have a great future. It was soon to be

followed in the zaviye-mosque of Yahs¸ı Bey in Tire in 1441

103

and very probably

also played a role in conceiving the plan of the great mosque of Mehmed

Fatih in Istanbul (1462). The ﬁve-unit porch in front of the Edirne building is a

modern reconstruction. The ruined t

urbe still shows some panels with a cobalt

blue tile decoration, a relic of the Seljuk past and rare in the Balkans.

104

Less than a decade later, but also without a date secured by a Bauinschrift,is

the highly monumental Muradiye Cami in the eastern outskirts of Edirne. It

shows roughly the same plan as the Beylerbey Camii but is one-third bigger.

A central domed section of 9.80 metres in diameter is followed by a slightly

smaller prayer section, surmounted by a dome. This two-domed space is

ﬂanked by a domed room on each side. This is now connected with the main

space through large arches but they have evidently been broken through later,

when the space was united with the main room. The building is preceded by a

monumental porch of ﬁve units. The glory of this building is the tile decoration

of the walls of the prayer section and the mihrab, showing evidently Chinese-

inspired ﬂower motives in various shades of blue against a white background.

Mecdi, the sixteenth-century translator of Tas¸k

opr

uzade’s famous biogra-

phy of Ottoman scholars S¸aqa’iq al-Nu‘maniyya, claims to have seen the vakﬁye

of the building dated 830/1426–7.

105

Hibri, however, gives 839/1435–6 as the date

of construction and adds a number of interesting details in his description:

Another [building] is the Muradiye Mosque, built by His Highness the Father

of Muniﬁcence [Murad II], which has two domes and one minaret, the minaret

being decorated with tiles. It is built on a high hill. He himself had made it

Mevlevihane [a lodge for Mevlevi dervishes] and indeed, to ensure that during

103 Ayverdi, Osmanlı Mim

ısinde, ii,p.542.

104 The most detailed description of the buildings of Beylerbey Yusuf Pas¸a, and the best

plan and elevation is by Ayverdi, Osmanlı Mim

ısinde, ii,pp.377–81.

105 Mehmed Mecdi Efendi, Had

aiku’s¸S¸ek

aik (Istanbul 1268 [1852]), vol. I, ed. Ab

ulkadir

Ozcan (Istanbul, 1989), p. 217.

180

Ottoman expansion into the Balkans

the ritual dance (sema) sorbets wouldﬂow, pipes have been placed [in the walls],

and some of them are still there. After some time, when it became a noble

mosque, a separate Mevlevihane was built opposite it.

The meals prepared in royal imaret, being extremely tasty and abundant,

are not only given to the Mevlevi dervishes and the poor students but also to

the houses in the surroundings. This mosque was built in the year 839 [1435–6].

It is related that when His Highness Sultan Murad Han beheld this place, he

immediately ordered the construction of this priceless Mevlevihane for His

Exaltedness Mevlana [Celaleddin Rumi].

106

The building, one of the best representatives of the so-called Bursa plan

mosque, or zaviye-mosque, was thus deﬁnitely not intended to be a mosque.

It only became one much later, by removing the walls separating the main

central hall from the lateral rooms, which can hardly have been anything else

but guest rooms or rooms for the Mevlevi dervishes. As with the Orta

Imaret

of Mihalo

glu Mehmed Bey, or the Yıldırım Camii nearby, the actual cooking

must have been done in a separate building, which has not survived. It should

be added that the accounts of income and expenditure from 1491, mentioned

before, call the building either an imaret or Mevlevihane. The well-preserved

Bauinschrift has only imaret.

In the year the Muradiye was completed, Murad II started the construction

of the grandest mosque of the empire hitherto, the Yeni Cami (New Mosque)

as it was called. It is known to us as the

Uc¸S¸erefeli Cami because of its

largest minaret, which has three successive balconies, a novelty in Ottoman

architecture. The date of construction is handed down by the early Ottoman

chroniclers and is written on various well-preserved inscriptions. The great

building (62 by 64 metres) was begun in 841/1437–8 and was completed in

851/1447. As its site, a ﬂat terrain was chosen outside the old walled city of

Edirne in the market area, a little north of the Eski Cami (Old Mosque). The

plan evidently is a further development of the Ulu Cami of Manisa, as was ﬁrst

pointed out by Robert Anhegger and is now generally accepted. Manisa had

been the capital of the beylik of Saruhan in western Anatolia, the place where

Murad had resided as prince before coming to the throne, and the place where

he spent a year and a half in retirementafter his abdication in favour of his young

son Mehmed II (1445–6). The great colonnaded courtyard, the ﬁrst in Ottoman

architecture, came from Manisa, as did the concept of an oblong prayer hall,

covered by a huge central dome and several smaller ones over the lateral

spaces. The more remote ancestor is the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, and

106 Codex Vindob. 1052,ff.16v–17r.

181

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the beyliks of western Anatolia had had intensive cultural contact with Syria,

to prove, in a sense, their independence from the successors of the Seljuks

in central Anatolia. The general form of the Edirne building, however, was

wholly ‘Ottomanised’, made more homogeneous and surveyable. The main

dome, spanning 26 metres, is the largest the Ottomans had constructed up

to that point. It rests on a hexagonal base of arches, supported by the front

and rear walls and by two massive hexagonal piers. The proportions of the

buildings are still low and ponderous, the architect evidently being unsure

about pushing the enormous dome to a greater height. The

Uc¸S¸erefeli Cami

is a revolutionary building. Its role in the developmentof Ottoman architecture

was once compared by Sir Nicolas Pevsner with that of the choir of the Abbey

of St Denis as reconstructed under Abbot Suger for the emergence of Gothic

architecture. It paved the way for the development of the vast centralised inner

spaces of the sixteenth centry, but it nevertheless shows an almost Romanesque

bulkiness. As a building it was the greatest architectural undertaking in the

Balkans since the days of Justinian.

The local historian and contemporary Ruhi-i Edirnevi is the only one of the

early Ottoman chroniclers to give the name of the architect: Usta M

usliheddin.

Thesame source tells us that M

usliheddin had also constructedthe great bridge

of Cisr-i Ergene (now Uzunk

opr

u), south of Edirne, which was completed in

847/1443–4, and was also employed by Murad’s successor, Mehmed II, for

his new palace on the banks of the Tunca river outside Edirne.

107

Parallel to

the construction of the

Uc¸S¸erefeli Cami, work was undertaken on buildings

designed partly to promote the hygiene of the Edirne Muslims, partly to

provide revenue for the upkeep of Murad’s great foundations. One is the

Alaca Hamam, a large hamam with an exquisite stalactite decoration, built just

north of the northern wall of Byzantine Adrianopolis, and the other, on an

even more magniﬁcent scale, on the main north–south artery of Edirne, to

the east of the old castle walls: the so-called Tahtakale Hamamı in the Sarac¸lar

Caddesi. The Alaca Hamam is dated by an inscription, now housed in the

Edirne Museum.

108

The Tahtakale Hamamı is one of the largest and most

important works of this kind in the entire domain of Ottoman architecture. In

107 For the text of Ruhi see Victor L. M

enage, ‘Edirne’li R

uhi’ye Atfedilen Osmanlı Tarihi’,

in Ord. Prof.

Ismail Uzunc¸ars¸ılı’ya Arma

gan (Ankara, 1976), pp. 328–39. For the historian

himself see J. H. Mordtmann, ‘R

ı Edirnew

ı’, Mitteilungen zur osmanische Geschichte

2 (1923–4), 129–36; and Hedda Reindl, M

anner um Bayezid (Berlin, 1983), pp. 7–15.For

the link between Manisa and Edirne see Robert Anhegger, ‘Beitr

age zur osmanishen

Baugeschichte II, 1,Die

Uc¸S¸erefeli Cami in Edirne und die Ulu Cami in Manisa’,

Istanbuler Mitteilungen 8 (1958), 40–5.

108 Dijkema, Inscriptions,pp.25–6. Edirne Museum: 841 (1440/1).

182

Ottoman expansion into the Balkans

contrast to the Beylerbey Hamamı and the Gazi Mihal Hamamı, mentioned

above, which are only slightly older, this hamam has large, domed, disrobing

rooms, and departs from the Syrian plan of the aforementioned hamams. The

male disrobing room is surmounted by a huge dome of almost 16 metres in

diameter, which sits on an elaborate stalactite ﬁlling in each of the four corners.

Through a tepidarium of six compartments one enters the bath room proper,

which shows the classical four-eyvan scheme, with four domed cells in the

remaining corners. All vaulting is highly elaborate, showing a profusion of

muqarnas (stalactite vaults), ﬁllings and geometrically designed vaults. In the

tepidarium we even see a melon-shaped half-dome, the same elements as

applied in the Beylerbey Camii from a decade earlier.

In contrast to the male section, the section of the great Edirne hamam

reserved for women is but modest. Here the dome of the disrobing room,

9.70 metres in diameter, sits on Turkish triangles. The tepidarium is very

small and the bath room proper shows a reduced version of the four-eyvan

scheme, with two eyvans only and with only two cells, ﬂanking each other,

without eyvan between them. The great bath, which without exaggeration

might be called a ‘cathedral of hygiene’, is not dated by inscription but must

be placed around 1435–40, when Murad was actively promoting Edirne into a

truly Islamic capital. The hamam occupies an area of 58 by 28 metres. According

to the annual accounts of 896/1491 published by Barkan it was the largestsource

of income for the dar

ulhadis (religious school) of Murad II in Edirne.

109

Another

building in this series is the exquisite hamam built in the depression between

the Muradiye Cami of Edirne and the famous Selimiye and popularly known

as Yenic¸eri Hamamı. Compared with those mentioned above it is small. Its

importance lies in the high-quality decoration of the vaults and dome, with

spiral, star and half-melon domes, sitting on elaborate muqarnas work in cut

plaster. This single hamam served as a source of revenue for the k

ulliye (mosque

complex) of Murad II in Cisr-i Ergene (Uzunk

opr

u), as is mentioned in the

annual accounts of 896/1491.

110

109 For a detailed plan of the hamam see Ayverdi, Osmanlı Mim

ısinde, ii,p.472, which,

however, omits the double water container and the heating room. A different plan

is given by Sabih Erken, ‘Edirne Hamamlari’, Vakiﬂar Dergisi 10 (1973), 403–19, plan

3. See also

Ilter B

ukdigan, ‘Tahtakale Hamam, Edirne, Turkey’, in Secular Medieval

Architecture in the Balkans 1300–1500 and its Preservation, ed. Sl. Cur

c and E. Hadji-

tryphonos (Thessalonike, 1997), pp. 330–1. For the 1491 accounts see Barkan, ‘Bazı

Imaret Tesislerinin’, p. 314.

110 Barkan, ‘Bazı

Imaret Tesislerinin’, no. 7,p.326. For an excellent plan, photographs

and detailed drawings of the vaults (but no identiﬁcation of the founder) see Do

gan

Kuban, ‘

Ikinci Murat C¸a

gı Hamamları Mukarnas Bezemeleri

Uzerine Notlar’, in Ord.

Prof. Ismail Hakkı Uzunc¸ars¸ılı’ya Arma

gan (Ankara, 1988), p. 455, appendix.

183

machiel kiel

In the 1430s important work was also carried out under Murad II in the larger

provincial centres, such as

Usk

up (Skopje) and Filibe (Plovdiv). The bridge and

Great Mosque of the sultan himself have already been mentioned.

Usk

up was

situated in a dominant location at the intersection of six important roads from

all corners of the Balkans. It was therefore chosen as the base for the operation

against Serbia and Albania, which had not yet been entirely subdued.

Usk

had been taken in 1392, during the aftermath of the battle of Kosovo, by the

provincial commander Pas¸a Yi

git. Pas¸a Yi

git was in charge of the western

uc throughout Yıldırım Bayezid’s reign (1389–1402) and subsequently under

Emir S

uleyman, Musa and Mehmed I, and is mentioned as such in the early

Ottoman chronicles. He was succeeded by his son, or adopted son,

Ishak, who

is the founder of the noble family of Ishakovi

c, which dominated the town for

almost a century, before being replaced by governors of devs¸irme origin.

In 842/1438–9,

Ishak Bey completed an extensive k

ulliye in

Usk

up, of which

the most important parts still survive today. They are situated outside the

narrow boundaries of the old Byzantino-Serbian capital, half a mile to the

north of it, on the road to the plain of Kosovo and further north to Bosnia.

Originally the foundation of

Ishak Bey consisted of a zaviye-mosque, a medrese,

a t

urbe, a kitchen building and a hamam, grouped together, and a second

group consisting of a six-domed bedestan with a large han opposite. Both the

latter buildings constituted the core of the

Usk

up C¸ ars¸ı district. Of the ﬁrst

mentioned group, the medrese, the kitchen building and the hamam, all three of

which are mentioned in the foundation charter, have disappeared. The hamam

was still standing in 1925 when Gli

sa Elezovi

published the ﬁrst detailed study

about the Ottoman monuments of Skopje. The main building, known as Alaca

Imaret, and the t

urbe are still standing. The main building is dated by its original

Bauinschrift to 842/1438–9 and is called a ‘noble imaret’.

In 1519 the imaret was changed considerably by removing the lateral walls

which separated the central hall from the side rooms. This change can still be

seen by the trained eye. The new arches, made to support the superstructure,

are crooked and awkward improvisations. The transformation from imaret

into mosque proper is documented by an inscription from 1519 placed above a

door in the left ﬂank, made from an old window. It states that the old building

was ‘enlarged’ into a ‘great mosque’ (cami-i kebir) on order of Hasan Bey, a

grandson of the founder in the month of Receb of 925/July 1519. It is one of the

rare documents pinning down the date of the transformation of an original,

and early, zaviye-mosque.

The han and the bedestan of

Ishak Bey are undated but must be from the

same years as the imaret. Both are mentioned in the vakﬁye, which is dated

184

Ottoman expansion into the Balkans

Zilkade 848/February 1445.Thehan, locally known as Suli An (Sulu Han), is

the oldest of its kind in the Balkans to have come down to us largely intact.

It shows the usual rectangular cloistered courtyard with two stories of barrel-

vaulted cells. Those on the upper ﬂoor disappeared in earthquakes and ﬁres

and were reconstructed in their nineteenth-century form. The lower part is

largely authentic. The court is ﬂanked on its short side by a vast hall with ﬂat

crossvaults on four massive square pillars. It functioned as the stables for the

animals in winter time. Along the fac¸ade on the main shopping street of the

c¸ars¸ı (market) was a row of twenty shops ﬁxed to the han proper. They have

now completely lost their original shape and were not reconstructed as they

had been.

On the opposite side of the main shopping street stood

Ishak Bey’s covered

market hall, the bedestan, which had, according to the vakﬁye, twenty-four

shops on its four sides. The main hall must have been covered by six domes

on two heavy square pillars but they have been destroyed long ago. Inside the

still-standing four walls, new wooden shops were built during a renovation in

1906.

111

In the fateful year of 1444, when a huge crusader army was laying waste

Danubian Bulgaria and advancing on Varna on the Black Sea, the beylerbey of

Rumeli, S¸ihabuddin Pas¸a, also known as Kula S¸ahin Pas¸a, was completing a

vast k

ulliye in his residence, Filibe (Plovdiv). The complex was loosely spaced

out over an area of more than a hectare at the southern end of the Meric¸

bridge of his fourteenth-century predecessor Lala S¸ahin Pas¸a, straddling the

main axis of the Ottoman city. This ran from the Cumaya Cami of Murad II at

the foot of the ruins of the Byzantino-Bulgarian hilltop town in the south, to

the bridgehead in the north. The new compound and the mosque of Sultan

Murad were the two foci around which Ottoman Filibe would develop. The

complex consisted of a zaviye-mosque, a large han at the bridgehead, a large

and very monumental hamam across the road, the mausoleum of the founder, a

kitchen block, a mektep (school) and, between the zaviye-mosque and the river,

a large, U-shaped medrese with twelve student cells. The building inscription

gives 848/1444 as the year of its completion. Five of the seven buildings of this

group survived into the early twentieth century. They are indicated on the

detailed 1891 map of Plovdiv by J. H. Schnitter. The hamam, which was so big

111 Fundamental for this group of buildings are Gli

sa Elezovi

c, ‘Turski Spomenici u Skop-

lju’, Glasnik Skopskog Nau

cnog Dru

sva 1 (1925), 136–76 for the buildings, and Turski

Spomenici, vol. I (Belgrade, 1952), for the vakﬁye. See also Ayverdi, Osmanlı Mim

ısinde,

ii,pp.557–63 with good plans and photographs and transcription of the inscriptions.

The statement that the han no longer exists is based on insufﬁcient observation.

185

machiel kiel

that it could house the local parliament of eastern Rumeli, was demolished

in 1931.Themedrese is known from some good photographs preserved in

the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul, which also has photographs

of the hamam before, and in the course of, being demolished. Today only the

zaviye-mosque and the mausoleum of the founder are preserved, both restored

by the Bulgarian Institute for Monuments of Culture and in an excellent state.

The socio-economic and religious-educative compound was ﬁnanced from

the tax revenue of a vast property, including many houses and shops in Edirne

and Malkara, ﬁve Turkish villages near Malkara and the very large and rich

villages of Kuklen, Vodno, Mavrovo and Novo Selo, south of Filibe itself, as

well as two big rice plantations of which the irrigation canals had been dug

on the initiative of the founder. In 1528 this property near Filibe yielded on

its own, according to the vakıf section of the tahrir register, a total of 179,897

akc¸e.

112

The villages mentioned above were highly privileged. Kuklen and

Vodno also contained Orthodox Christian monasteries which, especially in

later centuries, developed into important centres of Bulgarian Christian cul-

ture.

113

The so-called

Imaret Camii of Filibe is one of the largest of its kind in

the Balkans outside Edirne. It is composed of eleven domed or vaulted units.

The heart of the building is a central, dome space of almost nine metres in

diameter, lit by an oculus in the centre of the dome, covered by a turret. This

central hall is ﬂanked by two domed rooms of six metres in diameter each.

The mihrab is placed in a domed room in the rear, which opens towards the

main hall. Most of the domes rest on intricate belts of Turkish triangles and

pendentive-like ﬁllings of very rich muqarnas cut in plaster on a background of

geometric brickwork. Curious, and for long not understood, are two barrel-

vaulted corridors between the lateral rooms and the monumental portico,

which runs in front of the building. They have, apparently, no function at

112 BOA, tt 370,f.101.

113 For short descriptions and good photographs of these, and other monasteries in the

country see Georgi

Cavr

akov and Konstantin Tan

cev, B

algarski Manastiri (Soﬁa, 1978),

pp. 331–41. The story about the destruction of the monastery in the course of the forced

mass conversion of the Christians of the Rhodope district in the 1660s given in this

work is part of the nineteenth-century Bulgarian nationalist mythology. The story

was widely disseminated during the communist period. The Ottoman tahrir defters

from 1516, 1529, 1569, 1595 and 1712 clearly show that Islamisation did take place but

was a process stretching over more than two centuries. After the fall of communism

the monastery of Gorno Vodno was transformed into a luxury brothel. For details

on the real story of the conversion of the Rhodopes see M. Kiel, ‘Istorijata na “nasil-

stveno masovo pomjusjulman

cvane” na Rodopskite Hristijani i njakoi izvori, svırzani

s nego. Osmanskite registri na naselieto i dan

cnoto oblagane ot XVI–XVII v.: Krajat

na Mitologijata?’, in Mjusjulmanskata Kultura po B

algarskite Zemi, ed. Rositsa Gradeva

and Svetlana Ivanova (Soﬁa, 1998), pp. 56–126 (with facsimiles of the most important

Ottoman sources).

186

Ottoman expansion into the Balkans

all. The portico consists of ﬁve domed and vaulted units resting on six mas-

sive masonry piers. The minaret, which can be reached through the narrow

lateral corridor on the right, has a shaft in the form of a twisted spiral. The

entire building is made of carefully executed cloisonn

e. The fronton above

the central unit of the portico has a ceramo-plastique decoration of geometric

brickwork.

In the Bauinschrift the building is called al-‘imaret al-‘aliye. The chronicler

Nes¸ri, who also mentions the construction, likewise calls it an imaret.

114

Locally

the building is called

Imaret Camii. In the 1960s and 1970s the building was

carefully restored by the able architect Nikola Mushanov. When taking off the

various coats of plaster on the inside of the building it was discovered that

the two lateral rooms, which nowadays form the cross axis of the building,

were originally closed off from the main central hall by solid walls. These

had been removed at a much later stage, as the various coats of plaster indi-

cated. It was also found that underneath the ﬂoor there was a much older,

original ﬂoor, covered with marble and having a water pond in the middle.

Thus the central room of the ‘mosque’ had originally been something else.

The prayer section proper had been restricted solely to the second dome sec-

tion, which was originally reached by ﬁve steps in the middle. Niches to put

one’s shoes in before mounting to the prayer section were also found, as were

chimneys in the lateral rooms. The function of the curious lateral corridors

then became clear. The right one partly gave access to the minaret, and to the

lateral room, which had been nothing other than a guest room of the insti-

tution. The corridor to the left had in fact been a separate, lateral entrance

to the guest room, where one could enter without disturbing those assem-

bled around the pond in the central hall. As had been the case with the Alaca

Imaret of

Ishak Bey in

Usk

up the space for praying had been enlarged at the

expense of the function of accommodating travelling dervishes and scholars

and other distinguished guests. The change occurred in the third decade of

the sixteenth century, when Sunni orthodoxy became dominant and early

Ottoman institutions and brotherhoods like the ahi, who made offering hos-

pitality to travellers their main task, slowly disappeared or fused with other

organisations.

It would be better to cease referring to the kind of building to which the

Imaret Camii of Plovdiv, as well as the Alaca

Imaret in

Usk

up, the Mihalo

glu

114 ‘Kula S¸ahin Filibe’de bir imaretve bir medrese yapdı’: Nes¸ri, Gihann

umadie altosmanische

Chronik des Mevlana Mehemmed Neschr

ı, vol. I: Einleitung und Text des Cod. Menzel, ed. Fr.

Taeschner (Leipzig, 1951), p. 230.

187

machiel kiel

Imareti and the Muradiye in Edirne, or the Gazi Evrenos

Imaret in G

ulcine,

belong as zaviye-mosques. They were not a combination of various functions,

not a zaviye to which a mosque had been attached in order to create a more

monumental building at the centre of a k

ulliye. The greater part of these build-

ings were simply zaviyes for the ahi brotherhood and were transformed into

mosques at a much later stage. Not for nothing is the head of the institution

called Ahi in the foundation charters and notes in the vakıf registers, such as

those for G

ulcine and in 1470 for the

Isa Bey

Imaret in

Usk

up.

115

Onlyina

limited number of buildings of the same plan was this type used to accommo-

date the Mevlevi brotherhood, as was explicitly the case in Edirne’s Muradiye,

and also in the case of the Yes¸il

Imaret Camii/Yahs¸ı Bey Camii in the west

Anatolian city of Tire, from 1441, where the vakﬁye calls it a zaviye and the

traveller Evliya C¸ elebi mentions that it had previously been a mevlevihane.

The important archaeological ﬁndings in the

Imaret Camii in Plovdiv have

been left visible during the restoration of the building which, after the collapse

of communism, again serves as a house of prayer.

The t

urbe of the founder of this building complex, singularly important

for Filibe, stands in the greatest contrast to the monumentality of the other

buildings. It is but a simple, brick-built domed and lead-covered octagon of

modest dimensions, situated to the right of the main building. It doubtlessly

expresses the intentions of this old warlord, who played a decisive role in the

fateful battle of Varna, and again during the conquest of Constantinople, to

have his last resting place as simple as possible, as had also been the wish of

his master of many years, Murad II. The mausoleum was also restored and is

still held in veneration by the local Plovdiv Muslims.

116

A grand building completed in the same year as the imaret of Plovdiv is the

so-called Bey Hamamı on the main central square of Thessalonike (Ottoman

Selanik). Murad II had taken the city in 1430 and had converted the early

Christian basilica of Achairopoietos into a mosque, later known as Eski Cami.

In the early 1440s he started the construction of a huge double hamam in the

115 The key to the vast literature on the ahi brotherhood is Ziya Kazıcı, ‘Ah

ılik’, TDV

IA 2

pp. 540–3. See also ‘Akhi’ in EI2, i,pp.321–3 (Taeschner); C¸a

gatay, Bir T

urk Kurumu olan

ılik; Franz Taeschner, ‘Die b

urgerliche Futuwwa. Das Achitum im seldchukischen

und nachseldschukischen Anatolien’, in Franz Taeschner, Z

unfte und Bruderschaften im

Islam (M

unchen, 1979), pp. 277–402;MikailBayram,Ahi Evrenve Ahi Tes¸kilatinin Kurulus¸u

(Konya, 1991).

116 For an early description see Gertruda Rudlov-Hille and Otto Rudlov, ‘Grad Plovdiv i

negovite sgradi’, Izvestijana B

algarskijaArheologi

ceski Institut 8 (1934), 379–425, which also

includes the Schnitter plan of 1891. For more detail see Ayverdi, Osmanlı Mim

ısinde,

ii,pp.479–85. For the important inscription see in detail Tatarlı, ‘Turski kultovi sgradi

i nadpisi v Bılgarija’, p. 593.

188

Ottoman expansion into the Balkans

centre of town, about the largest of all Turkish hamams in the Balkans and

exquisitely decorated with a profusion of stalactites. Remarkable is the large (15

metres in diameter) octagonal, domed disrobing room of the male section. It

is followed by a likewise octagonal tepidarium. The hot section proper shows

the fully developed four-eyvan plan, with four separate cells (halvets), one at

each corner. The ﬁrst one on the left side is covered by a muqarnas-dome with

a profusion of stalactites. It must have been the room reserved for the sultan

himself, as is hinted at by Evliya C¸ elebi in 1668.

117

The female half of the bath

is more modest. It has a square disrobing room, followed by an octagonal

tepidarium. The hot section, sıcaklık, is a tripartite rectangular vaulted space

communicating with two halvets of the same size as in the male half of the

bath.

A long inscription in Arabic, placed over the main entrance portal, men-

tions Sultan Murad, son of Mehmed, son of Bayezid Han and his full title as

Leader of the Muslims, and ‘sultan al-guzat wa-’l-mudjahidin’ as builder, and

the month of Cemaziyelevvel of the year 848/September–October 1444 as the

date of completion. In the 1970s the great monument was bought by the Greek

Archaeological Service and has since been restored in a most exemplary

manner, now serving as an exhibition room.

A little north of it stood, until the end of the 1920s, a large and monumental

han that also belonged to the foundations of Sultan Murad in this city. A long

Arabic inscription gave the name of the ruler. In the nineteenth century, when

the story of Ottoman architecture was unknown, the building was declared

to be a Byzantine work. It was a vast rectangle around a cloistered courtyard

with seven arches at the long sides and ﬁve at the short sides. On the ground

ﬂoor it had thirty-three vaulted cells for the accommodation of travellers and

on the ﬁrst ﬂoor a corresponding number. At the rear, opposite the entrance,

was a vast vaulted stable with twelve massive square piers carrying the vaults

of the two-bay hall. This is the same solution as at the almost contemporary

Sulu Han in

Usk

up, albeit much bigger. On three sides of the exterior the

Bey Han had vaulted shops, nine on both short sides and eleven at the long

front side. The great hamam was also called Bey Hamamı, bey being the col-

loquial title of the ruler in the period the buildings came into being. Both

buildings served as a source of revenue for the upkeep of Murad’s

church/mosque in Thessalonike. The quality and especially the grand size of

both works show the scale of investment to reconstruct Selanik as an Ottoman

117 ‘Ve padıs¸ahlar gir

ub «gusl edecek bir kasr-i ‘alisi var . . .’: Evliya C¸ elebi, Seyahat-namesi,

viii,p.160.

189