Water and Healing Route · Stop 1
The first stop on the route, and the least known. This bathhouse has no building inscription — no stone tells who had it built, or in which year. Its date has to be read from the building itself.
It stands in Şifre Street, in the Hatuniye neighbourhood, near the Madenüs Bridge. It is built of finely dressed stone, rubble stone and mortar.1
It follows the traditional form of the Ottoman bathhouse: it consists of a cold room, a warm room and a hot room, and it also has a furnace (külhan). It is roofed with domes and vaults.1
There is no building inscription. It is probably a 17th-century Ottoman bathhouse.1
No date on the stone.
Hence “probably”.
On this site, buildings that have inscriptions are given exact dates — an inscription is a signature. Here there is no such signature; the only evidence left is the building's own architecture.1
The existence of these four parts and the dome-and-vault roofing are recorded in the source;1 the short explanations above are general knowledge about bathhouses.
The book gives this bathhouse's other name as “Yukarı Hamam” (the Upper Bath). A bathhouse of that name also appears in the first city history of Amasya, written in the 19th century. This is what it says:
“[Bülbül Hatun] also bought from their owner two ruined bathhouses called the ‘Çelebiler Hamamı’, repaired them and added them to her endowment. One of them is called the Aşağı Hamam (the Lower Bath); it adjoins the mosque directly. The other is called the Yukarı Hamam (the Upper Bath), and it adjoins the Seljuk palace at the head of the Madenüs Bridge.”
Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi, Amasya Fetvaları ve İlk Amasya Şehir Tarihi, p. 75 — our translation from the Turkish edition.2
Bülbül Hatun was the wife of Sultan Bayezid and the mother of the martyred Prince Sultan Ahmed. According to Vâzıh Efendi, on a ruined plot left from the Seljuks in the İçeri Şehir (the inner city) she had a mosque with a masonry minaret, a public kitchen (imaret), a school and a han built; she also bought two ruined bathhouses, had them repaired and added them to her endowment.2
Note — no conclusion is drawn here. The sources we have do not state outright that the “Yukarı Hamam” described by Vâzıh Efendi and the Altuntaş Bathhouse on this page are the same building. What is more, the sources do not agree on where the Yukarı Hamam was — see below.
Sources that use the same text by Vâzıh Efendi name two different bridges. This page does not take sides.
In the Turkish edition of Vâzıh Efendi, the Yukarı Hamam is “adjoining the Seljuk palace at the head of the Madenüs Bridge”.2 The book, too, places the Altuntaş Bathhouse in the Hatuniye neighbourhood, near the Madenüs Bridge.1
Reading Vâzıh's manuscript (fols. 33a-b), Kani Kuzucular places the Yukarı Hamam in the Kurşunlu neighbourhood, at the head of the Meydan Bridge.3 Ahmet Caner Çatal also records the Yukarı Hamam east of the Kurşunlu neighbourhood.4
The two descriptions point to two different bridgeheads: the Meydan Bridge is this route's İstasyon (Meydan) Bridge stop, while the Madenüs Bridge is another stop. The distance between them is about 280 metres — decisive for identifying a building, but not opposite ends of the city. For a building without an inscription, a definite identification still needs fieldwork.
A third piece of information — not a source, but local knowledge.
A description that came from the field was also used in preparing this
site; it does not appear in any printed source. It locates the bathhouse at
“the point where the Madenüs Bridge joins the inner city”
and adds: “Altuntaş, as a neighbourhood, is in Hatuniye
anyway.” This supports the first column above: both the Turkish
edition of Vâzıh Efendi and the book itself pointed to the same bridge.
We cannot give this as a footnote, because it rests not on a printed source
but on knowledge of the place. That is why it stands apart — and
it does not erase the other view. The record of Kuzucular and Çatal
remains above, just as it is.
This description was tested against the map itself. The book places the
bathhouse in Şifre Street. A street called Şifre Sokak really does
exist on OpenStreetMap, and it begins exactly where the bridge meets the
land — so the book's description and the field description point to the
same spot. Moreover, one metre from that point there is an entry named
“Ömer Altuntaş hayratıdır” (a charitable work of Ömer
Altuntaş): the name Altuntaş still lives there.
Because four pieces of information meet at the same place, the coordinates are
no longer provisional. Even so, the question of which building the
bathhouse is remains open, since no inscription has been found.
According to Vâzıh Efendi, there were two buildings within the city walls known as the “Çelebiler Hamamı”: one was the Çukur Hamam (today's Yıldız Bathhouse), the other the Yukarı Hamam.3
This statement is supported by the endowment deed of the Yakut Paşa Zaviye, which lists among the charitable works endowed a “Çelebiler Hamamı” within the walls. Kuzucular writes that, “since there is no other illuminating document either”, what Vâzıh says — that the Çukur Hamam and/or the Yukarı Hamam were called the Çelebiler Hamamı — can be accepted.3
A study of everyday life in 18th-century Amasya defines bathhouses as places “where women did their cleaning in daily life and, at the same time, enjoyed themselves and socialised”.5
This is no flowery phrase: in the Amasya court registers (şer'iyye sicilleri), including records dated 1777, disputes and accidents in bathhouses came before the court.5 So the hamam was a real public space into which the neighbourhood's tensions were carried as well — a place where women from different neighbourhoods and different circles met in the same narrow space.
According to the record, this bathhouse was built with both finely dressed stone and rubble stone, and mortar.1 That is no accident.
In Ottoman buildings, dressed stone goes where it will be seen and is meant to be shown; rubble stone goes on the back and side façades and on surfaces that will be covered with plaster. When a building has both, you can read from the wall where the money was spent.
Walk around the building. Find where the dressed stone ends. That is where the building's show façade ends.
Every factual statement on this page rests on one of the sources below. Titles are given in their original Turkish so that they can be found; quotations from them are our translations.