Ancient Traces Route · Stop 3
This building's name comes from a colour, and its entrance is found in no other mosque in Anatolia. You can see both at its door.
The building is thought to have been built in 1266-1267 by Seyfeddin Torumtay (Turumtay), governor of Amasya.2
Its name has two sources: the tomb adjoining the mosque was decorated with purple-turquoise tiles and glazed bricks, and the entrance part of the building was used as a madrasa.3
It is the only mosque in Anatolia with an iwan-shaped entrance, and it has a plan of three aisles running perpendicular to the qibla wall.1
In Anatolia,
the only mosque
with an iwan-shaped entrance.
The source says so plainly.1
An iwan is a vaulted space closed on three sides and entirely open on one. Iwans are the great niches facing onto the courtyards of madrasas and caravanserais; they are a signature of Iranian and Seljuk architecture. In mosques, however, the entrance is usually a portal — an ornate doorway opened in a wall.
Here, though, the entrance itself is an iwan: the door is not set in a flat plane but inside a deep hollow. You can see it in the photograph above — the arch is not on the surface of the wall but at the mouth of a volume drawn back inwards. This is the language of the madrasa carried over into a mosque — and indeed the entrance part of the building was used as a madrasa.3
In Turkish, “gök” (sky) is also a colour — the blue of the sky. The building's name comes from the purple-turquoise tiles and glazed bricks that covered the tomb next to it.3
The strip above is representative — these are not measured colour values of the tiles on the building. The source says only “purple turquoise”.3
The second comes from its founder, the third from his name (Seyfeddin).3
Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi, who wrote the first city history of Amasya in the 19th century, describes the tomb built by Torumtay Paşa like this:
Torumtay Paşa had a tomb resembling the Kaaba built.
Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi, as quoted in Kültürel Miras Boyutuyla Amasya.4
The comparison is not idle. Most Anatolian tombs have an octagonal body and a conical roof — pointed buildings that taper upwards. The Halifet Gazi Tomb is like that too. The Torumtay Tomb, by contrast, is rectangular in plan with a flat roof outside: in other words, a cube.5 That is what Vâzıh Efendi saw.
The tomb itself is a separate stop: the Torumtay Tomb.
Think of the door as you enter any other mosque in Amasya: an opening in a flat wall, within an ornate frame. Then come here.
Here, before you reach the door, you enter a space. Vaulted above you, closed on both sides, open in front. This is the iwan — and in Anatolia there is no other mosque whose entrance is built like this.1
Then look up: look for tiles and glazed brick in the band beneath the eaves. That is where the building's name comes from.3 How many colours can you count?
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.