Ancient Traces Route · Stop 4
Built for the third conqueror of Amasya. Four hundred years later a sultan saw it in ruins and issued a decree at once.
The tomb was built for Halifet Gazi, who died in 1225 and is remembered as the third conqueror of Amasya.2
It is a building with an octagonal body on a square base, covered inside by a dome and outside by a conical cap.1
When Murad IV came to Amasya and saw the tomb in ruins, he immediately issued a decree and had it repaired, and ordered a madrasa to be built beside it.2
The book states plainly that there are different views on this.2 This page takes no side.
The tomb may have been built at the same time as the Halifet Gazi Madrasa, dated 1209.2
The tomb may have been built in 1225, the year Halifet Gazi died.2
The Site Management Plan gives the date not as an estimate but as a reading: “it is understood from its inscription that it was built in 1228”.3
The difference between the three views is twenty years, and it is really a question: was the tomb ready before the man's death — built, that is, as part of a complex — or was it built after his death? The sources do not settle this; nor does this page pretend to.
But there is a difference. The first two views rest on inference: one starts from the date of the madrasa, the other from the year of Halifet Gazi's death.2 The third says that it reads the building's own inscription.3 A reading of an inscription is, in principle, stronger than an inference; even so, because the book and the other sources do not use 1228, all three stand together in the Key facts.
According to the record, which rests on the Amasya historian Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi, this is how it happened:
When Murad IV came to Amasya and saw the tomb in ruins, he at once issued a decree and had it repaired, and ordered a madrasa to be built beside it.
Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi, as quoted in Kültürel Miras Boyutuyla Amasya.2
What stands out here is the urgency. The record says “at once”: the sultan sees the building and decides on the spot. Halifet Gazi was a commander who had died four hundred years earlier — but because he was remembered with the conquest of the city, the ruined state of his tomb seems to have been unacceptable to the man who represented the state.
None of these four steps exists at the Torumtay Tomb: there the plan is rectangular, and the roof is a barrel vault inside and a flat roof outside.4 In the same city, fifty years apart, two completely different choices.
The tomb's door is small — you have to stoop to go in. Look above it: there is a muqarnas hood; that is, the inside of the door arch is filled with small honeycomb cells stacked one above another.
Then look at the carved stone panels at the sides and the rosette. These are the signature of Seljuk stonework. You can compare their state in the photograph with their state today: which surface has worn away, which has been repaired?
Last of all, look up and see the cap. Then walk to the Torumtay Tomb — about 260 metres by the verified coordinates. There is no need to look for a cap there, because there isn't one.4
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.
