Water and Healing Route · Stop 3
We know who had this bathhouse built. But what we really know is who ran it a hundred years ago, who stoked its furnace and who sat in the coffee house next door.
The bathhouse is in the Mustafa Paşa neighbourhood, on the south side of the Mehmed Paşa Mosque. The building repeats the classic Ottoman bathhouse design.1
It takes its name from its founder: because it was first built by Yörgüç Paşazade Mustafa Bey, it is known as the “Mustafa Bey Hamamı”.1
It was badly affected by the earthquakes so frequent in Amasya and fell into ruin. In 1830 it underwent a major repair and was opened again.1
The sources agree on the founder; on the year they differ by one. This page takes no side.
The date given on the basis of Pars Tuğlacı's Osmanlı Şehirleri: the bathhouse was built in 1436 by Yörgüç Paşazade Mustafa Bey.1
Kani Kuzucular, listing the standing buildings by period, records the Mustafa Bey Bathhouse as built in 1437.2
Osman Fevzi Olcay of Amasya describes this bathhouse as well when he writes about the Sofu-zade neighbourhood, where he was born and grew up. What he tells is not a document but a memoir; yet no other source shows the daily life of a bathhouse so closely.3
“Karabaracıoğlu Hacı Ali Hafız Ağa, the bathhouse keeper: he was a charitable, generous, neighbourly, very clean and noble-hearted man.
Hacı Hafız Ağa ran the Sinan Bathhouse at Selağzı and the Mustafa Bey Bathhouse in front of the Bimarhane. Both of these bathhouses were under Hafız Ağa's management, and the women's section was run by his wife, Ayşe Hanım.
In the evening, once the bathhouse had closed, the attendants of both bathhouses would stoke the furnace on the night watch, as its state required.”
Osman Fevzi Olcay, Amasya Hatıraları.3
Olcay also sketches the childhood geography of the neighbourhood: the open ground in front of the Bimarhane, the Mustafa Bey Bathhouse and the Çevikçe School was their “main playground”. On the corner directly opposite the bathhouse stood the house of Mumcu Hakkı (Hakkı the candle-maker).3
“Between the Mustafa Bey Bathhouse and the furnace part of the bathhouse there was a raised coffee house. In the evenings we would go up to this coffee house now and then.
The regulars of the coffee house were mostly fanciers of Indian hens and Indian cocks, and hunters. They would gather in this coffee house every night without fail, and on some nights they would even bring their cocks and set them fighting each other.”
Osman Fevzi Olcay, Amasya Hatıraları.3
The least visible but hardest-working part of a bathhouse is the furnace (külhan) — the firing place where the water is heated. According to Olcay, this one's furnace was stoked on a night watch, as its state required:3 that is, someone sat by the fire all night.
Walk round to the back of the building. The furnace side is usually the low, soot-stained part, away from the street; the fuel goes in there. The “raised coffee house” that Olcay climbed up to as a child stood between the bathhouse and the furnace.3
The coffee house has gone, and so have the cocks. But that gap between the bathhouse and the furnace is still there.
According to the yearbooks (salname) of the province of Sivas, the number of bathhouses in Amasya, the seat of the sancak, ran as follows:1
| Yearbook | Bathhouses |
|---|---|
| 1875 | 19 |
| 1876 | 22 |
| 1880 | 19 |
| 1882 | 14 |
| 1883 | 14 |
| 1888 | 14 |
In 1903 and 1907, 130 inns and 54 bathhouses were recorded across the whole sancak of Amasya.1 The four bathhouses on this route are what is left of that number.
Ottoman bathhouses were also told apart by type: those with separate sections for women and men were called “çifte hamam” (double bathhouse), those in the neighbourhoods set aside for women alone “avret”, and those built for men in the bazaar “rical hamamı”.1
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.
