Centralizing the Local: The Architecture of Death, Hospitality, Devotion, and Water in Amasya, c. 1209-1510

Abstract

This dissertation examines the urban, architectural, and infrastructural transformation of the city of Amasea/Amasya—situated in the Iris River (Yeşilırmak) valley in the central Black Sea region of Turkey—during the late medieval period by foregrounding its local architectural heritage, transregional connections, and natural environment. Taking Amasya as a case study, it expands the discussion of how locality and transregionality worked together in the making of urban images in Anatolia during this period. It argues that although Amasya did not serve as an official capital, its locally based elites systematically used architecture to designate, embrace, and represent Amasya as a center of its own. Patrons imagined Amasya—independent of its official status within shifting imperial hierarchies, discourses, and contexts—as a distinctive place, embedded in its long-standing past and connected to its transregional present. They maintained this program by founding funerary, socio-religious, and educational establishments, improving infrastructural facilities, and designing the riverscape and mountainscape. The dissertation reveals that the city’s built environment was shaped through a creative synthesis of local architectural heritage, including Mithridatic, Romano-Byzantine, and Armeno-Georgian building traditions, as well as Turkoman-Persianate idioms, Mamluk stone-masonry techniques, Italianate visual vocabularies circulating in the Black Sea region, and newly emerging Ottoman canonical forms. It argues that this remarkable visual diversity was an enduring feature of Amasya’s architectural discourse and culture. It traces how patrons and builders carefully selected, juxtaposed, and reworked diverse architectural forms and decorative vocabularies. This long-term building program led to the emergence of a built fabric that became legible as both locally embedded and cosmopolitan. The dissertation begins with a discussion of how patrons used funerary monuments as strategic tools to manifest their attachment to Amasya through the conspicuous use of spoliated materials and the accommodation of embalmed bodies and skeletal remains. It then examines the adaptation of the Ottoman T-shaped layout to Amasya’s local artistic, social, and environmental contexts after its incorporation into the Ottoman domains in the late fourteenth century. It analyzes in detail the spatial configurations, functions, and personnel of convent-masjids, mosques, and madrasas through original Arabic endowment deeds. The late-fifteenth-century construction boom is investigated through the ways in which it inscribed the political, cultural, and religious orientations of Bayezid II and his circle onto the riverfront. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the material cultures of water and the embodiments of water provision in architectural, visual, and infrastructural terms. Water is presented as an element that unmistakably shaped the city’s urban form, history, and imaginaries. An analysis of historical sources from later centuries is conducted to reconstruct the city’s altered waterscape, including its riverfront and now-lost streams. Practices of flood risk mitigation are discussed to shed light on the riverine conditions that shaped the construction of waterfront monuments. The dissertation demonstrates that through architectural and infrastructural practices, patrons manifested belonging, cultivated memory, negotiated local and imperial affiliations, and fashioned Amasya as a distinguished and prestigious urban center within late medieval Anatolia and the broader Islamicate world.