Guide
The Tokat mevlevihane stands on Bey Sokağı in the Soğukpınar quarter, and by the record it was built in 1638 by Muslu Ağa, also known as Sülün Mustafa Paşa, a janissary aga and one of Sultan Ahmed's viziers; the archives call it the Janissary Muslu Ağa Mevlevihane in the town of Tokat. He endowed it as well as built it, so that the sheikhs, dervishes, staff and visiting religious figures were fed from its income. Evliya Çelebi, who came in 1656, gave it a long passage in his travels and judged it as fine a building as the Beşiktaş mevlevihane in İstanbul. The lodge fell into ruin more than once; the present building on Bey Sokağı was put up early in the eighteenth century by Sheikh Mehmet Efendi, after fire destroyed the last of the endowment's income-bearing property in 1703.
The twentieth century treated it as a shell to be filled. After the lodges were closed in 1925 it stood empty from 1934, was repaired in 1939 and let to the gendarmerie, who used it as a women's prison from 1945 to 1949; it was repaired again in 1951 and used for Qur'an courses, then from 1954 as a boarding hostel for pupils of the imam-hatip school, and later again for Qur'an courses until it was so decayed that it had to be emptied and was close to collapse. Restoration begun by the General Directorate of Foundations in 1997 stalled for lack of funds; the real work was done between 2000 and 2004, and the building opened on 6 May 2006 as the Tokat Mevlevihane Waqf Museum.
The building is timber, two storeys, on a site of 3,000 square metres, and the article calls it among the most striking of the surviving mevlevihanes in Türkiye for its position and its ornament — one of the most original examples of nineteenth-century baroque in Anatolia. Its finest front is the one facing Bey Sokağı, with a row of columns carved in baroque motifs and a balcony running the whole length of it. The plan takes in the sheikh's quarters, five ground-floor rooms of the main building including the sheikh's reception room, the dervish cells, and the semahane above.
The collections came partly home. Valuables sent to the Tokat museum when the lodge closed in 1925 were brought back, and objects of historic value from mosques around Tokat were added. The reception room holds late manuscript Qur'ans, lithographed books, a hand-woven red silk interior covering from the Kaaba, and prayer rugs; the room to the left of the hall holds brass and copper candlesticks in use since the fourteenth century, among them ones given by Gülbahar Hatun, mother of Sultan Bayezid, to the mosque she founded; the largest room downstairs shows carpets and kilims of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries from Sivas, Tokat, Kırşehir, Konya, Niğde and eastern and south-eastern Anatolia, preserved in the mosques of the region. A narrow space holds a seventeenth-century ceiling boss from the Ulu Camii of Tokat, and a small room thirteenth-century tiles, sixteenth-century reliquary boxes and nineteenth-century clocks.
Stairs of stone and wood lead up to the balcony and the semahane. The door into it is double-leaved, with a carved baroque boss at the centre of the balcony and, above, two phrases in Arabic thuluth: "O God who opens doors" and "Open to us the door of good." The semahane is a single space apart from the women's gallery on the east side, screened off with a wooden lattice.
