Guide
This tomb was not built as one. The space began as a retreat cell — known to have been the furnace room or water tank left over from an earlier bath — where the founder of the Cerrâhî line withdrew; when he and the sheikhs who followed him, their families and certain privileged members of the lodge were buried in it, the retreat turned into a tomb. It is therefore not a separate building but the western half of the lodge's assembly hall, and the two are read as one interior.
The hall and tomb together occupy an irregular quadrilateral of roughly 18.5 by 14 by 16 metres, on Nurettin Tekkesi Sokağı. The eastern part, about 16 by 7.5 metres, is the assembly hall; the western part, about 18.5 by 6.5, is the tomb, and along the line between them stand six square wooden posts carrying the roof, with iron railings of vertical bars between them. Because the south wall along the street is not parallel to the north wall, the hall's south-east corner is obtuse and the tomb's south-west corner acute — and the mihrab was fitted into a chamfered filling in that obtuse corner. A small tomb of 6.5 by 5.25 metres and a room of three metres square, called the cennet oda, were added later. The walls, originally a timber frame plastered inside and boarded outside, were rebuilt in reinforced concrete in the repair of 1945.
Two inscriptions date the work you see. The verse inscription in talik on the inner face of the bow-arched main gate belongs to the repair carried out by Fahreddin Efendi in 1945; the one on the east wall of the assembly hall, its text by Abdurrahman Sâmi Paşa, records that Sultan Abdülmecid repaired and partly renewed the lodge in 1857–58. In the right-hand corner at the entrance is the seat of the first assembly hall, raised on a step, railed in iron and marked by a relief of the Halvetî-Cerrâhî crown.
