Guide
The Tokat clock tower is one of the clock towers raised in honour of the twenty-fifth year of the accession of Abdülhamid II, and is one of the emblems of the city. It was built with the help of the people by the governor Bekir Paşa and the mayor Mütevellioğlu Enver Bey, and made by a master named Hristo. Built in 1902 with three storeys, it gained another in 1915 and reached a height of thirty-three metres. It is of cut stone, and stands in the Behzat quarter so as to be visible from every part of the city.
The tower still works, where clock towers in many other places have stopped. Four dials run from a single mechanism, striking on the hour and the half hour, twice at two minutes' interval, and the sound carries easily across the city.
For the last twenty-five years a man named Ahmet Unan, carrying on the watchmaking trade he inherited from his father, has kept a shop beneath the tower and wound the clock. Every eight days he climbs 133 steps to wind a mechanism driven by weights on two ropes hung down the shaft. The escapement rests on a finely balanced rod that drives all four clocks at once, and the slightest shift in that balance can put the clock out; for that reason nobody but Unan goes up there.
