The tomb of Aziz Mahmud Hüdayi stands on the left of Hüdâî Avlusu Sokağı in Üsküdar, on the terraced lane that climbs west from the main gate of his complex, with the mosque and assembly hall attached directly behind it. Of all the tombs of holy men in İstanbul this has been among the most visited: until 1925 the Celvetî brotherhood came here in procession on the eves of the religious festivals, led by the head sheikh, and the stream of visitors has not stopped since.
The building shares the construction and the restrained empire decoration of the mosque behind it. Three spaces follow one another from north to south: a glazed entrance section, a room under a pyramidal cap where the tomb keepers kept watch, and the chamber itself. Over the chamber door is an Arabic prose inscription in talik giving the date of death, 1628. Inside, a wooden dome rises on four round marble columns in the middle of the rectangular room, divided within into thirteen segments like the crown of the Celvetî headdress; beneath it stands the wooden cenotaph, surrounded by gilded iron grilles, with ten more around it belonging to his children and a grandchild. A band of thuluth carrying the Sûrat al-Mulk, from the hand of the calligrapher Mahmud Celâleddin, runs round the upper walls, and chests in the room hold relics of the sheikh.
East of it is a second tomb, at first an open burial ground and roofed over probably in 1855–56, where many of the lodge's sheikhs, members and their families are buried; when its roof was lost in the republican period the wooden cenotaphs were replaced with odd cement sarcophagi carrying small Latin-letter nameplates, some of them wrong. Elsewhere in the complex's burial ground are headstones remarkable for their calligraphy and carving, and west of the mosque, in another section of it, stands the open tomb of Fatma Hanım Sultan — eight octagonal marble columns with diamond capitals carrying pointed arches, the spaces between them closed with superb cast bronze grilles, which makes it exceptional among open tombs of its kind.
The tomb is one piece of a lodge complex, and seeing it that way makes the rest of the site legible. Aziz Mahmud Hüdayi bought the ground in the Ahmet Çelebi quarter of Doğancılar in 1589 and began building the same year; the first lodge, finished around 1595 with help from his followers, doubled as the hall in which the Celvetî rite was performed, and in 1598-99 he added a pulpit himself and made it a mosque as well. Around it stood dervish cells, a kitchen large enough to serve as a public soup kitchen, a refectory, five allotted houses — one for himself and four for his daughters — and the main gate with two fountains beside it. The encyclopaedia entry calls the place the centre of the Celvetî order and one of the brightest centres of Sufi culture in Ottoman İstanbul, a school that drew rulers, members of the dynasty and the palace, statesmen, scholars, musicians and members of other orders alike.
Little of the first buildings is left. The lodge was closed in 1925; the mosque continued as a mosque, the allotted houses became lodgings for mosque staff and foundation tenants, and the wooden dervish cells, refectory and coffee hearth have vanished without trace. When the complex was rebuilt under Abdülmecid the buildings were renewed in the empire style, which the entry notes was entirely foreign to the age its founder lived in, and the Directorate General of Foundations repaired what was still standing in 1975. From the original complex only the open tomb west of the mosque and the two fountains to the left of the main gate have come down.
Approaching from the east, the pieces worth stopping at come in order. The main gate stands where Hüdâî Avlusu Sokağı meets Aziz Mahmud Efendi Sokağı, framed in köfeki-stone pilasters, and carries a verse inscription in talik dated 1855-56 recording Abdülmecid's rebuilding, with the sultan's cipher set between its two panels. The pair of fountains to its left were probably founded by Hüdayi himself: the left one bears an Arabic prose inscription in thuluth dated 1623-24 and, within the arch, a second verse text recording its repair along with the complex in 1855-56, while the smaller one beside it is dated by the numerical value of its last line to 1610-11. A third fountain, to the right of the gate, was built in 1728-29 by Damad Mehmed Paşa, son of Nevşehirli Damad İbrahim Paşa.
The mosque and assembly hall behind the tomb is a raised masonry building of three levels — basement, main floor and the partial upper storey formed by the galleries — with wooden columns carrying the galleries and paired windows between the piers opposite them. One feature in it belonged to this lodge and no other: the şeyh kafesi, the sheikh's lattice, set into the gap between two columns of the western ground-floor gallery. The entry explains it by a story told of Hüdayi and Hızır. The sheikh prayed the Friday prayer inside the lattice, and at a fixed point in the rite that followed, once the dervishes had risen to their feet, he left it and took his place in the hall proper; he reached it by a separate door on the west side, called the sheikh's door, without passing in front of the congregation.
On the north side of the lane are the kitchen, the entrance to the royal loge, the ablution taps, and a library whose front imitates an antique temple — fluted columns set into the wall with Ionic capitals, above them a moulded band made to look like an architrave, and over its vault three cone-shaped metal finials that the entry says have no parallel anywhere else. A verse inscription in talik names its founder, Lutfi Bey, and gives the numerical date 1899-1900. The royal loge itself has the character of a small palace: plastered inside, timber-clad outside, its upper floor carried across the lane on two pairs of wooden columns, with gilded carved crests over the upper windows bearing the names of God, the Prophet and the four caliphs.
When to go
- Climate
- Across İstanbul as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 6.8 °C in January to 24.7 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (99 mm) and lightest in July (22 mm). Long-term means for 1950-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
