The tomb stands behind the mosque Defterdar Mahmud Çelebi built for himself in Eyüp, between Defterdar Street and the lane behind the potters' quarter. It is an open canopy rather than a closed chamber: a small dome on an eight-sided drum, carried by four marble columns with diamond-cut capitals, the spaces between them filled with scalloped marble arches and pierced marble screens above and below.
A marble sarcophagus stands inside under a broken headstone whose inscription asks a prayer for the soul of "Defterdar Mahmud Çelebi Efendi" and gives the year 953 (1546). The Eyüpsultan municipality's page notes the stone was probably renewed later. The tomb was roofed in tile until 1970, when it was rendered in cement.
Mahmud Çelebi was chief treasurer to Süleyman the Magnificent twice: appointed in 944 (1537) and dismissed in 949 (1542), then appointed again in 951 (1544) and holding the office until his death in 953 (1546). He had trained under the calligrapher Şeyh Hamdullah and was himself a calligrapher; the mosque is the work of Mimar Sinan, domed when first built, brought down by the earthquake of 1179 (1766) and rebuilt with a wooden ceiling.
The Eyüpsultan municipality's page offers a reason for the site: the tomb and mosque of Abdülvedûd stand about three hundred paces further along the same line, and Mahmud Efendi is thought to have built here to be near his father. The burial ground around the tomb holds further headstones, some undated and one of them unreadable past the first line.
The approach has changed around the buildings. The courtyard once had a gate on each of the two streets; only the one on Defterdar Caddesi remains, and since the road was raised in 1973 that two-jambed gate sits in a hollow below it. To the right of it, sunk into the ground, is the Defterdar fountain of 1543. Over the gate runs an eight-line Arabic inscription in three rows, written in the founder's own hand, whose chronogram gives 1540. The mosque is of cut stone with a porch of four marble columns in front of its door, roofed together with the mosque itself; over the alternating marble arched doorway is a three-line inscription, again in Mahmud Çelebi's hand, dated 1541, with the profession of faith on either side of it and the name Mahmud in kufic above. The minaret stands on the right and is entirely of cut stone. The crack in the mihrab wall, left by the earthquake, is still there. In 1970 the courtyard walls were drawn back and the burial ground made slightly smaller.
The writer of the Hadîkatü'l-cevâmi' adds details that fill the man out. Mahmud Efendi had a school at Varna as well, and having qualified under the calligrapher Şeyh Hamdullah he was master of fine writing; an inkpot and pen were set on the finial of the mosque's minaret, and when the pen was lost over time only the inkpot remained, until the pen was put back during the full repair after the great earthquake of 1766. The large landing in front of the mosque came to be known as the Defterdar landing because of the mosque. The wooden medrese in the courtyard was let out room by room to married men on the trustee's decision, the school was removed and rental houses built in its place, and a wooden school was later built over the gate on the sea side. Early in the reign of Abdülhamid I, between 1774 and 1789, coffee houses and shops were built on both sides of the Defterdar landing until the place amounted to a bazaar; those shops and that bazaar were demolished in 1985 when the shores of the Golden Horn were opened up. Of the wooden medrese in the courtyard and the stone school on the side of the lane behind the potters' quarter nothing survives.
Mahmud Çelebi, known as Nazlı Mahmud Çelebi, was an İstanbullu. In front of his tomb stand three small marble sarcophagi with neither writing nor date on them; the municipality's page suggests they belong to children of the dynasty who died in the shore palaces beside the Defterdar landing. Among the headstones that can be read in the burial ground are those of Üftade Kalfa, a servant of Şah Sultan, dated February 1796; Melek Zat Kadın, another of Şah Sultan's servants and wife of İbrahim Halidi Efendi of the grand vizier's secretariat, dated 1789; İbrahim Edhem Bey, son of Arif Paşa, buried in 1857, who died young and whose stone carries a Mevlevi cap; and in the same grave Zekeriyya Bey, of the Nakşibendi order and the finance office, grandson of Ahmed Zekeriyya Paşa, dated 1883.
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).
