The tomb stands on Baybaba Sokak, facing the tomb of Mir-i Miran Mehmed Ağa. It is square in plan, in regular cut stone, under a single small dome, with stained glass in the upper windows and marble frames below.
Its front has lost something: the marble grilles that stood above the lower windows were removed in a repair in 1945 and the openings closed, which the municipality says spoiled the old look of the building. A vaulted portico on four columns with diamond capitals still shelters the door, and the interior keeps its painted decoration.
The pasha's marble sarcophagus has a slim four-sided headstone with a wound turban set on it and large rosettes on the side panels, and it carries no writing or date at all; the inscription over the door gives the year of his death. Feridun Ahmed Paşa trained under the chief treasurer, joined the imperial council as a secretary, and became the private secretary of Sokollu Mehmed Paşa.
His own name is not what the neighbourhood called this tomb. Feridun Paşa was known as a protector of the poor, and of him it was said that he arrived like Hızır for anyone in difficulty; the memory outlived the man so thoroughly that his name was forgotten and the tomb came to be called Hızır Baba. He is said to have been from İstanbul or from Bosnia, and in his youth he was famous for his looks. He was a writer of both verse and prose with a collection of his own poems, and the account says his house filled with men of letters.
The career behind the tomb was a fast one. After a strong education he became head of the imperial chancery in 1570 and keeper of the seal in 1573, was then moved to the governorship of the Semendire district, took the seal a second time in 1581 and died in office on 16 March 1583. On 6 April 1582 he had been married to Ayşe Hanım Sultan, daughter of Rüstem Paşa and Mihrimah Sultan; the marriage contract was drawn by the chief jurist Çivizâde Efendi over 35,000 gold pieces. A great banquet was given that day for the men of state, and Feridun Paşa, a generous man, spent without counting and gave goods away. He died a year after the wedding. The story that he married Esmihan Sultan after Sokollu Mehmed Paşa's death, the account says plainly, is not true. Besides the Münşeatü's-Selâtin, his collection of imperial letters, he left a history known as the Nüzhetü'l-ahbâr on Süleyman the Magnificent's Szigetvár campaign and what followed it, and a treatise on morals called Miftah-ı Cennet; he was also said to be gathering 1,880 documents covering the time down to Murad's accession. His son Halil Bey became Bey of Eskişehir in 1592 and died afterwards, and the second grave in the tomb, of which only the base survives, is thought to be his.
Two things around the tomb are worth knowing because they are no longer there to see. To the left of the tomb door stood the gate of the burial ground kept for his own followers; on its outer face was carved the opening of the creed and on its inner face a Persian couplet in talik, both from the hand of Hasan Üsküdari, a pupil of Mehmed Dede, grandson of the calligrapher Şeyh Hamdullah, who died in 1614 and was buried near his master. That gate and that burial ground were removed in 1945, in the same repair that took away the marble grilles from the tomb front. Elsewhere in the city his name survives in a place rather than a building: he had a garden in what is now Emirgan, known as Feridun Bey's garden, and Emirgan was founded on its ground. He used to go there in a ship of his own.
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).
