In the old Kırkçeşme quarter, on the Golden Horn side of the Valens aqueduct, stands a small complex of medrese, tomb and sebil. Its founder was Gazanfer Ağa, a chief white eunuch of the palace under Mehmed III, of Hungarian origin, who was executed in January 1603; his endowment deed of January 1596 records that he built the medrese and the sebil, and that he had a tomb made for himself beside them. Since the work was carried out in the years when Davud Ağa was chief court architect, the complex is thought to be his.
The tomb rises at the north-west corner of the outer courtyard, faced in cut stone, twelve-sided and domed. It is lit by two rows of windows, with cupboards set between the windows of the lower row, and traces of painted decoration survive inside above them. Besides Gazanfer Ağa's own, two women's cenotaphs stand here. In the courtyard around the tombs a small burial ground of some ten graves grew up, the earliest dated 1616.
The sebil at the north-east corner of the same wall is worth the few steps: eight-sided, with five of its faces projecting into the street, marble columns with muqarnas capitals carrying pointed arches of two-coloured stone, stone lattices cut within the arches and cast bronze grilles below them, a wellhead inside and moulded plasterwork in its dome. It was in a ruinous state until the repair of 1943, when the wide eave was added.
The medrese behind the tomb is the reason the group exists, and the entry calls it one of the first examples of a form that spread from this period: a small complex made up of a medrese standing on its own, not attached to a mosque. The main entrance is on Kovacılar Caddesi and opens into the small outer court where the tomb and the sebil stand; a second gate leads from there into the medrese, which has a regular plan. One thing in it has never been explained: the endowment deed speaks of seventeen cells, while the plan holds only fifteen, and the entry rejects the idea of counting the classroom and the lavatories to make up the number. A further cell was added behind the one on the boulevard side to the south, reached only through the room in front of it. The entry also calls the building unlucky in its siting: standing so close to the Valens aqueduct, which takes away its sun for the whole afternoon, has made it a damp place.
It came very near to being lost. The complex was damaged in the great fires that ran from the shores of the Golden Horn towards the Marmara and was wrecked in the fire of 1782, though repaired at once. A list of the medreses of İstanbul dated 23 July 1869 records twenty-five men living in it, and a report of 2 September 1914 notes that thirty could be housed. After the medreses were closed in the republican period it was left to fall down, and when Atatürk Bulvarı was cut through in the years when Lütfi Kırdar was governor and mayor the building stood at the very edge of the new road with its dilapidation in full view. Many historic buildings on both sides of the boulevard — the Sekbanbaşı, Revânî Çelebi and Yahya Güzel mosques, the Kırkçeşme fountains — were demolished to gain their plots; this complex escaped, and was repaired by Ekrem Hakkı Ayverdi in 1943-44. The municipality then arranged it as the City Museum and showed material on İstanbul in it; in Bedrettin Dalan's time as mayor part of that material was moved to rooms in the Yıldız Palace and the emptied medrese was rearranged as the Museum of Caricature and Humour. When there was an attempt to close that museum too in 1994, the argument that followed ended with the building left as a museum.
Gazanfer Ağa's other endowments are scattered across the city and beyond it. The deed records a mosque and a primary school at Gediz and fountains at Üsküdar. There is no doubt, the entry says, that he was the first founder of the Ayrılık Çeşmesi and its open prayer ground on the old Baghdad road near the Haydarpaşa meadow, on the Anatolian side; and he restored the Otakçılar mosque and endowed a well and a sebil beside it. One attribution is doubted: the Câfer Ağa medrese beside Hagia Sophia, on the edge of Alemdar Yokuşu, was being built by Sinan when its founder died in October 1557, and a man named Gazanfer Ağa had it finished in 1559-60 — he is taken to be the same person, but the entry notes that more than thirty years separate the two buildings, which raises doubt.
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).
