Sultan Bayezid II laid the foundation of this complex in Edirne himself in 1484, and it was finished in four years and opened in 1488. Its architect was Hayrettin, and its cluster of domes gives it a striking outline. With a hospital, a medical school, a mosque, a guesthouse, a soup kitchen, a bath and a bridge, it was one of the leading health, social, educational and religious institutions of its day: patients were treated in the hospital, students trained in the school, worshippers prayed in the mosque, travellers lodged in the guesthouse and the poor were fed from the kitchen.
The hospital, the darüşşifa, was planned in detail as a central hospital meant to give wide care with few staff, and the museum calls it the first of its kind in the world, with comparable buildings appearing in the west only some 200 years later. Its first staff were a chief physician, two physicians, two surgeons, two eye doctors and two pharmacists, 21 people in all, caring for 32 beds; later it became a centre for mental illness alone. The treatment drew on music, the sound of water and pleasant scents. An ensemble of ten singers and players performed three days a week, choosing a different makam for each condition: Rast for convulsions and paralysis, Irak for the irritable, Rehavi for headaches, Zengule for heart disease, İsfahan to sharpen the mind. Evliya Çelebi wrote that it was beyond what tongue could tell or pen could write, and it went on treating patients for 400 years.
The medical school next door ranked among the higher Ottoman madrasas and trained the hospital's physicians, with a teacher, an assistant, a librarian and 18 students who learned at the bedside in a master-and-apprentice system. Many of its books were donated by Bayezid II himself, and 37 medical volumes from it are kept in the Selimiye manuscript library.
In 1984 the Vakıflar Genel Müdürlüğü assigned every part of the complex except the mosque to Trakya University, building on rescue efforts started in the 1970s by Dr. Ratip Kazancıgil, then Edirne's health director. After restoration, the university opened its health museum in the hospital in 1997, with the wards brought back to life with mannequins, and in 2008 the medical school followed as a second section, re-creating a 15th-century lesson. In 2004 the museum received the Council of Europe's European museum award, given since 1977. It is a private museum belonging to Trakya University.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Edirne as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 2.8 °C in January to 24.8 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in December (71 mm) and lightest in August (23 mm). Long-term means for 1930-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
