The complex consists of a tomb tower, a caravanserai, a bath and a mosque, and was built at Tercan — the old name of the town is Mamahatun — on the caravan road between Erzurum and Erzincan. Its patron was Mama Hatun, daughter of İzzeddin Saltuk II, who came to the head of the Saltukid principality ruling Erzurum and its region in 1191.
The tomb tower and the round wall that rings it have, together, a plan and an architecture with no other example in Anatolia, and the district governorate calls the tomb unique. Its body is eight-lobed, set on a square base with chamfered corners and capped by an eight-lobed conical roof divided by rounded mouldings, faced throughout in dressed stone. The monument is really two different things — the tower and the wall that rings it.
The wall reads almost as a fortification, and its western side carries a monumental portal that projects outward. The doorway sits under a segmental arch within a deep niche with a muqarnas hood, flanked by colonnettes and closed above by a pointed arch. Verses in Kufic script on a ground of rumi scrollwork run across the face of the niche and the arch; the craftsman's own inscription is on the inner side, and the names of the Prophet and the four Caliphs appear in Kufic on the muqarnas capitals of the colonnettes. Thirteen pointed-arched niches open along the inner face of the enclosure — the first on the left holds a fountain, the first on the right a stair up onto the wall, and several others contain stone sarcophagi, one of them inscribed.
The tomb has two floors, both entered from the south. The upper chamber repeats the lobing of the exterior inside and is crowned by a lobed dome, lit by three slit windows; the lower is square and covered by a groin vault, with a window east and west. Decoration is concentrated on the portal, where geometric and plant interlace runs together with the Kufic lettering, though a curious motif of grape bunches appears on a niche arch to the left of the entrance and above the north window inside the tomb. The inscription names the architect, Ebü'n-Nemâ b. Mufaddal of Ahlat; there is no dated inscription, and the district governorate places the tomb in the middle of the thirteenth century on the evidence of its architecture.
The caravanserai, built at the beginning of the thirteenth century, is an important part of the group. It belongs to the concentric type and at 51 by 51 metres is the largest of them, the others being the Alara Han and the Ashab-ı Kehf Han. Square in plan and entirely of cut stone, it is braced by cylindrical towers at the four corners and by half-cylindrical or rectangular buttresses along the faces. A projecting portal stands at the middle of the east front, with a colonnette at each corner and a niche on either side. Through its depressed arch you reach the interior: rooms and eyvans around a wide central court, with a stable running the length of the building on the north and another on the south.
The bath, between the tower and the caravanserai, is rectangular and small. The changing room on the west is rectangular under a pointed vault, with a hexagonal pool at its centre; the warm room is square and domed, and the hot room rectangular under one vault and one dome. The mosque counted among the buildings of the complex has been altered entirely — the original collapsed and a new mosque was built in its place.
Getting there
- Access
- On Kervansaray Caddesi in the Mamahatun neighbourhood.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Erzincan as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from -2.8 °C in January to 24 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in May (54 mm) and lightest in August (7 mm). Long-term means for 1928-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
