The bedesten is the most substantial building in the Kara Mustafa Paşa complex at Merzifon, and it was put up for one reason: this was a town that lived on cloth. It covers a nearly square plot of 30 by 28 metres, built of cut stone, with the walls and dome drums laid in alternating courses of stone and brick and the door and window frames cut from single blocks. Inside, four cross-shaped piers divide the hall into nine equal bays, each under its own dome on pendentives; the roof is sheathed in lead. Thirty-two vaulted shops wrap around the outside, and you reach the hall through passages that run between them from the middle of each of the four faces.
Its later life was hard on it. After the building lost its original trade it was taken over as a weaving workshop by the Merzifon weavers' cooperative, which poured concrete footings for the looms, slung iron beams between the arches, added a mezzanine against the south wall and drove a chimney straight through a dome. Holes cut in the domes for light were later plugged with concrete. The weaving trade itself, famous for centuries, was pushed to the edge of collapse by mismanagement and heavy taxation, and the bedesten was left empty. In the 1980s the state tobacco monopoly used it as a leaf store; in 2000 the floor was levelled and carpet looms were moved in; for a while a private textile firm worked here.
The General Directorate of Foundations began a full restoration in 2006 and returned the building to its original form. In the typology of Ottoman bedestens it belongs to the middle-sized group: nine domes, no vaults or shop divisions inside, shops all round the outside.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Amasya as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 2.7 °C in January to 23.9 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in May (55 mm) and lightest in August (10 mm). Long-term means for 1961-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
