The Tokat mevlevihane, the lodge of the Mevlevi dervishes on Bey Sokağı in the centre of the town, opened on 6 May 2006 as the Tokat Mevlevihane Waqf Museum. It is a two-storey timber building on a site of 3,000 square metres, and the governorate counts it among the most striking of the surviving mevlevihanes in Türkiye for its position and its ornament — one of the most original examples of nineteenth-century baroque in Anatolia.
The order's roots in Tokat are older than the building. The Menakib ul-Arifin, the oldest source on the Mevlevis, records that while Mevlana was still alive he sent his deputy Fahreddin-i Iraki to Tokat at the request of Muineddin Süleyman Pervane, and the order took root here through the lodge Pervane had built in the thirteenth century. That first lodge was probably destroyed at the end of the fifteenth century, when Uzun Hasan burned Tokat. The second was built in 1638 on the plot at the entrance to Bey Sokağı by Muslu Ağa, also known as Sülün Mustafa Paşa, a janissary aga and one of Sultan Ahmed's viziers; the archives call it the Janissary Muslu Ağa Mevlevihane in the town of Tokat. He endowed it as well as built it, so that the sheikhs, dervishes, staff and visiting religious figures were fed from its income. Evliya Çelebi, who came in 1656, gave it a long passage in his travels and judged it as fine a building as the Beşiktaş mevlevihane in İstanbul.
That building has not survived intact; the lodge fell into ruin more than once, and the present one was put up early in the eighteenth century by Sheikh Mehmet Efendi, after fire destroyed the last of the endowment's income-bearing property in 1703. What remains from the earlier period are the Mevlana bath next door, now in private hands, the stone gateway at the entrance, and the bath inside the mansion with the room adjoining it.
The twentieth century treated it as a shell to be filled. After the lodges were closed in 1925 it stood empty from 1934, was repaired in 1939 and let to the gendarmerie, who used it as a women's prison from 1945 to 1949; it was repaired again in 1951 and used for Qur'an courses, then from 1954 as a boarding hostel for pupils of the imam-hatip school, and later again for Qur'an courses until it was so decayed that it had to be emptied and was close to collapse. Restoration begun by the General Directorate of Foundations in 1997 stalled for lack of funds; the real work was done between 2000 and 2004.
In its restored form the building shows the architecture of a nineteenth-century Tokat house, built in the bagdadi manner — a timber frame with mudbrick infill. Its finest front is the one facing Bey Sokağı, with a row of columns carved in baroque motifs and a balcony running the whole length of it. The plan takes in the sheikh's quarters, the dervish cells and, in the main building, five ground-floor rooms set around an L-shaped corridor, the sheikh's reception room among them; the upper floor is a single large hall, the semahane, where the ceremony was performed.
The collections came partly home. Valuables sent to the Tokat museum when the lodge closed in 1925 were brought back, and objects of historic value from mosques around Tokat were added. The reception room holds late manuscript Qur'ans, lithographed books, a hand-woven red silk interior covering from the Kaaba, and prayer rugs; the room to the left of the hall holds brass and copper candlesticks in use since the fourteenth century, among them ones given by Gülbahar Hatun, mother of Sultan Bayezid, to the mosque she founded; the largest room downstairs shows carpets and kilims of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries from Sivas, Tokat, Kırşehir, Konya, Niğde and eastern and south-eastern Anatolia, preserved in the mosques of the region. A narrow space holds a seventeenth-century ceiling boss from the Ulu Camii of Tokat, and a small room thirteenth-century tiles, sixteenth-century reliquary boxes and nineteenth-century clocks.
Stairs of stone and wood lead up to the balcony and the semahane. The door into it is double-leaved, with a carved baroque boss at the centre of the balcony and, above, two phrases in Arabic thuluth: "O God who opens doors" and "Open to us the door of good." The semahane is covered by a dome whose centre is decorated with plant motifs, and it is a single space apart from the women's gallery on the east side, screened off with a wooden lattice.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Tokat as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 2 °C in January to 22.5 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in May (59 mm) and lightest in August (9 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Getting there
- Access
- The lodge is in central Tokat and the city buses reach it.
