The tomb of Ümmi Kemal stands at Tekke Işıklar village, 27 kilometres southeast of Bolu, and takes its name from the man buried there. Ottoman sources give his real name as İsmail, with Ümmi Kemal as his pen name. He lived in the fifteenth century; the accounts say he was of the Oğuz and came to Anatolia from Khorasan, and that he descended from the Prophet's line. M. Fuad Köprülü called him the most mysterious poet of fifteenth-century Anatolian Turkish literature, and part of the reason he matters is scarcity: very few divans by the dervish-lodge poets of that period survive.
Ümmi Kemal left a prose work, the Risale-i Iman, three verse mesnevis — Kırk Armağan, Hazire-i Kuds and Risale-i Vefat — and a divan of 3,034 couplets, and a copy of each is kept at the tomb here. That he died at Tekke village and was buried here was first established from the entries in the Bolu court registers. The tomb has two parts. A long hall receives visitors at the entrance, and beyond it is the hexagonal chamber holding the grave: cut stone, six-sided, under a timber roof.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Bolu as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 0.6 °C in January to 20 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in May (61 mm) and lightest in August (24 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
