The Yakutiye Medrese in central Erzurum was built in 1310 — Hijri 710 by its portal inscription — by Cemalettin Hoca Yakut Gazani, in the names of Gazan Han and Bolugan Hatun, during the reign of the Ilkhanid ruler Oljaitu (Olcayto). It is the largest of the closed-courtyard medreses in Anatolia and one of the most striking buildings in Erzurum, as much for the balance of its plan as for the size of the motifs carved on it.
The west front, with its projecting crown portal, is the face to look at. The portal is worked in vegetal, geometric and figural ornament with bands of inscription. In the niches on either side, inside moulded arches, a pierced sphere sits below and a tree of life of palm leaves rises from it, with a pair of leopards facing each other beneath the tree and, at the top, a panel carved with a double-headed eagle — a tree of life assembled from symbols that mattered to the Turks of Central Asia. Of the two thick corner minarets, one is ruined down to its balcony and capped with a conical roof; of the other only the base remains, closed with a conical cap.
The building is single-storey and rectangular around a covered courtyard, its centre roofed with a muqarnas dome and the rest with pointed barrel vaults. Six barrel-vaulted rooms face each other down either side, and the minaret is reached from the one in the right-hand corner; the rooms were assigned to students and teachers by rank, which is why the carving over each doorway is different. The south iwan was planned as a prayer room, and marble endowment inscriptions in thuluth script set into it name the six villages given over to the medrese. Against the east wall stands a brick tomb tower with three windows and a conical cap; the tomb chamber at the end of the east iwan holds no grave.
The medrese spent a long stretch hemmed in: it was used as a barracks and surrounded by later buildings until those were cleared in the 1970s and 1980s and the site was landscaped. After restoration it became the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art and Ethnography, a branch of the Erzurum Museum Directorate. What is shown inside is ethnographic — women's jewellery and dress, men's jewellery and accessories, belts, copperware, weapons, seals and coins — set against the architecture rather than against gallery walls. In 2014 the medrese was added to the UNESCO tentative list together with other major Seljuk medreses in Sivas, Konya, Kayseri, Erzurum and Kırşehir, under the heading of the Anatolian Seljuk medreses.
Getting there
- Access
- On Cumhuriyet Caddesi in the centre; reached on foot or by public transport from anywhere in the city.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Erzurum as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from -9.1 °C in January to 19.6 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in July and August; rainfall is heaviest in May (73 mm) and lightest in August (18 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- Summer (1 May – 1 October) 08:00–19:00, closed Monday · Winter (1 October – 1 May) 08:00–17:00, closed Monday
