Mama Hatun Kümbeti

Mama Hatun was a daughter of İzzeddin Saltuk II of the Saltukids, a Turkish dynasty based at Erzurum, and she took power in 1191 after her elder brother Nasırüddin Muhammed². Arabic chronicles call her the lady of Erzurum, and in 1191 she led her troops to the siege of Malazgirt in support of the Ayyubid prince Taqi al-Din Umar². In 1201 she asked the Ayyubid sultan al-Adil to find her a husband of rank, but she was deposed and imprisoned, and her nephew Alaeddin Melikşah took her place; nothing is known of her later life².

The complex at Tercan, a town once called Mamahatun, joined the tomb to a caravanserai, a bath and a mosque on the caravan road between Erzurum and Erzincan¹. No inscription names the patron or the person buried, so the link with Mama Hatun is an assumption, as Yelen and Sarı and Archnet point out^5,6. Yelen and Sarı report the view that the master may have been sent from Ahlat because of the Ahlatshahs' political ties with Mama Hatun⁵. Evliya Çelebi, who passed through in 1640, saw a long carved marble sarcophagus and a mosque and bath near the tomb; seven years later the foundation's revenues had been seized and its buildings were falling into ruin².

The tomb has two parts: a round enclosure wall and a kümbet at its centre¹. TDV gives the wall a diameter of about 13.50 m and Erzincan's culture directorate a thickness of 2.50 m, while Archnet measures it at 17.35 m across and 4.5 m thick^1,4,6. The wall is plain apart from the portal on the west; inside it is lined with pointed-arched niches, thirteen according to TDV, twelve according to Yelen and Sarı and eleven according to Erzincan's culture directorate, and the first one on the left of the entrance holds a fountain under a trefoil muqarnas arch with bunches of grapes carved beside it^1,4,5. The portal's pointed arch carries Surat al-Ikhlas in Kufic script, five-pointed stars in roundels bear the names of God, Muhammad and the four caliphs, and inscriptions on the side niches name the architect¹. A restoration rebuilt the damaged parts in plain stone, so only a little of the carved decoration survives¹.

The kümbet stands on a square base whose upper corners are cut back to form an octagon¹. Its round body is made of eight convex half-cylinders separated by thin roll mouldings, and the conical cap follows the same flutes¹. TDV and Kültür Portalı say that no other tomb in Anatolia has this plan; TDV and Yelen and Sarı point to mausolea of the 6th to 4th centuries BC at Tagisken, east of the Aral Sea, as a distant parallel, and Yelen and Sarı also compare the ring wall with the enclosure of Momine Khatun's tomb at Nakhchivan^1,3,5.

Through the portal one enters the open ring between the wall and the kümbet, with the niches all around; TDV says six of them hold sarcophagi thought to belong to Mama Hatun's relatives, while Yelen and Sarı count five^1,5. The kümbet's door, under a flattened arch framed by a thin palmette frieze, has a blank inscription panel above it, and Erzincan's culture directorate says seven steps lead up to the upper room^1,4. Inside, the walls repeat the flutes of the exterior and their mouldings meet at the top of the dome like ribs, and the slit windows carry grapes, palmettes and rumi scrolls^1,4. Four steps lead down to the square, cross-vaulted crypt, which holds the sarcophagus traditionally taken to be Mama Hatun's; Erzincan's culture directorate, citing the historian T. Erdoğan Şahin, notes that the carved marble sarcophagus seen by Evliya Çelebi has been replaced by a later, symbolic one^1,4.