Mausoleum of Gazi Evrenos

Gazi Evrenos Bey led Ottoman frontier raiders (akıncı) in the conquest of the Balkans under Orhan, Murad I and Bayezid I, and his sons Ali Bey and İsa Bey succeeded him as raider commanders in Rumelia⁶. After 1384 he founded Yenice-i Vardar, “the new town near the Vardar”, today Giannitsa, on estates granted by Sultan Murad I, and made it an endowment administered by his descendants³. He died there in Shawwal 820 (November 1417) and was buried in a türbe; his grave inscription gives him the title “king of the ghazis and holy warriors”^5,6. Members of his family were buried around him, and the place gradually took on the character of a shrine^1,3.

Evliya Çelebi, visiting in 1668, described a domed türbe lit by windows on every side, with Evrenos’s marble sarcophagus in a chamber three steps below the floor and a second marble cenotaph in the hall above; he said he had seen no türbe so splendid anywhere⁵. In 1885-1886 Mehmed Şefik Pasha, trustee of the Gazi Evrenos endowment, rebuilt the old türbe in a 19th-century European style; an inscription over the entrance records a further repair in 1910⁷. The building was sold at auction in March 1937, and from 1942 to 1978 it housed a cotton-ginning works⁸. The municipality bought it in 1984 and ceded it to the Ministry of Culture for 99 years⁸.

The Ministry describes the first türbe as an imposing single-room building on a square plan with a lead-covered dome, while Androudis and Triantafyllidou describe the 15th-century core as an almost square, open türbe resting on four square piers^1,8. After the mid-17th century the core was extended to the south; with a mihrab and further rooms the building also served as a mosque, and it now has a T-shaped plan^1,3. Its present form comes from the work of 1885-1886 and from the radical reconstruction of 1908-1910^3,7. Writing for TDV in 1996, Semavi Eyice described a square brick building without a dome, with large windows, and judged from the very plain decoration and lettering of the grave slab that it was made at a later date⁵.

The building was restored in the 2000s at the municipality’s initiative, in collaboration with the 11th Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities⁸. An excavation in the north-west part found a male burial linked to the 15th-century core; the Ministry describes a cist grave at a lower level against the west wall, its walls painted with aniconic imitations of marble revetment^1,8. Machiel Kiel, writing for TDV, dates the restoration to 2005-2006 and says that Evrenos’s grave was opened during the works and his bones taken to Thessaloniki⁷.

Today the mausoleum works as a museum, with small exhibitions on the Ottoman town in its entrance hall⁸. The marble inscribed slab from Evrenos’s grave is displayed inside; it gives the day of his death, Wednesday 17 November 1417¹. Below floor level, against the west wall, lies the excavated cist grave with its painted imitation marble¹. Of the frescoes added in the 19th or early 20th century only a small part, imitating marble revetment on the lower walls, survives; the landscapes painted higher up, probably views of Giannitsa, are known from early photographs³.