Gül Baba’s türbe in Buda, Hungary
Sufism in Eastern Europe
Ethnographic fieldwork in Hungary, November 2015, July 2020 | Conducted within the framework of the research project ‘The Visual and Material Culture of Sufism in Central and Southeastern Europe’ | Outcome: 2 peer-reviewed articles [submitted]
High above Buda (part of present-day Budapest) on the Rózsadomb (Hill of Roses), accessible via steep narrow streets, one finds one of the best-preserved testimonies of Ottoman rule in Hungary: the türbe (mausoleum) of the Bektashi dervish Gül Baba (lit., Rose Father). Not only the street names that lead to the türbe – Gül Baba utca, Turban utca, and Mecset utca – but also the winding cobbled streets themselves evoke Budapest’s Ottoman past. The name Gül Baba apparently alluded to a title rather than a historical person; the term gül probably indicating a baba’s exceptional spiritual development as known from the esoteric use of the term gül in a Sufi context and the custom of some Sufi babas (spiritual guides) of wearing a gül on the top of their dervish caps.
Yet when the 17th-century Ottoman traveler and writer Evliya Çelebi visited the Gül Baba Türbe in 1663, he recorded that the baba died on September 2, 1541 immediately following the capture of Buda and that Süleyman the Magnificent himself together with Ebüssuûd Efendi, the most reputed şeyhülislâm, carried his coffin to his grave. In the period from 1543 to 1548, the third beylerbey (governor general) of Buda, Yahyapaşazade Mehmed, founded a tekke (Sufi lodge) at the site and had a türbe built on the baba’s grave. By the seventeenth century the tekke housed about sixty dervishes. Although it was destroyed during the siege of Buda from 1593 to 1606, the hexagonal-shaped türbe survived. In the post-Ottoman period, the site became the property of the Jesuits who in 1686 transformed the türbe into a chapel dedicated to St Joseph. After Maria Theresa (1717–1780) suppressed Jesuit activity in the Austrian Empire in 1773, the building became the property of the royal treasury. In 1833 the türbe passed into private hands. It was then that the türbe was again visited by Muslims from Bosnia who still knew of the sacred site by word of mouth. The türbe was first owned by a certain Jozsef Toma and in 1858 by the architect János Wagner who in the late 19th century built a villa around the türbe (‘Gül Baba türbéje’ in Hungarian) which was maintained by the Bosnian population of Buda. In 1873 the türbe gave shelter to Afghan and Persian dervishes, who during the summer dispersed all over the Hungarian countryside; but, at the request of the Turkish consulate, the Ministry of the Interior forbade them to beg in Hungary; seven of the Afghan dervishes were buried at the Hospital of the Brothers of Mercy. During renovation works carried out at the türbe from 1915 to 1918, the grave was opened and, interestingly, the remains of three skeletons were found. In 1916 Hungary granted Islam the status of a legally recognized religion, and Gül Baba’s türbe, then the northernmost pilgrimage site in Islam, once again attracted pilgrims who steadily increased in number. In 2019 the complex, which now houses a small museum, was restored by the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA), and was inaugurated by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Viktor Orban.
