Bey Yude Sultan Türbe in Aziz: The History of Research, Architectural Form, Issues of Chronology

Abstract

This article studies the mausoleum of Bey Yude Sultan, located in Aziz, a suburb of Bakhchisarai. The account of the monument by various authors are cited, as well as some visual sources depicting the structure. The mausoleum is a cubic building. The cube passes into an octahedron via triangular bevels, which are called Turkish triangles by the historians of architecture. The octagon is covered with a spherical dome, which formerly was topped with a hip roof. On the south side, the building had a portal with typical Seljuk niches in the side walls. Above the door there is a building inscription; in the lower tier there was a burial vault covered with a cupola. Most researchers date the construction to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. In 1991, there was a limited excavation of the mausoleum resulting in the find of a late-eighteenth-century coin. Taking this find into account, V. P. Kirilko has attributed the construction of the building to the said period. However, the architectural form of the Bey Yude Sultan Türbe in Azis meets with analogies only in the architecture of Asia Minor from the Seljuk and Early Ottoman Periods and in the Golden Horde. Therefore, it is difficult to imagine that, in the late eighteenth century, a building was constructed following all the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century canons.