The Tomb of Gül Baba
3 min readJan 22, 2017
thebrokencompass.xyz
January 22, 2017
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Islam in Europe has been a controversial topic as of late. People worry about whether these new arrivals, especially from Syria, can assimilate to the European culture and be a member rather than an outsider who clings to their way of life without any semblance of desire for integration. The thing that most of these people are missing, is that this is not the first time that the muslim religion has entered the European borders.
Muslims have lived in Europe for centuries and have had a major role in European history, architecture, and even culture. The article, So Hungry We Ate a Horse, discusses a dish that we ate in Ukraine that was brought to the region during Ottoman occupation. Today, the Ukrainians, although not all, eat this dish without any thought to its origins. There are cases of this throughout previously Ottoman conquered territories.
This article is in reference to the northernmost pilgrimage site for the muslim religion. When one thinks of a muslim pilgrimage site Mecca, Jerusalem, Medina, or other cities in South West Asia, come to mind but very few would add the city of Budapest, Hungary to that list. Yet, there lies the muslim patron saint of Budapest.
Gül Baba was a Bektashi dervish poet that accompanied Suleiman the Magnificent in his conquests of Europe. Baba had taken a vow of poverty, yet there he was at the side of the Ottoman Sultan. Sulieman expanded the Ottoman empire to great lengths, conquering lands from the Persians and pushing his army as far as Vienna, where his army was finally turned back. Sulieman battled with the Habsburgs for several decades taking many of their lands including the Kingdom of Hungary.
After defeating the Hungarian royal army, the Kingdom of Hungary was disputed between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The Habsburg’s wanted Ferdinand I to be king, but Sulieman appointed John Zápolya, the son of a Slavonian noble and a Silisian duchess from Cieszyn. With Ottoman support and his marriage to Princess Isabella Jagiellon, Zápolya remained the monarch.
Upon Zápolya’s death in 1541, Ferdinand decided to invade Budapest, which was then governed by Isabella Jagiellon. Sulieman took command of the Ottoman reserve army and defeated the Habsburg army. He annexed the Kingdom of Hungary into the Ottoman Empire and made Isabella Queen Regent of Transylvania.
During this siege, Gül Baba perished below the walls of the city during the fighting. Suleiman, who was also Caliph at the time, named Baba the patron saint of Budapest. During Baba’s funeral, Suleiman himself was a coffin bearer. This shows the amount of respect and importance that Suleiman held for his nonviolent companion of his military conquests.
In 1686, when the Habsburgs reconquered Budapest, Baba’s tomb was left untouched. The tomb was converted to a Roman Catholic chapel by the Jesuits for nearly two hundred years until the site went under private ownership of János Wagner, who allowed muslims access to the site. After an Ottoman funded restoration by a Hungarian engineer, the tomb became a national monument in 1914. In 1987 the Hungarian government financed the building of an Islamic Center and Mosque to surround the tomb.
Today, the Tomb of Gül Baba is a pilgrimage site for muslims, primarily from Turkey, and is a symbol of the shared history of the Europeans and the Muslim world. Although there has been many battles and attacks from both sides, it is the tomb of a man who put God before money and worldly possessions, a poet not a soldier, that compels people to make this pilgrimage.
The original contains photos.
Originally published at www.thebrokencompass.xyz on January 22, 2017.