Akşehir

Aksehir, "White Town", is a town in inner Anatolia at the foot of the Sultan Dagh, where the anecdotal Nasreddin Hoca is said to be buried.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.), article signed Cl. Huart and F. Taeschner, describes Aksehir as a town in inner Anatolia at the foot of the Sultan Dagh. In antiquity it was known as Philomelium. In older sources the name occurs as Akshar, Akhshehir, and the town was under Seljuk and Karamanoglu rule before it was annexed by Bayezid I. Travellers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, among them Ghazzi, Makki and Evliya Celebi, mention it. It was the capital of a sanjak and is now the seat of a kaza of the vilayet of Konya. Its importance came from its place on the Istanbul–Baghdad road. ²

Its mosque was founded by Bayezid I. The Tash Medrese has an inscription of the Seljuk Kaykaus I (613/1216) but is of a later date. Other monuments are a tekke with an inscription of Shahib Ata from the time of Kaykaus II (659/1260–69), the tomb of Sayyid Mahmud Khayrani with an octagonal pyramid (621/1224), the Ulu Cami of the early fifteenth century, the Iplikci Cami (738/1337) and an imaret. The tomb of Nasr al-Din Khoja is modern. ²