The Eyüp Cemetery, aka Eyüp Sultan Cemetery, is a historic burial ground located in the Eyüp district, on the European side of Istanbul, Turkey. It is administered by the General Directorate of Foundations. One of the oldest and largest Muslim cemeteries in Istanbul, it hosts graves of Ottoman sultans and court members, grand viziers, high-ranked religious authorities, civil servants and military commanders as well as intellectuals, scientists, artists and poets.
History
The cemetery was very popular with Ottoman people, as they wanted to be buried next to the tomb of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, in Ottoman TurkishEbu Eyyûb el-Ensarî. A close companion of Prophet Muhammad, he died during a raid against the Byzantine capital Constantinople and wanted to be buried as close as possible to the city walls. After the Conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, a tomb was constructed above his grave and a mosque, called today the Eyüp Sultan Mosque, was built in his honor. From that time on, the area now known as Eyüp has become sacred, and many prominent Ottoman people requested burial in proximity of Abu Ayyub. The Eyüp Cemetery is situated on the western bank of the Golden Horn just outside the historic Walls of Constantinople. It stretches between the Golden Horn's shore up to Karyağdı Slope, and further to Edirnekapı. Road construction works and nationalization around Golden Horn did great damage to the graves. Among the most interesting graves are of those of the Ottoman-era public executioners. They were not allowed to be buried in public cemeteries, and a separate burial ground, called the "Executioner Cemetery", existed on the Karyağdı Hill aside the Eyüp Cemetery. Their burial took place only in two cemeteries in Istanbul, and this secretly in the night. The headstones were blank without any name and date in order to avoid retaliation by the relatives of the executed persons. Unfortunately, only a few executioner graves have survived up to date.
Crime site
In the evening hours of a November day in 1994, a 45-year-old Austrian woman professor was assaulted, murdered and robbed as she was descending the hill through the cemetery after a coffee break at the popular cafeteria on the top of the hill. The murderer was a 17 yearsold car painter. In the early hours of afternoon on August 25, 2001, prominent Turkish Jewish businessman and a cofounder of Alarko Holding, Üzeyir Garih was found dead by cemetery guards next to the grave of Fevzi Çakmak. He was stabbed ten times, of which seven were deadly. Police arrested a suspect after two hours, who confessed the crime adding he committed the murder for robbery. However, the actual murderer, who robbed Garih's money and stole his mobile phone, was caught ten days later. Reportedly, Garih used to visit the grave of Turkey's first Chief of the General Stafffield marshal Çakmak every two weeks. Shortly after the 2001 murder case, a commissioner at the prosecutor's office of Eyüp district admitted that the Eyüp Cemetery had become a place of prostitution and drug use by negligence. It was reported that since the murder in 1994 no monitoring by police patrol was taking place in the cemetery and at the trail to the cafeteria on the top of the hill, which are frequented by tourists.
