Eskici Mehmed Dede

Eskici Mehmed Dede is a personage who is remembered in the sources as one of the saints of Anatolia and who lived in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He was originally from Amasya; after completing his first education there, he came to Bursa. Because he was engaged in the trade of cotton cloth, he became known by the nickname 'Eskici' (the rag-and-cloth dealer). In Bursa he attended the gatherings of Abdülmü'min Efendi, became his student, and advanced on the path of Sufism; later he married the granddaughter of Abdülmü'min Efendi. Although at the beginning he set trade aside for worship and seclusion, in order to provide for his family's livelihood he returned to commerce again with the understanding that 'the one who works is a beloved servant of God.' Although he was among the well-known cloth merchants of Bursa, he did not become attached to worldly wealth and distributed his earnings to the poor. According to what is related in the sources, his spiritual aid reached a poor person who desired to go on pilgrimage, and this event was influential in the Bursa judge (kadi) Azîz Mahmûd Hüdâyî leaving his post and becoming a student of Muhammad Üftâde. It is also related that the worm-infested rice of the merchant Akkaşzâde Seyyid Abdurrahmân Efendi was set right after Mehmed Dede's words, 'Send us some pilaf.' His date of death, according to the abjad chronogram derived from the verse 'Eskici Dede has departed from the worn-out world and given up his soul,' is the year 1028 (1619).