Hızırşah

The village of Hızırşah in the interior of the Datça peninsula, and its mosque, take their names from this fifteenth-century figure. He died in AH 853 — AD 1449/50 — and his tomb was built inside the complex in the village. That complex — a soup kitchen, a bathhouse, a guest house and an animal shelter — reflects the dervish lodge model brought to the peninsula under the Menteşe Beylik. Two accounts of who he was survive side by side: local historical narrative remembers him as a religious scholar who studied for years in Egypt, while the art historian Prof. Dr. Remzi Duran writes that he was a Menteşe bey, son of Orhan Bey and grandson of Menteşe Bey. Both accounts place him in the same role: someone who chose to settle on this peninsula and left a village behind him.

It is the peninsula's only case of a person's name surviving six centuries in everyday speech: the road sign, the village, the mosque and the culture house all carry it. With its square plan and single dome on an octagonal drum, the mosque is one of the peninsula's rare surviving examples of Beylik-period architecture; it was restored by the Directorate of Foundations in 2013 and returned to use. That his identity is still debated — bey or scholar — shows how thin the peninsula's written history is, and how village memory has filled the gap.