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İbrahim Yenigün-Vildan Balcı-Abdullah Yenigün-Sinan Uyanık

of providing water, watering (Şahin, 2017). The urban water-bearers, shown in
Figure 1, worked under the water administration and became an institutional
structure as a result of the increase in the number of fountains over time. This
structure was made up of two types, including pedestrian and mounted water
bearers, and each water bearer was assigned to certain wells, and people who
did not have a water bearer certificate, that is, the gedik, were not allowed to
carry out this duty. Within this framework, the Ottoman state carried out the
necessary supervision and treated this issue with great care in order to transmit
the safe and healthy water (Yıldız ve Özbay, 2012).

Figure 1. Urban Water-Bearers of the Ottoman Period (Yıldız and Özbay, 2012).
In addition to those who performed the duty of water-bearer as a profession,
there were also those who performed it voluntarily. Similar to the foundations
(waqf), which adopted the principle of providing water to people as a charity,
the water-bearers performed their task in accordance with this principle. The
people who voluntarily performed this task were called “dervish water carriers”.
This profession, which survived until the end of the 19th century, has
undergone various changes due to the supply of water in homes. In this
context, we can define the people who deliver carboy water to the houses as
the modern water bearers (sakas) (Yıldız and Özbay, 2012).

170 Journal of Environment, Urbanization and Climate