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The Jaffa city which is situated on the east of Mediterrenean Sea, its history is very old. Generally Jaffa city was used as a port of Jerusalem, has showed developing an increasing rate by constructed the railway. The population of Jaffa has grown rapidly, the Jewish migration was speed up to Jaffa since the beginning of the 20th century and Tel-Aviv was born as a new city to the north of the historic city. Many historical buildings are belong to Ottoman Empire that most of them were built in the 19th century in the Jaffa city. Civil buildings were mostly built in local style but Ottoman buildings were built in the Ottoman Empire style and western style inspired by local tradition. The Jafa Clock Tower, which is one of the two buildings examined in this paper, forms a public space in the city center, and the other building, qishla (barracks) or military store, stands out by the state authority. These tugras on two buildings belonging to Sultan Abdulhamit II and Turkish inscription on the door of the qishla, carries symbolic meaning to the country's political capital, Istanbul, in a way. The inscribtion of qishla is three lines and six verses and is located in the wide round arch of the main entrance door. 1885-86 dated inscription is placed just above the tugra. While the inscriptions on other Ottoman buildings in the region are in Arabic, the using of Turkish language is a conscious choice in this inscription on the qishla building. Here, it is necessary to consider a reflection of the principle that the official language of the state is Turkish in the Constitution. It should not be ignored, however, to give a strong message to the western states that pursue a number of accounts in the region without agreeing to a common official language without doing a Turkism policy. Today, the qishla building is used as a hotel by making some joints on the barracks building. The clock tower has been restored by the Israeli authorities and maintains an important symbolic meaning as an important monument of the city. Architectural constructions are the most important proofs for a nation that a part of the land that they live on a nation is made homeland. Today, these works carry traces and memories from us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calligraphers started to put their signatures at the bottom of their inscriptions on the tombstones at the end period of Ottomans. This new situation can be explained by stating that they began considering tombstones as proper spaces for their artistic endeavor. There is an inscription on a tombstone, which has a signature of its calligrapher, in Samsun Kökçüoğlu Central Graveyard. This paper aims at describing this inscription by giving some information on its calligrapher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being an inherent component of our history and culture, abjad numerological system has been employed for artistic purposes, but today it has started to sink into oblivion. The abjad numerological system was mostly employed to pinpoint dates of death of certain people in a artistic manner in tombstone inscriptions. This practice was very popular in Anatolia so that such tombstone inscriptions can readily be found throughout Anatolia. In this paper, we investigated the tombstones in Kökçüoğlu Central Graveyard in Samsun and gave examples of the tombstones with such inscriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]