Merkez Efendi was an Ottoman Islamic scholar and Sufi, a practitioner of the inner spiritual dimension of Islam that flourished alongside the empire's outward power. Sufism in the Ottoman world was not marginal — its lodges, or tekkes, were centers of education, charity, and music. Merkez Efendi belonged to the Halveti order, one of the most prominent Sufi brotherhoods of the era. His tomb, constructed in the 16th century as the founding anchor of this cemetery, drew pilgrims and mourners alike for generations. The neighborhood that grew around it took his name. Even the sign on the cemetery gate today carries it, a quiet persistence of devotion across half a millennium.

What makes this cemetery remarkable is the richness of the lives buried within it. Halide Edip Adıvar (1884–1964) rests here — one of Turkey's first feminist politicians, a novelist whose work shaped modern Turkish literature, and a woman who addressed troops during the War of Independence at Sultanahmet Square. Abdullah Cevdet (1869–1932), poet and radical freethinker, ideologist of the Young Turks, lies nearby. Sadettin Kaynak (1895–1961), whose compositions became some of the most beloved in Turkish classical music, occupies another corner. The composer and the revolutionary, the novelist and the Sufi — they all ended here, in the same 27,800 square meters of ground, under the same Istanbul sky.

The cemetery began with a single tomb and grew outward. It was extended significantly in the 1950s, when a second burial ground, the Kozlu Cemetery, was established 100 meters away to absorb the overflow of the expanding city. A full renovation in 2007 refreshed the grounds, and again in 2011 maintenance work was carried out in the lead-up to the burial of former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan (1926–2011). Erbakan — engineer, politician, and founder of several Islamist parties — was the last major public figure interred here. Since then, the cemetery has been closed to new burials except for family members of those already laid to rest, preserving its population as a finite archive of Ottoman and Republican lives.

Zeytinburnu today is a dense, working-class district on the western edge of Istanbul's historic peninsula, wedged between highways and the Sea of Marmara. The cemetery sits within this urban fabric without fanfare. Cypress trees — the traditional Ottoman grave-marker, their slender forms pointing skyward — shade the old tombstones. The Ottoman headstones bear calligraphy and turbans carved in stone, indicating rank and allegiance. Some stones have sunk at angles from centuries of Istanbul's seismic tremors. Walking among them is walking through the republic's formation: the novelists who imagined a new Turkey, the politicians who built and argued over it, and beneath them all, the Sufi mystic who gave this ground its name long before any of them were born.