Divan poets wrote verse about the cities in which they lived or which they visited, recording their buildings, waters, gardens and people as they saw them. Amasya is among the cities that became the subject of such poems. This section brings together older poems whose subject or occasion is Amasya itself; the selection is limited to poems whose full text can be read in a reliable edition.
The series contains five poems. The first is the closing couplets of Âb-ı Hayat, a verse treatise by Hızrî Mehmed Bey of Amasya, which state that the work was completed in the city. Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî's müseddes, whose refrain addresses Amasya, was written while the poet was governor of the province in 1595. The fifty-five-couplet mesnevi of Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi, mufti of Amasya, was composed in 1892 on the occasion of the rebuilding of the tomb of Şeyh Şâdî. The thirty-seven-stanza murabba written under the pen name Asrî by Hüseyin Hüsameddin, author of the History of Amasya, is a long city poem with "Amasya" as its refrain that moves through the town quarter by quarter. Ahmed Remzi Akyürek's ghazal For Amasya, sent from Üsküdar, recalls the city through its mosques, the Yeşilırmak, its water wheels and its apples.
Each poem is given in its original text with a rendering, and the places, people and events it mentions are explained in the commentary. Because these poems show the city's buildings and quarters through the eyes of different periods, from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth, they complement the articles in the History of Amasya and Places to Visit sections.
