Lying eight kilometres from the town of Göynücek and 53 kilometres from Amasya, Abacı is a small village where 56 people lived in 2025. Biricik Taştan, who carried out fieldwork on folk beliefs in the villages of Göynücek in 2019, records that there are settlers from Erzurum in the village; most of what is written about Abacı rests on her collection. There is another village of the same name, Abacı, in Amasya's central district. Nothing said here applies to that village.

The Name and the Old Records

Bekir Başalan, who studied the official renaming of places in Amasya, counts nine villages for Göynücek, and Abacı falls outside that number; the village bears its present name with no known earlier one. The published index of the 1530 accounts register of Karaman and Rûm, dating from the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, does not give the village's name either: in the sub-district of Geldiklan-âbâd, where today's Gediksaray, İkizyaka and Kışlabeyi are recorded under their old names, there is no such village, and the only entry under this name in the index is an Abacı community (cemaat) in another sub-district. When the village was founded, and when the people from Erzurum settled here, is not known. The origin of the name has not been explained either. The word "abacı" denotes someone who weaves or sells aba, a coarse woollen cloth, but no documented link has been established between the village and such a trade.

Customs

In Taştan's collection Abacı mostly appears in long lists in which the same belief is recorded for many villages together; a few practices noted only in this village, however, give information specific to it. One of them is the "fortieth-day" ritual (kırklama) for a newborn child: in Abacı it is performed against puerperal fever (al basması), and the Ikhlas chapter of the Qur'an is recited forty times, counted on the fingers. Among the customs concerning death, the setting up of the gravestone a year after death is also recorded for Abacı alone. The village is also counted among those where, if the body is to be kept waiting, an iron object such as scissors or a knife is placed on its belly so that it does not swell, where the coffin is carried to the graveyard from hand to hand by the village men, and where a tree is planted at the head of the grave. The photographic appendix of the thesis also includes a picture from the fieldwork in Abacı.

Population

Over the nineteen years for which records are kept, Abacı's population never reached seventy. In 2007, 49 people were registered, and the highest value is the 68 of 2008. Having fallen as low as 29 in 2019, the population recovered in the following years and rose in 2025 to 56, of whom 24 were men and 32 women. At this scale even the coming and going of a few households moves the series noticeably; the fall from 54 in 2018 to 29 a year later may also be the result of such a movement.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Other sources

Online sources