Aksalur, a village in Amasya's central district, takes its name from the Oghuz tribe of Salur combined with the adjective "ak", white, and in 2025 it had 506 inhabitants. Little is known of its written past: no historical study devoted to the village or record of a listed building has been found, and no entry for a village of the same name turns up in the published indexes of the old Ottoman registers. What can be said about the village therefore rests largely on the analysis of its name and on the population records.

The Name

Asena Yalnız, in her study of place names in Amasya formed with colour words, lists Aksalur first among the village names of this kind in the central district. According to Yalnız, the name is formed as an adjectival compound of ak, "white in colour, the opposite of black", and Salur, one of the twenty-four tribes of the Oghuz Turks. In her introduction she also cites Aksalur as one of the examples in which the historical and geographical traces of the region are reflected in Amasya's place names. Aksalur is not on Bekir Başalan's list of renamed settlements in the central district, so the village bears its present name with no known earlier one. That Salur is a tribal name does not by itself prove that the village was founded by a community from this tribe; no document showing a link between the place name and such a community has been found.

The published index of the 1530 accounts register of Karaman and Rûm contains an interesting entry in this respect, but it cannot be connected directly with the village. The index has an entry for an "Ak Salur bölüğü"; this tribal section, registered under the kaza of Artukâbâd, was not a village and lay outside the liva of Amasya. The same index also lists a village called Salur in the sub-district of Ladik and a village called Salurcu in the sub-district of Argoma. These entries show that the name Salur circulated in the region in the sixteenth century as the name of both communities and places; but under what name, and in which sub-district, today's Aksalur was registered in 1530 could not be determined.

Population

In 2007, 625 people were registered in Aksalur. Over the next nineteen years the population fell in a slow and almost unbroken decline, to 581 in 2015, 546 in 2020 and 506 in 2025; the total loss was 119 people, or about nineteen per cent. The decline is interrupted only by small recoveries of a few people: the population rose above the previous year's figure to 627 in 2008, 608 in 2010, 581 in 2015 and 546 in 2020. In 2025 the village had 252 male and 254 female inhabitants. The series shows no sudden jumps or collapses; the loss may be thought of as the departure of a few households spread over the years, but there are no village-specific data on the causes or direction of the migration.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

  • Asena Yalnız, "Amasya İli ve İlçelerinin Renk Adlarıyla Oluşan Yer Adlarının Gramatikal ve Bölgesel İncelemesi", Amasya Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi (ASOBİD), 12, 2022, pp. 133-159 (Aksalur: p. 139).
  • Bekir Başalan, "Amasya İlinde İsimleri Değiştirilen Yerleşim Yeri Adları Üzerine Bir İnceleme", DergiPark, pp. 1385-1386 (central district, Table 1). https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/4249891

Other sources

Online sources