A researcher who wants to write the history of a city needs more than chronicles and travelers' notes; he also needs the regular records the state kept about itself. In the Ottoman Empire the most systematic form of those records was the yearbook, or salname. Prepared anew every year, these volumes listed who governed a province, how many schools, madrasas and libraries it had, how many people lived in each district, and what the land produced. Because Amasya was a sanjak center attached to the province of Sivas in the second half of the nineteenth century, the city's late institutional history is largely preserved in the pages of the Sivas Provincial Yearbooks and in the Education and State yearbooks.

The Salname as a Genre

The word salname comes from the Persian sal (year) and name (a written thing, a letter); the genre was also called nevsal. The term covers the informational publications that the central government, the ministries, military institutions, provinces, and some private bodies and individuals issued every year in the Ottoman Empire. They are roughly divided into official and private yearbooks, and the official ones fall under three headings: state, ministry and provincial yearbooks. The first state yearbook appeared in 1263 (1847) under the leadership of Mustafa Reşid Pasha. The historian Hayrullah Efendi had been assigned the task, but the volume was in fact prepared by Ahmed Vefik Pasha. It drew interest in the West as well and, in the same year, was translated into French and published in installments in a French journal.

State yearbooks gave the central organization of the empire, the holders of offices and posts, calendars, postal tariffs and information on foreign states all in one place. The work was first carried out in the secretariat of the Ministry of Education, and from 1306 (1888) it passed regularly to the Sicill-i Ahval Commission. Each year the commission sent the previous year's forms to the ministries and provinces and asked for the information to be updated. Because the requested data often arrived late, the biographical information and organizational charts in these yearbooks contain many errors, and any researcher who uses them as a source has to keep this warning in mind. State yearbooks were printed regularly between 1847 and 1912, were interrupted by war between 1912 and 1916, and the last issue bears the date 1918.

Provincial yearbooks spread on the model of the Fihrist-i Vilayet-i Haleb, prepared by the Aleppo secretary İbrahim Halet Bey, whose economic information and statistics had caught the attention of the Sublime Porte. A copy of this work was sent to every province with the request that similar yearbooks be prepared. The first provincial yearbook appeared in Sarajevo in 1283 (1866), followed by those of Aleppo, Konya, Syria and the Danube provinces. Provincial secretaries prepared them, and besides Turkish some were published in Arabic, Greek and Bosnian. In total 504 provincial yearbook entries have been identified. Some provinces issued only a single volume, while in others the number reached thirty-five. The publication span of the Sivas Provincial Yearbook is given in catalogs as 1287 (1870) to 1325 (1907), and it was printed at the Sivas Provincial Press.

What a Provincial Yearbook Contained

The contents of provincial yearbooks varied from province to province, but the general framework is similar. The volume opened with calendar and geographical information, followed by a chronology of the sultans' births, accessions and deaths. Then came the province's administrative organization, its officials, its administrative divisions, and the numbers of sanjaks, districts, subdistricts and villages. Some volumes also list the names and terms of office of the governors and commanders who had served in the province. In yearbooks published over a long period, buildings such as mosques, madrasas, dervish lodges, soup kitchens, coffeehouses, baths, inns, hospitals and covered bazaars are counted one by one, along with water, gas, railway and tramway companies, fairs, farmland, livestock, post offices and telegraph centers. Population was given by sanjak and district, and also by sex and religious community. The administrators, teachers and pupil numbers of Muslim and non-Muslim schools were recorded as well, and some volumes include photographs of schools.

This structure turns a province's history from a dry chronology into something measurable. A reader holding a yearbook can learn how many villages a district had that year, how many teachers worked in a given school, and which charitable institution was still standing. When the yearbooks of consecutive years for the same province are placed side by side, the founding and closing of institutions and the changing numbers of pupils can be followed.

Amasya's Place within the Province of Sivas

Sivas became a province in 1863 within the provincial system introduced during the Tanzimat. At the end of the nineteenth century the province consisted of the sanjaks of Sivas, Amasya, Tokat and Şarkî Karahisar. Besides the central district, the sanjak of Amasya included the districts of Merzifon, Köprü (Vezirköprü), Mecidözü, Ladik, Havza and Gümüşhacıköy. For this reason Amasya's presence in the yearbooks is to be sought not as a stand-alone city section but under the heading of the Amasya sanjak in the Sivas Provincial Yearbook. The total population of the province appears in the 1903 records as 1,035,268. Of these, 853,425 were Muslims, 127,389 Armenians and 46,185 Greeks, and the remainder were Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Copt.

The yearbooks record a wide institutional framework for the sanjak of Amasya, extending from administrative councils and court panels to secondary and preparatory schools, madrasas and markets. They are valuable also because they show the city's older charitable foundations and its newly established Tanzimat institutions on the same page and on the same plane. On one side stand madrasas of several centuries' standing; on the other, the rüştiye and idadi schools opened by the state, side by side in the same tables.

Schools in Amasya according to the 1870 Yearbook

One of the earliest figures on Amasya's educational life is found in the Sivas Yearbook of 1870. According to this volume, 718 Muslim pupils were studying in twenty-seven primary schools in Amasya. An Armenian primary school had 195 pupils. The city had thirty-one madrasas, in which twenty-six preachers, twenty-three imams and forty-four professors served and 278 students were studying. The number of madrasas and staff is high and the number of students comparatively low; each madrasa was a small circle of students gathered around a teacher.

This picture also reflects a transition in which the city's old centers of learning had begun to give way to state schools. Ziya Pasha, the district governor of Amasya, demolished the Alaca Yahya Madrasa in 1865 and had a rüştiye school built in its place; there is also a record stating that the Ministry of Education demolished the same madrasa in 1864 and built a rüştiye on the site, so the date of the event is given a year apart in the sources. It is likewise recorded that the same Ziya Pasha had the Narlı Bahçe Madrasa demolished in 1865. The Sivas Yearbook of 1892 reports that one rüştiye and four primary schools had been opened in Amasya. The yearbooks make this transition measurable year by year.

The Amasya Idadi

One of the institutions on which the yearbooks give the most information about Amasya is the Mekteb-i İdadi, the secondary school that followed the rüştiye. At the end of the nineteenth century the province of Sivas had three idadis: Sivas, Amasya and Tokat. The founding date of the Amasya idadi is not the same in the sources. One study reports that the school opened in 1892 but gave instruction for a time in the rüştiye building because its own building was unfinished; another says the Amasya idadi began instruction in 1896, while an encyclopedia entry on the city's educational history says the school was founded in 1895. These three dates probably correspond to different stages, the establishment of the school, the completion of its building and the actual start of instruction, but there is no document that confirms this.

The idadi building constructed in the reign of Abdülhamid II no longer stands. According to a study based on archival documents, construction stalled at foundation level because of budget difficulties and was later resumed; the building is known through survey and project documents. The same study notes that the facades of such idadi buildings were often neoclassical, while the plans ranged from a single rectangular block to a U-shaped layout. From 1926 the school continued as Amasya Middle School; its high school section was opened in the 1954-1955 school year, and the middle school section was phased out in 1993-1994. The institution continues its work today as Amasya Anatolian High School.

The education yearbooks also give the idadi's courses and pupil numbers. The curriculum of the Amasya idadi included subjects such as geometry, bookkeeping, geography, ethics, religious studies, history, arithmetic, French, Turkish, drawing, calligraphy and Persian. Pupil numbers are recorded as 91 in 1898, 72 in 1899, 111 in 1900, 121 in 1901 and 97 in 1903. The number of non-Muslim pupils in 1903 is nine; twenty are seen in Sivas and one in Tokat. All three idadis of the province were open to non-Muslim pupils, but the presence of many non-Muslim schools in the region is regarded as the reason for the low demand for these schools.

The Education Yearbooks of 1898-1903 and the Sanjak of Amasya

Between 1316 (1898) and 1321 (1903) the Ministry of Public Education published the Education Ministry Yearbook six times. The first issue ran to 1,257 pages, and the third (1318/1900) to 1,677; it contained the ministry's history, ministers, officials, schools, libraries, examinations and tables of prizes. A study of the sections of these yearbooks devoted to the province of Sivas makes the educational and cultural infrastructure of the sanjak of Amasya measurable.

The province had twenty-four rüştiyes, and about a thousand people studied in them each year. In the districts attached to the sanjak of Amasya, rüştiye pupil numbers for 1898, 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1903 are recorded as follows: Merzifon 93, 105, 100, 87 and 91; Köprü 45, 44, 39, 30 and 30; Mecidözü 61, 60, 56, 56 and 46; Ladik 86, 118, 110, 97 and 120; Havza 34, 24, 37, 31 and 35; Gümüşhacıköy 49, 62, 50, 47 and 65. Two or three teachers served in the rüştiyes, and each school also had a calligraphy teacher. For the 1906-1907 school year the number of rüştiyes in the sanjak of Amasya is given as seven.

The table of madrasas expresses Amasya's character as a traditional center of learning in numbers. According to the 1903 yearbook the province of Sivas had 113 madrasas in total and 4,772 madrasa students. The central district of Amasya had 19 madrasas and 530 students, the most crowded group of madrasas in the province. Köprü shows 6 madrasas and 288 students, Merzifon 4 madrasas and 85 students, Gümüşhacıköy 3 madrasas and 184 students, Ladik 2 madrasas and 60 students, and Mecidözü 1 madrasa and 12 students. In this table the sanjak of Amasya, with about 35 madrasas and 1,159 students, is among the densest regions of the province. Madrasa studies note that the number of scholarly institutions reached its peak between 1398 and 1592, stagnated after Amasya was attached to the province of Sivas, and kept declining from 1800; the figures of 1903 show that, despite that decline, the city still housed the largest number of madrasas in the province.

Non-Muslim schools also show Amasya's multicultural character. In 1903 the province of Sivas had 282 non-Muslim schools in total: one idadi, fourteen rüştiyes and 267 primary schools. In the sanjak of Amasya they were distributed as follows: one rüştiye and ten primary schools in the center of Amasya, three rüştiyes and five primary schools in Merzifon, and three, eleven, four, thirty and sixteen primary schools in Mecidözü, Köprü, Gümüşhacıköy, Havza and Ladik respectively. Across the province 12,443 non-Muslim Ottoman subjects attended school; although the non-Muslim population made up about seventeen percent of the total, its schooling rate was markedly higher than that of Muslims.

Foreign schools also appear in the yearbooks under a separate heading. Of the nine foreign schools in the province of Sivas, three were in Merzifon. The coeducational idadi of the American Protestant mission, dated 1280 in the Hijri calendar, had 200 girls and 310 boys. The French Jesuit boys' idadi, dated 1282, had 110 pupils, and the girls' primary school opened in 1892 had 80. In the city of Amasya itself, besides the Armenian Bartevian College, a Catholic French school operated; it is recorded that French missionaries opened a church and school in 1883 and that in 1892 Muslim families were forbidden to send their children to these schools.

Libraries

One of the notable headings in the yearbooks is libraries. Of the seventeen libraries identified in the province of Sivas, ten were in the sanjak of Amasya. This shows that at the beginning of the twentieth century the sanjak was the region of the province with the most cultural investment. In the center of Amasya the libraries of Abdüllatif Efendi (355 volumes), Şeyh İsmail Efendi (202), Sultan Bayezid (73) and Pervane Bey (55) are listed; in Köprü those of Müftü Efendi (277) and Taş Medrese (106), in Merzifon those of Mustafa Pasha and Çelebi Sultan Mehmed Han, and in Ladik that of Mehmed Efendi (120) are recorded. Because libraries were mostly known by the name of their founder, this list documents that the city's endowment tradition was still at work at the end of the nineteenth century. The founder of the Mustafa Pasha library in Merzifon appears in the 1898 yearbook as Kara Mustafa Pasha.

It also emerges from the yearbooks that the same province had a single press and a single newspaper. The official Provincial Press, founded in 1865-1866, was inside the government house and published only in Turkish; the newspaper was the official gazette issued in Sivas.

Using Yearbooks as a Source

Although yearbooks are official records, they are not flawless. Information was gathered at the provincial center, and errors could be made at the printing stage. In a table concerning the Sivas girls' rüştiye, the pupil number for 1900 is given as 23; the researcher who examined it estimated that the figure was a misprint and should be 123. After 1300 (1883) the state yearbooks turned into long lists of officials and embassies, and statistical information was limited to the numbers of sanjaks, districts, subdistricts and villages. That an institution does not appear in a yearbook in a given year does not mean it did not exist that year; the conditions under which the yearbooks were prepared must be taken into account.

The tradition of provincial yearbooks continued in the Republican period with the provincial annuals; the annuals published collectively in 1967 and 1973 are its continuation. Today most Ottoman yearbooks can be searched in digital yearbook catalogs. İSAM's catalog lists, besides the Sivas Provincial Yearbook, the yearbooks of neighboring provinces such as Ankara, Trabzon, Kastamonu, Hüdavendigâr and Adana. For anyone who wants to study Amasya's nineteenth-century educational and institutional history, these catalogs are the starting point.

Chronology

1847: The first state yearbook is published under the leadership of Mustafa Reşid Pasha; it was prepared by Ahmed Vefik Pasha.

1863: Sivas becomes a province; the sanjak of Amasya is attached to it.

1864-1865: The Alaca Yahya Madrasa is demolished and a rüştiye school is built in its place (the date appears a year apart in the sources).

1866: The first provincial yearbook appears in Sarajevo.

1870: The first issue of the Sivas Provincial Yearbook is published; twenty-seven primary schools and thirty-one madrasas are recorded in Amasya.

1888: The preparation of state yearbooks passes regularly to the Sicill-i Ahval Commission.

1892-1896: The Amasya idadi is established and begins instruction (the date differs among the sources). The Sivas Yearbook records that in 1892 one rüştiye and four primary schools were opened in Amasya.

1898-1903: The Education Ministry Yearbooks appear in six issues; the school, madrasa and library data of the sanjak of Amasya are given in detail in these yearbooks.

1903: The population of the province of Sivas is 1,035,268; 97 pupils are enrolled at the Amasya idadi.

1907: The publication span of the Sivas Provincial Yearbook ends in this year.

1912: The regular publication of state yearbooks ends; they are not published between 1912 and 1916 because of the war.

1967 and 1973: Provincial annuals are published collectively in the Republican period.

Sources

Primary sources

Academic studies

  • Togay Seçkin Birbudak, "Sâlnâmelere Göre Sivas Vilayeti'nde Eğitim-Öğretim (1898-1903)", Kastamonu Eğitim Dergisi, 15/1, 2007, pp. 303-316.
  • Emre Kolay, "Arşiv Belgeleri Işığında Amasya Mülkiye İdadi Mektebi Binası", Uluslararası Sosyal Araştırmalar Dergisi, 12/64, 2019, pp. 318-328.

Other sources

  • Bilgin Aydın, "Salnâme", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, 2009. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Nurettin Birol, "XIX. Yüzyıl Sonlarında Sivas Vilayeti'nde Müslüman Eğitim-Öğretim Kurumları ve Faaliyetleri".
  • "Amasya" entry, Türk Maarif Ansiklopedisi. turkmaarifansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • İSAM Yearbook Catalog, list of Ottoman yearbooks.

Online sources