Amasya lies in the narrow valley cut by the Yeşilırmak, close to the North Anatolian Fault. The cliffs on either side of the valley gave the town a natural defence and the alluvial soil along the river gave it fertility, but proximity to the fault zone also brought repeated earthquakes over the centuries. The town as it stands today, from the walls of the citadel to the Seljuk and Ottoman buildings, bears the marks of repairs laid one upon another. Many structures show large restorations that were evidently carried out in different periods.

The earthquake history of Amasya cannot be told through a single disaster. The records reach back to the third century, and from the sixteenth century onward the Mühimme registers, the kadi court registers and local historiography make it possible to follow, in part, which building was damaged and when. The 1668 earthquake appears in this chronology only in its place in the sequence; the fault and the geology are the subject of a separate article.

The Beginning of the Record: 236 and 509 CE

The first destructive earthquake in the written record dates to 236 CE. According to local compilations, traces of this earthquake have been found in Roman records, and the event took place on the North Anatolian Fault. Another earthquake recorded in the region belongs to 509 CE. Very little information about the damage caused by either event has survived: which neighbourhoods and buildings were affected, and how many lives were lost, is unknown. These two dates show that Amasya was within the reach of the fault zone in antiquity as well, but to say more would go beyond what the sources allow.

The same records contain a warning. The possibility must be kept in mind that there were earthquakes in antiquity that caused relatively little damage and were never written down. In periods when record keeping was weak, a moderate shock in a small city often went undocumented. The two dates above are therefore not a complete list of the earthquakes Amasya experienced; they are simply the records that happen to have survived.

The Sixteenth Century: The First Detailed Record in the Mühimme Registers

The first earthquake in the region about which detailed information is available dates to 1579. The event is entered in the Ottoman Mühimme registers. According to the entry, the shock was especially strong in Çorum, while in Amasya it damaged the Hızır Pasha Mosque, its soup kitchen (imaret) and its madrasa. Local compilations note that, although it cannot be asserted with certainty, this earthquake can be said to have occurred on the Laçin-Çorum fault. The importance of the entry is that an earthquake is mentioned in central government correspondence together with specific buildings in Amasya; the town now appears as a settlement where damage assessments were made.

About a decade later, in November 1590, another shock struck the Sultan Bayezid II Complex. According to the entry in the TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam, which relies on Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin, the domes and arches of the mosque and the domes of the imaret partly collapsed in this earthquake and the damage was repaired at once. Another study dates the same earthquake to 1591; the conversion between Hijri and Gregorian years often produces a one-year difference of this kind in the sources. The Bayezid Complex is the first major yardstick building of Amasya's earthquake history, and it enters the records again with every large shock in the centuries that follow.

The Seventeenth Century: 1647-1648, 1668 and 1684

In the earthquakes of 1647-1648 the Hacı Hamza Mosque, the Fethiye Mosque and the Hilafet Gazi Madrasa were damaged in Amasya. The records give only the names of these three buildings; how great the damage was, and in which year and by whom the repairs were made, is not reported. It is nevertheless notable that all of them were religious and educational institutions working at neighbourhood scale; the shock therefore affected the monumental buildings of the town together with the mosques and madrasas at the centre of daily life.

The largest earthquake in the region occurred in 1668. The date is given as 16 August in local compilations, while most studies based on the Kandilli record use 17 August. According to assessments of its zone of effect, the fault between Niksar and Bolu ruptured completely; in Amasya the domes and minarets of the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, the walls of Amasya Citadel, masonry buildings, the domes of most mosques and many parts of the Bedesten were brought down. İbrahim Agha of Merzifon, the administrator of the complex, had the damage repaired within a year. The magnitude estimates, the length of the rupture and the effects of the quake in Amasya are treated in detail in a separate article; in this chronology 1668 stands as the largest shock in Amasya's recorded history, and the earthquakes that followed it struck a building stock already weakened by it.

This last point can be seen in the earthquake of 14 October 1684. In the shock, which came only sixteen years later, most masonry buildings were damaged, the Sultan Bayezid Mosque was damaged again, and the effects were felt in Niksar as well. The records give neither the epicentre nor the magnitude of this earthquake. They do indicate, indirectly, that the repairs made after 1668 were tested again in the next shock, and that the complex continued to operate as an institution of care.

The 1734 Earthquake and the Palace of the Beys

Little is known about the 1734 earthquake. According to the entry reported in local compilations, the only information about it is that the Palace of the Beys, which had been destroyed and rebuilt in earlier earthquakes, was damaged; the palace was never repaired after this earthquake. The entry cites the mark "HH" as its source, which refers to the Amasya Tarihi of Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar. The month of the earthquake, its intensity, its epicentre and its effect on other buildings in the town are unknown. Even so, the fate of a single building makes 1734 significant for the history of Amasya, because the Palace of the Beys holds a heavy place in the political memory of the town.

The Palace of the Beys is the palace area in the inner citadel that was known by this name in the Seljuk period. The Ottomans called it the Palace of the Princes (Şehzadeler Sarayı), and the name Saraydüzü Barracks was also current among the townspeople. From the time of the Danishmendids the area was a residence of sultans and commanders. According to Selim Özcan's study of the princely period, it acquired its definitive form during Çelebi Mehmed's term as sanjak governor of Amasya, in 1396, when the place known as the Gümüşlüzâde mansion was bought from Gümüşlüzâde Hoca Celâleddin Çelebi and a large palace was built there. The same study writes that the palace was used as a palace for about 350 years in the Ottoman period and is remembered as the place where Murad II and his son Ahmed Çelebi, Prince Ahmed, son of Bayezid II, and Selim I were born. The round figure of centuries is evidently approximate; yet the sources agree that in the most brilliant age of the princely sanjaks the palace was the political centre of Amasya.

Since the practice of sending princes to the provinces was abandoned toward the end of the sixteenth century, it is possible that by 1734 the palace had long since lost its original function. That may also be the reason it was not repaired, but the sources do not say so explicitly; they report only that the palace was not rebuilt after this earthquake. That a structure repeatedly destroyed and repaired in earlier shocks was this time abandoned without repair nonetheless suggests that an era had closed. The surviving remnant of the centuries of the princely sanjak passed into history with a single earthquake.

The Late Eighteenth Century: 1776 and 1794

On 29 October 1776 an earthquake occurred that affected Vezirköprü and Merzifon. According to the kadi registers, the Ayşe Hatun Tomb, which had already been in ruins, collapsed in this shock. The importance of the register entry lies in documenting that a neglected structure received its final blow in an earthquake; an earthquake often destroys buildings that are poorly maintained and weakened.

On 18 July 1794 a large earthquake occurred in the Çorum region. Amasya was affected by the shock. The records give no information about the form the damage took. Even so, the centre of the earthquakes that affected Amasya appears to shift gradually toward the districts around the town, in the direction of Merzifon, Vezirköprü and Çorum. The entries for 1776 and 1794 show Amasya as part of a series of settlements lined up along the fault.

The Writer Who Kept the Town's Memory

A large part of the records stretching from 1734 to 1794 rests on the work of a single author. Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar was born in November 1869 in the Çeribaşı quarter of Amasya, the son of Abdizâde Hacı Mehmed Agha. He began his first schooling in 1879 at the Balcı School in the quarter, entered the rüşdiye in 1883 and finished it in 1887. By his own account, during his school years he took private lessons in Persian language and literature, examined the books in the Abdüllatif Efendi Library, and began collecting his first information on the history of Amasya at that time. In 1889 he went to Istanbul, and in 1899 he received an icâzet (licence) from Tokadîzâde Ahmed Nûreddin Efendi. In later years he served as a judge in Vezirköprü, Osmancık, Niksar and Refahiye. His last post was as translator of old records in the Ministry of Pious Foundations.

All these posts eased his access to the court registers and the endowment documents. His working from the sources, his searching the court registers in and around Istanbul for the notables of Amasya, his work in the libraries of Hania and Damascus, and his bringing together of manuscripts, endowment deeds, inscriptions and gravestones define his method. The method also explains how the earthquake notes found in the kadi registers and endowment records from 1668 to 1776 entered the history of Amasya.

The Amasya Tarihi was in fact planned in twelve volumes. Only four were printed in Istanbul between 1912 and 1928; the remainder of volume IV appeared in 1935. The Municipality of Amasya purchased the work in 1979; volume V is lost, while the manuscript volumes VI to XII are held on deposit in the Süleymaniye Library. Volume I describes the foundation of the town, its districts, citadels, quarters, mosques and tombs, its men of letters, calligraphers, sheikhs, scholars and madrasas; volumes III and IV deal with the Ottoman period and with the scholars and sheikhs who rose in Amasya up to 1688 and the governors who came to it. Since the period covered by the published volumes ends in 1688, it cannot be told from the outside from which volume the 1734 entry was taken; it may have come from the unpublished volumes, but no document shows this.

Two different judgements exist regarding the reliability of the work. Franz Babinger describes it, on some subjects, as "a real treasure" and recommends that it be translated, at least in part, into a Western language. On the other hand, the fact that Yasar mostly does not name the sources he used, and that on some subjects he attempts excessive etymological comparisons, has caused some researchers to doubt its scholarly value. Considering the two attitudes together, it is appropriate to use every piece of information in Amasya's earthquake records that rests on Yasar with caution until it is confirmed by an independent document. The 1734 entry is precisely this kind of information. Yasar died on 10 February 1939 in his house in Şişli, Istanbul, before the Erzincan earthquake, and was buried in Feriköy Cemetery.

The Instrumental Period: Shocks After 1939

After 1900 earthquakes began to be measured with instruments and the records became markedly more detailed. Over the last century, the large earthquakes along the North Anatolian Fault are seen to follow a regular migration toward the west. In the sequence that began with the 1939 Erzincan earthquake and extends to the Izmit earthquake of 17 August 1999, a large part of the fault was ruptured westward in succession. Amasya lies right beside the eastern part of the sequence.

The Erzincan Earthquake of 26-27 December 1939

The earthquake, with a magnitude of 7.8, shook northeastern Anatolia around 02.00 on the night of 26-27 December. The recorded local time is 01.57, and the shaking is said to have lasted 52 seconds. A fault about 360 kilometres long ruptured, and in the area of effect a total of 32,962 people lost their lives; another record gives the official figure as 32,968 and the number of collapsed buildings as 116,720. The severe winter conditions and the difficult circumstances in which search, rescue and relief proceeded are cited as reasons for the high death toll. On the same day the temperature fell to as low as minus 30 degrees.

The Kandilli records give a surface-wave magnitude of 7.9 and the USGS assessment a moment magnitude of 7.8; the earthquake was the product of a strike-slip rupture at a depth of about 20 kilometres. Its epicentre lies in the Erzincan Plain, an area made up of river deposits that, according to historical documents, had been entirely destroyed eleven times in the last thousand years. Counted among the largest earthquakes recorded in Anatolia, this shock was the first of the series of large earthquakes that migrated westward along the North Anatolian Fault between 1939 and 1999. The great rupture in Amasya's own history had occurred three hundred and seventy years earlier, in 1668; the 1939 earthquake is not counted as having its epicentre at Amasya but lies at the edge of a wide area of effect.

Amasya was not at the direct centre of this earthquake, but it was within its zone of effect. Hulusi Alataş, the minister of health and social assistance of the time, told the Assembly that the earthquake had had a destructive effect in the provinces of Erzincan, Sivas, Amasya, Tokat, Samsun, Ordu, Giresun, Gümüşhane, Yozgat and Tunceli, and gave the first figures: 23,131 dead, 7,994 injured, 16,385 houses completely destroyed and 9,157 houses that could not be entered. Alataş also noted that the figures were changing every day. Amasya is thus named among the provinces that suffered damage in the official tallies of the first days, but the sources examined contain no separate table of the loss within the province itself.

The effect of the earthquake on the buildings of Amasya can be followed most closely through the Sultan Bayezid Complex. According to studies that examine the complex through an endowment document, the Bayezid Mosque was damaged again in the 1939 earthquake, and some arches and domes of its last congregation area collapsed. A significant part of the madrasa was also destroyed in this shock and in the 1943 earthquake; between 1952 and 1971 it was repaired by the General Directorate of Foundations and began to be used as a library. The repair of the mosque in the 1960s is not judged successful in the TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam. The complex seen today is the result of repairs made one upon another after the earthquakes of 1590 and 1668 and those of the twentieth century.

Amasya's place in the relief network is also recorded. According to the shipment tables in İlhan Haçin's study, which rests on the Prime Ministry Republican Archive, 9 tons of provisions and 9,406 pieces of clothing were sent to the province of Amasya from the Sivas Transit Depot, and 50 pieces of provisions from the Samsun depot. The same study counts Amasya among the places where earthquake victims were resettled: 324 people were housed in newly built homes. It is also recorded that in the first days of January 1940 İsmet İnönü returned from Amasya and reported the situation in the region to the ministers of the interior and health; the instruction that aid to Erbaa be sent from Samsun instead of Tokat was a result of this meeting. Amasya therefore appears after 1939 as a place that received aid as much as a stop on the regional relief route.

The destruction caused by the earthquake is regarded as having influenced the introduction of earthquake regulations in Turkey. This development is not supported by a document specific to Amasya, but it is clear that the building of the town throughout the twentieth century would be bound by the general regulations.

1942, 1943 and 1996

Three years after 1939, in November-December 1942, three earthquakes occurred about a week apart that affected the area around Laçin, Hamamözü, Osmancık and Çorum. Because of the distribution of damage they are called the Kızılırmak Valley earthquakes. The second occurred on 2 December on the Merzifon-Gümüşhacıköy fault north of Osmancık, with a magnitude of 5.9. Settlements in the valley and on its slopes suffered heavy damage and five people died. Separately from these, on 20 December 1942 an earthquake with a surface-wave magnitude of 7.0 centred on the Erbaa district of Tokat took place; in this shock, which killed about 3,000 people, Erbaa suffered the greatest damage and Niksar and Almus were also affected. It matters that the two series are separate: the first, close to the provincial boundary of Amasya, lies in the Kızılırmak basin, while the second lies in the direction of Kelkit-Yeşilırmak, near the western end of the 1939 rupture.

On 26-27 November 1943 the Tosya-Ladik earthquake occurred. Given a surface-wave magnitude of 7.5-7.7, the earthquake caused about 4,000 deaths and produced a surface rupture 280 kilometres long. Its relationship to Amasya is known through buildings: according to the sources describing the Bayezid Complex, the 1943 earthquake also did great damage to the domes and contributed to the collapse of parts of the madrasa.

The latest significant earthquake to enter the provincial records in recent times is the Mecitözü earthquake of 14 August 1996. In this shock, of magnitude 5.6, villages attached to Mecitözü and Merzifon suffered heavy damage, one person died, nine were injured and a total of 2,606 dwellings were damaged. The places where damage was concentrated are the villages of Akpınar, Oymaağaç, Mahmutlu, Balgöze, Diphacı and Karasar. The epicentre lies between Mecitözü and Merzifon and the related fault is the Sarıbuğday-Çorum fault.

Ground, Structure and the Risk of Recurrence

The general conclusion from the records is that Amasya and its surroundings have been exposed to large and destructive earthquakes repeatedly since the 1500s. Local compilations add an important comment to this picture: considering that the old town of Amasya sits on resistant limestone, it is clear that even earthquakes that caused no damage in the past would, if repeated today, have far greater destructive effects in the modern town that is spreading over the alluvium of the Yeşilırmak. The same finding holds for the districts of Taşova, Merzifon, Suluova, Gümüşhacıköy and Hamamözü. The movement of the town has thus been from rock ground, which reduced the effect of historical earthquakes, toward looser ground that could cause heavier damage in a shock of the same size.

It is often said that the timber mansions and Yalıboyu houses along the Yeşilırmak behaved more flexibly than stone buildings in earthquakes. General engineering knowledge supports this view; however, among the records examined for Amasya there is no direct document showing how these houses behaved in a particular earthquake. Almost all recorded damage is concentrated in mosque domes, minarets, citadel walls and masonry buildings; that is, the damaged structures are heavy and tall ones. This pattern shows that domes and minarets are the most fragile parts against the lateral shaking of an earthquake.

Chronology

236 CE: The first destructive earthquake recorded around Amasya; its traces are found in Roman records.

509 CE: Another recorded earthquake in the region; very little is known of its damage.

1579: Recorded in the Mühimme registers; strong in Çorum, it damaged the Hızır Pasha Mosque, imaret and madrasa in Amasya.

November 1590 (1591 in some studies): Domes and arches of the mosque of the Sultan Bayezid II Complex and the domes of the imaret partly collapsed; repaired at once.

1647-1648: The Hacı Hamza Mosque, the Fethiye Mosque and the Hilafet Gazi Madrasa were damaged.

16 or 17 August 1668: The fault between Niksar and Bolu ruptured; in Amasya the domes and minarets of the Bayezid Mosque, the citadel walls and many parts of the Bedesten collapsed; the complex was repaired within a year.

14 October 1684: Most masonry buildings were damaged; the Bayezid Mosque was damaged again.

1734: The Palace of the Beys was damaged and never repaired.

29 October 1776: In the earthquake that affected Vezirköprü and Merzifon the Ayşe Hatun Tomb collapsed.

18 July 1794: The large earthquake in the Çorum region also affected Amasya.

26-27 December 1939: Erzincan earthquake; Amasya is among the provinces within its zone of effect, and the last congregation area of the Bayezid Mosque was damaged.

November-December 1942: Kızılırmak Valley earthquakes; the 5.9 magnitude earthquake of 2 December caused heavy damage around Osmancık. On 20 December a separate earthquake of magnitude 7.0 centred on Erbaa occurred.

26-27 November 1943: Tosya-Ladik earthquake; the domes of the Bayezid Complex were heavily damaged.

14 August 1996: Mecitözü earthquake (5.6); 2,606 dwellings were damaged.

17 August 1999: The Izmit earthquake was the last great link in the westward rupture sequence that began at Erzincan in 1939.

Sources

Primary sources

Academic studies

  • Selim Özcan, "Amasya'da Sancak Beyliği Yapan Şehzadeler Döneminde Amasya Şehri", Amasya Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, no. 5.
  • İlhan Haçin, "1939 Erzincan Büyük Depremi", Cumhuriyet University, March 2014 (dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/675865).
  • "1939 Erzincan Büyük Depremi ve Erzincan Vilayetinde Yardım Faaliyetleri", ATAM Dergisi (atamdergi.gov.tr/tam-metin/58/tur). atamdergi.gov.tr

Official sources

  • Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, "Depremler", amasya.ktb.gov.tr/TR-59473/depremler.html

Other sources

  • Turgut Akpınar, "Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 18, 1998, pp. 551-552. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "1939 Erzincan depremi", Vikipedi (tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Erzincan_depremi). tr.wikipedia.org
  • "1942 Niksar-Erbaa depremi" and "1943 Tosya-Ladik depremi", Vikipedi.

Online sources