To read Amasya's population map, one has to start with its landforms. The province lies just behind the Black Sea coast, in the transitional belt between the coastal ranges and the Central Anatolian plateau, and settlement clings to the plains, valleys and river courses of that belt. According to the address-based population register at the end of 2025, 342,242 people live in the province; since its area is 5,628 square kilometres, there are 61 people per square kilometre. This is roughly half the national average (112) and shows that part of the province is mountainous and sparsely settled. Amasya ranks 57th among 81 provinces by population and holds 0.40 percent of the country's inhabitants.

The present picture did not appear overnight. The concentration of people in the Yeşilırmak valley and on the Merzifon and Suluova plains, and the scattering of villages along mountain foothills and the edges of the summer pastures, continue an old pattern that can be traced in the records from the Ottoman tax surveys down to Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin's Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya), written at the beginning of the twentieth century. What has changed is the balance of weight between towns and villages; over the past half-century that balance has shifted decisively towards the towns.

Administrative Framework and General Picture

The province is divided into seven districts: Merkez, Merzifon, Suluova, Taşova, Gümüşhacıköy, Göynücek and Hamamözü. It has eight municipalities, 107 neighbourhoods within the municipal boundaries and, in addition, 372 villages. The central district has two municipalities, while each of the other six districts has one. The gender distribution is balanced: 172,102 men against 170,140 women, which is 101 men for every hundred women. The number of registered foreign residents is 2,749.

Neighbourhood and village counts reflect the character of each district. The central district has 40 neighbourhoods and 100 villages; Suluova has 21 neighbourhoods, Merzifon 20 and Gümüşhacıköy 12. Taşova has only 7 neighbourhoods against 63 villages, Göynücek 3 against 38, and Hamamözü 4 against 17. In other words, settlement in Taşova, Göynücek and Hamamözü rests mainly on villages, whereas urban neighbourhoods predominate in Merkez, Suluova and Merzifon. The numbers of men and women also diverge from district to district. In the central district men (77,218) outnumber women (74,215), and men are also in the majority in Gümüşhacıköy and Göynücek. In Merzifon (38,978 women, 38,099 men), Suluova, Taşova and Hamamözü, women form the majority. The data sets do not explain the reasons for these differences.

The age structure points to a population older than the Turkish average. The median age is 40.5, 5.6 years above the national median (34.9); it is 38.9 for men and 42.2 for women. 16.1 percent of the population is aged 0-14, 66.7 percent 15-64, and 17.2 percent 65 and over; across Turkey the share of those over 65 is 11.1 percent. For every hundred people of working age there are 49.9 outside working age (46.0 in Turkey). In 2025, 2,680 children were born in the province, giving a crude birth rate of 7.8 per thousand (10.4 in Turkey). The total fertility rate, at 1.26, is below the national figure (1.42). In the same year 2,013 marriages and 747 divorces were registered; the average age at first marriage is 28.1 for men and 26.0 for women.

Household structure likewise shows a shrunken family pattern. The average household size is 2.79 persons (3.08 in Turkey). Of 116,181 households in total, 21.9 percent are single-person, 62.6 percent nuclear families and 13.4 percent extended families. The ageing of the population and the smallness of households complement each other, and the two should be read together as the background to the emptying of the villages.

The Long Course of the Population

The first reliable estimates of the population of the city of Amasya come from the Ottoman tax registers (tahrir). According to the survey of 1525, the city consisted of fifty-five neighbourhoods, five of them non-Muslim, and its population is estimated at about 8,000, of whom some 2,000 were non-Muslims. At the end of the sixteenth century there were still fifty-five neighbourhoods, six of them non-Muslim, and the population had risen to 10,000. Evliya Çelebi, who toured the city in the mid-seventeenth century, counts fifty-three neighbourhoods, forty-eight Muslim and five non-Muslim, and 5,000 households, which corresponds roughly to 20,000 people. In this period the population grew while the city hardly expanded physically, and the narrow valley, which offered little room for growth, is thought to have been the decisive factor. In the nineteenth century the population is estimated at between 25,000 and 30,000.

Hüsâmeddin writes that he inferred "from old registers" that in the days when the princes resided in Amasya the city had some seventy neighbourhoods and about sixty thousand inhabitants, and he believes that in later centuries the city lost its former glory and shrank. The tax registers do not support this view: the Amasya of the princes was a city of no more than ten thousand people, and in later centuries its population grew rather than declined. The loss of political weight is real; a dwindling of the population is not borne out by the documents. The figures Hüsâmeddin gives for his own time, on the other hand, agree with nineteenth-century estimates: in the 1910s the "Amasya Beldesi" (town of Amasya) had fifty-three neighbourhoods, some eight thousand households and about thirty-seven thousand inhabitants.

The most detailed record from the intervening period is the Amasya population register of 1840, one of the population enumerations introduced under Mahmud II that counted males only. According to this register the city had 55 neighbourhoods; 23 of them were inhabited solely by Muslims and 32 by Muslims and non-Muslims together, with Muslims in the majority in 21 of the mixed neighbourhoods and non-Muslims in 11. There was no neighbourhood made up entirely of non-Muslims. In the temettuat (income survey) registers drawn up four years later, in 1844-1845, 48 neighbourhoods appear, and the numbers of households and the names of household heads have changed considerably. Selim Özcan, who studied the register, attributes the discrepancy to wars, migration, epidemics and the different methods by which the two records were prepared; he notes that the population register was most probably a copy produced at the centre, whereas the temettuat records were original surveys made on the spot. In the same records Kayabaşı appears as a village in the population register and as a neighbourhood in the temettuat register; even then the boundary between town and countryside was not sharp. The number of neighbourhoods in this period varies from source to source: one encyclopaedia entry gives some thirty-six neighbourhoods for the nineteenth century, while the registers count more than fifty.

At the level of the sanjak, Hüsâmeddin reports two counts. According to the survey of 1254 (1838-1839), 51,391 males were counted in the Sanjak of Amasya, which then consisted of thirteen kazas (districts), and by adding the same number of females a total of 102,782 was obtained. In 1330 (about 1912) the sanjak, by then reduced to seven kazas, had a settled population of 250,918; Hüsâmeddin writes that the total including those counted as visitors was around two hundred and eighty thousand. According to the same table, the central kaza of Amasya had 46,350 Muslims, 9,166 Armenians, 2,561 Greeks and 40 Copts (Roma), the kaza of Gümüş Hacıköyü about 31,300 people and the kaza of Merzifon about 33,900. The figure of sixty-eight thousand given for the central kaza in the introduction does not match the total of this table, and some lines of the table also show errors of writing or typesetting: the Greek population of Havza is written with exactly the same figures as the Armenian population of the centre. Because the sanjak's boundaries differed from those of the present province, these figures, which include Havza, Köprü, Ladik and Mecidözü, cannot be compared directly with the population of today's province.

The Republican censuses show the province's growth in the twentieth century. Amasya province had 114,884 inhabitants in 1927, 128,113 in 1935, 136,029 in 1940 and 163,669 in 1950. In the 1960 census the population jumped to 257,281; part of this increase results from Taşova being transferred from Tokat to Amasya in 1953. The population reached 307,025 in 1970, 341,287 in 1980, 358,289 in 1985 and 357,191 in 1990, and peaked at 365,231 in the 2000 census. When interpreting the difference between the 2000 census and the figure of 334,786 recorded in the address-based register in 2010, it should be borne in mind that the two measurements rest on different methods; the 2000 census counted people where they were on census day, whereas the address-based register uses their place of usual residence. Even so, it is clear that the province's population has stagnated since 1990.

The course of the last decade continues this stagnation. The provincial population, 322,167 in 2015, rose to 342,242 in 2025, an increase of 20,075, or 6.2 percent, over ten years. Most of the increase occurred between 2016 and 2018; no explanation has been found for the jump of about 7,600 people in 2018. The highest figure was recorded in 2024 (342,378), followed by a small decline of 136 in 2025. The annual rate of change is close to zero, at 0.4 per thousand.

Distribution by District

The population is not shared equally among the districts. The central district, with 151,433 people, holds 44.3 percent of the province; it is followed by Merzifon with 77,077 (22.5 percent) and Suluova with 46,928 (13.7 percent). Together these three districts account for about 80.5 percent of the provincial population. Taşova has 30,034 inhabitants, Gümüşhacıköy 22,319 and Göynücek 10,823; Hamamözü, with 3,628, is the smallest district and makes up 1.1 percent of the province's population.

The areas of the districts are not proportional to their populations, and this is the main factor shaping the density map. The central district, at 1,889 square kilometres, covers more than a third of the province, yet has 80 people per square kilometre. Density is 87 in Merzifon and 103 in Suluova. Suluova, whose small area is given as 456 square kilometres in some sources and 516 in others, and which has a broad plain floor, is the most densely settled district in the province. By contrast, density is 31 in Taşova, which covers 971 square kilometres, 35 in Gümüşhacıköy, and 18 in Göynücek and Hamamözü. The mountainous and forested districts are the ones that pull the provincial average down.

Change over the past year has run in different directions from district to district. Between 2024 and 2025 Hamamözü grew by 1.71 percent, Göynücek by 0.33, Merzifon by 0.29 and Merkez by 0.25 percent, while Gümüşhacıköy fell by 1.52, Taşova by 1.03 and Suluova by 0.37 percent. Hamamözü's 1.71 percent rise amounts to 61 people and reflects only the district's short-term trend. On a fifteen-year scale the picture is different: Hamamözü's population, 4,508 in 2010, has fallen to 3,628. Over the same period Merzifon rose from 69,237 to 77,077 (about 11 percent) and Merkez from 143,635 to 151,433 (about 5 percent), while Suluova, going from 47,510 to 46,928, stayed almost where it was. Taşova lost about 9 percent of its population, Gümüşhacıköy about 10 percent and Göynücek about 9 percent. The provincial total, rising from 334,786 to 342,242 in this period, remained at almost the same level, while the population shifted towards Merkez and Merzifon.

Valley, Plain and Upland

The altitudes of the districts give a good clue to the distribution of the population. Taşova, at about 240 metres, is the lowest district in the province and lies at the western end of the fertile plain that includes districts such as Erbaa, Niksar and Reşadiye to the east. The central district lies at around 400 metres; the city centre stands at 411 metres. Göynücek is at about 520 metres and Suluova at about 540. Hamamözü lies at about 690, Merzifon at about 740 and Gümüşhacıköy at about 820 metres. The sources differ by a few metres on these values; round numbers are used here. The overall pattern is clear: the east of the province and the valley floor are low, while the west and north-west form a high plateau.

Hüsâmeddin's description conveys well how the city relates to its surroundings. In his account Amasya is a valley some thirteen kilometres long, stretching from the Ziyere (today's Ziyaret) quarter in the north-east to the Çalan locality at the end of the gorge in the south-west, with a width varying from one thousand metres to three kilometres. The Pontic range to the south, the Canik and Harşena ranges to the north, and the Şeyhcui and Karaman mountains to the west enclose the city, while the valley connects with the outside world through three gorges that open like great gates. The north-eastern gorge widens along the river towards Taşova, the northern gorge, some ten kilometres long, opens onto Suluova, and the south-western gorge, four kilometres long, leads via Derbend and Çalan to the plain in the west. A river flows through all three gorges, and both banks are covered with vineyards and orchards. Today's highways and district centres are also largely strung out in the directions pointed out by these three gates.

Merzifon and Gümüşhacıköy are the plain-bearing parts of the high belt. Gümüşhacıköy is the westernmost district of the province; it is bordered by Merzifon to the east, by Çorum province to the south and west, and by Samsun province to the north. Tavşan Dağı breaks up the north-east of the district's land, Ereğli Dağı the south-west and the 1,873-metre İnegöl Dağı the west, while its central and eastern parts are plain. The Gümüşsuyu Çayı and the Hamamözü Deresi, coming down from the mountains, water this plain and then join the Kızılırmak and the Yeşilırmak outside the district's boundaries. The district has four irrigation ponds, which are extending the area of irrigated farmland. The plain around Merzifon, for its part, has been densely settled since very early times. Strabo's mention of the region as the "thousand villages" and the hundreds of mounds and settlement traces identified by archaeological research show that the attachment of settlement to the plain is an old phenomenon.

The uplands between the plains are also part of the settlement pattern. Hüsâmeddin writes that on the slopes of Akdağ, east of the city, a mountain about twelve hundred metres high stretching from east to west, the summer pasture was plentiful, the winter quarters favourable, the water abundant and the air healthy, that most of the sheep of the Sanjak of Amasya grazed there in summer, and that its butter, cheese and yoghurt were renowned in the region. This division of labour between plain villages and mountain villages helps explain why settlements were founded sometimes at the edge of the plain and sometimes along the route to the summer pastures. Today, too, about two-thirds of Suluova's villages are plain villages and one-third forest and mountain villages; the villages are compact, that is, built as clustered neighbourhoods. The drainage of the marshes in the Republican period and the sugar factory opened in 1954 also played a part in the dense settlement of the plain; the population and economic structure of the district were fundamentally transformed by these two developments.

The climate supports this distribution. The province has a transitional climate between the Black Sea and continental types: summers are neither as dry as in the continental interior nor as rainy as on the coast, and winters are neither as mild as on the coast nor as harsh as inland. Because of the moderating effect of the Yeşilırmak and its valley system, snow may fall on the higher ground, but in the city centre it either has little effect or does not last long. The favourable climate of the valley floor is one of the factors that has made it easier for settlement to persist in the same place for centuries.

Old Nahiyes and Today's Districts

Today's district boundaries rest on the nahiye (sub-district) system of the Ottoman period. In the early sixteenth century the Sanjak of Amasya consisted of the central kaza together with the kazas of Ladik and Merzifon, and the central kaza of Amasya contained six nahiyes and 321 villages. The number of kazas changed frequently in the following centuries; at the end of the nineteenth century the sanjak, attached to the province of Sivas, had eight kazas: Amasya, Merzifon, Vezirköprü, Osmancık, Gümüşhacıköy, Ladik, Havza and Mecidözü. By the years in which Hüsâmeddin was writing, Osmancık had been detached and the sanjak reduced to seven kazas. The central kaza of Amasya was bordered by Ladik and Erbaa to the east, Mecidözü to the west, Tokat to the south and the kazas of Havza, Merzifon and Hacıköyü to the north; it had four nahiyes and some one hundred and sixty villages.

These four nahiyes divided the rural part of the present central district according to the points of the compass. The centre of the Akdağ Nahiye in the east was the village of Akviran, and the nahiye took its name from the mountain with summer pastures mentioned above. The centre of the Öz Nahiye in the south was Ezinepazar; in this village, formerly called Cuma Pazarı (Friday Market) and later Ezine Pazarı after the Persian word "âzîne" meaning Friday, Hacı Hamza Bey had built a mosque, and Mehmed Ağa a large inn, a bath and a zaviye (dervish hospice). According to Hüsâmeddin, the nahiye took the name "Öz" (pure, genuine) because it was inhabited by Turkmen tribes such as the Bayındırlı, Akçakoyunlu, Esenli and Karakeçili. Ezinepazar became a small township (belde) in 1987 and, as its population fell, reverted to village status in 2013; this small example also shows the place of the old nahiye centres within today's rural population.

The Hakala Nahiye in the north covered the plain formerly known as Arguma or Suluova. According to Hüsâmeddin, the village of Hakala grew after about 745 (1344-45), eclipsed the name Arguma and became the centre of the nahiye. The village had a large zaviye founded in 764 (1362-63) by the Rifâî sheikh Seyyid Necmeddin Yahya, a madrasa built by Kâsım Bey in 867 (1462-63) and a second madrasa built by the Hacı Beyzâde family, as well as mosques and baths. With the soup kitchen and endowments of its zaviye, Hakala had the appearance of a "prosperous town" until about 1100 (1688-89); later its madrasas fell into ruin and the place shrank back to the scale of a village. Suluova, which is today the district centre, became a bucak (sub-district) under the name Suluca in 1902, a municipality under the name Suluova in 1946 and a district in 1957; the settlement weight of the plain thus passed from Hakala to the new centre near the junction of the railway and the highway.

The centre of the Geldiklan Nahiye in the west was Ortaköy. Hüsâmeddin links the name of the nahiye to the Afshar chief Baygeldi, who he says was settled here in the Danishmendid period, and he regards the names of the nahiye's villages Afşar, Olus, Doğan, Alikadı, Yağmur, Karlı and Akçakoyunlu as derived from the names of Turkmen tribes and chiefs; these explanations are the author's own and have not been confirmed by other documents. The disappearance of a town can also be traced in the same nahiye. According to Hüsâmeddin, the town of İltekin, which appears in old endowment deeds as the centre of the Simre Nahiye, was ruined during the Şahkulu uprising of 917 (1511), remained a village until 1018 (1609-10), was then counted among the neighbourhoods of Amasya, and by 1241 (1825-26) had disappeared even as a neighbourhood.

The other present-day districts also grew out of the kazas and nahiyes of the early twentieth century. In Hüsâmeddin's time the town of Hacıköy, centre of the kaza of Gümüş Hacıköyü, consisted of nearly eight hundred households; the kaza's total population was about thirty-two thousand, and its sixty or so villages were divided into four nahiyes. In the nineteenth century the town had become a new settlement of eight neighbourhoods named Cimöre, Artukâbâd, Saray, Hacı Yahya, Adatepe, Beylik Çayır, Ermeni Kilise and Çay; in 1299 (1881-82) it became the kaza centre, while the town of Gümüş, previously the kaza centre, became a nahiye centre. The nahiye in the south-west of the kaza, on the eastern and northern slopes of the İnegöl Mountains, bore the name of the village of Hamamözü; Hüsâmeddin writes that the Göçeri tribe had formerly lived there and that some Çepni had been settled, and that the village names Çetmi and Göçeri survive from them. The kaza of Merzifon contained twenty neighbourhoods, some four thousand households, four nahiyes, about forty-five villages and some thirty-eight thousand inhabitants. Considering that the records of 1520 list thirty-four neighbourhoods in the town of Merzifon, twenty-eight Muslim and six non-Muslim, with an estimated population of five to six thousand, it becomes clear that the town long remained the plain's only large centre.

The administrative map was redrawn in the Republican period. Amasya became a province on 20 April 1924. The former sanjak's kazas of Havza, Vezirköprü and Ladik now belong to Samsun, and Mecidözü (Mecitözü) to Çorum. Taşova became a district in 1944 by separating from Erbaa and was transferred from Tokat to Amasya in 1953; Göynücek separated from Merkez in 1954 and Suluova in 1957. Göynücek lies in the south-west of the province, was for a time attached to Çorum, and occupies a junction position between the provinces of Amasya, Tokat, Çorum and Yozgat. The origin of Hamamözü's present centre is recent: in 1887 the farm of two notables of the village of Gümüş was sold to Circassian immigrants numbering 60 households, and the settlement was founded on this farm. The place became a municipality in 1971 and a district in 1990.

Road distances to Merkez show that settlement is gathered along a corridor. Suluova is 26 kilometres from Merkez, Göynücek 46, Merzifon 46, Taşova 48, Gümüşhacıköy 68 and Hamamözü 90 kilometres. Merkez, Suluova, Merzifon, Gümüşhacıköy and Taşova lie along the D.100 state highway, which is the province's main axis of dense settlement. Göynücek is connected to the D.180 road and Hamamözü to the road running via Gümüşhacıköy; these are the ends that lie off the axis. Amasya is on the road linking the interior of Anatolia to the port of Samsun and has also been connected to Samsun by the railway built in 1930. In Hüsâmeddin's time, too, the Çeltek Bridge at the end of Suluova, at the point where the Amasya road and the Merzifon road part, marked this junction; the road had been repeatedly renewed as a macadamised highway since 1300 (1882-83).

Migrations and New Settlements

The nineteenth century was a period in which communities from outside were added to Amasya's settlement map. After the wars of 1828-1829 and 1853-1856, and especially after the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878, some of the Muslim migrants arriving from Crimea, the Caucasus and the Balkans were settled in the city of Amasya and its villages; waves of migration continued into the middle of the twentieth century with the Balkan Wars, the First World War and the population exchange of 1923. Archival documents show that migrants received assistance during settlement, were granted exemptions from taxes and military service, and were given support in education and employment.

In the city the most visible trace of this migration is the İhsaniye neighbourhood. According to Hüsâmeddin, this neighbourhood, bounded by the macadamised road to the east, the Ahmak vineyards to the west, the cemetery to the south and Gülüs to the north, was formed with the arrival of the Tatars settled here from 1295 (1878) onwards; it was recorded in state registers as İhsaniye, but among the people the name "Tatar Mahallesi" (Tatar Quarter) prevailed. Osman Fevzi Olcay, on the other hand, writes that the people of İhsaniye were Crimean Tatars who came from Crimea in 1292 (1876-77), and that the neighbourhood received its name because Abdülhamid II provided for their settlement; there is a difference of a few years between the two authors. The absence of a Tatar neighbourhood from the 1840 population register also confirms that the neighbourhood was founded later. Olcay notes that almost all the residents of the neighbouring Şamlar quarter in his day were likewise migrants who had come from various places to settle, among them migrants from Oltu.

Migration did not come only in the wake of the Russian wars. In the early nineteenth century some Sunni families from Shirvan, particularly from the Agsu area, settled in Amasya and were long known as "Şirvanlı" (people of Shirvan). In the Mir Hamza Nigârî quarter described by Olcay lived the disciples and relatives of the Naqshbandi sheikh Hamza Nigârî, along with fellow countrymen who had come from Shirvan. The descendants of these migrants live today in six villages of the Suluova and Merzifon districts and have preserved their Azerbaijani identity. The Circassian settlement of Hamamözü, founded on a farm, is an example of one of these communities growing into a district centre.

Hüsâmeddin also gives his own estimates of the composition of the population at the beginning of the century. On the basis of the 1912 figures he counts two-thirds of the sanjak's 202,246 Muslims as Turkmen, half of the remaining third as Tatar, Kumyk, Lezgian and Nogai, and the other half as Circassian, Kurdish, Georgian and Laz. According to him, eighty percent of the people in the towns were Sunni, and forty percent of those in the villages Alevi. These proportions are not based on a census and should be read as the author's impressions of his own time; even so, they show that differentiation between town and village has long been part of the settlement geography. According to the same table, 23,079 Armenians and 24,560 Greeks lived in the sanjak in 1912; these communities left the region with the deportations of the First World War years and the exchange of 1923, and the sanjak's population composition changed fundamentally in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Villages

77,759 people live in the province's 372 villages, which corresponds to about 22.7 percent of the provincial population. The average village population is 209 and varies greatly from district to district. In Taşova 18,678 people live in 63 villages, so the average village has 296 inhabitants. The 100 villages of Merkez have 26,432 inhabitants, an average of 264. In Merzifon 12,151 people live in 70 villages (an average of 174), in Suluova 7,190 in 40 villages (180), in Gümüşhacıköy 6,992 in 44 villages (159) and in Göynücek 4,778 in 38 villages (126). The smallest villages are in Hamamözü: 1,538 people in 17 villages, or an average of 90 per village.

When today's village counts are compared with the figures of the early twentieth century, the village network proves remarkably durable. The difference between the one hundred and sixty or so villages Hüsâmeddin gives for the kaza of Amasya and the hundred villages attached to the central district today can largely be explained by parts of the old kaza passing to other districts. The sixty or so villages of the kaza of Gümüş Hacıköyü come close to the 61 villages of present-day Gümüşhacıköy and Hamamözü. Against the forty-five or so villages of the kaza of Merzifon, the present district of Merzifon has 70 villages; the difference must stem, besides boundary changes, from settlements that belonged to other units at the beginning of the century being added to the district later. Most villages have preserved their names, their sites and, at times, endowed buildings going back centuries; what has changed is the number of people living in them.

The distribution of the village population among the districts is also striking. Merkez and Taşova hold about 58 percent of the province's rural population (34 and 24 percent respectively). In Taşova most of the district's population lives in villages: the share of town dwellers is only 37.8 percent, and the village population (18,678) is well above the urban population (11,356). There is no other district where the rural population is in the majority; the urban share is 55.9 percent in Göynücek, 57.6 percent in Hamamözü and 68.7 percent in Gümüşhacıköy.

If 2010 and 2025 are compared district by district, the decline in village population is visible everywhere. Those living in villages fell from 22,379 to 18,678 in Taşova, from 16,290 to 12,151 in Merzifon, from 9,841 to 7,190 in Suluova, from 10,281 to 6,992 in Gümüşhacıköy and from 3,097 to 1,538 in Hamamözü. In Göynücek the village and township population of 9,627 fell to 4,778, and in Merkez from 43,730 to 26,432; these last two declines may also have been affected by the fact that the settlement classifications of the two periods do not match exactly, and should not be explained by migration alone. Nevertheless, the direction is the same in every district. In Hamamözü the village population halved in fifteen years, while the population of the district centre rose from 1,411 to 2,090; the emptying of the countryside can be read as a movement feeding the small-town centre.

The rural population has fallen markedly within ten years. Those living in villages numbered 95,735 in 2015 and 77,759 in 2025; in ten years 17,976 people, about 19 percent, were lost. Over the same period those living in towns rose from 226,432 to 264,483, an increase of 38,051, or about 17 percent. The difference between the two movements gives the total increase of the provincial population: 38,051 minus 17,976 equals 20,075. In other words, the whole of the province's growth comes from the towns, while the villages are losing people. Compared with 2010 the trend appears even clearer: in that year 115,245 people lived in villages, making up 34 percent of the provincial population. Rural-to-urban migration is not new either; archival studies have shown that in the Ottoman period, too, there was internal migration from the kaza of Amasya and its nahiyes to the city and, mostly, to Istanbul. Today the bulk of out-migration from the province consists of young people heading to the big cities for education and work.

The Rural-Urban Balance

The share of town dwellers rose from 70 percent in 2015 to 74 percent in 2021 and 77.3 percent in 2025. Even so, Amasya's towns are small in scale: the urban population of the central district, the largest settlement, is 125,001. The urban population is 64,926 in Merzifon, 39,738 in Suluova, 15,327 in Gümüşhacıköy, 11,356 in Taşova, 6,045 in Göynücek and 2,090 in Hamamözü. The ranking of district centres by size does not match the ranking of district populations exactly; Taşova is fourth by district population but fifth by urban population, behind Gümüşhacıköy.

In the central district, too, the rural-urban divide is clear. 82.6 percent of the district's population lives in the town and the rest in a hundred villages. Merzifon (84.2 percent) and Suluova (84.7 percent) have the highest rates of urbanisation. What these three districts have in common is that their urban centres lie on an agricultural plain or close to the transport axis. In the districts of the mountainous belt, by contrast, population loss is shrinking both villages and centres. Seen over the long term, the difference in size between the city of Amasya, with thirty-seven thousand people at the beginning of the century, and the old town of Merzifon, with five or six thousand, persists today in the same direction, but within a narrower range.

77.3 percent of those living in Amasya are registered in the province itself. The rest have their civil registration in other provinces, and the largest group among them, 20,464 people, are registered in Samsun. This proportion shows the intensity of everyday ties with the neighbouring province; details of migration from the province to its districts or from the districts outwards, however, are not included in the data sets used here.

The City Centre Fitted into the Valley

The city centre of Amasya is built on the floor of the narrow valley that the Yeşilırmak has cut between two slopes. As the river crosses the city it runs west to east; to its north rise the royal tombs carved into steep cliffs and the citadel above them, while the southern bank is less steep and flatter, so settlement has developed mostly on this side throughout history. This setting has caused the city to take the form of a strip stretching lengthwise along the river. The historic Yalıboyu houses are lined up along the riverbank, the most valuable part of this narrow space. New residential areas, meanwhile, are growing towards the surrounding areas where the valley opens out more widely and towards the neighbouring plains.

The narrowness of the valley determined the city's dense fabric centuries ago as well. Hans Dernschwam, who came to Amasya with the Austrian embassy in the spring of 1555, relates that in the city, built in a narrow valley, most houses were two-storeyed and made of mud brick, and looked as if they were piled on top of one another. He also records that the houses burned in a great fire that broke out in those same days were quickly rebuilt, and that there was one wooden and three stone bridges over the river. In the early sixteenth century the city had nine mosques, ten madrasas, four zaviyes, six soup kitchens and fifteen baths. As the population grew in the following centuries while the area the city could occupy hardly expanded, the neighbourhoods became ever more crowded.

The narrow valley also brings certain dangers to the city. Amasya has suffered earthquakes and floods from time to time throughout its history. Olcay relates that the flood of June 1948 caused the deaths of eighty-eight people, that in Yukarı Savadiye one hundred and forty-nine houses were completely destroyed and swept into the Yeşilırmak, and that some five hundred houses were damaged. The vulnerability of neighbourhoods built where the slope streams descend to the river to such disasters can be counted among the reasons why new settlement has turned to the flatlands outside the valley.

The boundary between the city's edges and the surrounding villages has also shifted over time. Karasenir, which Hüsâmeddin describes as "having the appearance of a prosperous village but counted as part of the city", is today a neighbourhood of the central district, while Kayabaşı is registered as a village. Ziyere, which formed the north-eastern edge of the city, is today a settlement called Ziyaret attached to the central district and had a population of 4,084 in 2021. Of the neighbourhood names listed by Hüsâmeddin, Üçler, Beyazıtpaşa, Pirinççi, Hacı İlyas and İhsaniye still live on among the official neighbourhood names, while names such as Eski Kethüda, Uzun Mustafa, Bozahane, Pervane Bey and Temenna have dropped out of the official list.

The 40 neighbourhoods of the central district share an urban population of 125,000; compared with the fifty-three neighbourhoods of the early twentieth century, they are fewer in number but far more populous. The 100 villages of the district, for their part, connect to the city from the higher ground surrounding the valley. The valley system carried by the Yeşilırmak both moderates the city's climate and determines its line of communication.

Chronology

1520: Thirty-four neighbourhoods are recorded in the town of Merzifon; its population is estimated at five to six thousand.

1525: According to the tax survey, the city of Amasya has fifty-five neighbourhoods and about 8,000 inhabitants.

1555: Hans Dernschwam describes the dense, mud-brick fabric of the city in its narrow valley.

1838-1839: 51,391 males are counted in the Sanjak of Amasya.

1840: The Amasya population register shows 55 neighbourhoods in the city.

1844-1845: The temettuat registers record 48 neighbourhoods in the city.

1878: According to Hüsâmeddin, Tatar migrants settle in the İhsaniye neighbourhood (Olcay gives 1876-77).

1881-1882: Hacıköy becomes the kaza centre and the town of Gümüş a nahiye centre.

1887: The farm at Hamamözü is sold to Circassian immigrants.

1902: Suluca (Suluova) becomes a bucak.

1912: The settled population of the Sanjak of Amasya is recorded as 250,918.

1924: Amasya becomes a province.

1927: In the first census of the Republic the provincial population is 114,884.

1930: The Amasya-Samsun railway opens.

1944: Taşova becomes a district; it is attached to Amasya in 1953.

1948: Eighty-eight people die in the June flood, and one hundred and forty-nine houses are destroyed in Yukarı Savadiye.

1954: Göynücek becomes a district; the sugar factory in Suluova goes into operation.

1957: Suluova becomes a district.

1990: Hamamözü becomes a district.

2000: The census records the provincial population at its peak of 365,231.

2025: 342,242 people live in the province; the share of town dwellers is 77.3 percent.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar, Amasya Tarihi, vols. 1-4, Amasya Municipality Cultural Publications, 2022, pp. 76-77 (population of the sanjak, kaza and city; the valley and gorges), p. 113 (İhsaniye neighbourhood), pp. 187-192 (nahiyes of the kazas of Amasya and Hacıköyü), p. 206 (Merzifon), pp. 211-212 (Simre and İltekin), pp. 254-257 (population tables of 1838-39 and 1912): https://amasya.bel.tr/uploads/e-kitap/kitap/1-4/files/basic-html/page76.html
  • Osman Fevzi Olcay, Amasya Hâtıraları (Bildiklerim, Gördüklerim, İşittiklerim), Amasya Municipality (the İhsaniye, Şamlar and Mir Hamza Nigârî neighbourhoods; the 1948 flood) amasya.bel.tr
  • Amasya05, research notes on Hüsameddin's Amasya Tarihi (volume 1 introduction, the sections on Merzifon, Mecidözü and Gümüş Hacıköyü; volume 2 population tables).

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources