The story of a city is often best read in the traces left by its population and its growth. Amasya's twentieth century was the period in which a provincial sanjak seat, thinned out by wars and migrations, gradually and then rapidly filled the narrow floor of the Yeşilırmak valley. At the opening of the century the town was no more populous than it had been in its own past; its population, estimated at between twenty-five and thirty thousand for the nineteenth century, did not even reach thirteen thousand in the first census of the Republic. By the end of the century more than seventy-four thousand people lived in the same city, and the vineyards and orchards of the valley had largely given way to apartment blocks. Behind this transformation lay the population exchange, the railway, state institutions, industrial investment on the plains, rural-to-urban migration and, finally, zoning plans that tried to fit a growing city into a constricted landscape. The passage from a predominantly agricultural town to a city diversified by industry, education and services can be traced as much in neighbourhood names and in the present appearance of the valley as in the figures of the census tables.

Amasya at the Turn of the Century

In the late Ottoman period Amasya was a sanjak seat attached to the province of Sivas. For centuries the town had remained a settlement squeezed into the valley at the foot of the cliffs; its population, which reached ten thousand at the end of the sixteenth century, rose to around twenty-five to thirty thousand in the nineteenth, while the number of its quarters stood at about thirty-six. Non-Muslim communities made up a significant part of this population. On the eve of the First World War some 24,950 Greeks are reckoned to have lived in Amasya and its districts; the non-Muslim share across the sanjak is given as around twenty-two per cent, although the English abstract of the same study puts it at eighteen per cent. The war years transformed this picture at its roots. Between 1914 and 1923 first the Armenian population and then the Greeks left the region; the departure, during and after the war, of the non-Muslim population that had largely sustained the urban economy meant that Amasya entered the new era with a depleted population.

In the same years the town also suffered physically. A great fire in 1915 left a wide open space in the centre that would remain empty for a long time; locally it became known as the "Yangın Yeri", the Burnt Ground. During the Turkish War of Independence, attacks by Greek bands had devastated the surrounding villages and small towns. After the war, landowners could not build new houses even when they had the money, and waited for building permits because the map drawn of the burnt areas had never been put into effect. Following the proclamation of the Republic, Amasya became a province on 20 April 1924. In the early years Havza, Lâdik and Vezirköprü, which today belong to Samsun, were also among the districts attached to Amasya; their separation from the province before the 1927 census narrowed its boundaries and directly affected the population recorded in the first counts.

The Population Exchange and the Newcomers

The convention on the exchange of populations signed between Turkey and Greece on 30 January 1923 was ratified by the Grand National Assembly on 23 August 1923 and came into force on 25 August 1923. Amasya was one of the provinces in which exchangees sent on from Samsun were resettled. In the course of 1923 the first convoy brought 260 migrants to the town, and in 1924 a further 5,081 were dispatched from Samsun. As there were no empty buildings fit for habitation in the town, the migrants were first distributed among the villages; efforts were then made to settle them permanently by providing houses, huts and draught animals. A settlement office was set up in the province, and all the abandoned properties (emvâl-i metrûke) in Amasya were allocated to the exchangees. It was hoped that exchangees from the Salonica region, experienced in cotton and tobacco growing, would help spread these crops, which had hitherto been neglected in Amasya.

According to a document dated 17 August 1924, there were 791 exchangees in 225 households in the central district and its villages. Most of them had come from the district of Kayalar in the province of Monastir; they had originally been destined for Elazığ and Gümüşhane, but because they refused to settle there they were redirected to Amasya and its districts. Families from Salonica, Drama, Langaza and Doyran were settled in villages such as Zana, Ziğere, Tuzsuz, Karaağaç and Bağlıca. Those settled in the town received up to one and a half dönüms of vineyard and garden according to the size of their household, while those in Ziğere and Zana were allotted six dönüms of land per person. The government and the Red Crescent Society (Hilâl-i Ahmer) distributed seed, and the 1,090 lira given to those settled in Tuzsuz were used to buy oxen, cows and donkeys. Across the province the exchangees received a total of 448 houses, 43 shops, 14,887 dönüms of fields and 1,549 dönüms of vineyards.

The total number of exchangees who came to Amasya varies from source to source. One table gives the number of migrants sent on from Samsun as 4,055; according to a report of March 1925, 5,440 of the 58,486 migrants from Drama, Kavala, Salonica and Kayalar had been settled in Amasya. Ministry of the Interior figures speak of 475 families and 2,087 people between 1924 and 1933, while the Statistical Yearbook of 1930 counts a total of 4,247 migrants between 1923 and 1929. Serdal Balcı, adding those who arrived in 1925-1929 to İbrahim Erdal's figure based on the 1924 register of the migrants' administration, raises the total to 10,868 and notes that this corresponded to only forty-four per cent of the Greek population that had left. The exchangees soon blended with the local population. The four-wheeled horse carts brought by the İnebosu migrants settled in Havza began to replace the two-wheeled ox cart and became widespread under the name "muhacir arabası", the migrants' cart; these families also played a large part in the development of tobacco farming.

The 1927 Census: The Republic's First Measurement

The new state had to know its population in order to plan its resources. In 1926 a General Directorate of Statistics attached to the Prime Ministry was established, headed by the Belgian statistician Camille Jacquart. The First General Census Law was passed on 2 June 1926, and after trial counts in places such as Sivas and Ödemiş, the country's first general census was carried out on 28 October 1927 under a curfew. The census was based on counting people where they happened to be at that moment, so foreigners visiting or working in the country were also recorded. The results were published in three fascicles in 1929 and, for the first time, set out at provincial and district level not only the total population but also sex, age, marital status, literacy, religion, mother tongue and occupation.

According to this census, 114,884 people lived in the province of Amasya, 55,842 of them men and 59,042 women; some official tables give the total as 115,191. The province then consisted of three districts, the Central District, Merzifon and Gümüşhacıköy, and 300 settlements. Some 52.6 per cent of the population lived in the central district, 24.5 per cent in Merzifon and 22.9 per cent in Gümüşhacıköy. On the 5,550 square kilometres of the province there were 21.7 people per square kilometre, against a national average of 17.89. Density was highest in Gümüşhacıköy (28.9) and lowest in the extensive central district (16.7). Amasya held 0.8 per cent of the country's population and ranked 51st among 63 provinces. The share of people living in the provincial and district centres was about twenty-six per cent; three quarters of the population lived in villages. The town itself numbered just 12,824 people, a figure given in some sources as 12,481.

The Demographic Marks of War

The 1927 census shows clearly how the people of Amasya had emerged from the succession of wars. The fact that women outnumbered men by 3,200 is explained by male losses in the Balkan Wars, the First World War and the War of Independence, as well as by wartime migration and the exchange. The marital status figures reveal this loss even more starkly: there were 9,752 widows in the province against only 697 widowers. Some 47.1 per cent of the population was single and 43.4 per cent married; 328 women and 87 men were divorced. In the age distribution the surplus of women was concentrated in the adult and elderly groups, while among children and young people males were in the majority. This shows that adult men had been thinned out in the war years, while in the generation born after the war the balance was beginning to be restored.

The provincial population was remarkably young. Children up to the age of twelve, numbering 35,804, made up 31.2 per cent of the population; adding the thirteen-to-nineteen age group raised the proportion to 47.8 per cent. The twenty-to-forty-five age group, which bore the main burden of production, stood at 42,629 people, or 37.1 per cent. The state's policy of increasing a population reduced by wars and epidemics would nourish this young structure. The census had also recorded the disabled population in detail: among the 1,470 disabled people in the province were 413 lame and 161 maimed in the arm, and the fact that most of them were men is explained by veterans wounded in the arms and legs during the wars.

Language, Religion and Place of Birth

After the exchange and the migrations of the war years, Amasya had become a largely homogeneous province in religious terms. In 1927, 99.1 per cent of the population was Muslim and 0.9 per cent non-Muslim. Of the 1,039 non-Muslims who remained, 777 were recorded as Armenians; they were followed by 190 Christians, 39 Orthodox, 23 Jews, six Catholics and three Protestants. More than half of the non-Muslims lived in the central district. According to the mother-tongue figures, Turkish was the mother tongue of 93.6 per cent of the population. Turkish was followed by Kurdish with 3,256 speakers, Circassian with 1,535 and Armenian with 938; there were 389 speakers of Albanian and 386 of Tatar. Kurdish speakers lived in Merzifon and the central district, Circassian speakers in Merzifon and Gümüşhacıköy, and almost all Albanian speakers in Merzifon. The share of Turkish as a mother tongue rose to ninety-five per cent in the 1935 census.

The place-of-birth figures show who had recently come to Amasya. Of the province's inhabitants, 1,595, or about 1.4 per cent, had been born abroad. Of these, 839 had been born in Russia, 385 in Greece, 150 in Serbia, 69 in Romania and 32 in Bulgaria; 25 people from Iran and five from Albania also appeared on the list. The large number born in Russia is linked to the mainly Circassian migrants from the Caucasus, and those born in Greece to the exchangees. It is also known that in the late Ottoman period 175 migrant households, mostly from the eastern provinces, had been settled in the area. This layered history of migration lives on today in the villages and quarters of Amasya in the form of different dialects and customs.

Literacy and Livelihoods

Perhaps the gravest finding of the 1927 census was the literacy rate. Across Turkey only 10.8 per cent of the population aged seven and over could read and write; in Amasya the figure was 2.3 per cent. Of the 2,052 literate people in the province, 1,946 were men and only 106 women. Some 58.7 per cent of the literate lived in the central district, with Merzifon second and Gümüşhacıköy last. The young educated men and teachers lost in the wars account for much of this low figure; it is known that some schools produced no graduates at all for several years during the First World War. The new alphabet adopted a year later, in 1928, and the literacy campaign launched in its wake would aim to change this picture.

The structure of livelihoods was just as one-sided. Of the 44,238 people with an occupation, 36,857, or 83.3 per cent, worked in agriculture and animal husbandry. Industry employed 2,141 and trade 2,062 people; they were followed by 1,739 soldiers, 441 civil servants, 320 people in the liberal professions, 98 postal and telegraph employees and 64 judges. Women made up twenty-nine per cent of total employment, and 96.8 per cent of working women were in agriculture. The share of those living from farming was highest in the central district, while the share of industrial workers was highest in Merzifon. The ratio of the employed to the total population remained at 38.5 per cent, and the burden of the dependent population rested on this narrow base of employment.

The Stagnant Years: 1927-1950

In the first quarter-century of the Republic the town of Amasya practically stood still. The urban population of 12,824 in 1927 fell to 11,981 in 1935, rose to 13,635 in 1940, dropped back to 13,344 in 1945 and reached 14,470 in 1950. In twenty-three years the town gained only 1,989 inhabitants. Eren Şenol attributes this stagnation to the departure, during and after the war, of the non-Muslim population that had sustained the urban economy, to the narrowing of the provincial boundaries, to the 1942 earthquake and to the flood disaster of 1948. Although the total population of the province rose from 114,884 to 163,669 over the same period, the share of those living in the provincial and district centres fell from around twenty-five per cent to twenty-three; growth was taking place largely in the villages. Amasya's earthquake geography and the floods of the Yeşilırmak made themselves felt in these years too, as the two hazards that every period of growth in the valley would have to reckon with.

Since the population did not grow, the built-up area hardly expanded either; such changes as occurred were mostly the result of disasters and of individual public investments. In 1938 the village of Helvacı, outside the town, was incorporated within the urban boundaries and became the Helvacı quarter. After the flood of 1948 the Burnt Ground, empty since the fire of 1915, was allocated to the flood victims, and the Yüzevler and Fethiye quarters were founded there. The railway, meanwhile, opened the town's first axis of growth towards the north. The railway station is said to have opened to traffic in 1927; some sources date the completion of the Samsun connection to 1930. The station had been built on land of low agricultural value, but the convenience it brought to transport and trade soon made its surroundings attractive. The Akbilek quarter on the fertile soil to its south and the Hızır Paşa and Şeyhcui quarters to its north grew up thanks to this pull. The appearance of the town in these years can be followed in Gabriel's town plan of 1934; Şenol places this plan at the head of the maps through which he traces the town's development in the Republican period.

After 1950: Institutions, Industry and Migration

With the 1950s the picture changed rapidly. The provincial population, 163,669 in 1950, rose to 227,044 in 1955; this thirty-nine per cent leap in five years cannot be explained by natural increase and is linked to the enlargement of the provincial boundaries. In the same years the administrative map of the province was redrawn. Taşova, which had become a district in 1944 while attached to Erbaa, Göynücek in 1954 and, in later years, Suluova took their place among the districts of Amasya; the date of Suluova's elevation to district status is given as 1957 in some sources and 1946 in others. The creation of new districts reduced the village population of the central district but turned the district centres into small towns. The Amasya Sugar Factory, which went into production at Suluova in 1954, together with the facilities of the Meat and Fish Corporation, encouraged sugar beet cultivation and livestock farming and drew heavy migration to the plain, and the settlement growing up around the factory soon developed enough to gain district status.

The town of Amasya, too, began to grow after 1950. Its population of 14,470 in 1950 reached 28,525 in 1960 and 36,646 in 1970. The decisive factors in this increase were the enlargement of the provincial boundaries, the founding of the infantry training brigade, state investment in the service sector and migration from the countryside. The buildings of the Regional Directorate of Forestry, founded in 1950, had been placed where the valley floor meets the slope, on land of low agricultural value; but a building cooperative formed by the institution's staff put up 55 houses on the fertile valley floor, and construction began around the Ayvasıl vineyards. The Amasya Infantry Training Brigade, founded in the same year, had also chosen its site well, but regular transport between the brigade and the town and the growing movement of people gradually turned the Yazı and Orman vineyards at its entrance into residential quarters. The Sağıroğlu lime quarry, opened in the 1950s, employed more than three hundred workers before mechanisation; the Helvacı (Şehreküstü) quarter, where these workers settled, grew first on the slopes and then spread towards the flat, fertile land.

Across the province the rate of urbanisation also began to climb. The share of people living in the provincial and district centres, twenty-two per cent in 1955, became twenty-seven per cent in 1960, thirty-two per cent in 1970 and thirty-eight per cent in 1980. The village population, meanwhile, continued to grow in absolute terms and peaked at 213,210 in 1980. In this period the growth of the town and the district centres was fed less by the emptying of the villages than by part of the surplus rural population turning towards nearby centres. What gave the farming population the chance to earn income outside agriculture was, to a large extent, the expansion of administrative functions; according to Şenol, in Amasya, where agriculture had been the most important economic activity and farmland had been protected until 1950, the administrative function that gained weight after that date began to swell the urban population.

A Province of Emigration

In Turkey, migration from the countryside to the cities had advanced slowly and gradually until the 1950s, after which it accelerated into a mass movement. The mechanisation of agriculture and easier transport between village and town were the main driving forces behind this current. From the late 1970s the village-to-city migration that had intensified in the 1960s began to give way to migration from city to city, and in the 1980s even relatively small cities outside the major centres started to lose population through migration. Amasya is a typical example of this general trend. In 1975-1980 the province received 17,066 migrants and lost 24,434; the net migration rate was calculated at minus 24.5 per thousand. Between 1980 and 1985 this rate fell to minus 32.5 per thousand.

The heaviest loss came in 1985-1990. In these five years Amasya received 20,273 people and lost 40,189, and the net migration rate fell to minus 59.7 per thousand. The result was reflected in the census: the provincial population of 358,289 in 1985 fell to 357,191 in 1990, the first decline from one census to the next in the Republican period. Although the net migration rate eased to minus 26.8 per thousand in 1995-2000, the province remained a net exporter of people until the end of the century. Present-day records likewise show that people registered in Amasya but living outside the province are concentrated above all in İstanbul, in industrial centres such as Kocaeli and Bursa, and in Ankara, İzmir and Samsun. The village population melted away rapidly after 1980, falling to 194,647 in 1990 and to 168,610 in 2000.

Thus by the end of the century the balance between countryside and town had been reversed. The proportion living in the provincial and district centres rose to forty-six per cent in 1990 and fifty-four per cent in 2000; in the 2000 census 196,621 of the province's inhabitants lived in towns and 168,610 in villages and small municipalities. The number of people per square kilometre had risen from about 21 in 1927 to 64 in 2000. Even so, Amasya continued to slip in the ranking of provinces by population; 51st among 63 provinces in 1927, it fell to 53rd among 81 in 2000. Most of those who left were young, and together with falling fertility this handed an ageing population structure on to the new century. Amasya's population and settlement geography still bears the consequences of this transformation at the level of districts and villages.

A City Too Large for Its Valley

What sets Amasya's urbanisation apart from that of many Turkish cities is that the area into which growth could expand was limited by nature from the outset. The city lies in the narrow Yeşilırmak valley at an altitude of about 400 metres, between cliffs rising to 1,200 metres on either side. Instead of spreading radially, it has therefore developed in a linear fashion parallel to the river. The valley floor, however, contains the most fertile soils in the province; in the agricultural inventory the valley floor within the municipal boundaries is classified as "Agricultural Land of Prime Importance". In the second half of the century every step in the city's growth meant converting a piece of this fertile soil into housing, roads or public buildings. Most public buildings, including the railway station, the Regional Directorate of Forestry, the Highways and State Hydraulic Works offices, the high schools, the faculty of education, the bus terminal, the municipality and the government building, rose on this first-class farmland.

The chronology of the zoning plans is given differently in the sources. Şenol traces the city's development through plans drawn by Gabriel (1934), Demiray (1954), Beyru (1966) and Yeltman (1981) and through aerial photographs of 1953, 1969 and 1989. Yaşar Bahri Ergen and Mustafa Ergen, by contrast, state that the first zoning plan was prepared in 1945, revised in 1965 by the architect Rauf Beyru, and that the last comprehensive plan was drawn up in 1985 by the architect Fahri Yetman and approved by the Ministry of Public Works and Settlement. In the 1970s and 1980s the historic fabric of the city centre was placed under protection. According to Yetman's plan report, 145 of the 210 listed buildings in the historic centre were dwellings, and the area was protected as a conservation site. The protection of this fabric, home to the Yalıboyu houses, pushed the housing needs of the growing population towards the wider parts of the valley.

The urban population of 36,646 in 1970 reached 57,288 in 1990. State investment in education, industrial plants founded by the private sector, improvements in road transport and incentives for tourism all played a part in this increase. The search for new residential land culminated in the zoning plan of 1981, which opened the farmland around the city to development. Ahır Önü, the Kirazlıdere, Bahçeleriçi, Filingir or Frenkler and İltekin vineyards, all covered with fruit trees, began to turn into residential areas; some two square kilometres of prime agricultural land were diverted to other uses in this period. The plan report recorded that the urban population had risen from 11,981 to 48,010 between 1935 and 1980 and projected a population of 90,000 for the year 2000. Assuming an average household size of 4.5, it calculated that 20,000 dwellings would be needed for this population. In the south, on the Tokat road around Helvacı, new housing areas for eight to nine thousand people were planned beside the prison, military units and a fruit juice factory; in the north, between the Samsun road and the Tersakan stream, cooperative housing for four and a half to five thousand people was planned at an average density of 150 people per hectare.

The plan also envisaged a ban on building in areas at risk of flooding and rockfall, and a green belt along the banks of the Yeşilırmak. Yet the growth that actually took place soon exceeded the plan's measures. The urban population reached 70,112 in 1997 and 74,393 in 2000; in the twenty years from 1990 to 2010 roughly another five square kilometres of prime farmland were turned into residential land. In 1993 a small industrial estate was built about ten kilometres south of the city, again on fertile land, and scattered houses began to appear along the road. The construction after 1990 of buildings for the electricity distribution company, the police directorate and the gendarmerie command in the Göllü vineyards area was a new link in the same chain. According to Yaşar Bahri Ergen, building density rose by sixty per cent after 1980 without any increase in area, and the city entered the new century carrying a load beyond its capacity in terms of green space, parking and social facilities.

Amasya at the End of the Century

The 2000 census reveals the balance of a century-long transformation. Of the 133,207 inhabitants of the central district, 74,393 lived in the city and 58,814 in the villages. The district centre of Merzifon had become a town of 45,613 and that of Suluova a town of 42,715; whereas in 1927 the province had only three district centres, by the end of the century seven district centres shared its urban population. The growth of industry and services alongside agriculture had diversified the city's economic base. Even so, in terms of population the province had practically stood still in the last quarter of the century, sustaining its growth less through natural increase than through internal movement from the countryside to the centres. That a province where three quarters of the people lived in villages in 1927 had come by 2000 to house more than half of them in towns is the briefest summary of Amasya's century of urbanisation.

At the beginning of the new century one more element was added to this picture. Amasya University, founded in 2006, rejuvenated the city's population with students from every corner of Turkey; the student population directly affected trade, the housing market and cultural life. Nevertheless, like many Anatolian cities, Amasya continued to lose young people who left for the big cities in search of education and work. The greatest test of urbanisation, however, was to grow while preserving the historic fabric. The narrow geography of the Yeşilırmak valley had formed a natural frame limiting construction, and while the historic centre with its riverside Yalıboyu houses was placed under protection, new residential areas developed towards the wider parts of the valley. Zoning plans and conservation regulations sought to balance modern needs against the historic heritage; the city thus largely preserved its identity, but the price of that balance was paid by the vineyards and orchards of the valley.

Chronology

1915: A great fire in the town leaves a wide empty space in the centre known as the "Yangın Yeri" (Burnt Ground).

30 January 1923: The Turkish-Greek population exchange convention is signed; in the same year the first 260 migrants are settled in Amasya.

1924: A further 5,081 migrants are sent from Samsun; Amasya becomes a province on 20 April 1924.

28 October 1927: The first general census is held; the provincial population is recorded as 114,884 and the town's as 12,824.

1927-1930: The railway station opens to traffic; the Samsun rail connection is completed.

1935: The town's population falls to 11,981.

1938: The village of Helvacı is incorporated within the town boundaries as a quarter.

1942: The Amasya earthquake; it is counted among the factors that slowed the town's population growth.

1948: Flood disaster; the Burnt Ground is allocated to the victims, and the Yüzevler and Fethiye quarters are founded.

1950: The Regional Directorate of Forestry and the Infantry Training Brigade are established; the town's population is 14,470.

1954: The sugar factory at Suluova goes into production; Göynücek becomes a district.

1955: The provincial population jumps to 227,044.

1970: The town's population reaches 36,646.

1981: A new zoning plan opens the vineyards and orchards around the city to development.

1985-1990: The net migration rate falls to minus 59.7 per thousand; the provincial population declines for the first time.

1993: The small industrial estate is established.

2000: The city's population reaches 74,393; fifty-four per cent of the provincial population lives in towns.

2006: Amasya University is founded.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Prime Ministry General Directorate of Statistics, 1927 Umumi Nüfus Tahriri, Fascicles I-III, Ankara 1929.

Academic studies

  • Yılmaz, Y. and Karadeniz, V., "Türkiye Cumhuriyeti'nin İlk Genel Nüfus Sayımına Göre Amasya İlinin Demografik Yapısı", Oltu Beşeri ve Sosyal Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi, 2/1 (2021), pp. 36-51.
  • Balcı, S., "1923 Tarihli Türk-Rum Nüfus Mübadelesinin Amasya'nın Demografik Yapısına Etkisi", pp. 39-49; see also Balcı, S., Cumhuriyet Döneminde Amasya (1923-1950): İdari, Siyasi, Sosyal ve Kültürel Yapı, doctoral thesis, Atatürk University, 2014.
  • Şenol, E., "Amasya Kentinin Cumhuriyet Dönemi Mekânsal Gelişimi ve Tarım Alanlarının Amaç Dışı Kullanımı", Uluslararası Sosyal Araştırmalar Dergisi, 7/30 (2014), pp. 229-242.
  • Ergen, Y. B., "Amasya'nın Kentleşme Problemleri", Trakya Üniversitesi Mühendislik Bilimleri Dergisi, 18/2 (2017), pp. 113-119.
  • Kızılaslan, N. and Arslan, F., "Kırsaldan Kente Göç Hareketlerinin Nüfusun Cinsiyet ve Eğitim Faktörlerine Etkisi (Amasya İli Örneği)", Gaziosmanpaşa Bilimsel Araştırma Dergisi, 11/3 (2022), pp. 147-158.

Official sources

  • Ministry of Environment and Urbanisation, Amasya Provincial Directorate, "Nüfus" (table of urban and village population, 1927-2010).
  • Governorship of Amasya, Nüfus; Central Black Sea Development Agency, Amasya population data.

Other sources

  • Ergen, Y. B. and Ergen, M., "Amasya'nın Kentleşme Dinamikleri: Topografya ve Nehir Topoğrafyası Tarafından Şekillenen Doğrusal Kent Gelişimi", SPLANDES, 5/1 (2025).
  • "Amasya", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 3. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Amasya" and "Amasya (il)", Turkish Wikipedia (tables of provincial, district and urban population by census year). tr.wikipedia.org

Online sources