During the First World War, Amasya bordered none of the Ottoman fronts. No enemy fleet approached the Yeşilırmak valley, no Russian army reached the city, and no gun was fired before the walls of its citadel. Even so, the years 1914 to 1918 were among the heaviest in the city's recent history, because the burden of modern war fell on the roads, fields, granaries and households behind the front as much as on those at the front itself. Young men were called up, the producer's harvest was gathered on the army's account, hundreds of thousands of refugees from the east poured into the cities along their route, and disease spread from the barracks into the market. Amasya, then a sanjak centre attached to the Province of Sivas, lay at the point where all of this converged.

Background to the Ottoman Entry into the War

The Ottoman entry into the war unfolded over several weeks. One day after Germany declared war on Russia, on 2 August 1914, an Ottoman-German alliance treaty was signed in Istanbul and general mobilisation was proclaimed the same day. Some sources give 3 August for the proclamation; the government meanwhile announced its armed neutrality. The German cruisers Goeben and Breslau, fleeing the British fleet, took refuge in the Dardanelles on 10 August and joined the Ottoman navy as Yavuz and Midilli, presented as purchased vessels. At the end of October the Ottoman fleet, including these ships, sailed into the Black Sea and shelled Sevastopol and Novorossiysk; Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire on 2 November 1914. The caliph's call to jihad was issued on 15 November.

The state had come out of the Balkan Wars defeated only a year earlier. According to an assessment published by the Turkish Historical Society, the army consisted of thirteen corps under four army inspectorates, with thirty-eight infantry and four cavalry divisions; its firepower was weak, and transport and rear-service units were almost non-existent. Although mobilisation was regarded as complete by the end of September 1914, weapons and ammunition were lacking and most of the rear services had not been set up. The same assessment notes that the Ottoman state entered the war without adequate preparation under pressure from the German High Command. The cost of these shortcomings was paid first by the provinces, which were made responsible for meeting the army's needs.

Amasya's Logistical Position

The Caucasus line against Russia was one of the areas in which the Ottoman army lost the most men. In the Sarıkamış operation, which ran from 22 December 1914 into early January 1915, 60,000 of a force of 112,000 were lost; most of the soldiers had frozen to death. The headquarters of the Third Army at Erzurum withdrew under the Russian advance, first to Erzincan, then to Refahiye, and in 1917 to Suşehri. The main supply route of this army ran through Istanbul, Bolu, İskilip, Amasya, Tokat and Şebinkarahisar; the density of villages along the road made it easier to quarter troops and to set up supply points. Amasya thus became the back door of a front on which it was never itself a stage.

The city's commercial position had already worked in this direction before the war. The old road that reached Amasya from Basra by way of Baghdad, Mosul, Diyarbakır, Malatya, Sivas and Tokat continued to the ports of Samsun and Sinop, and the cotton hand-weaving of Tokat, Zile, Merzifon and Amasya reached Istanbul and the Black Sea ports through the Samsun landing. During the war, grain collected from Çorum, Amasya, Sivas and Tokat was carried by road to Samsun and Sinop and shipped on by boat to Trabzon. Amasya's wheat, flour and transport capacity formed part of a network that extended well beyond the sanjak's borders.

The Population of the Sanjak

To understand the effect of the war on Amasya, one has to look at the sanjak's population structure in 1914. According to a study of the exchange period, Amasya in 1914 had six districts and 230,263 inhabitants; Muslims numbered 178,689, or 78 percent, and non-Muslims 51,574, or 22 percent. Another compilation describes the sanjak as having seven districts (Amasya, Merzifon, Ladik, Havza, Vezirköprü, Gümüşhacıköy and Mecidözü) and counts, among roughly 200,000 inhabitants, 31,717 Armenians and 39,676 Greeks. Patriarch Ormanian gives the Armenian Apostolic population of the sanjak as 25,000, while a higher figure of 55,000 has been given for the pre-war Greek Orthodox population. That the figures diverge so widely reflects differences of method and definition in pre-war enumeration, and on this subject no single number should be relied upon.

The picture varied from district to district. Of Havza's 25,552 inhabitants, 17,384 were Muslim, 7,852 Greek and 316 Armenian; Vezirköprü had 41,727 Muslims, 4,856 Greeks and 320 Armenians; the district of Merzifon contained 3,553 Greeks and 3,309 Armenians. The sanjak was a populous and mixed society, and each development brought by the war affected these communities differently.

Mobilisation and Agriculture

Mobilisation struck the peasant, who made up the largest part of Ottoman society, directly. About 80 percent of the young population worked in agriculture, and calling the men up reduced the hands available to work the fields. The state discharged those born in 1285-1287 (1869-1872) while calling up those born in 1288-1309 (1873-1894). Discharge had pleased the producers, but the call-up of farmers aged between twenty and twenty-nine just as autumn seed was to be sown put the next harvest at risk. The Province of Trabzon instructed the districts under it, Canik above all, to have the seed sown by those not called to arms, but this had little effect.

The Tekâlif-i Harbiye (war levy) commissions set up in the early months of the war had the authority to requisition surplus produce from the population. The value of the goods taken was to be assessed by the commission and paid for at the end of the mobilisation. In a period when the currency was steadily losing value, this arrangement left the producer in difficulty. In Canik, wheat and other goods collected in this way were redirected within the very first weeks to Trabzon, to meet the needs of refugees fleeing the eastern front; in other words, the peasant's produce flowed from the first months of the war straight to needs behind the front.

Calling up soldiers in Amasya also had a painful history. According to what the English traveller H. F. Tozer reported, of the roughly 15,000 men who had gone to the front from the sanjak in the Ottoman-Russian War of 1877-1878, only ten percent were able to return. This figure cannot show with certainty what weight the memory carried when the new war began, but it gives the measure of a loss handed down across generations. The sources at hand contain no consolidated figure for how many Amasya soldiers fell on which fronts in the First World War. Since the Ottoman army fought in such distant theatres as the Caucasus, Gallipoli, Iraq, Palestine and Syria, the Hejaz, Galicia, Romania and Macedonia, it can be said that the sons of the sanjak were scattered across this wide geography.

Food Shortages

Soon after the proclamation of mobilisation, on 9 August 1914, a special commission made up of officials of the Ministries of War and the Interior was set up to deal with the supply of the population and the army. But as the war dragged on, the problem grew. Although the Ottoman state was an agricultural country, it imported goods such as sugar and flour; because these entered largely by sea, prices leapt once the Straits were closed, and the Istanbul City Prefecture announced that fixed prices were needed for goods such as flour, bread and kerosene. After 1915, as the war intensified, commodity prices rose further. The government introduced bread ration cards on the German model. Studies of the period record that women waited with their children at the doors of municipalities for ration bread, and that in households whose men were at the front, women took on the livelihood and provisioning of the family.

In this picture Amasya was a source of food not only for its own people but also for neighbouring sanjaks. The wheat of Canik (Samsun) on the Black Sea coast was met from Sivas, Tokat, Amasya and Çorum, and the supply file of Canik is among the documents that show Amasya's role in the war years in most detail. The Canik Mutasarrıf left the meeting at Sivas having obtained promises of 100,000 kilograms of grain each from Amasya, Çorum and Tokat, and a further 200,000 kilograms each were later promised by Amasya and Tokat. Yet in practice matters did not go as on paper. Canik merchants who went to Tokat, Amasya and Çorum to buy grain met with the condition, imposed by the Mutasarrıf of Amasya, that purchases be made only from designated districts; the district governors of the places they visited claimed to have needs of their own and blocked the purchases, and in some places limited the grain that could be bought. The Mutasarrıf of Çorum designated only two districts from which grain could be drawn. In the end the merchants began to return empty-handed and gave back the pledges they had signed. The only concrete result of this trip was that 15,375 kilograms of flour, previously prepared in Amasya, could be obtained, of which 4,650 kilograms were sent on to Giresun.

This example shows that in the war years every sanjak had first to protect its own people. At an evaluation meeting held in Amasya by the Third District Supply Board, the obstruction of the grain that Canik wished to bring was discussed, and it was decided that the seed grain of Canik's farmers should be obtained from outside. The state, for its part, tried to place supply on a central footing. The temporary laws issued in 1916 were extended on 5 April 1917 by the law "on the sale and distribution of foodstuffs and other necessities", and a regulation of 25 April 1917 divided the country into supply regions. On 24 May 1917 profiteering and hoarding were forbidden, and cases of this offence were assigned to the courts-martial. The Supply General Decree of 18 August 1917 placed the supply directorate under the Ministry of War and for the first time merged the supply of the civilian population with that of the army. Distribution was tied to ration cards, and military and civilian distributions were entered in separate registers.

We have no price series for Amasya, but information from neighbouring Canik shows the weight of the period. Towards the end of 1917 an oka of bread there had risen to 80, 90, even 100 kuruş; a civil servant on an inadequate salary was forced to choose between death and theft. Where supplies were short, barley bread was distributed, and the bread given out after 8 October contained 30 percent barley. It may be supposed that similar hardships were felt in the cities of the interior, but for Amasya one has to refrain from giving a figure for which there is no documentary basis.

Refugees and the Crowds from the Eastern Front

One of the developments that affected Amasya most was the westward flow of the people of eastern Anatolia, who left their homes before the Russian advance. The movement that began after the failure at Sarıkamış grew in 1916 when Erzurum and Trabzon fell under Russian occupation. Columns of old and young, women and children, set out from Erzurum, Erzincan, Bayburt and their surroundings and marched towards the interior, both from the direction of Sivas and from the Black Sea coast. The wave of migration reached as far as Sinop, İnebolu, Amasya and İzmit. Epidemic disease and the impossibility of securing supplies made the journey harder still.

The state had drawn up an instruction to send and settle this mass of people, and had opened soup kitchens and vaccination stations along the route. After the occupation of Erzurum, the line that reached Sivas by way of Suşehri, Zara and Koçhisar and went on from there to Çorum or Kayseri by the Tokat road formed the busiest line of migration. Along this line about 150,000 refugees were vaccinated against epidemics. By the end of 1916 the number of refugees reaching Sivas, Tokat and Amasya exceeded 300,000. Since it was not thought right to keep all of them within the operational zone of the Third Army, 144,964 people were sent on to Çorum, Yozgat, Kayseri, Niğde, Kırşehir and Konya; rent assistance was provided to those sent on, and 8,637 houses were given to families in need.

The Amasya-Merzifon line had a distinct place within this movement. When some of the refugees who had taken shelter in the Samsun region were struck by the malaria found there, they were settled in the Amasya-Merzifon and Sinop-Kastamonu districts, where malaria was absent; some were also sent on to Çorum by way of Kavak, Havza and Merzifon. Of 129 people who came to the district of Havza as refugees during the First World War, 80 did not wish to go back, and 49 agreed to return. The sanjak had also received Nogai, Crimean and Circassian migrants from the Caucasus, Dagestan and Crimea, beginning with the Balkan Wars. The population fabric of the city changed continually throughout the war through these migrations.

Epidemics, Hospitals and the Red Crescent

The cause of a large share of the deaths in the war years was disease rather than combat. Sivas, which lay directly behind the Caucasus front, became the medical base of the region: the Red Crescent Hospital had been founded there on 1 December 1914, and with the transfer of the Erzurum hospital to the city and the halting of shipments through the port of Trabzon, the city turned into a hospital complex of 4,000 beds. Army General Staff records on bed capacity in the same region state that Amasya had a hospital of 1,000 beds; for comparison, Refahiye is listed with 500, Zara with 1,000, Tokat with 1,000, Zile with 300, Samsun with 500, Ordu with 400 and Giresun with 500 beds. In this series Amasya, together with Zara and Tokat, ranks among the largest capacities after Sivas and Zincidere.

Cholera, dysentery, typhoid and spotted fever (typhus) stood out among the diseases. In 1917, 179,445 people in Sivas were given the cholera vaccine, yet 192 cases of cholera were recorded within the Province of Sivas and 101 of the sick died; the disease was seen most in the centre of Sivas, Erbaa, Merzifon and Amasya. Doctors also fell victim to spotted fever, and on 7 April 1917 Server Kâmil Bey, acting head of the Third Army medical service, made vaccination compulsory for doctors who had not had typhus. The large refugee columns, inadequate shelter and the difficulty of feeding people all contributed to the spread of the epidemics.

The branches of the Red Crescent Society were the main carriers of medical and relief work in this period. In the Province of Sivas, branches were opened from the end of 1914: at Aziziye in October 1914, at Kangal and Tokat in December 1914, at Reşadiye, Niksar, Erbaa and Zile in March 1915, at Zara and Yıldızeli in May 1915, and at Hafik in June-July 1915. Amasya does not appear on this list; the detailed study of the Amasya branch's activities covers the years 1919-1925, and it can be understood that the branch began operating seven months after the one at Havza. The donations the society collected at the central level amounted to 76,839 lira in 1914, 149,698 in 1915, 156,932 in 1916, 146,890 in 1917 and 134,506 in 1918. As researchers have emphasised, the Red Crescent did not merely distribute aid; it also played a part in organising civil society behind the front in line with the needs of the war. As for the extent to which the people of Amasya took part in this aid network, no local document is found in the sources consulted.

The Non-Muslim Population in the War Years

The result of the war that changed Amasya society most profoundly was the loss of the weight that the non-Muslim population had held in the sanjak. In 1915 the Ottoman government decided on the relocation and resettlement of the Armenian population from certain regions, and this decision covered the sanjak of Amasya as well. The Greek population was displaced in various ways during the war years and during the National Struggle. The nature of these events, responsibility for them and the figures remain disputed in historical writing today. Turkish studies based on Ottoman documents treat the relocation and resettlement decision in the context of the Russian advance in eastern Anatolia and the activities of Armenian bands; international genocide memorial compilations, for their part, report that arrests were made in the sanjak of Amasya from March 1915, that five convoys of about 12,000 people were sent out in early July, and that many deaths occurred on the road. According to a 1919 publication of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate cited in the same compilations, 89,370 Greeks were deported from the "Amasya region" during the war; this number is not compatible even with the pre-war Greek population estimate of 55,000 given for the sanjak, and so it cannot be taken as established fact.

The demographic picture left at the end of the war can be measured in studies of the population exchange. In Havza, between 3,000 and 4,000 people died during the First World War and the War of Independence, and 8,340 Greeks in 36 villages left the country, so that the population of the district fell by as much as 50 percent. In Vezirköprü, the places emptied between 1914 and 1923 by the departure first of the Armenians and then of the Greeks were filled by exchangees arriving from Greece. The 1923 Turkish-Greek population exchange completed this process; a sanjak that had contained about 22 percent non-Muslims before the war became, in the Republican period, a city with a 98 percent Turkish population.

Public Order and the End of the War

Public order also weakened behind the front. According to a report that Mustafa Kemal Pasha sent from Samsun on 25 May 1919, at the beginning of mobilisation bands formed separately of deserters and of Muslim, Greek and Armenian elements had engaged in petty theft and occasional murder within the Samsun province (liva); some bands that emerged during the Greek and Armenian deportations acquired a political character and were encouraged from outside during the Russian advance. A study of the National Struggle based on General Staff archive documents states that during the war years the interventions of army units kept the bands under a measure of control, and that the situation changed after the Armistice of Mudros, when the armies were reduced and arms were taken away.

The Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918. By this point the sanjak of Amasya had changed greatly from four years earlier: a part of its young men had not returned, the agricultural population had shrunk, its non-Muslim neighbours had largely gone, and hundreds of thousands of refugees had passed along its roads. A few months later, while in Amasya between 12 and 26 June 1919, Mustafa Kemal issued the Amasya Circular on 22 June; the Defence of Rights Association was founded in the city on 14 June 1919, and the Amasya Talks took place on 20-22 October 1919. The city's role in this period was a continuation of the logistical and administrative functions it had assumed in the war years and of the upheaval the region had gone through.

Chronology

2 August 1914: The Ottoman-German alliance treaty was signed and general mobilisation proclaimed (3 August in some sources).

9 August 1914: A special commission of officials of the Ministries of War and the Interior was set up for the supply of the population and the army.

2 November 1914: Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire.

1 December 1914: The Sivas Red Crescent Hospital was founded.

22 December 1914-January 1915: The Sarıkamış operation.

July 1915: Relocation of the Armenian population from the sanjak of Amasya (its characterisation and figures are disputed among sources).

1916: Russian occupation of Erzurum and Trabzon; hundreds of thousands of refugees move into the interior.

5 April 1917: The law on the sale and distribution of foodstuffs and other necessities was issued.

24 May 1917: Temporary law against hoarding and profiteering.

18 August 1917: The Supply General Decree.

30 October 1918: The Armistice of Mudros.

14 June 1919: The Defence of Rights Association was founded in Amasya.

22 June 1919: The Amasya Circular.

Sources

Academic studies

  • "Birinci Dünya Savaşı Yıllarında Canik'in İaşe Durumu (1914-1918)", Belleten, December 1999, vol. 63, no. 238. belleten.gov.tr
  • Süleyman Tekir, "Birinci Dünya Savaşı'nda Doğu Anadolu ve Doğu Karadeniz Rus İşgal Bölgelerinden Yapılan Göçler", Çağdaş Türkiye Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi, XVI/32, 2016.
  • Murat Yolun, "Birinci Dünya Savaşı'nda Hayırseverlik ve Seferberlik: Osmanlı Hilâl-i Ahmer Cemiyeti'nin 1917 Mekteb-i Sultânî Sergisi", Atatürk Araştırma Merkezi Dergisi, no. 105, 2022.
  • Alev Gözcü, "I. Dünya Savaşı ve Osmanlı Devleti'nin Gündelik Hayatından Kesitler", Çağdaş Türkiye Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi, XVI/32, 2016.

Other sources

  • İsmet Görgülü, "Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nun I. Dünya Harbine Girişi ve Çarpıştığı Cepheler", Turkish Historical Society.
  • Mustafa Sarı - Coşkun Doğan, "I. Dünya Savaşı'nda Hilâl-i Ahmer (Kızılay) Cemiyeti'nin Sivas'taki Faaliyetleri", Akademik Bakış, vol. 17, no. 33, Winter 2023.
  • Serdal Balcı, "1923 Türk-Yunan Nüfus Mübadelesinin Amasya'nın Demografik Yapısına Etkisi" (The Effect of the 1923 Turkish-Greek Population Exchange on the Demographic Structure of Amasya).
  • Mehmet Evsile, "Millî Mücadele Döneminde Amasya", TÜBA, 2022.
  • TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Birinci Dünya Savaşı" entry. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr

Online sources