Amasya stands where the Yeşilırmak squeezes into a narrow valley, and its present-day transport system follows the line of that valley. The route between Samsun on the Black Sea coast and Central Anatolia passes through this corridor within the provincial borders, and the connections toward Çorum, Tokat and Sivas meet in the city. The province covers 5,628 square kilometres and had a population of 342,242 at the end of 2025, about 77 percent of whom live in urban areas. That so small a province has roads, railways and an airport all at once is the natural result of lying on a corridor in mountainous country. Long before the railway and the asphalt, the same corridor carried caravans, imperial couriers and armies on campaign; most of today's state roads trace the routes of the Seljuk and Ottoman periods.

Geographic Position and Its Effect on Transport

The city centre of Amasya lies at about 400 metres above sea level, whereas the average altitude of the province reaches 1,150 metres. This difference explains why transport within the province is divided between the valley floor and the high plateaus. The central district sits on the valley floor carved by the Yeşilırmak. The flat land extending east toward Tokat and west toward the Suluova plain is a continuation of that valley. Taşova, at 240 metres, is the lowest district of the province and lies where the Yeşilırmak descends toward the Tokat border. Merzifon, at 746 metres, and Gümüşhacıköy, at 822 metres, by contrast, stand on the high plain in the northwest. This duality between valley and plateau also shows that the province's transport network is woven from two separate arms.

The distribution of settlements has shaped the main transport lines as well. The road distances of the district centres from the provincial centre are as follows: Suluova 26, Göynücek 46, Merzifon 46, Taşova 48, Gümüşhacıköy 68 and Hamamözü 90 kilometres. None of these distances is long, but the difference in altitude between valley and plateau affects journey times regardless of distance. The history of Taşova reflects this difficulty: the district remained attached to Erbaa in Tokat province from 1923 to 1944 and was transferred to Amasya in 1953 on the grounds that access to Tokat was hard and services arrived late.

The city itself has had to fit onto the narrow floor of the valley. Hüsameddin calls the gorge at the southern end of the town Ferhad Arası; in his day Helvacı Pınarı, at the southern foot of Ferhad Kayası, and the Veng ridge at its northern foot both lay on the macadam road to Tokat. The fountain at Helvacı Pınarı had been built by Helvacı Mehmed Ağa, the Amasya mütesellim (deputy governor) who died in 1064 (1653-54). The road through the town follows the river, so every road entering from east or west joins the same riverside street that marks the edge of the old neighbourhoods.

Roads in the Seljuk and Ottoman Periods

When Anatolia gained a place in world trade under the Seljuks, its roads were organised along two main axes. The east-west road ran from Antalya and Alanya through Konya, Kayseri and Sivas to Erzurum and Iran, while the north-south road came from Kayseri to Sivas and descended by way of Tokat to the ports of Sinop or Samsun, whence ships carried goods on to Sudak in the Crimea. Amasya was a sanjak centre close to the stretch of this north-south road between Tokat and the Black Sea coast. Along these roads the Seljuks built caravanserais a day's stage apart, every 30 to 40 kilometres; the Ottomans continued the same work with buildings known as hans.

In the Ottoman period the roads leading from Istanbul into Anatolia were divided into three main routes, the right, middle and left arms. According to Ali Açıkel's study of the Tokat post station, the middle arm ran from Üsküdar through Gebze, İznik, Sapanca, Geyve, Hendek, Düzce, Bolu, Tosya, Hacı Hamza and Osmancık to Merzifon and Amasya, and from there through Turhal, Tokat, Sivas, Malatya, Harput, Diyarbekir and Mosul to Baghdad. The left arm followed the same road as the middle arm as far as Merzifon, where it branched off through Lâdik, Niksar, Şebinkarahisar and Kelkit to Erzurum, and from there by one branch to Kars and by another to Tabriz. Merzifon thus became the point where two main arms divided, and Amasya an important halt on the Baghdad road. Today the stretch of the D.100 from Osmancık to Merzifon and on to Amasya lies largely on this old middle arm.

At the post stations (menzil) couriers travelling on state business were given fresh horses and lodging. The stations were set at intervals of 3 to 18 hours, and the closure of a single station in between could upset the whole system. Açıkel cites a decree of 10 March 1789 relating that the Turhal station had closed after the townspeople who ran it were resettled elsewhere, that the horses of the Tokat station had been forced to cover the 18-hour road all the way to Amasya, and that animals were dying on the long journey. On the complaint of the people of Tokat, the reopening of the Turhal station was ordered. The record also shows that the Amasya station was directly linked with Tokat as the next halt on the middle arm.

The post station of Amasya stood inside the town, in the Bozahane quarter. Hüsameddin's biographies mention the "old Menzilhane Street" and the fountains and small mosques near the post station; the fountain known as Kadı Çeşmesi is one of them. The office of menzilcibaşı, head of the station, was held by the town's leading families and brought income and influence. İbrâhim Çelebi, son of the mütesellim Kara Abdî Bey, served as menzilcibaşı and several times as town steward (şehir kethüdası), and died in 1119 (1707-08). Turhallı Hacı Hüseyin Ağa also made his fortune as menzilcibaşı; his son Abbas Efendi was popularly known as İbadullah Çelebi. Several members of the family known as Menzilcioğlu were likewise appointed town steward in later generations.

That the middle arm passed through Amasya is clear from the records of great military movements as well. Hüsameddin follows Murad IV's return from the Yerevan campaign day by day, drawing on the Sefername kept by the palace pages of the Enderun and on a Cihadname in the Lâleli Library. According to the Cihadname, after resting a day at Tokat the sultan moved on through İnepazarı, Turhal and Eski İnepazarı, reached the Amasya station after a seven-hour march on the twenty-first of Cemaziyelahir, and passed on to the Gelgiras station the following day. Hüsameddin notes the difference in detail between the two sources and prefers the Sefername because it rests on eyewitness testimony; he adds that Vecihî, Naîmâ and the other major chronicles have no record of the sultan stopping at Amasya. In 1648 the rebel Vardar Ali Paşa likewise set out from Amasya and marched through Gelgiras, Gümüş, Osmancık and Hacı Hamza to Çerkeş. In both records the first halt west of Amasya is Gelgiras.

The road north to Samsun was a road of trade and of brigandage alike. Among the events of 1154 (1741-42) Hüsameddin records that the Janissary commander Zorluoğlu Mehmed Ağa went out after brigands who had appeared on the Amasya-Samsun road, and that he was granted the rank of haseki for scattering them and returning. The link of this road with the Canik coast shaped Amasya's relationship with the sea in every period: many who fled or were exiled from Amasya passed through Samsun, and those who reached Samsun went on from there to Istanbul by steamer.

The Macadam Road and the City's New Axis

From the middle of the nineteenth century the Ottoman state began to give weight to road building. The importance the port of Samsun gained for military shipments in the Crimean War and in the later wars with Russia made it necessary to renew the road linking Samsun with the interior. A macadam road (şose) was built from Samsun to Sivas; yet this road, too, proved unequal to the freight traffic between Central Anatolia and the port, and was repaired repeatedly in later years. Lying on the stretch where the Samsun-Sivas road passed through the valley, Amasya was among the towns most affected by it.

The macadam road through the town was laid out in 1281 (1864-65) by Ziya Paşa, governor (mutasarrıf) of Amasya. As Hüsameddin tells it, when the road fell right on top of the dilapidated Narlı Bahçe Madrasa, the madrasa was pulled down, more than half of it was taken into the road, and the other half was given to its teacher, Hâfız Mehmed Efendi, who built a house there. In the same year Ziya Paşa had a wooden bridge built on top of Alçak Köprü, put up another elegant wooden bridge in front of the government house, and had the Mağdinus bridge repaired. Today one of the city's main avenues bears his name, and İstasyon Köprüsü stands at the end of this boulevard.

The road soon became the backbone of the town. When Hüsameddin lists the neighbourhoods, he defines the boundaries of Üçler, Receb, Şâmîce, Hacı İlyas and Tatar by this road; the Torumtay tomb, the Şehzadegân tomb, the tomb of Receb Çelebi, and the Saraçhane, Feyziye and Kapancızâde madrasas stood "on the macadam road" in his day. In the Pirinççi quarter, where Gümüşhaneli Ali Şefik Paşa lived, the garden on the south side of the road was called Şefik Paşa Bahçesi. The street running parallel to the river thus became an axis that cut the old neighbourhood fabric on both sides and along which the new public buildings were lined up.

Because the road ran along the valley floor, crossing the mouths of the streams that come down from Harşena, it lived with the danger of floods. According to Hüsameddin the most dangerous of these streams was Çakallar Deresi, which reaches the river at Selağzı. In 1271 (1854-55), after a violent downpour, its flood destroyed the bridges and houses over it, swept animals, carts, timber and people into the river, and left a large stone on the dome of the Sinan Hamam. Since the mouth of the stream met the macadam road, the danger was constant; in 1325 (1907-08) the governor Ahmed Cevdet Bey had a tunnel built under the road, separating the stream from it.

The effect of the road was felt outside the town as well. Havza, then part of the sanjak of Amasya, was until 1298 (1880-81) a small town administered by a judge and a director. Hüsameddin relates that once the macadam road was laid past it, traffic and transport became easier, and that the population grew rapidly with the settlement of Tatar and Circassian immigrants. Large hans began to be built to lodge the people who came in spring from distant provinces such as Ankara, Sivas and Trabzon, the town became the seat of a district governor, and the number of its households, about a hundred before, approached five hundred. Çeltek Köprüsü, at the western end of Suluova where the Amasya and Merzifon roads part, was also part of the same road. This single-arched bridge, known to have existed in 812 (1409-10), had a narrow, very high and steep arch; when the macadam road, renewed again and again since 1300 (1882-83), filled and levelled both its sides, the arch was left below and the top of the bridge became flat.

The Bridges over the Yeşilırmak

The bridges linking the two banks of the valley are the oldest part of the town's internal transport. Hüsameddin counts six bridges in the Amasya valley in his day: four of masonry and two of timber. Çalan Köprü, at the end of the southern gorge, appears in old documents as İltekin Köprüsü; with its stone foundation and its arches of red brick it is attributed to İltekin Gazi, one of the Danishmendid emirs. Meydan Köprüsü stands in front of the castle's Meydan Gate, at the end of the Hacı İlyas neighbourhood. The Mağdinus bridge (Madenüs in popular speech) was the wooden bridge in front of the madrasa of Bayezid II; it was repaired in 890 (1485) together with the building of the mosque and renewed many times in later centuries. Alçak Köprü rises on the foundations of a very old bridge, opposite the Kızlar Sarayı. The Helkis bridge, or in popular speech Hükümet Köprüsü, stands in front of the clock house. Kuş Köprü, finally, is the stone bridge in front of the Şamlılar neighbourhood whose wide arch makes its deck look almost flat.

The history of these bridges has been interrupted again and again by the floods of the river. The sources give different details on the site and founding of Meydan Köprüsü. According to Hüsameddin, the Sultan Bridge built around 540 (1145-46) by the Seljuk Sultan Mesud lay about a hundred metres below the present bridge and collapsed in the earthquake of 718 (1318); a wooden bridge was then put up first, and around 776 (1374-75) the emir of Amasya, Şadgeldi Paşa, had the bridge rebuilt in masonry. The records of the Ministry of Culture, by contrast, state that the first bridge of 1145 stood on the same spot and that the present bridge was rebuilt in the 1370s on its remains and in the same character. The two sources agree on the later period: badly damaged in the flood of 1241 (1825-26), the bridge was renewed in 1244 (1828-29) through the efforts of Özlü Hacı Yusuf Ağa, a notable (âyan) of Amasya. Its deck, carried on three wide piers of cut stone, was widened and covered with concrete in the major repair of 1940, and metal railings were fitted along its edges. After the railway came, the road to the station on the opposite bank crossed this bridge, and the name İstasyon Köprüsü, the Station Bridge, took hold.

The story of Alçak Köprü is just as eventful. According to Hüsameddin its granite foundation, with small arches, belonged to a very early period; when the riverbed silted up, the arches disappeared and thick masonry piers were set on top of them. The bridge took its name, "the low bridge", from having sunk over time, and it remained in use until 1281. Because of the flood danger, Ziya Paşa had a wooden bridge built on top of it, using the old bridge as a foundation; this was carried away in the flood of 1298 (1880-81) and rebuilt in 1299 (1881-82), with the help of benefactors, with masonry piers and a timber deck. The wooden bridge in front of the government house had also collapsed in the flood of 1294 (1877); Ahmed Şâkir Paşa, inspector-general of Anatolia, collected contributions in 1318 (1900-01) to rebuild it in masonry, but although its three piers rose, the work was never finished, and the piers too were destroyed by later floods.

The name of Kuş Köprü has also changed over time. Hüsameddin writes that in old records dated 768 (1366-67) the bridge appears as "Hundî Köprüsü" and later as "Kondı Köprüsü", and that the name was gradually corrupted into Kuş Köprü. Relying on the Ikdü'l-Cüman, he shows that Hundî Hatun, who built it, was the daughter of the Seljuk Sultan Mesud and not his mother. The structure known today as Künç Köprü links the Bayezidpaşa and Şamlar neighbourhoods. There are eleven bridges over the Yeşilırmak in the city centre today; four of them, Alçak Köprü, the Çağlayan bridge attributed to the Danishmendid period, the Seljuk Künç Köprü and İstasyon Köprüsü, are historic stone bridges. The cutwaters built on the upstream faces of their piers break the force of the current and have allowed these bridges to withstand floods for centuries.

The Road Network

Amasya is linked by state roads to its neighbouring provinces of Samsun, Çorum and Tokat. The province's transit route lies on the D.100 state road, referred to in official records as the European-Iran International Transit Highway. This road reaches Osmancık and Amasya from the Bulgarian border by way of Edirne, Istanbul, Bolu and Tosya, and continues from there through Erbaa, Erzincan and Erzurum to the Iranian border. Its section within the province is defined by the control-section numbers 100-17, 100-18 and 100-19. According to provincial records, Gümüşhacıköy and Merzifon lie on section 100-17, the central district and Suluova on 100-18, and Taşova on 100-19; in other words, the road links the towns in this order from west to east. Passing through Bolu, Tosya and Osmancık, this route can be regarded as the modern counterpart of the Ottoman middle arm.

The second major state road is the D.180, which comes from Çankırı by way of Çorum. It passes through Amasya on its way to Tokat, and access to the Göynücek district is provided by a link branching from section 04 of this road. The D.795 runs from Samsun through Merzifon and Çorum to Yozgat. Because Merzifon lies on both the D.100 and the D.795, it acts as a junction in the northwest of the province; that it was the point where the old middle and left arms parted is the historical counterpart of this position. Traffic descending from Samsun to Central Anatolia can head toward Ankara directly through Merzifon and Çorum without entering the Amasya valley, whereas those following the valley call at Amasya itself. This two-way structure makes the province's network a system fed by two main arms.

There is no settlement centre in the province without a road. Ninety percent of village roads are asphalted and there is no problem of access in summer or winter; some records give the same information more cautiously, saying that a significant share of village roads is asphalted. The difference between the two statements may arise from the figure changing from year to year. The location of the western districts is also part of this network. Gümüşhacıköy lies 18 to 20 kilometres from Merzifon, 23 to 25 from Hamamözü and 35 to 40 from Osmancık in Çorum province; Çorum city is about 60 kilometres away by way of Hamamözü. The plateau road from Gümüşhacıköy to Vezirköprü in Samsun province is about 40 kilometres long, and this northern pass is one of the secondary links outside the valley. Gümüşhacıköy's old position on the road can also be seen in the caravanserai and covered market (bedesten) that Köprülü Mehmed Paşa built in the town and endowed in 1071 (1660-61).

The Bus Terminal and Intercity Travel

On average 140 intercity buses enter and leave the Amasya bus terminal every day. There is a vehicle almost every hour to the neighbouring provinces of Samsun and Çorum, which indicates that the province's passenger traffic is heaviest toward the north and the west. Travel between the airport and the city and districts is provided by Turkish Airlines shuttle services and airport taxis. Stops mentioned on the airport routes include the Amasya Park shopping centre, Çorum and the Taşova bus station. These links allow an air passenger to continue from Merzifon to the city centre in the valley, to neighbouring Çorum, and to Taşova in the northeast.

Distances to Major Cities

The road distance to Samsun is calculated at between 125 and 131 kilometres depending on the route; the journey takes about an hour and a half by private car and a little longer by bus. The shortest road connection to Ankara is about 333 kilometres by way of the D.200, which route planners give as about four hours; by way of the D.100 and the motorway the route lengthens to 412 to 421 kilometres. The distance to Istanbul is around 670 kilometres. Amasya is thus an hour and a half from the Black Sea coast and four hours from Ankara, a midpoint through which roads run in both directions. These distances vary by a few kilometres depending on the source; the exact driving time depends on the route and the season.

The Amasya bus terminal is in the Kirazlıdere neighbourhood of the provincial centre, about three kilometres from the centre. It is reached from the city centre in ten to fifteen minutes by minibus and municipal bus, and in less time by taxi. Urban transport is provided by municipal buses, minibuses and taxis; because the urban fabric is concentrated on the narrow valley floor, distances within the centre are short. Some written sources mention a new terminal built, or to be built, in the Boğazköy area; details on this could not be verified in official sources.

The Railway Connection

Building the Line

The idea of a railway linking Samsun with Sivas arose early, as the macadam road proved inadequate. On 27 August 1857 the Ottoman government gave verbal approval to the English investor Edward Price to build the Samsun-Sivas and Sivas-Erzurum railways, but the project came to nothing. The question was reopened in 1911 and again failed. In 1914 the finance minister Cavid Bey promised the construction rights to a French company; the company set to work at once but abandoned the project when the First World War broke out. After the war the line was taken up within the railway project of the American Chester group. On 27 April 1920, four days after the Grand National Assembly opened in Ankara, Law No. 449 decided on the construction of the Samsun-Sivas railway; the Chester project passed the Assembly on 9 April 1923 but could not be carried out because of political developments such as the Mosul question.

In the end the government decided to build the line with national resources. Following the Assembly's decision of 22 March 1924, construction began in January 1925. The Samsun-Havza section was finished in 1927; the opening ceremony of the station at Havza was reported in the magazines of the day in October of that year. The Havza-Amasya section was also completed in 1927, and Amasya Station entered service the same year. The line reached Zile in 1928 and Sivas in 1932; the railway of about 380 kilometres was opened to traffic in its entirety on 15 December 1932. The contract for the Samsun-Kavak section was taken by Nuri Demirağ, one of the first contractors of Republican railway construction; it was with this line that Demirağ began his career as a contractor.

Local contractors also worked on the line, and not all of them came out of it with a profit. Hüsameddin tells of Bayram Efendi of the Hacı Mahmud Ağazâde family, born in Havza in 1291 (1874-75), who served as trustee of the Seljuk endowments, as a member of the Havza administrative council and several times as mayor. Bayram Efendi had increased his fortune during the First World War, but suffered heavy losses on the section of the Amasya-Samsun railway he had contracted, and died of grief over it in 1347 (1928-29).

The railway also changed the plan of Amasya. The station was set up at Karaağaç Meydanı, at the foot of Harşena Castle, east of the Hızırpaşa neighbourhood. In his Amasya Hâtıraları, Osman Fevzi Olcay writes that before the First World War this square had a bad reputation and was left under police watch, and that with the coming of the railway the area changed completely and became one of the finest pleasure grounds close to the town. In Olcay's account the İçeri Şehir neighbourhood runs below the castle, "following the present railway", as far as the head of Meydan Köprüsü, and the bridge is also called İstasyon Köprüsü. The municipality sold the derelict old cemetery beside the road to the station to Arabacı Şükrü Usta, a cartwright, who put up a large building there and founded a workshop called the Şark Araba İmalathanesi, the Eastern Carriage Works.

The Line and the Station

Amasya lies on the railway between Samsun and Sivas. Known as the Samsun-Kalın railway, this line is standard gauge (1,435 millimetres) and has a total length of 377.762 kilometres; it has 39 stations from Samsun Station to Kalın station in the Yıldızeli district of Sivas. At Kalın it joins the Ankara-Kars line. Leaving Samsun, the line reaches the Amasya provincial border at about kilometre 96, by way of Havza; within the province it passes through Hacıbayram, Suluova, Boğazköy, Çeltek, Amasya, Eryatağı, Kayabaşı, Ovasaray and Kızılca before arriving at the Tokat border. About 98 kilometres of the line lie within Amasya's borders. Amasya Station is about 133 kilometres from Samsun Station. Official records give 130 kilometres to Samsun and 261 to Sivas, while another record gives 134 kilometres for Samsun; the difference appears to depend on whether the measurement is taken from the station or from the provincial border. That the line passes through Çeltek shows that the point where the old macadam road divided into the Amasya and Merzifon roads was a passage for the railway too.

Within the provincial borders, official records count two stations of the main kind and six smaller stations. The two are Amasya and Hacıbayram; the six are written as Kızılca, Kayabaşı, Eryatağı, Boğazköy, Suluova and Hacıbayram. Amasya Station stands in the Hızırpaşa neighbourhood in the city centre, on İstasyon Caddesi. It consists of one side platform and one island platform, has six tracks and is operated by TCDD Taşımacılık. The station building carries the features of the First National Architectural Movement of the early years of the Republic: it has a symmetrical plan, opens from a two-storey pointed-arch entrance in the middle into a wide waiting hall, and continues on both sides with wings of equal length. The station is about five kilometres from the bus terminal, and most hotels can be reached on foot.

Modernisation and Present-Day Services

The present state of the line is the product of a major renewal that began on 29 September 2015. During the modernisation, carried out with European Union grant support, the line was closed to traffic, the old rails were removed entirely, and the infrastructure and superstructure were rebuilt. In the course of the work 183 new switches were laid, 121 level crossings were renewed and connected to an automatic-barrier signalling system, 12 tunnels were improved and 19 passenger stops were built. Of the historic bridges on the line, 43 were restored and 37 were demolished and rebuilt. The cost of the project has been given as 260 million euros, of which 148.6 million euros were met by the EU grant. Signalling and telecommunications installations to European Union standards were installed, and lifts and ramps for accessibility were built at stops and in underpasses and overpasses. As a result of the renewal, the Samsun-Sivas journey time fell from 8 hours 50 minutes to 5 hours 45 minutes. The operating speed of the line is 60 kilometres per hour.

The first trial freight train ran on the renewed line on 5 May 2020; officials point out that the line is a strategic rail link between the ports of Samsun and Mersin, connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Amasya Station returned to service on 1 November 2020, but passenger services could resume only on 21 June 2022; between 2015 and 2022 no passenger train departed from Amasya.

Today three regional train services call at Amasya Station. The Samsun-Amasya service runs one return trip every day; the journey takes an average of 3 hours 9 minutes and the line has 11 stops. On the Amasya-Havza line three return trips run every day. The Samsun-Sivas train runs on certain days of the week, with one service each, leaving Samsun on Friday, Sunday and Tuesday and leaving Sivas on Thursday, Saturday and Monday. Because timetables change from time to time, TCDD Taşımacılık announcements should be consulted for current times. Since the line carries not only passengers but also freight, the flow of goods toward the port of Samsun can also run along this corridor.

Air Transport

The province's air gateway is Amasya Merzifon Airport in the Merzifon district. The airport, with the IATA code MZH and the ICAO code LTAP, is open to both civil and military use, and all its scheduled flights are domestic. Its distance from the city centre of Amasya is given as 46 kilometres in official records and 42 kilometres in another source; it is 5 to 7 kilometres from the Merzifon district centre. It is about 63 kilometres from Çorum and about 46 kilometres from Havza. The airport therefore serves not only Amasya but also the surroundings of Çorum and Havza. Because the airfield is used as the Air Force's 5th Main Jet Base, civil traffic shares its runways with military use.

The sources give different figures for the runways. Some records speak of a single runway oriented 05/23 and give its length as 2,927 metres in one place and 3,232 metres in another; a more recent record shows two parallel concrete runways 3,235 metres long. The difference may depend on the measurement method, on whether part of the runway is counted, or on whether the military runway is entered separately in civil records. There are also two figures for terminal capacity: older records give about 120,000 passengers a year, while current statistical tables list a capacity of 700,000 passengers. The car park holds 132 vehicles.

Turkish Airlines flights between Istanbul and Amasya Merzifon began on 20 June 2008 and operate every day of the week in both directions. Pegasus also flies three days a week between Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen and Merzifon. One record gives these days as Monday, Thursday and Saturday, another as Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Because schedules change seasonally, the flight days should be confirmed with the airline before travel. In addition, the airport in Samsun is about 130 kilometres from Amasya and is listed as the province's second air-transport option. The neighbouring provinces of Çorum, Tokat and Sivas also have their own airports, which are counted among small airfields open only to domestic flights; Merzifon, for its part, serves as a shared gateway for Amasya, Çorum and Havza.

Passenger statistics show how the airport is used. The total number of passengers, 13,888 in 2008, rose to 39,577 in 2009 and 113,458 in 2013, and reached its highest value in 2017; the figure for that year is given as 224,256 in one source and 221,996 in another. In the following years the figure was 180,471 in 2018 and 167,758 in 2019, and fell to 90,013 in 2020 because of the pandemic. The figure for 2023 is 131,513 in one source and 130,204 in the other. The recovery continued in the following years: 137,850 passengers were recorded in 2024 and 154,954 in 2025. Although scheduled flights are domestic, a number of international passengers appear in the statistics every year; in 2025 there were 17,489.

The Port of Samsun and Sea Transport

Amasya has no coastline of its own. The nearest port is Samsun, 130 kilometres away. Because both the railway and the road extend toward this port, the province's exports and imports pass through Samsun. Samsun Station is the zero-kilometre point of the railway line, and its connection with the port of Samsun is shown on the route map. For this reason the province's products can also be carried to the port by rail. The port's importance for Amasya is not new: from the middle of the nineteenth century the farm and livestock products of Central Anatolia were shipped from Samsun to Istanbul and abroad, and goods from outside were distributed to the interior through the same port. In the Crimean War and in the later wars with Russia, supplies gathered in the interior were also carried to the front from this port.

The Contribution of Transport to the Economy

Agricultural products grown in Amasya and the plains around it are carried by rail and road to surrounding markets and to the big cities. Suluova, 26 kilometres from the centre, is the largest settlement nearest to it and, as the most densely populated district of the province, has more than 100 people per square kilometre. Proximity to the port of Samsun also offers an advantage for exports. The air link makes access easier for visitors who wish to see the historic and natural attractions of the province; direct flights to Istanbul are the principal link in this access.

Chronology

1145-46: The Seljuk Sultan Mesud built the Sultan Bridge over the Yeşilırmak (on the site of today's İstasyon Köprüsü or about a hundred metres below it, depending on the source).

1374-75: Şadgeldi Paşa, emir of Amasya, rebuilt Meydan (İstasyon) Köprüsü in masonry.

1409-10: The Çeltek bridge in Suluova is attested in the records.

1635: Returning from the Yerevan campaign, Murad IV came by the Tokat-Turhal road to the Amasya station and passed on to Gelgiras the next day.

1660-61: Köprülü Mehmed Paşa endowed the caravanserai and covered market he had built in Gümüşhacıköy.

1741-42: The Janissary commander Zorluoğlu Mehmed Ağa scattered the brigands on the Amasya-Samsun road.

10 March 1789: The closed Turhal post station was ordered to reopen after the Tokat horses had been forced to cover the 18-hour road to Amasya.

1828-29: Meydan Köprüsü, wrecked in the flood of 1825-26, was renewed through Özlü Hacı Yusuf Ağa.

27 August 1857: Edward Price received verbal approval for a Samsun-Sivas railway; the project was not realised.

1864-65: The governor Ziya Paşa laid out the macadam road through the town and had a wooden bridge built on top of Alçak Köprü.

1881-82: Alçak Köprü, swept away in the flood of 1880-81, was rebuilt with masonry piers and a timber deck.

1907-08: The governor Ahmed Cevdet Bey separated Çakallar Deresi from the road with a tunnel passing beneath it.

27 April 1920: The Grand National Assembly decided on the construction of the Samsun-Sivas railway with Law No. 449.

January 1925: Construction of the Samsun-Sivas railway began.

1927: The Havza-Amasya section was completed; Amasya Station opened as part of the Samsun-Sivas railway line.

1928: The railway reached Zile from Amasya.

15 December 1932: The Samsun-Sivas railway opened to traffic in its entirety.

1940: The deck of İstasyon Köprüsü was widened and covered with concrete.

20 June 2008: Turkish Airlines flights between Istanbul and Amasya Merzifon began, and Merzifon airport opened to domestic civil traffic.

29 September 2015: The Samsun-Kalın railway was closed to traffic for modernisation.

5 May 2020: The first trial freight train ran on the renewed line.

1 November 2020: The renewed Amasya Station returned to service.

21 June 2022: The Samsun-Amasya and Amasya-Havza regional trains resumed service.

2025: Amasya Merzifon Airport handled 154,954 passengers.

Sources

Primary sources

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources