Bayat, 65 kilometres from the city centre, is among the villages of the central district of Amasya lying farthest from the centre, and over the last forty years it has lost almost all of its population. The village, which had 312 inhabitants in the 1985 census, had only 35 registered residents in 2025. Written information about it is scarce; what there is consists of a few official records, population series and the traces of the name in old registers.

Places of the Same Name

The name Bayat occurs in more than one place around Amasya. There is also a village called Bayat in the Merzifon district today; Bekir Başalan's list based on 2024 data counts the two villages separately, one among the villages of the central district and the other among those of Merzifon. The village described here is the one in the central district. Bayat does not appear in Başalan's table of renamed settlements. The name itself is also found in the biographical volumes of Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar among the fourteenth-century beys of Amasya: Pehlivanoğlu Bayat Bey and İnaçoğlu Bayat Bey are men who bore it. Hüsâmeddîn does not connect these men with any village, so there is no basis for saying that the village took its name from them.

Two Bayads in the Register of 1530

The published index of the 1530 accounting register lists two villages called "Bayad" in the kaza of Amasya: one in the western nahiye of Geldiklan-âbâd (register p. 361), the other in the nahiye of Yavaş (p. 375). Among the villages of the Yavaş nahiye are the old names of central-district villages now called Yolyanı, Yeşilöz, Sarımeşe, Aydınca and Ümük, namely Haniski, Kirap, Efte, Zigala and İmük; these correspondences can be traced in Başalan's table. Which of the two entries corresponds to the Bayat of the central district, or whether it corresponds to either of them, cannot be determined from the index. The register shows only that the name and the page exist; the number of households in the village that year is not given in the index on which this article relies.

Village Services and Population

Official village data archived in 2016 show that Bayat had a working primary school and that bussed schooling was also provided; the village had no health post, but it did have a postal agency, a drinking water network and a sewage system. The population series shows a continuous decline. The censuses recorded 312 people in 1985, 285 in 1990 and 189 in 2000. The population, 125 in 2007 when address-based registration began, fell to 84 in 2012 and 48 in 2018; in 2025 the village had 35 inhabitants, 17 men and 18 women. Nine tenths of the population have been lost in forty years, and although the decline has slowed in recent years, it has not stopped.

Bibliography

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