Çatalçam is one of the smallest villages of the Merkez (central) district of Amasya; in 2025 only 25 people were registered here. Until 1958 the village belonged not to Amasya but to the kaza of Taşova, and it was transferred to the central kaza by a single decision together with the villages of Beldağı and Yuva. This administrative change is the most concrete historical fact about the village to be found in written sources; no record of the settlement's foundation, the origin of its name or its earlier history has been found.

From Taşova to the Central District

By a decision dated 18 October 1958, published in the Official Gazette of 28 October 1958 and bearing the signatures of President C. Bayar, Prime Minister A. Menderes and Minister of the Interior Dr. N. Gedik, the villages of Beldağı, Çatalçam and Yuva, attached to the Tekke sub-district of the kaza of Taşova in the province of Amasya, were attached to the Ezinepazar sub-district of the central kaza of the same province. The reason for the decision is not given in the text. That the three villages are named together in a single article suggests that they formed a neighbouring group on the boundary. Çatalçam's place in the Tekke sub-district of Taşova until that date also suggests that the village lies today in a part of the central district close to the Taşova boundary. Village records of 2016 give Çatalçam's distance from Amasya as 47 kilometres.

The Name and Older Records

In Bekir Başalan's article tracing changes in village names, Çatalçam is counted among the hundred villages of the central district but is not included in the table of changed names. Since Başalan made this comparison with the village lists published from 1928 onwards, the Amasya population register of 1840 and the provincial yearbooks, it follows that there is no trace of the village appearing under a different name in these sources. Going further back, to the sixteenth century, there is no trace either: in the village index of the register of 937 (1530), neither Çatalçam nor any similar village name appears among the sub-districts of the Amasya province. This silence is open to two different readings, that the village was recorded under another name at that date or that it was founded later, and on its own it leads to no conclusion. Since villages with the same name exist in other provinces of Anatolia, every record in which the name Çatalçam occurs must be checked separately to see whether it belongs to this village.

Population

Çatalçam's decline began before the address-based records. According to earlier censuses the village had 114 residents in 1985, 98 in 1990 and 84 in 2000; the same records note that the village had a primary-school building, but that the school was not in use and the children were bused to school elsewhere. In 2007, 58 people lived in the village; the figure fell slowly to 41 by 2013 and rose again to 57 in 2017. The real break came after that: the population dropped to 39 in 2019, 32 in 2020 and 26 in 2021. Steady between 25 and 27 over the last five years, the village had 13 men and 12 women registered in 2025. In the forty years since 1985 the village has lost more than three-quarters of its population.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Other sources

Online sources