In the Ottoman period Amasya was a sanjak capital that raised princes, but it was also a provincial city whose daily life was shaped by its neighborhoods, markets, caravanserais and craft organizations. Evliya Çelebi, who traveled through the city in the middle of the seventeenth century, describes Amasya in the Seyahatname according to the scheme he applied to every major Ottoman town, and his account puts beside the dry figures of the archival registers a picture of how the city looked: how many neighborhoods, shops and mosques it had, and how its vineyards were watered.

The defining feature of the city is that it stands in a narrow valley squeezed onto both banks of the Yeşilırmak. The narrowness of the valley restricted settlement for centuries, so that Amasya, rather than growing into a large metropolis, remained a dense, many-quartered town ringed by vineyards and water wheels. The closeness between Evliya Çelebi's figures and those of the sixteenth-century registers points the same way: over two centuries the number of neighborhoods hardly changed, while the population rose slowly.

Evliya Çelebi and Amasya

The Seyahatname is divided into volumes following Evliya Çelebi's successive journeys and contains the record of a traveler who crossed the Ottoman lands. According to the Seyahatname entry of the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, the second volume describes Bursa, İzmit, Amasra, Sinop, Samsun and Trabzon along the Black Sea coast, and also gives information on Düzce, Bolu, Gerede, Amasya, Niksar, Erzurum, Merzifon and Çorum. The date of his visit to Amasya is uncertain. Some publications place the visit in April 1640, while researchers working on Amasya generally speak only of the middle of the century. In addition, in different editions of the Seyahatname the Amasya account is cited under different volumes and page numbers, so that the same passage is attributed to the second volume in some articles and to the third in others.

Evliya Çelebi describes cities according to a set scheme. Geographical position and history come first, followed by the buildings, with the history, architectural value and present condition of the fortress and the mosques; then the way of life of the inhabitants, their character, level of education, dress, crafts and customs are treated, and the account ends with promenades and places of pilgrimage. The Amasya section follows this order, and for that reason it is a useful source for the economic and social structure of the city. On the other hand, Evliya Çelebi's numbers are sometimes round and serve the narrative as much as observation, so his figures need to be read together with other documents.

The Sanjak of Amasya within the Rum Province

When Amasya came under Ottoman administration it became the center of a sanjak of the same name. According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, the sanjak, together with Tokat and Sivas, was an important administrative unit of the Rum province and at first served as the province's center. The Rum Province was established in 1398, its seat was first in Tokat, then moved to Amasya, and from 1526 onward was Sivas. This sequence makes sense when considered together with the century in which Amasya shone as a princely sanjak; the city was one of the weighty centers of the provinces, militarily and administratively.

The size of the sanjak changed over time. At the beginning of the sixteenth century it consisted of the central district of Amasya together with the districts of Lâdik and Merzifon; the district of Amasya had six subdistricts and 321 villages. In the record of 1576-1577 the number of districts rose to seven with the addition of Gümüş, Gedegra, Zeytun and Simre-i Lâdik. Evliya Çelebi writes that in the mid-seventeenth century the sanjak had nine districts. In documents of 1665 this number is eleven, and in documents of 1671 it falls to ten. At the end of the nineteenth century the sanjak, attached to the province of Sivas, consisted of eight districts: Amasya center, Merzifon, Vezirköprü, Osmancık, Gümüşhacıköy, Lâdik, Havza and Mecidözü. This fluctuation shows that the boundaries of the sanjak were not a fixed line but were redrawn according to the needs of taxation and administration.

Where administrative business was conducted in the city is also of interest. In Ottoman cities the governors mostly used their own residences as administrative centers, and separate government buildings did not play a decisive part in the physical structure of the city until the Tanzimat period. In Amasya, however, it is clear that there was a place where judicial matters were handled; Evliya Çelebi calls the Burmalı Minare Mosque the Court Mosque, and this name suggests that the mosque housed the kadi's court.

Fifty-Three Neighborhoods

According to Evliya Çelebi, Amasya had a total of fifty-three neighborhoods, forty-eight Muslim and five non-Muslim. He gives the population of the city as five thousand households, that is, an estimated twenty thousand people. This number of neighborhoods agrees to a large extent with the archival records. According to the first survey of 1520, examined by Selim Özcan, the city had fifty-two neighborhoods, forty-eight Muslim and four non-Muslim. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi speaks of fifty-five neighborhoods for 1525, five of them non-Muslim, and again of fifty-five for the end of the sixteenth century, six of them non-Muslim. In the nineteenth century the number of neighborhoods had fallen to about thirty-six.

The population figures vary more. The register of 1520 shows 1042 Muslim households, 471 unmarried men and 324 non-Muslim households; at five persons per household the population of the city comes to about 7300, and when palace servants and the military class are added it reaches about 8000. At the end of the sixteenth century the population had risen to 10,000, while the non-Muslim population had fallen to about 1500. Evliya Çelebi's estimate of twenty thousand is far above these figures. The difference may come from a real increase, but it may also come from the traveler's generous count of households; the choice of multiplier between households and persons is decisive in such calculations. In any case it is accepted that the population grew in the seventeenth century but that the city did not expand much physically, the reason being the position of the city, which was not favorable for growth. In the nineteenth century the population stood between 25,000 and 30,000.

In an Ottoman city the neighborhood was an administrative, fiscal and social subunit; it was a community of families who prayed in the same small mosque and knew one another. Neighborhoods generally formed around a mosque, small mosque, madrasa, lodge or soup kitchen and took their name from that building. Sometimes a market, a fountain or a square, and sometimes a well-known scholar or sheikh of the area, gave the neighborhood its name. All three tendencies are seen in Amasya: of the fifty-two neighborhoods, fifteen bear the names of mosques, small mosques, soup kitchens and madrasas, six the names of markets and bazaars, and fifteen the names of scholars, sheikhs and dervishes. Names such as Hacı Hamza, Hatuniye, Yakutiye, Bayezid Paşa, Mehmed Paşa, Şamlar, Gökmedrese and Sofular derive from founders, endowments and buildings, while names such as Kazancı, Saraçhane, Pirinççi, Bozahane and Devehane point to the economic function of the neighborhood. The separation of Muslim and non-Muslim neighborhoods was a result of the tendency of people of the same religion to live together. In the survey records, non-Muslim households are seen to be concentrated in neighborhoods such as Acemali and Saraçhane.

Mosques, Madrasas and Dervish Lodges

The backbone of the neighborhood order was the religious buildings, and Evliya Çelebi gives a large number on this subject: the mosques of Amasya altogether number about two hundred, and the traveler names nine mosques and twenty small mosques among them. This number appears to include small mosques and minor places of worship; according to Özcan's calculation for the princely period, a mosque was built in thirteen of the forty-eight Muslim neighborhoods, and twenty-five small mosques were built in the twenty-four neighborhoods without a mosque, so that over the hundred and eighty-two years of the princely governorship a total of thirty-seven mosques and small mosques were added. The traveler's figure of two hundred therefore reflects a general impression rather than the result of a count. A record from the beginning of the sixteenth century counts nine mosques, ten madrasas, four lodges, six soup kitchens and fifteen baths. Dernschwam writes that in 1555 he counted eleven mosques in the city.

The mosque in which Friday prayers were performed in the city was the Fethiye Mosque, converted from a Nestorian monastery after the Danishmend conquest. When the Bayezid II Complex was finished in 1486, the mosque of the complex took on the role of Friday mosque. Prince Ahmed laid the foundation of the complex in 1481, the year his father Bayezid ascended the throne; the complex consists of a mosque, madrasa, primary school, soup kitchen and ablution fountain. In the princely period Amasya had three complexes: this one, the complex built by Yörgüç Paşa in 1431, and the complex built by Vizier Mehmed Paşa in 1495. The Yörgüç Paşa Complex consisted of a mosque, a tomb, a soup kitchen and a madrasa of four rooms.

Dervish lodges were a separate branch of neighborhood life. Evliya Çelebi says that there were about forty buildings of the Sufi orders in and around Amasya. The largest and most perfect among them is the Mevlevi lodge; according to the traveler, the building was roofed with domes and vaults, the domes of the semahane and safahane were covered with lead, the other parts with tile, and its poor and dervishes were orderly and vied with one another in service and hospitality. The Hızır İlyas Lodge, the Gökmedrese Lodge, the Müftüzade Ahmed Efendi Lodge, the Şamlar Lodge, the Gülabizade Lodge, the Pirler Lodge, the Kanlı Pazarı Kadiri Lodge and the Miskinler Lodge are the other important buildings he names. He names the Halveti sheikh Zekeriya Pir İlyas as the founder and head sheikh of the Hızır İlyas Lodge and writes that his tomb is in Saraçlar and had become a place of pilgrimage visited by everyone.

The Fortress and the Security of the City

The fortress on Mount Harşena in the north of the city kept its importance in the Ottoman period as well. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the fortress had a commander, a steward and fifty-seven garrison soldiers; there were mud-brick houses inside the fortress, and the fortress staff lived there. Every day, morning and evening, trumpets and drums were sounded from the fortress toward the city. Five granaries are reported as set aside for storing provisions.

Evliya Çelebi writes that the fortress contained an old-style palace, a mosque in the name of Yıldırım Bayezid, gunpowder stores, a wheat granary and cisterns. It is reported that in describing the mosque he said its ceilings rose to the sky. This mosque is the structure whose remains are reported to have been found in the excavations at Harşena; the excavation director Emine Dönmez has said that a square foundation wall, a fire pit thought to be the base of a minaret, and a large number of nails, spikes and door fittings were found, and that these finds suggest the timber elements of the building. Another detail the traveler records about the function of the fortress is also significant: against the raids of the Celali bandits the wealthy of the city carried their valuables up into the fortress. From the second half of the seventeenth century the fortress began to fall into neglect and lose its former importance, and after the eighteenth century it fell into ruin.

Market, Bedesten and Caravanserais

According to Evliya Çelebi, Amasya had about 1060 shops, and its markets were busy and rich. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi places this record beside the count of nearly 2500 weavers made by the French geographer Vital Cuinet at the end of the nineteenth century, and concludes that the city had a lively industrial and commercial life. Following Suraiye Faroqhi's criterion, Özcan counts settlements with between 1000 and 3000 taxpayers (a population of 5000 to 10,000) as medium-sized cities, and places Amasya in this group even in its princely period. This gap between its political weight and its population is explained by the narrow settlement area of the city inside the valley.

In an Ottoman city the center of the market was the bedesten. The bedesten was a covered market where the great merchants were found and where mostly luxury goods and goods in transit trade were bought and sold, and it existed only in large, rich cities. In Amasya the bedesten was built in 1483 in the Kazancı neighborhood, on the south side of the Helkıs Bridge, by Hüseyin Ağa, one of the chamberlains of Bayezid II. Around the bedesten the market known as Aşağı Pazar (Lower Market) developed, and in the Ottoman period this market became still more active. Later another market place, called Yukarı Pazar (Upper Market), was set up around the Kapan Han. At the beginning of the sixteenth century there was a market called İbadullah in the Bozahane neighborhood, and another market known as Kağnı or Kanlı Pazarı near the Aydın small mosque and bath in the Devehane neighborhood.

Caravanserais were the places where visiting merchants and travelers lodged. Among the buildings that brought life to the Aşağı Pazar district are named the Bayram Paşa Han, the Bakırcıoğlu Han, the Menzilci Mirza Hans and the Bezzâzistan; this information is compiled from sources between the princely period and the seventeenth century. The position of Amasya at a crossroads explains the existence of these caravanserais. The trade route linking Tarsus, Kayseri, Zile and Samsun passed through the city, and the road from Azerbaijan to Bursa also went by it. For that reason the city was an important market for silks coming from Iran.

Baths, fountains and squares accompanied the public life of the city. Among the baths recorded are the bath built in 1436 in the Mehmed Paşa neighborhood by Mustafa Bey, the son of Yörgüç Paşa, the bath of Hızır Paşa dated 1466, the Kumacık Bath of 1495 in the Bayezid Paşa neighborhood, and the bath of 1511 built in the Kayabaşı neighborhood by Sinan Paşa, the governor-general of Sivas. Some of the fountains belong to the city's merchants; Hoca Acem Ali of Nishapur had a fountain built in 1465 in front of his house in the neighborhood named after him. In the west of the city, on the flat ground at the head of the Meydan Bridge, there was an Archery Ground where archery was taught, and south of the Yeşilırmak a Pilgrims' Square where the pilgrims gathered.

Guilds and Production

In Ottoman cities the craftsmen worked within guild organizations that the kadi registered and supervised. Weavers' guilds had a staff made up of a sheikh at the head, a steward (kâhya or kethüda), a yiğitbaşı, an işçibaşı and two experts. The sheikh was a respected person who could read and write and managed financial affairs, the kethüda an experienced master who had reached the peak of the craft, and the yiğitbaşı the person who kept order, and this governing group was approved and registered by the kadi. The main duty of the organization was to prevent poor or incompletely finished cloth from reaching the market, to seal good cloth, and to oversee the examinations held for the promotion of apprentices to journeymen and of journeymen to masters. Price and quality rules were set by the market-inspection codes and by the price registers. This general framework is not separately documented for Amasya, but it is assumed that the craft organizations of the city also followed the same order.

The best information specific to Amasya's craftsmen comes from neighborhood names and census records. The neighborhood names Kazancı, Saraçhane, Pirinççi, Bozahane and Devehane show which trades were concentrated in those quarters; in Ottoman cities it was usual for a neighborhood name to come from a group of craftsmen. In the population register of 1840 and the temettuat registers of 1844-1845, from the middle of the nineteenth century, occupations such as saddler, tanner, farrier, butcher, tailor, barber and gardener appear. These records belong to two centuries after Evliya Çelebi and give only an idea of the variety of crafts.

Silk holds a special place in the productive life of the city. In the sixteenth century Amasya had a dye-house, a candle-house and a mint, and silk weaving was widely practiced. The Ottoman administration supervised the silk trade closely. The amount of silk fabric that entered the city by official channels and was weighed within ten months in 1554-1555 was 10,632 lodra, about fifteen tons. Because the city lay on the Azerbaijan-Bursa road, it was an important market for silks coming from Iran, and this figure gives the measure of that trade. In the two hundred and more estates examined in seven registers of the Amasya court records for 1784-1880, fifty-nine different fabrics were identified, a hundred and five varieties with their subtypes, and the most frequently seen fabric was found to be printed cotton, followed by broadcloth. According to this study, one in every four fabrics used in the city was brought from outside the city.

Water, Vineyards and Fruit

One of the subjects on which Evliya Çelebi dwells most in describing Amasya is water and the vineyards and gardens. He writes that the Yeşilırmak comes to the city from the south, waters many thousands of vineyards and gardens, and flows north turning many hundreds of water wheels, and he points out that the water wheels of Hama, Adana and Amasya are famous. This observation does not stand alone. In the fourteenth century Ibn Battuta described Amasya as a city on a large river, surrounded by vineyards and melon gardens and full of orchards, and wrote that houses and gardens were watered by wheels set up on the river. Abu al-Fida, a writer of the same period, also records that the city had many gardens and water wheels. At the beginning of the nineteenth century James Morier saw countless water wheels beating on the river from the fortress, and Victor Fontanier wrote that the horse-driven wheels were far more numerous than elsewhere in Asia.

What Evliya Çelebi records about fruit is detailed. He writes that Amasya produced forty kinds of pears, ruby-colored cherries, seven kinds of juicy grapes, mulberries and seven kinds of bread quinces, and that quince preserve had no equal anywhere. As drinks he lists molasses sherbet scented with musk and amber and quince-preserve sherbet, and says that these are as beneficial in great heat and in the heat of the bath as sealed clay; the grape must strained through felt, called deliyoran, he finds ruby-colored and very strengthening. This list shows the variety of vineyard and garden production. The idea that mulberry trees and silkworm rearing were widespread in the city rests on other sources, and the Amasya apple does not appear in this list of fruits by Evliya Çelebi. The fame of the Amasya apple belongs to later centuries.

The Same City through Other Eyes

The city described by Evliya Çelebi can be framed by the records of travelers who came before and after. Hans Dernschwam, who came to Amasya on 7 April 1555 with the Austrian embassy, writes that he saw a dense settlement in a narrow valley, that most of the houses were two-storied and of mud brick, and that they looked piled one upon another. He counted one wooden and three stone bridges over the Yeşilırmak, described a great fire that broke out on 14 April 1555 and the quick rebuilding of the burned houses, and portrayed the princely palace as a simple one-storied brick building with a garden at the foot of the mountain. He also records that Süleyman the Magnificent was residing there at the time.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Morier writes that amid the uniformity created by flat-roofed houses the mosque minarets gave variety, and that the finest building was the Bayezid II Mosque by the river. Georges Perrot, who came in 1861, calls Amasya the Oxford of Anatolia and says that nearly 2000 students were studying in the madrasas. Read together, these notes show that the basic appearance of the city, with its neighborhoods squeezed into a narrow valley, linked by bridges over both banks of the river and surrounded by vineyards and water wheels, did not undergo great change over the centuries. Physical growth continued until the beginning of the sixteenth century and afterward gave way to densification. With the end of the princely governorships the cultural and commercial vitality of the city also weakened gradually.

Chronology

1398: The Rum Province is established; its seat is first Tokat, then Amasya.

1483: A bedesten is built in the Kazancı neighborhood by Hüseyin Ağa.

1486: The Bayezid II Complex is completed and the Sultan Bayezid Mosque becomes the Friday mosque.

1520: The first survey; 52 neighborhoods are recorded, 48 Muslim and 4 non-Muslim.

1525: According to the records the city has 55 neighborhoods and a population of about 8000.

1526: The seat of the Rum Province becomes Sivas.

1554-1555: The silk fabric entering the city in ten months is weighed at 10,632 lodra.

1555: Hans Dernschwam arrives in Amasya and a great fire breaks out in the city.

Around 1640 and later: The journey in which Evliya Çelebi describes Amasya; the date of the visit is given differently in the sources.

1665 and 1671: The number of districts of the sanjak is recorded as eleven and ten respectively.

1808-1809: James Morier passes through Amasya.

1861: Georges Perrot visits the city.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Seyahatnâme" and "Evliya Çelebi" entries. https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/seyahatname--evliya-celebi
  • Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, Book 2, ed. Zekeriya Kurşun, Seyit Ali Kahraman, Yücel Dağlı, Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2006.
  • "Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesinde Anlatılan Tekke ve Zaviyeler", Turkish Studies, 15/7 (2020).
  • "Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesinde Meyve", Motif Akademi.
  • Amasya Şer'iyye Sicillerindeki Dokuma Ürünleri (1784-1880) and Selim Özcan, H.1256 (1840) Tarihli Amasya Nüfus Defteri ile H.1260-1261 (1844-1845) Tarihli Amasya Temettuat Defterlerinin Karşılaştırmalı Değerlendirmesi.
  • Rum Eyaleti, Vikipedi; Seyahatnâme (Evliya Çelebi), Vikipedi.

Academic studies

  • TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Amasya" entry. https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/amasya
  • Selim Özcan, "Amasya'da Sancak Beyliği Yapan Şehzadeler Döneminde Amasya Şehri", Amasya Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, no. 5.
  • Duygu Kalkan Açıkkapı, "19. Yüzyılda ve 20. Yüzyıl Başlarında Amasya Kent Merkezinde Yeşilırmak Üzerindeki Su Yapıları", Amasya Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, Amasya Special Issue, 2022.

Other sources

  • TRT Haber report on the Harşena Fortress excavations and the remains of the Yıldırım Han Mosque.

Online sources