Çulpara is a village of Göynücek built where Karadağ descends towards Amasya, close to the stretch where the Çorum Çayı joins the Çekerek River. In the mid-nineteenth century it was one of the most populous winter quarters of the Milli, a semi-nomadic Kurdish tribe, in the Mecitözü area, and the registers preserve even the name of its headman. Home to 179 people today, Çulpara is one of the few villages in the district that has managed to hold its population in recent years.

Name and Location

The name Çulpara has remained unchanged in official records; it does not appear in Bekir Başalan's table of the nine settlements in Göynücek whose names were changed. No sourced explanation of the meaning or origin of the name has been found. The clearest description of the village's location comes from Murat Alandağlı. Describing the winter quarters of the Milli tribe, Alandağlı writes that Çulpara and Gaffarlı, lying where Karadağ gradually descends towards Amasya and the Çorum Çayı meets the Çekerek, had the features needed for settlement. He also reads the division of both places into a lower and an upper part as a sign of their aptitude for settled life.

Winter Quarters of the Milli Tribe

The Milli were a large semi-nomadic Kurdish tribe whose origins lay in eastern and south-eastern Anatolia. From the late eighteenth century part of the tribe moved north, and towards the middle of the nineteenth century it made the mountain slopes and uplands of the Mecitözü area its home. Sabit Genç notes that in 1838-39 the tribe had 1,235 males in 429 households in its winter quarters on and around Karadağ, and that most of these quarters later became villages around those of the Gökçeli Yörüks. Among the winter quarters Genç lists are Çulpara, alongside today's villages of Başpınar, Şıhoğlu, Çayan, İkizyaka, Kafarlı, Koyuncu and Şarklı. The two communities had to share the summer pastures of Karadağ.

In the census registers Alandağlı examined, the winter quarter of Çulpara is recorded as belonging to the Hasan Paşa clan of the tribe. In the first register, which gives no household figures, 53 people are counted at Çulpara; one of the later registers records 91 households and 175 people, the others 50 households and 140 people and 47 households and 133 people. On these figures Çulpara, together with Kebir (Büyükkışla), Badın and Gaffarlı, was among the winter quarters with the densest Milli population. One register also states that the headman of the quarter was Halil bin Ali, aged 63. The revenue records show that the income of the Çulpara quarter from both shares belonged to İbrahim of Sivas, a retired timar-holding cavalryman.

The transformation of the tribal winter quarters into villages was completed in the Republican period. Showing that the names of the Milli quarters largely remained unchanged, Alandağlı notes that Çulpara appears on the map of 1945 and is recorded in the village list of 1968 as a village of Göynücek. Çulpara is not, however, on the list of villages that Mehmet Özsait surveyed systematically in Göynücek in 1987 and 1989, and no publication reporting a mound or historic building on village land has been found.

Population

Çulpara's population has not undergone the rapid decline seen in most villages of Göynücek. The population, 159 in 2007, stayed between 140 and 170 for fifteen years, reaching its lowest point of 142 in 2022. The figure then rose again to 158 in 2024 and 179 in 2025. The latest count records 92 men and 87 women in the village; this is almost exactly the 175 people that one of the nineteenth-century registers gives for the winter quarter.

Bibliography

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