A city's infrastructure is usually an arrangement that works out of sight. The streetlamp that comes on, the water that runs from the tap and the wastewater carried out of town through underground lines are noticed only when they fail. Amasya's modern infrastructure took shape in the same way, through the accumulation of many small and large decisions that depended on one another. At the center of this accumulation lies the Yeşilırmak, which divides the city in two. The river has been a source of drinking and irrigation water and of electricity, and in flood years it has been a threat the whole region had to reckon with.

The year in which electricity and piped water first reached Amasya is not given as a clear date in the published sources. For that reason no precise date is offered here for the city center. The developments are told first within the general course of events in Turkey and then through the documented examples from Amasya Province: the municipal power plant in Merzifon, the Durucasu plant, the Almus Dam, the rubber weir on the Yeşilırmak and today's inventory of power stations.

The Beginnings of Electricity in Turkey

Electricity entered Ottoman lands during the reign of Abdülhamid II. Concession proposals to light Istanbul with electricity were rejected in 1889 on the grounds that the city's layout and street pattern were unsuited to electric lighting, and only the palaces were permitted to use it. In cities such as Beirut, Izmir, Salonica and Damascus, however, electricity spread earlier. In Anatolia the first attempt at production was made in Tarsus. The sources mention a small 2-kilowatt dynamo driven by a watermill in 1902. The plant, promoted by Dörfler, an Austrian who looked after the municipality's technical affairs, opened a few years later, probably in 1905-1906, and until the First World War it lit the streets and a few houses. A date of 1910 is also given for Tarsus's electrical infrastructure, and at that stage the sources speak of a 75-kilowatt hydroelectric plant on the bank of the Berdan River. That the sources give dates that are close but not identical shows how hard it is to document these early installations.

The first large plant in Istanbul was the Silahtarağa Thermal Power Station. Some sources give 1913, others the opening of 14 February 1914. The plant served until 1983. In the Ottoman Empire the production and distribution of electricity counted as a public service, and the right to operate it was granted by concession, most often to foreign-capital companies. The concession law of 1910 and the provisional provincial law of 1913 formed the legal framework of this arrangement. Provincial special administrations could be granted electricity, gas and tramway concessions for no more than forty years, while the authority to supervise the work remained with the Ministry of Public Works (Nafia Nezareti). Municipalities also obtained concessions themselves. Edirne received its electricity rights in 1909, Eskişehir in 1919, and Samsun from 1920 for sixty years.

Electricity and Municipalities in the Early Republic

When the Republic was proclaimed, the country had about 38 power plants with a total installed capacity of roughly 33 megawatts and an annual output of 44.5 million kilowatt-hours. Most of them ran on engines; fourteen belonged to individuals, thirteen to partnerships and eleven to municipalities. The sources name only Istanbul, Adapazarı and Tarsus as electrified towns, while another account lists Istanbul, Izmir, Mersin and Adapazarı. Ninety-four percent of the population lived without electricity, and annual consumption per person was between three and five kilowatt-hours. Capital, operating experience and technical staff were all lacking. For that reason new concessions were granted in the 1920s for cities such as Ankara, Adana, Bursa, Mersin, Balıkesir, Gaziantep, Tekirdağ and Edirne. The Ankara Electric Turkish Joint-Stock Company was founded in 1927, the Adana and Urfa companies in 1929, the Konya company in 1930 and the Malatya company in 1931.

The Municipal Law No. 1580, adopted in 1930, expressly listed electric and gas lighting, the tramway and water installations among the duties of municipalities. The law also provided that the facilities of concession companies would pass to the municipalities free of charge when the term expired. This provision opened the way for electricity and water in smaller towns to be run by the municipality itself. İller Bankası was founded in 1933, and Etibank, the General Directorate of Mineral Research and Exploration and the Electrical Power Resources Survey Administration followed in 1935. In that same year installed capacity in the country reached 126.2 megawatts, production 213 million kilowatt-hours, and the number of electrified provincial centers 43. Between 1938 and 1944 the concessions of foreign-capital companies were bought by the state and transferred to the municipalities.

The electricity service of small towns in these years was very different from that of the large cities. Of the 165 plants in service by the end of 1940, municipalities operated 125. Of a total of 174 plants, 125 had a capacity below one hundred kilowatts, 41 between one hundred and one thousand kilowatts, and only eight above one thousand. The plants broke down often, could not be maintained by specialists, and many institutions could not open engineer and technician posts because of financial difficulty. Given this general picture, it was normal for a district municipality in Anatolia to make do with a single engine-driven plant.

Early Examples of Electricity in Amasya Province

The earliest documented example of electricity within Amasya Province is in Merzifon. The Merzifon Municipal Power Plant began producing electricity in 1931. The change that electricity brought to the district was not confined to economic growth. A cinema and a printing house opened in the town in the same period. The building known as Motorhane was an industrial facility that supplied the region with energy in the 1930s. After standing idle for many years, it was taken up by the Merzifon Municipality in 2014, within the culture-oriented development strategy, with the aim of converting it into a cultural center.

The first step in the conversion came in 2016, when the Merzifon Municipality and the ÇEKÜL Foundation launched the Motorhane Cultural Center as a project. The project was later taken over by the Motorhane Culture Network, which received a grant from the Ortaklaşa program that the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts runs with European Union support. The network is led by the Sinop Sustainable Development Association, and its partners are the Merzifon Municipality, the Urban.koop Urban Studies Cooperative and the ÇEKÜL Foundation. The opening events took place on 22-24 May 2025, and the program included forums, film screenings, a concert and an exhibition called "Şimdiki Zaman" (The Present Time). Plans call for open-air cinema, concerts and workshops in the summer, with arrangements to be made in the garden and the annex, and for a protocol with Amasya University for applied courses. The old power plant has thus moved from producing energy to producing culture.

The picture for Amasya's city center can be drawn mostly from general statistics. Between 1937 and 1950 the number of electrified provincial centers in the country rose from 49 to 62, district centers from 84 to 198, sub-district centers from 15 to 28 and villages from 5 to 12. The number of subscribers rose from 206,146 to 517,412 over the same period. The sources do not separate out what share of these figures belongs to Amasya. Still, remembering that at the beginning of 1950 installed capacity stood at 407.8 megawatts and production at 789.5 million kilowatt-hours, it is clear that electricity in the daily life of a provincial center like Amasya was a limited and intermittent service.

The Limits of Electrified Town Life

In the 1950s regular electricity could not be supplied outside the large cities. Many centers had electricity only partially, enough to benefit from the morning and noon radio broadcasts. In most places power was supplied only after dark, until ten or eleven at night. Because the voltage was low the lamps burned weakly, and faults on the lines could leave towns without electricity for days, sometimes weeks. The change from gas lamps to electric bulbs did not happen in a day under such conditions. It entered homes, the market and workshops gradually. A line fed by a small plant connected to a single machine could run mill and workshop motors as well as lighting, and this gave small industry its first opening.

In those same years the country used very little of its water power. According to the calculations of the Electrical Power Resources Survey Administration, Turkey's water power was 4 million kilowatts, and the energy that could be produced each year from the Yeşilırmak, Kızılırmak, Sakarya, Gediz, Göksu and Euphrates rivers was about 12 billion kilowatt-hours in total. As of 1951 only 10,762 kilowatts of this potential, about one four-hundredth, was in use, and electricity could be supplied to only ten or twelve villages in the whole country. That the Yeşilırmak was one of the six rivers named in this list shows what kind of potential Amasya held in terms of energy.

Dams on the Yeşilırmak and Durucasu

The first major link between the Yeşilırmak and electricity generation grew out of the effort to control floods. A major flood struck the region in 1951, and the State Hydraulic Works (DSİ), following its surveys, decided to build a dam to bring the river's flow under control. The dam, built upstream of Amasya in the Almus district of Tokat, had its foundation laid in 1957 and was completed in 1966. It was opened by the prime minister of the day, Süleyman Demirel. The earth-fill dam rises 78 meters above the riverbed, with a lake area of 31.3 square kilometers and a storage volume of 950 million cubic meters. The three-unit power plant has a capacity of 27 megawatts and produces about 99 gigawatt-hours of electricity a year. The same facility irrigates an area of 21,350 hectares. The reservoir is also used for fishing, and when the lake receded in 2022 the remains of a village that had gone under water fifty-five years earlier came to light.

In dry years such as 2014 and 2017, Almus's hydroelectric output fell by 33 and 37 percent respectively. This figure also shows that hydroelectric production depends on rainfall and the regime of the river. For a dam meant to provide flood control, irrigation and power together, a dry year tests all three functions at once.

One of the first hydroelectric plants built by the State Hydraulic Works within Amasya is Durucasu. In the DSİ list found in the sources, Durucasu appears as a plant that entered service in 1955 with an installed capacity of 0.8 megawatts and an annual output of 3 gigawatt-hours. Small as it is in power, it is among the earliest records showing that Amasya began to obtain electricity from its rivers and streams in the Republican period. Another plant with a similar name appears in today's inventory in Taşova as the 1.07-megawatt Durucasu HES, and yet another as the 10-megawatt Duru HES. Since the sources do not explain how these relate to the 1955 installation, they are not linked to it here.

Water and Sewerage

Amasya's water culture is far older than its electricity. In the Ottoman period water was brought to the city by means of fountains, water channels and pious endowments (waqfs). In the Republican period this long tradition continued through piped water. The Municipal Law of 1930 made water installations a duty of municipalities, and İller Bankası was founded in 1933. No published chronology has been found that would allow the development of Amasya's drinking water and sewerage network to be followed year by year, so the information below shows only the present situation.

The Water and Sewerage Directorate of the Amasya Municipality carries out drinking water, sewerage and rainwater services within the municipal boundaries and adjoining areas. According to current figures the city has 28 water reservoirs, one wastewater treatment plant and 57,586 active water subscribers. The drinking water network is about 422 kilometers long, the sewerage network about 240 kilometers and the rainwater lines about 44.5 kilometers. Ninety-nine percent of households are connected to the sewer, and the remaining one percent use septic tanks. The drinking water system is monitored by SCADA, and disinfection and the biological and bacteriological analysis of the water are the directorate's responsibility. The directorate's declared aim is to maintain, repair and renew these three services in newly zoned areas and in all neighborhoods.

Bridges and the Riverbank

Because the Yeşilırmak runs through the city, a large part of its infrastructure consists of bridges. The Low Bridge (Alçak Köprü), built in the Roman period to connect the castle and its surroundings to the opposite bank, was constructed with four high arches of evenly cut stone. As the riverbed rose over time the piers were buried and only the upper parts of the arches remained visible, and because the deck came close to the water the townspeople gave the bridge this name. In 1865 Ziya Paşa, then governor of Amasya, had piers built above the arches. The clock tower that Ziya Paşa had built on the Nergis Bridge in the same year withstood a major earthquake seventy-five years after its construction, but it was demolished in 1940 on the grounds that it stood in the way of the Hükümet Bridge. The tower was rebuilt in 2002.

Arranging the riverbank was important for a long time not only for the city's appearance but also for getting rid of the bad smell. In summer, when the discharge of the Yeşilırmak fell, the water level dropped close to the riverbed, caused odor, and the river could not be used for tourism. The search for a solution came in the late 2010s with a project that treated energy production together with the problem.

The Rubber Weir and Energy Production on the Yeşilırmak

The "Yeşilırmak Rubber Weir, Creation of Recreation Areas and Renewable Energy-Based Development Project" prepared by the Amasya Municipality was opened with a ceremony in March 2019. In the project, supported also by the Middle Black Sea Development Agency, inflatable rubber weirs were installed along about 300 meters of the river where it passes through the city center. The weirs raised the water level by two to two and a half meters and extended boat trips on the river to all twelve months of the year. The project cost about 20 million liras. The Ministry of Industry and Technology covered 7 million of it through the Middle Black Sea Development Agency, and the Amasya Municipality and the Provincial Special Administration were among the project's stakeholders.

The plant installed beside the weirs works with a screw method and creates no visual pollution on the river. Brought into service the previous November, it had a capacity of 200 kilowatts and was expected to produce about 1 million 728 thousand kilowatt-hours a year. The electricity was used in the municipal service building and for lighting around the river. At the opening, Minister Mustafa Varank presented the scheme as the only energy production project in Turkey on a horizontally flowing watercourse. A fountain, a pier and an amphitheater had been built on both banks, and it had become possible to tour Amasya by rowboat and motorboat within the city. The project combined energy production, recreation and the river's odor problem in a single investment.

Today's Energy Infrastructure

According to energy statistics, the 26 power plants in Amasya have a total installed capacity of about 365 megawatts. Annual production is about 850 gigawatt-hours, which corresponds to 1.02 times the province's own electricity consumption. The province's hydroelectric capacity amounts to about 164 megawatts in eleven operating plants. The main plants are: Midilli HES (33 MW), Amasya Kale HES (29 MW), Yaprak HES (24 MW), Yavuz HES (23 MW), Umutlu HES (20 MW), Duru HES (10 MW), Osmancık HES (9 MW) and Çarıklı HES (9 MW). Amasya Kale HES has an average annual output of about 66 gigawatt-hours and a net head of 36 meters. The plant's output in 2023 was 51 gigawatt-hours. Production licenses have been granted for two plants named Karayel and Karayel 1.

Wind energy also holds a place in the province's energy balance. The wind plant with 26 Nordex turbines at Kayadüzü in Merzifon has, according to the Amasya Governorate, a capacity of 63.5 megawatts, produces about 112.9 million kilowatt-hours a year and is counted as the province's largest power plant. Energy statistics websites give 75 megawatts for the same plant. The difference may stem from installed and operating capacity being calculated differently, or from the records dating from different times. The second wind plant, around the villages of Aydınca, Beldağı, Çatalçam and Halifeli in the central district, is operated by Şehzade Enerji. The Governorate gives 46.2 megawatts for this plant of 14 turbines, the statistics site 42 megawatts. Officials have stated that 97 more turbines could be added to the site, raising the total capacity to 366.3 megawatts.

Small plants running on solar power, thermal power and waste are also part of the inventory. The Amasya Boyalı solar plant has 10 megawatts, the Amasya Sugar Factory thermal plant about 7.8 megawatts, the Lesaffre Turquie plant about 5.4 megawatts, the Suluova biogas facility 2 megawatts and the landfill gas plant about 1.8 megawatts. A figure of 270 megawatts is given for the planned Suluova Thermal Power Plant, which is not yet in operation. A pre-license has been granted for a wind plant in Taşova.

Chronology

1902: The first electricity production in Anatolia was carried out in Tarsus with a small 2-kilowatt dynamo.

1913-1914: The Silahtarağa Thermal Power Station in Istanbul entered service (the sources give the date as 1913 or 14 February 1914).

1923: When the Republic was proclaimed, the country had 38 plants with about 33 megawatts of capacity.

1930: Municipal Law No. 1580 made electricity, gas and water installations a duty of municipalities.

1931: The Merzifon Municipal Power Plant began producing electricity.

1933-1935: İller Bankası, Etibank, the General Directorate of Mineral Research and Exploration and the Electrical Power Resources Survey Administration were founded.

1940: The Amasya Clock Tower was demolished because of the construction of the Hükümet Bridge.

1951: A major flood struck along the Yeşilırmak, after which DSİ surveys brought dam construction onto the agenda.

1955: The 0.8-megawatt Durucasu plant (Amasya), built by DSİ, entered service.

1957-1966: The foundation of the Almus Dam was laid, and the dam was completed and opened.

1970-1982: The Turkish Electricity Authority was founded, and municipal electricity facilities were transferred to it.

2002: The Amasya Clock Tower was rebuilt.

2019: The Yeşilırmak Rubber Weir and the 200-kilowatt energy plant on the river were opened.

2025: Opening events of the Motorhane Cultural Center were held in Merzifon.

Sources

Academic studies

  • Atatürk Araştırma Merkezi Dergisi, Vol. XXXIV, No. 98 (2018): Nadir Yurtoğlu, Cumhuriyet Türkiyesinde Elektrik Enerjisi Üretimi ve Enerji Politikaları (1923-1960). https://atamdergi.gov.tr/tam-metin/5/tur
  • OSMED, Osmanlı Medeniyeti Araştırmaları Dergisi, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2016): İmparatorluktan Cumhuriyete Türkiye'de Elektriğin Tarihsel Gelişimi (1850-1938). https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/227508
  • Emine Erol, Türkiye'de Elektrik Enerjisinin Tarihi Gelişimi: 1902-2000 (Istanbul University doctoral thesis)

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources