Gaffarlı is one of the few villages of Göynücek that has not lost population in recent years: 124 people lived there in 2008, and 119 were registered in 2025. Its name is written Gaffarlı in official lists, but the form Kafarlı lives on both in everyday use and in some official texts. The village was last mentioned from the rostrum of parliament because of families whose homes were flooded in the downpour of July 2024.

How the Name Is Written

In Bekir Başalan's study of renamed settlements in Amasya, the Göynücek table gives the new name as Gaffarlı and the old one as Gafarlı. Başalan counts this change, together with Şeyhler/Şıhlar, Şeyhoğlu/Şıhoğlu and Tencerli/Tencirli, among those made so as to recall the old name; in other words, the correction touched only the spelling and kept the name itself. The district governorship's list of villages also gives the name as Gaffarlı. Curiously, when Başalan lists the thirty-eight villages of the district in the same article, he writes the name as Kafarlı, and the village is called Kafarlı in the 2024 parliamentary speech too. No document has been found showing which of the three forms is the oldest, or from which person or community the name derives.

Tracing the name further back has not been easy. The great accounting register of 1530, from the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, is of no help here: in its published index there is no village named Gafarlı or Kafarlı either in the Geldiklan sub-district, to which the Göynücek villages then belonged, or anywhere else in the sanjak of Amasya. The name does not appear in the volumes of Hüsâmeddîn Yasar's Amasya Tarihi that were searched either. How long the village has borne this name therefore remains unclear.

The 2024 Flood

Speaking in the General Assembly of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey on 10 July 2024, the Amasya deputy Reşat Karagöz said that a heavy downpour had struck the Göynücek villages of Çaykışla, Tencirli, Kafarlı and İkizyaka. According to Karagöz, the damage was worst in Kafarlı: because the stream had not been regulated, there were families in the village who were caught by the floodwater and whose houses, together with their cars and belongings, were left unusable. The speech states that there was no loss of life; how many houses were affected, and whether any stream improvement work was later carried out, is not known.

Population

Gaffarlı's population series departs from the general trend of the district. From 124 in 2008 and 113 in 2012, the population dropped as low as 67 in 2017, hovered in the nineties in the following years and rose to 133 in 2024. In 2025, 119 people live in the village, 64 men and 55 women. This is quite close to the figure of seventeen years earlier, whereas over the same period many villages of the district lost more than half their population. No source explains the fluctuations.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources