Amasya lies in the narrow valley of the Yeşilırmak, hemmed in by high cliffs on both sides, at an elevation of roughly four hundred metres. On the north bank the steep slopes of Mount Harşena rise with the rock tombs and the citadel; the south bank is gentler and flatter, so settlement has spread mostly in that direction. Within the city the river flows through a valley some four kilometres long. On the left bank the strip between the citadel ruins and rock tombs and the river is so narrow that housing forms only a thin band there, while the real growth area is the right bank, which continues to expand today toward the south-east and south-west. This geography also shaped the neighbourhood pattern. Amasya's historic quarters were never laid out on a regular plan; they formed by following the strip the valley allowed, the mouths of the streams, the heads of the bridges and the foot of the citadel.

Neighbourhood names are the most durable record of that history. Many of the mosques, madrasas, markets, baths and fountains have vanished or moved, yet Hatuniye, Savadiye, Pirinççi, Sofular, Şamlar, Gökmedrese, Fethiye, Üçler, Şehirüstü and Beyazıtpaşa are still names of living neighbourhoods. The records, from the Ottoman survey registers to nineteenth-century censuses, from Evliya Çelebi to local writers who lived in the city, allow one to trace around which buildings, in which period and with which communities these names emerged.

The Shape the Valley Gave

Amasya began as a citadel town. The fortress on Mount Harşena was the centre of defence and control from the earliest ages, and most of the settlement lay inside the walls. In time habitation spilled around and below the citadel, and the city became an open one. Scholars think this transition accelerated when the Turks took the city and the area outside the walls was opened to settlement. Two walls are said to have descended from the citadel to the Yeşilırmak and, joining the plains along the left bank, to have enclosed the city. Hüseyin Hüsameddin describes the interior of the citadel as two neighbourhoods wide and writes that it held two towers, two gates, a palace, a mosque, a madrasa, a lodge, a soup kitchen and two baths. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the fortress had a warden, a steward and fifty-seven garrison soldiers, and the mud-brick houses inside housed the castle's staff. From the second half of the seventeenth century the citadel began to lose its former importance and after the eighteenth century fell into disrepair; everyday life continued entirely in the neighbourhoods below.

Following the river axis, the city first stretched east to west and then grew along the river toward Samsun in the north and Tokat in the south. The bridges built one after another over the river mark this growth. In the core area stand the Alçak Bridge from the Roman period, the Hükümet (Helkis) and Magdenüs bridges from the Byzantine period, and the Meydan (İstasyon) Bridge from the Seljuk period. The area around the Roman-era temple of the Mother Goddess on the south bank is said to have served as a prayer ground under the Danishmendids and a musalla under the Seljuks, and the Bayezid II Complex was built on the same ground. This chain shows that patterns of use persisted in the same places from one era to the next. The zone at the foot of the citadel and along the east-west line of the river was the core of the city in every period, and Hatuniye and today's Yalıboyu strip lie on the north side of that core.

The Logic of the Neighbourhood

In the Ottoman city the neighbourhood (mahalle) was the smallest administrative, fiscal and social unit. It is described as the part of the city where families of a congregation worshipping at the same small mosque settled together; neighbourly solidarity, mutual responsibility and social oversight worked within this frame. Neighbourhoods usually formed around a mosque, a small mosque, a madrasa, a dervish lodge or a soup kitchen, and sometimes around a market, a fountain or a square. Their names were mostly taken from that building or from a well-known scholar, sheikh or dervish of the district. In Amasya the rule can be seen clearly. One study found that fifteen neighbourhood names derive from mosques, small mosques, soup kitchens and madrasas, six from markets, and fifteen from scholars, sheikhs and dervishes.

During the roughly one hundred and eighty-two years in which princes served as sanjak governors at Amasya, the neighbourhoods grew denser with new buildings. In that time mosques were built in thirteen of the forty-eight Muslim neighbourhoods, and in twenty-four neighbourhoods without a mosque twenty-five small mosques were erected, so that thirty-seven mosques and small mosques in all were founded. The princes had them built in the names of their mothers and wives, and nearly all the governors, beylerbeys and pashas appointed to the city had a mosque or small mosque built in their own names. Evliya Çelebi says the city's mosques numbered some two hundred in all and names nine mosques and twenty small mosques among them. Because each new building drew new households around it, a neighbourhood's name often became fixed together with the name of its founder: Bayezid Paşa, Mehmed Paşa, Hızır Paşa, Hacı İlyas, Yakutiye and Hatuniye are names that reflect this tradition.

The Number of Neighbourhoods in the Records

The number of neighbourhoods varies with the source and the period. In the first Ottoman survey of 1520 Amasya consists of fifty-two neighbourhoods, forty-eight Muslim and four non-Muslim. The same record shows 1,042 Muslim households, 471 unmarried men and 324 non-Muslim households; at five persons per household the city's population comes to about 7,300, and with palace servants and the military class added it approaches eight thousand. The encyclopaedia entry, drawing on the same register, gives fifty-five neighbourhoods for 1525, five of them non-Muslim; the figures fifty-two and fifty-five circulate together in the literature. At the end of the sixteenth century there were again fifty-five neighbourhoods, six of them non-Muslim, and the population had risen to ten thousand. In the mid-seventeenth century Evliya Çelebi counts fifty-three neighbourhoods, forty-eight Muslim and five non-Muslim, and records five thousand households and about twenty thousand inhabitants. For the nineteenth century the encyclopaedia entry gives the number of neighbourhoods as about thirty-six. Yet in the population register of 1840 the city appears with fifty-five neighbourhoods.

The differences stem in part from the nature of the records. Comparing the 1840 population register with the 1844-1845 income-tax registers (temettuat), Selim Özcan found fifty-five neighbourhoods in the first and forty-eight in the second. He attributes the missing seven to the possibility that some of the neighbourhood-based registers of the tax survey were mixed into other classifications. According to him all neighbourhoods of the tax survey, even where names changed, are among the neighbourhoods of the census: Gümüşlüzade appears in the population register as Gümüşlüoğlu, Bağıhelkıs as Helkisbağı, and Pazar-ı Süfla as Aşağıpazar. In other words the names changed form over time, while the neighbourhood as a unit stayed the same from record to record.

The diary of Hans Dernschwam, who came to the city in the spring of 1555 with an Austrian embassy, is a rare witness to the physical appearance of these neighbourhoods. Dernschwam writes that he saw a dense settlement in a narrow valley, with houses, mostly two-storeyed and built of mud brick, looking as if piled on top of one another. At that time there were one wooden and three stone bridges over the river and eleven mosques in the city. During the visit, on 14 April 1555, a great fire broke out; Dernschwam notes that the burned houses were rebuilt in a short time. He describes the princes' palace as a simple one-storey brick building with gardens, standing at the foot of the mountain.

Neighbourhood and Endowment: Traces of the Princely Era

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was above all endowment buildings that defined the identity of the neighbourhoods. The complexes, soup kitchens, baths and fountains built by the princes and the ruling circle gave the districts they stood in both a name and a livelihood. The first of the period's three complexes was built in 1431 in the Gökmedrese neighbourhood by Yörgüç Paşa, tutor of Murad II, and consists of a mosque, a tomb, a soup kitchen and a four-room madrasa. The second is the Bayezid II Complex, whose foundation Prince Ahmed laid and which was completed in 1486; it stands in the Hacı İlyas neighbourhood, comprises a mosque, madrasa, school, soup kitchen and ablution fountain, and took on the function of the Friday mosque. The third is the complex that Mehmed Paşa, a vizier of Bayezid II's time, established in 1495 in the neighbourhood that bears his name, containing a masonry mosque, soup kitchen, tomb and madrasa; the encyclopaedia dates this mosque to 1486.

The soup kitchens also served at neighbourhood scale. Yakup Paşa, one of the emirs of Çelebi Mehmed's time, built one in 1412 in the neighbourhood called by his name; Sinaneddin Yakut Paşa in 1413 in the Yakutiye neighbourhood; Yahşi Beyzade Bayezid Paşa in 1414 in the Bayezid Paşa neighbourhood; and Bülbül Hatun, mother of Prince Ahmed, in 1509 in the Hatuniye neighbourhood. These kitchens, where madrasa students ate free, also supplied morning and evening meals to the neighbourhood's poor and to travellers staying overnight. The Hızır Paşa Madrasa was founded in 1466 in the neighbourhood bearing his name, the Abdullah Bey Dar al-Hadith Madrasa in 1485 in the Sofular neighbourhood, and the Büyük Ağa and Küçük Ağa madrasas in 1489 and 1495 in the Şamlar neighbourhood. The baths show the same distribution: the Mustafa Bey Bath was built in 1436 in the Mehmed Paşa neighbourhood, the Hızır Paşa Bath in 1466 in its own neighbourhood, the Kumacık Bath in 1495 in the Bayezid Paşa neighbourhood and the Sinan Paşa Bath in 1511 in the Kayabaşı neighbourhood.

Fountains defined the water supply and meeting points of neighbourhood streets. The Acem Ali Fountain was built in 1465 in front of the house of the merchant Hoca Acem Ali of Nishapur, the Temenna Fountain in 1467 in the Temenna neighbourhood, the Hacı Hamza Fountain in 1468 in front of the small mosque of the neighbourhood of the same name, and the İlyas Ağa Fountain in 1515 in the neighbourhood of the same name. Market areas also left their mark on neighbourhood names. Around the covered market (bedesten) that Hüseyin Ağa, one of Bayezid II's palace gatekeepers, had built in 1483 in the Kazancı neighbourhood south of the Helkis bridge, the Lower Market (Aşağı Pazar) developed. The Bayram Paşa Inn, the Bakırcıoğlu Inn, the Menzilci Mirza Inn and a cloth market (bezzazistan) were the buildings that kept this market lively. Near the Kapan Inn the Upper Market arose, in the Bozahane neighbourhood the İbadullah Market, and around the Aydın Small Mosque and bath in the Devehane neighbourhood the Kağnı (Kanlı) Market. On the south side of the Yeşilırmak, in the neighbourhood of the Aşağı Meydan Small Mosque, lay a second square, the Pilgrims' Square (Hacılar Meydanı); it is said to have taken its name from pilgrims gathering there on their way to and from Mecca. The flat ground at the head of the Meydan Bridge in the west of the city was known as the archery ground because it was used for archery.

Hatuniye and the Foot of the Citadel

The Hatuniye neighbourhood lies at the foot of Mount Harşena, in the shadow of the citadel walls. The Hatuniye Mosque and soup kitchen built by Bülbül Hatun, Prince Ahmed's mother, form the core of the neighbourhood, and its name most probably derives from this charity. For the mosque the encyclopaedia gives 1510 and Selim Özcan 1511; the soup kitchen is dated 1509. Hatuniye, which appears in 2019 figures as the smallest neighbourhood of the central district with 126 people, has many empty houses today. The neighbourhood also contains the Saraçhane Mosque (recorded as dating from 1372), the clock tower and the Emin Efendi Mansions. Bestekar, Bülbül and Derya streets are among its street names. The neighbourhood is recorded with eighteen Muslim households in the 1840 population register and nineteen in the tax register, and no non-Muslim household appears in either count.

At the foot of the citadel the streets climb the slope on stone steps. Above are the dark hollows of the rock tombs, below the tiled roofs. Door knockers, the braces that carry the timber bay projections, known as eliböğründe, and lime-washed walls are the distinguishing elements of this fabric. The eliböğründe method gains extra interior space by projecting the upper floor of the houses over the street. In recent years officials have announced that the expropriation of empty and derelict buildings is planned. The traditional settlement fabric of the neighbourhood was analysed in detail in a master's thesis prepared at Gazi University in 2006, and conservation proposals were developed.

The Yalıboyu Strip and the Order of Civil Architecture

The Yalıboyu Houses, treated in a separate article, must be mentioned briefly to understand the civil-architecture side of the neighbourhood fabric. These houses line the riverbank on narrow, long plots between the Yeşilırmak and Mount Harşena and are built in the hımış technique, a timber frame filled with earth. Some examples also show the bağdadi technique, plaster over a lattice of laths. Most houses are one or two storeys over a basement, with gabled or hipped roofs covered in curved tiles. The main façade faces south, toward the river. Eaves and joinery are coated with the traditional aşı paint, and the walls carry hemp-reinforced lime and straw-clay plaster against damp. That the buildings were erected on remains of the city wall, using the wall as the lower-floor wall, is another remarkable aspect of the fabric.

The long, narrow plot brought a two-mass solution with it. The larger mass near the river served as the women's quarters (harem), the smaller mass near the street as the men's reception wing (selamlık), and the courtyard between them became the space of production and neighbourliness. Hearths and wells were added to the courtyards, and wooden lattices were fitted to openings facing the street for privacy. The arrangement is thought to have been used by the queen mothers and pashas who came to the city with the princes. In the literature one also finds romantic interpretations to the effect that the close relationship with the river was shaped by longing for Istanbul. Amasya has suffered heavily from the 1939 Erzincan earthquake, countless floods and fires.

The first step toward protecting the fabric was the registration of urban conservation areas in 1979 by decision of the High Council of Immovable Antiquities and Monuments; the city was divided into seven areas, and the section where Yalıboyu lies became Area No. 2. In this area every kind of building activity except minor repairs was halted until a conservation and development plan could be made. Interim conservation plan decisions taken in 1981 limited storey heights and façade openings, and in 1992 the Ankara Conservation Board decided that the registration of 126 civil buildings should continue. In 1994 the Yalıboyu Houses Conservation Project was launched and eighty houses were registered. The Amasya Foundation for the Protection of Cultural and Natural Assets, founded in 1996, tried to build a conservation order in which the governorate, municipality, civil organisations and citizens work together.

Around Savadiye, Pirinççi and Sofular

Savadiye grew up in the valley opened by the Savadiye Stream and is a settlement divided into two branches, Upper and Lower. The 1840 population register shows in Lower Savadiye six Muslim and seventy-four non-Muslim households, and in Upper Savadiye eight Muslim and twenty-eight non-Muslim households; in the tax survey the proportion is largely preserved. These figures confirm the account given by Osman Fevzi Olcay. According to Olcay, because its air and water were good, Christians in particular lived in Savadiye, and after the deportation of 1915 not a single one was left there. In the sixteenth century the area had vineyards and gardens known as the Prince Ahmed Gardens (1576). Savadiye is also the neighbourhood where the tomb of Gümüşlüzade Pir Şücaaddin İlyas stands; old sources also call the neighbourhood Zevadiye.

Olcay describes Upper Savadiye before the First World War as Amasya's most select outing place. He relates that after the declaration of the war the military had the trees of the Soğukpınar Gardens cut down to supply lime for repairing the ruined palace at Saraydüzü, and that the denuded slopes later worsened a flood disaster. According to him, the flood of June 1948 caused the death of eighty-eight people, the complete destruction of 149 houses in this district and damage to some five hundred homes. The link between the felling of the trees and the flood is Olcay's own interpretation and is not stated to rest on an independent record. In Lower Savadiye the majority are Turks and migrants from Shirvan. The neighbouring Mir Hamza Nigâri neighbourhood was mostly inhabited by disciples of Hamza Nigâri, his relatives and fellow townsmen from Shirvan.

The Pirinççi neighbourhood is registered in the 1840 population register with twenty-three Muslim households; the tax register shows fourteen Muslim and two non-Muslim households. Where its name comes from is not known with certainty. Olcay writes that part of the neighbourhood began at the building that was the French School and was later called the Şehr-i Yâri School, and ran along the continuation of the Savadiye Stream with rows of houses as far as the place called Dersi Tamam, and that the Çukur Konak district also belonged to Pirinççi. The mansions of the Şirvanlızade families stood in a row here. The district where the French School stood is called the Bayezid Paşa neighbourhood; entering the city from the west of the Kunç Bridge, it is the first neighbourhood one meets on the south-east side of the Yeşilırmak. In 1840 Bayezid Paşa was the most populous neighbourhood of the city: 112 Muslim and 104 non-Muslim households.

The Sofular neighbourhood is the area stretching from the hill where the hospital stands to the Sofular Mosque. Though its slope is steep, its air is said to be good. The mosque appears in the encyclopaedia entry as the Dar al-Hadith, Sofular or Abdullah Paşa Mosque, dated 1502; Özcan, however, writes that the Abdullah Bey Dar al-Hadith Madrasa was built in 1485. The difference between the two records points to the possibility that the mosque and the madrasa were built at different dates. In 1840 the neighbourhood consisted of fifty Muslim and forty-eight non-Muslim households. Olcay describes most of its residents as Turks and Muslims and relates that migrants from Oltu also lived in this district.

Non-Muslim and Immigrant Neighbourhoods

Amasya's neighbourhoods do not consist only of Muslim ones. According to the 1840 population register, of the fifty-five neighbourhoods in the city twenty-three were purely Muslim and thirty-two were neighbourhoods where Muslims and non-Muslims lived together; in twenty-one of the mixed neighbourhoods Muslims were in the majority and in eleven non-Muslims. The total number of households is 3,180: 2,236 Muslim and 944 non-Muslim. In the tax survey this figure falls to 2,709, with 1,857 Muslim and 852 non-Muslim households. Özcan explains the drop by the long military service and war losses of Muslim men and by the emigration of non-Muslims to big cities; the plague and cholera epidemics of the period also affected population movement. No neighbourhood inhabited only by non-Muslims appears in either count. In settlements such as Aşağı Pazar, Bozahane, Çırakçı, Dere and Savadiye, non-Muslim households stand out.

The same counts also show how mobile the neighbourhoods were. In the population register Acemali and Saraçhane have no non-Muslim households, but four years later thirty-nine non-Muslim households appear in Acemali, thirty-two in Saraçhane and two in Pirinççi. Özcan links this to the decrease in the number of neighbourhoods, movement within the city and migration from the countryside because of the wars. According to Olcay, in the Dere (Temenna) neighbourhood, that is the district where the Burmalı Minare stands, the majority of residents were Christians. Olcay also relates that in the Sofuzade neighbourhood, where he was born and grew up, his Christian neighbours were subjected to deportation in 1915.

Migrations brought new neighbourhood names in the second half of the nineteenth century. Olcay writes that the İhsaniye neighbourhood was founded on the slope continuing from Şamlar to the fork of the road toward Kulis Hill and Ziyaret, and that it took this name because the settlement of the Crimean Tatars who arrived from Crimea in 1292 (1876-1877) was arranged by Abdülhamid II. The explanation given for the Şamlar neighbourhood, on the other hand, is a tradition: it is said that people fleeing Umayyad oppression came from Damascus and settled there, so that the district was called Şamlılar and later Şamlar. This account has no historical record. In the 1840 register Şamlar appears with forty Muslim households; the residents of Olcay's time were almost all migrants who had come from various districts. Those from Shirvan in Lower Savadiye, the Shirvani disciples and fellow townsmen around Mir Hamza Nigâri, and the Oltu migrants in Sofular are traces of the same migration movements. Neighbourhood identity was renewed with these settlements.

Garden Neighbourhoods and Outing Places

Although townspeople made their living from non-agricultural work, viticulture and gardening were widespread in the Yeşilırmak valley. The lands of the city are not state land; they belonged to the townspeople and were generally cultivated by themselves. Some neighbourhoods stayed within this belt of gardens. According to Olcay the Şeyhcui neighbourhood was Amasya's outing place famed for its grapes and cherries. In season people moved to their pavilions there, neighbours entertained one another under the cherry trees, and the cherry season lasted a month. As the heat grew, the outing crowd gradually returned to the city, and most waited for the grape season. The Helkis neighbourhood is the district running from in front of the government building through a tunnel toward the Harşena Castle road; in Olcay's time it was orchard and garden land, and people sat in groups under walnut trees. This view changed after the railway was laid.

The İçeri Şehir neighbourhood extends below the citadel, following the railway line to the head of the Meydan Bridge. The Meydan Köprü (Kurşunlu) neighbourhood is the area from the end of the castle gate toward the station, and there were fruit gardens along the river. The Yukarı Meydan (Hızır Paşa) neighbourhood lies west of the station, in the western part of Karaağaç Square at the foot of the citadel; the name Elekçiler Meydanı (Sieve-makers' Square) given to the middle of the square comes from a community that Olcay calls the Kıptiler (Gypsies), who made sieves and riddles there. Olcay writes that this area, once a select outing place where samovars boiled, lost its standing because the railway line and the land in front of it obstructed access. The railway reached the city in 1930, and settlement turned toward the broad areas south of the Yeşilırmak. The population was 12,481 in 1927, 14,470 in 1950, 36,646 in 1970 and 53,431 in 1985.

From the Old Neighbourhood to Today

In the 2019 figures the most populous neighbourhoods of the central district are Şeyhcui (23,145), Hacılar Meydanı (14,837), Bahçeleriçi (11,821), Ellibeşevler (9,503) and Akbilek (9,112). Savadiye has 941 inhabitants, Sofular 394, Pirinççi 414, Gümüşlü 167 and Hatuniye 126. This difference between the right-bank neighbourhoods, where new housing areas were built, and the neighbourhoods in the old core of the valley shows in which direction the city has grown over the last hundred years. The old neighbourhoods have lost population, while the narrow streets at the foot of the citadel and the hımış houses on the north bank have remained under protection.

Chronology

1372: Recorded as the construction date of the Saraçhane Mosque.

1431: The Yörgüç Paşa Complex is built in the Gökmedrese neighbourhood.

1483: Palace gatekeeper Hüseyin Ağa has the covered market built in the Kazancı neighbourhood.

1486: The Bayezid II Complex is completed in the Hacı İlyas neighbourhood.

1495: The Mehmed Paşa Complex and the Kumacık Bath are built.

1509-1511: Bülbül Hatun's Hatuniye soup kitchen and mosque are built (sources give 1509, 1510 and 1511).

1520: The first survey records fifty-two neighbourhoods, forty-eight Muslim and four non-Muslim.

1555: Dernschwam's visit; great fire on 14 April.

1840: According to the population register, fifty-five neighbourhoods and 3,180 households.

1844-1845: The tax survey records forty-eight neighbourhoods and 2,709 households.

1876-1877: Crimean Tatars are settled in the İhsaniye neighbourhood.

1930: The railway reaches Amasya.

1979: Urban conservation areas are registered and the city is divided into seven zones.

1994-1996: The Yalıboyu Houses Conservation Project and the conservation foundation are established.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Osman Fevzi Olcay, Amasya Hatıraları, Amasya Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları No: 8, Amasya 2009.

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources