Amasya was one of the Anatolian cities connected to the new communications network within the first decade of the Ottoman Empire's acquaintance with the electric telegraph. The line between Samsun and Amasya was strung in 1864, and the city soon became a junction where branches running north to the Black Sea coast, south through Yozgat to the great Baghdad line, and east to Zile all met. The post was reorganised alongside the telegraph, and the post office, carrying letters, newspapers and money orders, together with the telegraph office, became two of the busiest official institutions of a provincial town in the post-Tanzimat era. Half a century later, in the summer of 1919, this infrastructure assumed a role no one could have foreseen. The telegrams Mustafa Kemal Pasha sent from Amasya and the transmission of the Amasya Circular over these wires to the whole country tied the city's communications history to the beginning of the Turkish War of Independence.

Communications Before the Telegraph: Relay Stations and Tatars

In the centuries before the telegraph, the state's communications depended on couriers carrying decrees and orders on horseback and on the relay stations (menzilhane) where they stopped. Amasya was an important halt in this system. The Anatolian middle route, setting out from Üsküdar and passing through Bolu, Tosya, Osmancık, Hacıköy and Merzifon, reached Amasya and continued from there to Turhal, Tokat and Sivas, and then by way of Diyarbakır and Mosul to Baghdad. The left branch of the same road, splitting off at Merzifon, ran through Lâdik and Niksar to Karahisar-ı Şarkî and Erzurum. Long before any telegraph wire, therefore, Amasya was one of the stopping points for official news flowing between the east and Istanbul.

The officials who carried this news were called tatars. Organised into a corps and placed under a fixed discipline in the reign of Abdülhamid I, the tatars wore their own distinctive dress and cap, which no one else was permitted to wear. A work devoted to the tatars relates that a tatar was obliged to reach Baghdad from Üsküdar in twelve days, that relay stations stood roughly every thirty-two kilometres, and that the courier rested and changed horses at them. The relay organisation was reformed under Mahmud II, but communication by post tatars remained the empire's principal channel of news until 1840.

A regular postal service open to the public began after the Tanzimat Edict with the founding of the Ministry of Posts on 23 October 1840. The first post office opened in Istanbul in the courtyard of the Yeni Cami under the name Postahane-i Amire; a translator was even appointed to render the addresses of items written in languages other than Turkish. From 1863 postage stamps came into use on letters, the first of them printed in London. In the provinces, however, the old practice long survived alongside the new order. In the province of Sivas in 1872 the post was still carried by tatars to major centres such as Amasya, Tokat and Divriği, while smaller towns received theirs by the hands of gendarmes.

The Birth of the Telegraph in the Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman state's first experiment in long-distance signalling predates the electric telegraph. In the opening months of the Russo-Ottoman War of 1828-1829 a semaphore telegraph was tried between the two shores of the Bosphorus; made of rods moving crosswise, the device proved of little use. The electric telegraph first reached Istanbul in 1839 with an apparatus brought by Chamberlain, an American who worked with Morse. Chamberlain, however, set off for Vienna to improve the instrument, the steamer carrying him capsized on the Danube and he drowned, so this first attempt came to nothing. A more successful demonstration took place in the summer of 1847. The American geologist Lawrence Smith, assisted by the missionary Cyrus Hamlin, installed two telegraph instruments in Beylerbeyi Palace, one in the throne room and the other in a distant corner, and sent messages in both directions in the presence of Sultan Abdülmecid. The sultan had the demonstration repeated the next day for his high officials, asked for a line to be built between Istanbul and Edirne, and sent a decoration to the inventor, Morse.

It was war that brought the first real telegraph line to Ottoman territory. During the Crimean War in 1854 the British linked Balaklava in the Crimea with Varna on the Bulgarian coast by a 340-mile line, regarded at the time as the longest submarine cable in the world. It was followed by the Varna-Ruse line opened by the French and the Varna-Istanbul line laid by the British. Built for military purposes, these first lines were not open to the public. With the completion of the Istanbul-Edirne line in 1855 the capital was joined to Europe by wire, and in the same year a separate Telegraph Directorate was established to regulate telegraph affairs. The first telegram in Turkish could be sent only on 3 May 1856; in the early years the working language was French, since most of the equipment and technicians came from France.

The state lost little time in training its own staff for the new technology. The Fünun-ı Telgrafiye Mektebi (School of Telegraph Sciences) opened on 20 January 1861 and was followed in 1872 by the School of Posts and Telegraphs; from 1869 steps were also taken to establish a telegraph factory to reduce dependence on imported machinery and equipment. The lines spread at an astonishing pace. According to the figures cited by Roderic Davison, the empire's telegraph lines, which measured 6,490 kilometres in 1863, rose to 13,750 in 1866 and 25,137 kilometres in 1869, reaching 36,640 kilometres by 1904. The telegraph was adopted far more quickly than the railway because putting up poles and stringing wire required much less money and labour than laying track.

The first force to carry the telegraph into the interior of Anatolia was the British plan to link London with India. The Yozgat-Sivas section of the Baghdad line, which was to run through Üsküdar, İzmit and Ankara to Sivas and from there via Diyarbakır, Mosul, Baghdad and Basra to join the Indian lines at Fao, was completed on 13 December 1859. Sivas thus joined the Ottoman telegraph network as early as 1859. Amasya's story would begin as a branch of this great line opening northwards towards the Black Sea.

Amasya Joins the Telegraph Network

The idea of connecting the Baghdad line to the Black Sea coast took concrete form in 1863. Among the three main Anatolian routes, the Yozgat-Samsun line held an important place within the northern branch, and its construction began on 24 June 1863 on condition that the poles be supplied by the local population. When the telegraph inspector Ali Rıza Efendi came to Samsun that same year, the people of Samsun were also eager for a wire to reach their town. The question of where the line would pass became a small rivalry. The merchants of Tokat asked for the Samsun wire to be joined to the Baghdad line through their own town. In the opinion of the telegraph administration dated 17 December 1863, routing the line through Tokat instead of along the Amasya-Yozgat route would add a distance of four or five hours, and it was proposed that in that case the extra cost of poles and labourers' wages be charged to the inhabitants. In the end the line was built through Amasya.

In 1864 the Samsun-Amasya wire was completed, and the telegraph was carried from Yozgat to Amasya and from there to Samsun. Davison relates a curious detail about its construction: the Turkish engineers who built the line between Samsun and Amasya in 1864 had to keep the poles moist, and so they dipped them in muddy pools of water. In those same years part of the population regarded the telegraph with suspicion, and some took it for a kind of magic. In Edirne, it is said, the telegraph office was placed outside the town for fear that it would attract lightning. Being connected to the line early, amid such debates, put Amasya ahead of many of the towns around it. Tokat was linked to Sivas only in 1868, and that line was not joined to the Samsun-Amasya line but ran directly between Tokat and Sivas.

Amasya's administrative position as the seat of a sanjak also shaped the network. The province of Sivas, established when the Provincial Regulation of 1864 was reissued in 1867, initially consisted of the sanjaks of central Sivas, Amasya and Karahisar-ı Şarkî. Under the arrangement of 1871, Lâdik and Maden-i Sim, today's Gümüşhacıköy, gained the status of districts (kaza) within the sanjak of Amasya. Districts such as Zile, Erbaa and Turhal also remained attached to Amasya for a time. The telegraph office at the centre of this extensive sanjak was a natural relay point for the districts' correspondence with the state.

The Zile Line and the Regional Network

The first branch to extend outward from Amasya ran to Zile. In 1869 the inhabitants of the district of Zile, then part of the sanjak of Amasya, petitioned for a line to be brought to their district by way of Amasya. A letter of 9 December 1870 sent to the governorate of Amasya stated that the cost of poles and the like would be met free of charge, that is, from local resources, and calculated that the wire and instruments to be brought from Europe would cost 8,335 francs and the officials' salaries 2,166 kuruş a month. According to Murat Hanilçe's study based on archival documents, Zile was linked by a line to the sanjak seat of Amasya in 1870. The Ottoman telegraph map of 1874 shows the Amasya-Zile line alongside the Niksar-Ünye and Tokat-Sivas lines.

These connections turned Amasya from a mere terminus into a gateway of regional communications. The layout of the lines sometimes had odd consequences. A telegram sent from Niksar, in the sanjak of Canik, to Tokat could reach its destination only by travelling around through Ünye, Samsun, Amasya, Yozgat and Sivas, since there was no direct wire between the two towns. This long route caused delays and disrupted communications whenever the cable broke. When Tokat became a separate sanjak in 1880, Zile and Erbaa were detached from Amasya and attached to Tokat; in the same year the Tokat-Zile line was put into service under İsmail Hakkı Pasha, who as governor worked to extend the telegraph.

The case of Erbaa shows how laborious it could be for a provincial town to obtain the telegraph. During the years when it belonged to the sanjak of Amasya, Erbaa had no telegraph, and its connection, in Hanilçe's words, "was constantly overlooked or ignored". After it passed to Tokat, the town's merchants wrote that they needed the telegraph to learn crop prices, arrange transport and communicate directly with markets such as Samsun, Amasya and Tokat; they declared themselves ready to give the domestic loan coupons worth 10,000 kuruş they held towards a telegraph office building. These efforts, which intensified in 1887, bore fruit only in 1896. Around 1880, initiatives for lines to Lâdik, Köprü, Maden-i Sim and Osmancık had also gathered pace, but because the expected supply of materials from the government never came, these lines were postponed to later years.

Lines to the Districts of the Sanjak

Bringing the telegraph to the districts of the sanjak of Amasya took many years, as the example of Erbaa suggests. Edip Uzundal's study of the sanjak of Amasya in the reign of Abdülhamid II treats this subject in detail. A letter sent by the Serasker (minister of war) to the General Staff on 16 October 1892 called for telegraph lines to be built to the district seats of Lâdik, Havza, Vezirköprü and Gümüşhacıköy in the sanjak of Amasya and Erbaa in the sanjak of Tokat. According to the letter, the costs in these places had already been pledged by the local population. The memorandum sent to the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs stressed that these lines were also necessary for military communications.

Even the intervention of the military authorities did not settle the matter quickly. The following year the engineering office of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs prepared survey estimates for each line. According to these, the Lâdik-Havza-Vezirköprü line would be 45 kilometres long and require 630 poles, while the Merzifon-Hacıköy line was calculated at 20 kilometres and 280 poles. A further 10,000 kuruş was allowed for building a telegraph office in each of these centres. The Council of Posts and Telegraphs decided to postpone the lines, noting that even if the inhabitants took on 27,439 francs 10 centimes and 255,036 kuruş for equipment and other expenses for all the requested lines, the budget had no provision for the 1,935 francs and 153,580 kuruş needed for salaries and running costs. The administration was wary less of the one-time cost of construction than of recurring annual expenses such as staff and maintenance; it was reckoned that the revenue from these lines would not reach even a third of the salaries and expenses to be paid.

Staff lists drawn from the provincial yearbooks (salname) nonetheless show the network gradually expanding. In the early 1870s Amasya had a telegraph director and a postmaster. From 1872 there were telegraph officials at Mecidözü, and by the mid-1870s at Zile and Merzifon. In the 1880s the title of the post at Amasya appears in some years as director of telegraphs and posts and in others as director of telegraphs. There were telegraph officials at Merzifon and Mecidözü, while for Maden-i Sim and Havza a postal official appears in 1888 and a telegraph official in 1890. That these entries precede the line requests of 1892 suggests that the first officials may have been appointed before the lines were completed, but the documents available do not fully clarify this relationship.

By the turn of the century the picture had changed considerably. According to the yearbooks of 1903 and 1907, the office in central Amasya, known as the "Telegraph and Post Office", employed a director, a chief operator, four operators and two muvassıl-ı muharrerat, that is, messengers who delivered telegrams to their recipients. A line sergeant was responsible for maintaining each of the lines towards Zile, Yozgat and Lâdik. Merzifon had a separate Post and Telegraph Office with its own director, operator, telegraph sergeant and messenger. A director of telegraphs and posts served at Köprü, a telegraph official each at Mecidözü and Lâdik, and a telegraph and postal official each at Gümüşhacıköy and Havza. The network that had begun with a single wire in 1864 had thus reached every district seat of the sanjak within forty years.

How the Telegraph Office Worked

The Amasya telegraph office operated as part of the telegraph and postal organisation of the province of Sivas. In 1870-1872 there was a Telegraph Inspectorate in central Sivas, while telegraph or postal directors and their staff served at Sivas, Amasya, Karahisar and Tokat. The provincial organisation's workforce reached 30 in 1872, stood at 32 in 1890 and rose to 74 in 1903. Under an instruction dated 14 April 1873, the inspectors toured the lines of their districts twice a year, in spring and autumn, had damaged poles and wires repaired before winter, and checked the conduct of the officials in the telegraph offices, their ledgers and accounts, and the condition of the machines.

The daily routine of the telegraph offices was laid down by a regulation dated 24 October 1859. Under it, the state's official institutions had priority in sending telegrams, with merchants and the public coming after them. A separate penalty was set for divulging the secrets of telegraphic correspondence. The telegraph rooms opened at hours that varied with the season and worked on Fridays, Sundays, religious festivals and Christian holy days as well; the opening and closing hours of each room were written on its door. Directors of provincial telegraph offices were required to know how to send and receive telegrams themselves. Operators looked after the batteries, kept their machines clean, inspected the apparatus each day on going on duty, and did not leave their post except at mealtimes. Officials were obliged always to wear the uniform proper to their grade, kept clean.

The line itself was guarded by mounted and foot sergeants. According to the regulation, the sergeants set out every day at sunrise to walk the line, slackened the wires as needed in winter and tightened them in summer, and cleaned the cobwebs from the wires and porcelain insulators. The line sergeants posted in 1903 on the lines running from Amasya towards Zile, Yozgat and Lâdik were the provincial face of this work. The messenger who delivered a telegram to its recipient had to report immediately to the telegraph office if he could not find the addressee or if the person had died or moved away. When delivery required going to places more than an hour from the telegraph office, expenses such as boat and horse hire were paid by the owner of the telegram.

The telegraph was not a cheap service, but it became more affordable over time. In 1862-1863 and 1866-1867 a twenty-word telegram from Sivas to Istanbul cost 82 kuruş; in 1872 the charge fell to 35 kuruş. In the same year a twenty-word telegram from Sivas to a place within the province cost 10 kuruş, and to neighbouring provinces such as Erzurum, Ankara, Trabzon and Kastamonu 15 kuruş. For distant centres such as Aydın and Edirne the figure rose to 40 kuruş, and for Rumelian cities such as Bosnia, Shkodër and Ioannina to 60 kuruş. Since Amasya was subject to the same provincial tariff, a telegram sent by an Amasya merchant to Tokat or Sivas went for far less than one sent to Istanbul.

The Merger of Post and Telegraph and Its Effect on Town Life

The postal and telegraph administrations, which had developed separately, were merged on 21 September 1871 into a Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs attached to the Ministry of the Interior. The merger was felt in the provinces as well. In Amasya the separate telegraph and postal directorates gradually gave way to a single "directorate of telegraphs and posts". The Ottoman state joined the international union for telegraph communications in 1865 and entered international postal transport in 1876. Parcel and money order services began in 1901, wireless telegraphy in 1906 and the first manual telephone exchange in Istanbul in 1909, when the institution was renamed the Ministry of Posts, Telegraphs and Telephones; in 1913 it became the General Directorate of Posts, Telegraphs and Telephones.

The telegraph's greatest impact was on administration. Davison notes that from the late Tanzimat onward the Ottoman archives are full of copies of telegrams passing between the Sublime Porte and provincial officials. It was now possible to send orders to the governor of a sanjak, a gendarmerie unit or a military force within hours. As an American missionary wrote in 1874, for all its shortcomings the telegraph enabled the central power in Istanbul to run the whole empire like a machine. The same wire also worked in the other direction. The public could convey their complaints to the central government by telegraph, and local administrators could be held to account in this way. Petitions sent by telegraph by individuals and communities are quite common among Ottoman documents.

Commercial life, too, quickened with the telegraph. The needs the Erbaa merchants set out in their petition, namely learning crop prices in good time, arranging transport and communicating directly with markets, applied equally to the merchants of Amasya. A trader who learned of prices and demand in distant markets by telegraph could manage his business more shrewdly. Official bodies shortened administrative procedures by corresponding more quickly with the centre, while for ordinary people letters and telegrams became the most precious means of keeping in touch with relatives far from home. The post office was a place where townspeople corresponded with distant kin, merchants with business partners and students with their families. Stamps, the mail coach and regular delivery represented the modernising face of everyday life.

For this reason the telegraph office became one of the busiest public institutions in town. Official correspondence, commercial news and private messages all passed through the same room. Telegraph officials were required to work with the care and discretion their profession demanded, and the duty to guard the secrecy of correspondence placed them among the trusted figures of the town. One of the most striking examples of the telegraph's political power came in 1908. The telegrams that poured into Yıldız Palace from Macedonia before the proclamation of the Second Constitutional Era, demanding that the constitution be put into force, showed that this instrument could cease to be the sultan's means of control and be turned against the centre. Eleven years later that experience would be repeated in Anatolia, in Amasya.

The Amasya Telegraph Office in the War of Independence

After landing at Samsun on 19 May 1919 as Inspector of the Ninth Army Troops, Mustafa Kemal Pasha conducted most of his work at the telegraph key. He sent telegrams to corps commanders, governors and sanjak governors, calling for rallies to protest the occupations and for protest telegrams to be sent to the Great Powers and the Istanbul government. In a telegram to the Ministry of War on 24 May he reported that he would move his headquarters temporarily to Havza in order to examine on the spot places where disturbances had occurred, such as Merzifon, Vezirköprü, Amasya, Lâdik and Havza, but that for the sake of secure communications his address would remain Samsun. In another telegram to the Ministry of War on 10 June he reported on activities in the region based on intelligence received from the district of Merzifon and the sanjak of Amasya.

Before coming to Amasya, Mustafa Kemal Pasha sent a telegram from Havza to the Mufti of Amasya, Hacı Tevfik Efendi, announcing his wish to visit the city. The mufti's reply also came by telegraph: "The people of Amasya will be proud to embrace those who struggle for the homeland, the faith and the state." The Pasha entered Amasya on the evening of 12 June 1919, during the month of Ramadan, and was received with enthusiasm. One of his first acts in the city was to have the Amasya Society for the Defence of Rights founded. Meanwhile he had a room in the Saraydüzü Barracks, where he was staying, fitted out as a telegraph office, and from there he sent telegrams of resistance to every corner of the country. In a telegram to Sultan Vahdeddin on 16 June he stated that, if necessary, he would resign his post and return to the bosom of the nation.

In these days the wire was a weapon for both sides. Ali Kemal, Minister of the Interior in the Istanbul government, announced that officials and officers who obeyed Mustafa Kemal's orders would be tried by court martial, and issued a coded circular dated 23 June 1919 stating that the Pasha had been dismissed and that no official business was to be conducted with him. This circular too reached the provinces over the same wires. The General Directorate of Posts and Telegraphs, for its part, had announced that the telegrams of the Societies for the Rejection of Annexation and the Defence of Rights would not be transmitted. The question of who would have access to the telegraph office thus became one of the central issues of the struggle.

The Amasya Circular was prepared in this atmosphere. On 21 June 1919 talks began in the Saraydüzü Barracks with Mustafa Kemal Pasha, Ali Fuat Pasha, commander of the 20th Corps, Hüseyin Rauf Bey, former Minister of the Navy, and Refet Bey, commander of the 3rd Corps. Kâzım Karabekir Pasha, commander of the 15th Corps in Erzurum, and Mersinli Cemal Pasha in Konya did not attend in person, but the text was submitted to them as well and their approval obtained. According to some accounts, Cafer Tayyar Bey in Edirne also took part in the talks by telegraph. At the time of signing, Ali Fuat Pasha was in another room communicating with his corps in Ankara and was called from there to sign. The principles were dictated by Mustafa Kemal Pasha to his aide-de-camp Cevat Abbas Bey during the night of 21 to 22 June.

It is noteworthy that one of the circular's articles refers directly to the telegraph. The fifth article recalled that the General Directorate of Posts and Telegraphs had announced that the telegrams of the Societies for the Rejection of Annexation and the Defence of Rights would not be transmitted, and declared that this stance would be firmly rejected and that demonstrations and resistance would continue until communication was secured. The sixth article required commanders to inform one another immediately in the event of any new occupation of any part of the homeland, which was possible only by wire. Among the signatures at the end of the text were those of Hüsrev Bey, the staff official responsible for communications, the aide Muzaffer Bey, who sent the cipher to military authorities, and a civilian official, unnamed in the Nutuk, who enciphered it for civil authorities.

On 22 June 1919 the circular was transmitted by telegraph to all civil administrators and military commanders from the westernmost to the easternmost part of the country; the transmission was carried out by Abdurrahman Rahmi Efendi. The fact that Mustafa Kemal Pasha sent a circular even to western regions beyond his authority as Inspector of the Ninth Army is one of the reasons this telegram is regarded, in a sense, as a revolutionary proclamation. Calling for three delegates from every sanjak to be sent to a national congress in Sivas, the text passed over the wires of the Amasya telegraph office and spread to every corner of Anatolia. For this reason the Saraydüzü Barracks, where the Amasya Circular was drafted and from where it was sent by telegraph to the whole of Turkey, holds a special place in the city's memory.

The weight of the telegraph in the War of Independence continued in the years that followed. With the occupation of Istanbul on 16 March 1920, the telegraph offices were occupied as well. İhsan (Pere) Bey, chief official of the Istanbul Central Telegraph Office, and his colleagues kept up communications with Ankara through a secret centre they set up in the building's basement. Halil Özcan's study of this centre records Atatürk as saying, "We won the National Struggle with telegraph wires." Among the first concrete examples of that saying are the telegrams sent from Amasya in June 1919.

Post, Telegraph and Telephone in the Republican Era

Attached to the Ministry of the Interior in the early years of the Republic, the PTT General Directorate was placed in 1933 under the Ministry of Public Works as an administration with an annexed budget, and in 1939 under the Ministry of Transport. It became a state economic enterprise in 1954 and was converted to the status of a state economic organisation in 1984. Law No. 4000 of 1994 split the institution in two, and from 24 April 1995 the General Directorate of the Turkish Postal Administration and Türk Telekomünikasyon A.Ş. began operating separately. In 2000 the Postal Administration again took the name General Directorate of the Post and Telegraph Organisation, and in 2013 it was restructured as the Post and Telegraph Organisation Joint Stock Company.

In Amasya, too, postal, telegraph and telephone services continued to develop under this umbrella. The telegraph gradually lost its importance in the face of the telephone and the digital networks that followed, but its place in Amasya's communications history was not erased. The wire that arrived from Samsun in 1864 connected the city first to Istanbul and the Baghdad line through Yozgat and Sivas, and then to Zile and the districts of the sanjak. Fifty-five years later the same network announced the first programme of the War of Independence to the whole country from a room converted into a telegraph office in the Saraydüzü Barracks.

Chronology

1828-1829: A semaphore telegraph was tried on the Bosphorus during the Russo-Ottoman War.

23 October 1840: The Ministry of Posts was founded; the first post office opened in Istanbul in the courtyard of the Yeni Cami.

1847: An electric telegraph demonstration was held at Beylerbeyi Palace in the presence of Sultan Abdülmecid.

1854: The Varna-Balaklava submarine cable was laid during the Crimean War.

1855: The Istanbul-Edirne line was completed; the Telegraph Directorate was established.

3 May 1856: The first telegram in Turkish was sent.

13 December 1859: The Yozgat-Sivas section of the Baghdad line was completed.

20 January 1861: The Fünun-ı Telgrafiye Mektebi (School of Telegraph Sciences) opened.

24 June 1863: Construction of the Yozgat-Samsun line began.

1864: The Samsun-Amasya wire was strung; Amasya joined the telegraph network.

1867: The sanjak of Amasya was attached to the newly founded province of Sivas.

1868: The Tokat-Sivas line was built.

1869: The inhabitants of Zile petitioned for a line by way of Amasya.

1870: Zile was linked to Amasya by a telegraph line.

21 September 1871: The postal and telegraph administrations were merged as the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs.

1874: The Amasya-Zile line appeared on the Ottoman telegraph map.

1880: Tokat became a sanjak; Zile and Erbaa were detached from Amasya; the Tokat-Zile line opened.

16 October 1892: The Ministry of War called for telegraph lines to Lâdik, Havza, Vezirköprü and Gümüşhacıköy.

1893: Surveys were made for the Lâdik-Havza-Vezirköprü and Merzifon-Hacıköy lines; the lines were postponed on budgetary grounds.

1896: Erbaa joined the telegraph network.

1903-1907: There was a Telegraph and Post Office in central Amasya, and telegraph staff at Merzifon, Köprü, Mecidözü, Lâdik, Gümüşhacıköy and Havza.

1909: The institution was renamed the Ministry of Posts, Telegraphs and Telephones.

12 June 1919: Mustafa Kemal Pasha arrived in Amasya; a room in the Saraydüzü Barracks was fitted out as a telegraph office.

22 June 1919: The Amasya Circular was transmitted by telegraph to all civil and military authorities.

1939: The PTT General Directorate was attached to the Ministry of Transport.

1995: The PTT was split into the Postal Administration and Türk Telekom.

Bibliography

Academic studies

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Official sources

  • Turkish Post and Telegraph Organisation (PTT), "Tarihçe" (History), ptt.gov.tr.

Other sources

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  • Çopur, İzzettin, "Amasya Genelgesinin (Tamimi) 100. Yılı", izzettincopur.com. izzettincopur.com
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  • Wikipedia (Turkish), "Amasya Genelgesi" and "Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda ulaşım ve haberleşme". tr.wikipedia.org

Online sources