The present name of İkizyaka in Göynücek is a new one; for centuries the village appears in written sources under the name Efkeri. This older name turns up both in the accounting register of 1530 and in Hüsâmeddîn Yasar's Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya), and it places the village among those of the old Geldiklan sub-district west of Amasya. Little has been written about İkizyaka as it is today, where 129 people lived in 2025; almost everything we know of its past follows from the trail of that old name.

From Efkeri to İkizyaka

In Bekir Başalan's study of renamed settlements in Amasya, the table for Göynücek gives Efkeri as the former name of İkizyaka. Başalan notes that of the nine changes in the district, Şeyhler/Şıhlar, Şeyhoğlu/Şıhoğlu, Gaffarlı/Gafarlı and Tencerli/Tencirli were made so as to recall the old names, while the rest received new names whose dictionary meaning differs from the old ones. İkizyaka belongs to this second group: the new name preserves neither the sound nor the sense of Efkeri. The study does not state in which year the change was made. No explanation of what the name Efkeri derives from has been found either; the new name is clearly made up of the words ikiz (twin) and yaka (side, bank), but no document is known that explains why it was chosen.

Efkeri in the Geldiklan Sub-district

Efkeri is recorded as a village in the Geldiklan(-âbâd) sub-district in the accounting register No. 387 of 937 (1530) (p. 359). The register contains no other village of this name within the sanjak (liva) of Amasya; the second entry of the same name belongs to the Kâfirni sub-district of another sanjak. The fact that the Geldiklan sub-district in the same register also includes the present Göynücek villages of Varay (Gediksaray) and Cender (Kışlabeyi) makes it a strong possibility that the Efkeri of 1530 is the present İkizyaka. The index gives the village's name and page; it does not show the number of households or taxes.

Describing the Geldiklan sub-district, Hüsâmeddîn Yasar writes that its name goes back to Baygeldi Bey of the Afshar tribe, who settled here in the Danishmendid period, and that the name "Baygeldi Alan" was in time worn down to "Geldiklan". According to him, Şâdgeldi Pâdişâh, the ruler of Amasya from the Akçakoyunlu clan living in the sub-district, set these lands aside as freehold for his own descendants, and when their influence in Amasya came to an end the family lived here. The name Efkeri appears explicitly in this section of Yasar's work: he says that Şâdgeldi Pâdişâh's descendants had dervish lodges, madrasas, schools and baths in the village bearing the name of İlik Dede, in Efkeri, in Kızılca-i Sağîr and in Ilıca. The sentence lists the four villages together; it does not specify which of these buildings stood in Efkeri. No published information has been found on any building from this period surviving in present-day İkizyaka. Even so, these lines show that in the early Ottoman centuries the village lay in a milieu tied to the local lords of Amasya and their pious endowments.

The 2024 Downpour

On 10 July 2024, in the General Assembly of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, the Amasya deputy Reşat Karagöz stated that a heavy downpour had struck the Göynücek villages of Çaykışla, Tencirli, Kafarlı and İkizyaka. Detailed damage is described in the speech only for Kafarlı (Gaffarlı) and Çaykışla; it does not say what was damaged in İkizyaka, and it notes that there was no loss of life.

Population

The population of İkizyaka fell from 200 in 2008 to 129 in 2025; at the last count 66 men and 63 women were registered in the village. The decline has been slow and steady: 166 people were counted in 2012, 142 in 2016 and 121 in 2021. The rise to 167 in 2024 lasted a single year, and in 2025 the population fell back to 129. Over seventeen years the village has lost a little more than a third of its population.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

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Other sources

Online sources