According to the records of Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar, İlgazi takes its name from Ilgaz Mehmed Bey, one of the lords serving the Danishmendid ruler Melik Danişmend Ahmed Gazi: Yasar writes that this lord's farm near Amasya was known in his own day as "İlgaz Köyü". Today 133 people live in the village, 35 kilometres from Amasya. What is known of the past of İlgazi, whose population has fallen to a fifth in forty years, amounts to a few lines of record, yet these lines carry the origin of its name back to the first generation of Turkish rule in Amasya.

The Farm of Ilgaz Mehmed Bey

In his biographical volumes Yasar presents Ilgaz Mehmed Bey as one of the emirs of Melik Danişmend Ahmed Gazi, a lord who served in his campaigns. He adds that the bey died after the year 500 (1106-07), that he was "a warrior for the faith" and that he was also called "İlgâzî". Yasar's sentence on the village itself is brief: the bey's farm near Amasya was known, in the years the author lived, as İlgaz Köyü. The present form of the village name matches the second name Yasar gives the bey, İlgâzî. İlgazi is absent from Bekir Başalan's table of settlements in the central district renamed during the Republican period; apart from small differences of spelling, the name has not changed since the early records.

Yasar's account is built on the pattern of a lord's farm turning in time into a village that bears his name, and the same author gives similar explanations for other villages around Amasya. He cites no endowment deed or inscription showing the founding of the farm or the life of the bey. The statement that İlgazi's name comes from Ilgaz Mehmed Bey therefore rests, for the present, on Yasar's account alone.

İl-Gâzî in the 1530 Register

In the published index of the 1530 accounts register, a village named "İl-Gâzî" is recorded in the Geldiklan-âbâd nahiye of the kaza of Amasya; the entry refers to page 356 of the register. No other village of the same name appears in the Amasya liva. Hüsâmeddîn Yasar describes Geldiklan as a nahiye covering the western parts of Amasya, with Ortaköy as its centre. No document has been found showing directly that the present site of İlgazi lay within this nahiye; still, the uniqueness of the name in the liva makes it plausible that the index entry belongs to the present village. As the index gives only the name and the page, the size of the village in that year is unknown.

The "İlgazılı Hacı Seyyid Yûsuf" whom Yasar lists among those who died in the events of the year 1121 (1709) also draws attention to this village by his name. Yasar describes him as trustee of the Fağfur Paşa endowment and a seyyid from among the scholars. The text does not say, however, whether the epithet "İlgazılı" points to the village of İlgaz in Amasya or to some other İlgaz in Anatolia, so the man cannot be tied to the village with certainty.

In the Records

The official village record for 2012 places İlgazi 35 kilometres from the provincial centre. The village's primary school had closed and children had been moved to bussed education. There was no health post, health centre or PTT agency. The village had a mains water network but no sewerage.

Population

In the 1985 census İlgazi was a village of 617 people. The population fell to 538 five years later and 360 in 2000, and had dropped to 196 by 2011. In the address-based records 226 people appear in 2007. The series jumps to 241 for a single year in 2018 and falls back to 185 the next; the records do not explain this one-year increase. In 2025 the village had 133 inhabitants, 67 men and 66 women.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Other sources

Online sources