When Amasya was reorganised as an independent province, an Ilısu district was added alongside the central district, Merzifon, Gümüşhacıköy, Havza, Lâdik and Vezirköprü, and its seat was the village of Ilısu, which today belongs to the Göynücek district. A year later the district was reduced to a nahiye (sub-district); since then the village has lost its administrative weight and withdrawn among the smaller settlements of the district. What sets Ilısu apart from its surroundings today is the warm spring rising in the middle of the village and the old pool structure that stands over it. Women still wash laundry in this structure, though its age has not yet been established by any document.

The Name

The name appears to be formed from the words ılık (warm) and su (water), which fits the spring in the village; yet no written explanation directly linking the name to the spring has been found. Ilısu is absent from the list of renamed settlements in the district compiled by Bekir Başalan, so the name has not undergone any official change in recent times. When the Ottoman accounting register of the provinces of Karaman and Rûm for the year 1530 was published, its index included a field (mezraa) from the Geldiklan sub-district of Amasya, read as "Il[ı]-su" (p. 360). Since the present Göynücek villages of Varay (Gediksaray) and Cender (Kışlabeyi) are recorded in the same sub-district, the area evidently lay within Geldiklan at that time. Even so, it cannot be shown from the documents that this field, of which the index gives only the name and page, is the same place as the present village; the fact that the register does not use the name for a village, only for a cultivated field, adds to the uncertainty.

District and Sub-district Seat

Drawing on the State Yearbook (Devlet Salnamesi) of 1925, Sabit Genç writes that an Ilısu district was formed when the independent province of Amasya was established, and that its seat was the village of Ilısu in Göynücek. In the reorganisation of 1926, Vezirköprü, Lâdik and Havza were attached to the province of Canik (Samsun), the Ilısu district was turned into a sub-district, and the number of Amasya's districts fell to three: the centre, Merzifon and Gümüşhacıköy. Cemal Karadağ's study of the yearbooks of 1925-1928 likewise names Ilısu, together with Varay, Ezinepazar, Akdağ (Zana) and Zara (Geldiklan), among the province's sub-districts after 1926. Within a few years, then, the village passed from being the seat of a district to being the seat of a sub-district.

The official history of the district tells the story of the same years from another angle. According to it, Göynücek first became a district in 1922, lost this status in 1926, was for a time attached to the Ilısu sub-district, and became a district again in 1954 under Law No. 6324. Placed side by side, the two accounts suggest that in the mid-1920s the administrative centre of the area lay for a while at Ilısu, and that after the district was abolished Göynücek too was attached to the Ilısu sub-district. How the date 1922 is to be reconciled with the yearbook entry of 1925, and when Ilısu ceased to be a sub-district seat, remain unclear in the sources.

Kocaman Tepe

The district history cites the Ilısu Kocaman Tepe mound as "the finest example" of settlements from the period 750-585 BC, when Phrygian, Cimmerian, Scythian and Medo-Persian rule was felt in the region. No excavation report or survey publication on this mound could be found. For now the dating rests solely on this official promotional text; nothing is known of the mound's size, its finds or its distance from the village.

The Spring and the Old Pool

A news report published in October 2024 described how the women of Ilısu meet every Sunday to wash laundry in the old bathhouse structure built over the 28-degree spring that rises in the middle of the village. The then district governor (kaymakam) of Göynücek, Mustafa Kartal, said that the village had been settled in the 3rd century AD and that the Romans had built baths and pools where the healing water emerges. According to Kartal, the structure is now used sometimes as a laundry and sometimes as a playground for children, while in the past it served as a bath for bridegrooms and brides; he added that there was a project to use the thermal water in greenhouses and that efforts were under way to open the site to tourism. One of the older women of the village says the water always flows "at the same temperature", and that they wash their laundry here just as they saw their mothers and grandmothers do.

The attribution of the structure to the Roman period rests on this statement alone; no scholarly publication, listing decision or museum inventory supporting it has been found. Nor could any document from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the General Directorate of Mineral Research and Exploration (MTA) or the governorship be found showing that the spring is officially registered as a thermal spa or geothermal field, so the term spa has not been used here, only a warm spring.

Hüsâmeddîn Yasar's Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya) contains a curious parallel. Yasar writes that the "Ilıca Karyesi" (village of Ilıca) in the Geldiklan sub-district took its name from the hot spring in the middle of the plain, and that Rıdvân Ağa of Amasya built and endowed here in 987 (1579) the bath known as the "Geldiklan Hamamı". In Rıdvân Ağa's biography it is related that he endowed this bath, together with the "Ilısu farm" (Ilısu çiftliği), to his descendants, that the hot spring later changed its course and began to rise above the bath, and that the bath, left on dry ground, fell into ruin. The shared name and the warm water inevitably call the present Ilısu to mind. Yasar, however, refers to the settlement as "Ilıca" and gives no clue connecting it with Göynücek; the 1530 register, too, records a village of Ilıca in the Geldiklan sub-district distinct from the field of Ilısu (p. 356). It therefore cannot be said that Rıdvân Ağa's bath is the structure at Ilısu, and the dates in the two accounts do not match either.

Population

According to the address-based population registry, 181 people lived in Ilısu in 2025, 83 of them men and 98 women. The population, 574 in 2008, fell to 421 in 2012 and 200 in 2017, rose suddenly to 381 in 2018, and then declined again to 311 in 2022 and 213 in 2024. In seventeen years the village has lost more than two thirds of its population, and the rise of 2018 did not last. That a place which was once a district seat has now fallen below two hundred inhabitants also shows that its administrative standing never returned after 1926.

Chronology

1530: A field named "Il[ı]-su" is recorded in the Geldiklan sub-district in the accounting register of Karaman and Rûm; whether it is the same place as the present village is uncertain.

1925: According to the State Yearbook, the Ilısu district, with its seat at the village of Ilısu, is created in the independent province of Amasya.

1926: The Ilısu district is converted into a sub-district.

1 October 2024: It is reported that the old structure over the village's warm spring is used as a laundry and that work is under way to open it to tourism.

Bibliography

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