In traditional Anatolian society, what held a village or a neighbourhood together was less a body of written rules than the obligations people took upon themselves towards one another. The culture of imece and neighbourliness that Amasya's villages and neighbourhoods have sustained for centuries rests on that same shared conscience. When a house was being founded, the threshing floor cleared, the vineyard harvested or the winter stores laid in, neighbours hurried to help; hardship grew lighter as it was shared, and joy grew as it was shared. This order showed itself as much in the field and the wedding house as in the kitchen of a house of mourning, in the wheat boiled for a child's first tooth, and in the chairs set out before a door in the cool of the evening.

One point should be made at the outset: no field study was found that treats Amasya's imece on its own terms and collects local records of farm work and village services. The details of how imece worked in village affairs come from sources describing Anatolian villages in general. Concrete Amasya examples are found mostly in studies that record wedding customs, folk beliefs and rites of passage, in a field study carried out in the villages of Göynücek, in Osman Fevzi Olcay's memoirs of the Amasya neighbourhoods of the early twentieth century, and in local news reports on practices that continue in the region today; most of the local detail below is drawn from these.

The Meaning and Workings of Imece

Imece is the doing of tasks together, voluntarily or by obligation, within a village or a community of villages. If it has been decided to remedy some problem of the village, every household contributes labour; where manual work is needed, one person from each household comes to work, and a household with nobody to send pays a sum equal to a labourer's daily wage. When money has to be raised, the levy is called salma, and each household gives in proportion to its means. In some regions households are ranked as first, second and third class according to their wealth, and the salma is assessed accordingly. The decision on imece or salma is made by the muhtar (village headman) together with the council of elders.

This arrangement has no written statute; it rests on an unwritten law accepted by everyone, and in villages that municipal services do not reach it takes the place of the work a municipality would do. Repairing village and field roads, sewerage, clearing and fencing the common pasture, building a school or mosque, collecting fuel for the school, cleaning the village oven, supplying chairs, pitchers and cauldrons for weddings, and hosting a guest who comes to the village are counted among such tasks. Salma, for its part, is the means of raising money for the village's charitable works, for help to a young man about to enter military service, and for building work in the village.

In farm work, imece comes into play when the season presses. As sowing time approaches, neighbours able to help are called for those whose fields have not been ploughed; on the appointed day everyone arrives with tools and equipment, and those who come are offered lunch or tea. The work is finished quickly, with songs and in good spirits. In grain-growing regions nobody began the threshing while someone's crop remained uncut; the uncut fields were first harvested together by imece, and only then did people turn to the threshing floor. The fields of those left without help, the sick or the elderly, of widows and of families whose son was away in the army are worked in turn, arranged by the muhtar or by respected figures of the village, and these jobs were often given priority over those of the well-off households. In this way imece also served as an unwritten means of protecting the weak.

Winter Preparations and Shared Tables

One of the clearest signs that imece has not vanished altogether from the town comes from the Nergiz neighbourhood in central Amasya. In this neighbourhood of some forty households, the women renew the sheep's wool in their quilts and pillows every year at the end of summer, waiting for the hot days. A woman who has washed her wool at home lets her neighbours know; the wool is spread out in the streets to dry, then beaten with sticks in the old way to air it, and carefully picked over. The neighbourhood's woman muhtar, Nuran Muslu, says the work has gone on like this for years and that the women finish it quickly by joining hands; in the neighbourhood these women are called the "Golden Girls". Residents who still sleep on wool mattresses while many homes have switched to synthetic fibre say that wool keeps one cool, but that the custom is beginning to be forgotten. The rest of the winter preparations are done the same way: soup ingredients, yufka, tomato paste and tarhana are made together with the neighbours.

In the villages the shared table lives on together with present-day forms of salma. In the village of Tatlıpınar, with its hundred and forty households, a practice begun fourteen years ago has the whole village break the Ramadan fast together in the old school building throughout the month. The village cook prepares three cauldrons of hot food every day, the men distribute it, and what is left over is put into containers and eaten at home at the pre-dawn meal. The costs are met from money the village men collect by imece; the muhtar, Cemal Onat, says that this arrangement has freed the women from the bustle of cooking throughout Ramadan. Interrupted during the pandemic, the practice later resumed, and relatives living abroad and anyone whose road passes through the village are invited to this table. In the village of Alpaslan in Taşova, the village children gather after the fast-breaking meal in the middle of Ramadan and go round the houses, and the householders greet them with mani verses and put something in their baskets. Baskets that once received apples, pears and walnuts now receive mostly things bought from the grocer; the villagers say this custom of "basket swinging" (sepet sallama) has a history of more than a hundred and fifty years. This night, on which the whole village opens its houses one by one, serves as a festival in which neighbourliness is taught to children.

Shared Labour at Weddings

The field in which shared labour is recorded most often in Amasya is the wedding. Preparations run through a division of duties directed by officials such as the steward (kâhya) and the yiğitbaşı; in the Akdağ villages of Suluova the young men of the village pound the wheat for keşkek together at the stone mortar, and the groom's family carries wheat, meat and fat to the bride's house as a group. The convoy that goes to fetch the bride is made up of the vehicles of relatives, neighbours and acquaintances, and guests from other villages are lodged and hosted by the villagers. The details of the wedding are covered in a separate article, so only its side of mutual aid is mentioned here.

The field study carried out in the villages of Göynücek follows this mutual aid step by step. As a wedding approaches, the neighbours help the girl with her trousseau; headscarves, needle lace and handwork are made together, and the stockings, cross-stitch and lace-edged headscarves destined for the trousseau chest are prepared jointly by the mother, the bride-to-be and the neighbours. In the past people came to a wedding house from distant villages on horseback or by donkey, so neighbours set aside room in their homes both for the guests and for their animals. The wedding meal is cooked by relatives and neighbours. Before the wedding a meal called "danışık" used to be given, and the burden of hosting guests was shared among households. The researcher notes that this practice was rooted in a sense of mutual aid and solidarity, but also that today nobody readily takes on another's expenses and the cost of the wedding is mostly borne by the groom's side. The third day of the wedding is called "okuntu"; first the village's own guests arrive, then those from outside villages. Those who come to the okuntu do not come empty-handed, and the gifts and money they bring are given to the groom's side; according to the compilation, this custom too is rooted in mutual aid.

At Birth, Circumcision and in Chosen Brotherhood

Neighbourliness is woven from small exchanges that begin with a child's arrival in the world. In the villages of Göynücek, when a child's first tooth appears, diş hediği is made: wheat, chickpeas or beans are boiled, the neighbours are invited to the house or the boiled grain is carried to them on plates. The neighbours do not send the plate back empty but return it with an egg or some money inside. In some homes no cradle is bought for fear that a misfortune once suffered will recur, and another household's cradle is used; after a birth some families do not make çökelek cheese or bazlama flatbread at home but ask their neighbours for them. These habits, dressed in the garb of belief, keep the doors of neighbouring houses ajar in the first days of a new family.

At circumcision this bond takes a more lasting form. In the same region the kirve, the boy's sponsor at circumcision, is considered closer than one's own brother, and for that reason no daughter is given in marriage to a kirve. The kirve is chosen from among relatives or someone with whom the family gets on well, and may come from the same village or from neighbouring ones. The kirve pays the circumcision money and buys the circumcision clothes, the gifts brought by the kirve's side lie on the circumcision bed, and the kirve relationship does not end when the ceremony does. Since most of the villages studied are Alevi villages, the compilation also mentions musahiplik, the Alevi institution of ritual brotherhood. Informants liken the kirve to the musahip: both are "brothers chosen in this world", and like kirves, musahips do not give or take daughters in marriage from one another. At weddings it is often the musahip who handles the bargaining over the "sale" of the bride's broom and baby pillow to the groom's side. Because being a kirve is regarded as a heavy duty, care is taken to choose someone able to bear the burden.

Sending Off Conscripts, Mourning and Illness

The custom of seeing off young men going to military service, recorded among the region's local customs, is another example of neighbourliness in which burdens are shared. Weeks beforehand, relatives, neighbours and acquaintances invite the young man to meals in turn and give him gifts such as pocket money and clothing. On the day of departure all his kin see him off with halay dances and prayers to the sound of drum and zurna. Certain dances, such as the yelleme, are danced in this context especially by young men going into service. General accounts of imece, for their part, also mention that the field left behind by the one who goes is worked by neighbours and that money is collected for the future conscript through a salma.

In times of mourning and illness, neighbourliness continues in the form of taking over the work of a household. According to accounts collected in the villages of Göynücek, the neighbours bring food to the house of the deceased; the bereaved are not expected to busy themselves with cooking as well, so that they may mourn in peace. In the past, before the dead were washed, neighbours would bring a white sheet or soap, a practice that no longer continues. The usable clothes of the deceased are given to neighbours, or kept for forty days and then given to someone in need. After the burial, in some villages a grave sacrifice is slaughtered and a funeral meal distributed, and on the seventh, fortieth and fifty-second nights after the death the Quran is recited and food is served; halva is roasted in some places on the third and fortieth days and in others distributed during the recitation of the mevlit.

The respect that mourning lays upon neighbours also governs days of celebration. In the past no wedding or festivity was held for a time while there was a death in the village; if a wedding fell on the day of a funeral, the host of the wedding would go to the house of mourning to ask permission. If permission was given the wedding went ahead, but more often it was postponed. A living example of this was witnessed during the fieldwork: on the day the researcher attended an okuntu in the village of Çaykışla, one of the villagers died; the bereaved family sent their gift to the wedding house but did not attend, and the host of the wedding held it that day with their permission. Although these rules are not observed as strictly today, care is still taken over the bounds of merriment on days when there is a funeral.

Caring for the sick by pooling effort, looking after the house of a neighbour who has gone abroad, visiting a newborn child and sending a plate of food are likewise links in the same habit. Some of these details do not rest on a written compilation specific to Amasya; they are told as habits that come from the traditional neighbourhood life of Anatolia and are well known in the region as well. The same habit is seen in visits to shrines around Amasya: a visitor who finds healing makes halva as an offering and distributes it to his neighbours. The collecting of money for a sacrificial animal when people go out to pray for rain in dry spring weather is likewise a recorded shared practice of the region.

Neighbourliness in a Town Quarter

The most vivid picture of the town counterpart of the solidarity described in the village compilations is given by Osman Fevzi Olcay's Amasya Hâtıraları (Memories of Amasya). Olcay describes the Sofuzâde quarter where he was born and grew up as a central neighbourhood close to the market and bazaar, where the square in front of the Bimarhane, the Mustafa Bey Bath and the Çevikçe school served as the children's playground, and he lists his neighbours house by house. In this list, at one corner lives Tütüncü Hacı Ahmet Ağa, opposite him Kapaloğlu Veli Efendi from Erbaa, and further on the blind Hatice Molla and her husband Hacı Necip Efendi; after each name Olcay notes sadly that none of them is still alive. What stays in the author's memory is most often the everyday manner of his neighbours: in the house of Mumcu Hakkı, Rabia Hatun, the eldest of the family, is among the respected elders of the quarter, her grandson and daughter-in-law come to the evening gatherings "observing the right of neighbourliness", and in Olcay's words this family ran to help with every trouble of the neighbours.

The evenings of the quarter also revolved around neighbourliness. Olcay remembers Dubaracıoğlu Hamamcı Hacı Ali Hafız Ağa, who ran the Sinan Bath in Selağzı and the Mustafa Bey Bath in front of the Bimarhane, as "charitable, generous, fond of his neighbours". After supper the Ağa would take his seat opposite his street door, chairs would be set out and his narghile brought; hearing that he had come outside, the neighbours, the author's father first among them, would arrive one by one and be offered coffee. Nimet Efendi, son of Çorumlu Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi, who had served as mufti, likewise opened the selamlık, the men's quarters of his house, and conversed with the elders of the neighbourhood; the children of the quarter went to kiss his hand. İmam Hoca, who came from the villages of Mecitözü, was known in the quarter as "Hacıbeş Dede" because he pleased the children by giving them money, and Pembe Hatun from Kaleköy is remembered as "a pious, charitable and much-loved lady". Kurdoğlu Mehmet Bey, trustee of the Mehmet Paşa Mosque, was also known for his generosity and his help to the poor.

The neighbours of this quarter did not belong to a single community. Among the houses Olcay lists are those of Mumcu Hacı Agop, the jeweller Andıran, the shoemaker Mehsiyah and Doctor Dumyalıyan. He remembers Arucuoğlu Karabit Usta, who lived directly opposite their house, as someone "so precious that the debt of neighbourliness could never be repaid". Witty, full of jokes and a master of draughts, Karabit Usta liked to tease his Muslim neighbours because a shared wall stood between his house and that of a neighbour named Cennet Hanım, cennet meaning paradise: he would say that the Turks joked that Christians would never see the face of paradise, whereas with one kick at the wall he would enter "Cennet" before them, and he made his neighbours laugh. Olcay records in a short sentence that this neighbour was deported in 1915. The memoir shows at once how a right of neighbourliness that made no distinction of religion was lived in an Amasya street, and how those same years broke that fabric apart.

Endowments, Charity and the Shared Table

Behind the solidarity of the neighbourhood stood a wider system of aid that the town had built through pious endowments (waqfs). Hüseyin Hüsameddin lists by name, alongside Amasya's five imarets (public kitchens) and five hostels, eleven ziyafethanes, houses of hospitality open to guests, travellers and the poor; their food was plentiful, their cooks and bakers fixed, and their attendants salaried. According to Hüsameddin, until forty years before the time of his writing the houses of Amasya's leading families were likewise open to all, each like a ziyafethane. This hospitality that kept the mansion door open was a larger-scale counterpart of sending food to a neighbour in the quarter.

Olcay's memoirs show that this system was still working at the start of the twentieth century. Next to the room on the Yeşilırmak side of the Mehmet Paşa Madrasa, built, as he remembered it, in 902 (1496), there was a bakehouse and an oven; its founder had thought of this social aid when he built the madrasa. In this oven pide bread was baked especially throughout Ramadan and distributed to the townspeople, to the poor of the quarter and for charitable purposes. From the income of a simit bakery in Selağzı endowed to the Aşağı Pirler tomb, flour halva was made each year on the eve of the Feast of Sacrifice by the hand of Karcı İmam Tevfik; the halva was wrapped in pide, carried to the tomb in large laundry baskets, and distributed after the hafızes had completed a recitation of the Quran and prayed. Olcay stresses that this custom was carried out without fail on the same day every year.

The Neighbour Is in Need of His Neighbour's Ashes

The saying commonly heard among the people, "a neighbour needs his neighbour's ashes," expresses the essence of this culture. In the traditional Amasya neighbourhood, neighbourliness is a concern that does not wait for a knock at the door: a plate is sent from what has been cooked, the sick are cared for together, and the house of a neighbour who has gone abroad is looked after. Among the sayings recorded in Amasya, the one that expresses this reciprocity most plainly is "El eli yur, el de döner yüzü yur." In the region it is explained to mean that a kindness done will not go unrequited. The neighbour who works in your field today knows he will find the same support in his own work tomorrow; this is what gives imece its continuity. The return of the diş hediği plate with an egg inside is a small example of the same reciprocity. In one of the local mani verses, the beloved who puts keşkek in the oven to cook for tomorrow is addressed thus: "Don't eat alone, my love, send word to your friends." The idea that a meal should not be eaten alone finds a place even in a mani.

The religious basis of neighbourliness in Muslim societies is verse 36 of the Quran's surah an-Nisa. The verse lists kindness to the neighbour immediately after kindness to parents. Commentators explain the near neighbour in this verse as the person whose house is closest and the distant neighbour as one living farther away; some have said that the near neighbour is a relative and the distant one a non-relative, others that the first is a Muslim and the second a non-Muslim. As to the limit of neighbourhood, since no sound report exists, many scholars adopted the view that custom determines who counts as a neighbour. Al-Awzai is reported to have counted forty houses in every direction of a house as its neighbours. In the hadiths attributed to the Prophet the importance of neighbourliness is expressed more explicitly; the best known of them states that Gabriel stressed the neighbour's right so much that the Prophet thought he would make the neighbour an heir. It is also reported in the hadiths that one whose neighbour is not safe from his harm cannot be said to have fully believed, and that the best neighbour in God's sight is the one who does the most good to his neighbours. Neighbours are advised to give one another gifts, beginning with the nearest, and this advice can be read as the religious ground of the habit in Amasya of taking a plate of food to a neighbour's door.

Scholars are united that non-Muslim neighbours also hold the rights of neighbourhood. Because the hadiths use the concept of neighbour without distinguishing religion, not harming one's neighbour and doing him good are presented as the duty of everyone who believes in God and the Last Day. The phrase "right of neighbourliness" that Olcay uses of his Armenian neighbour Karabit Usta shows how this understanding had settled into everyday speech. Neighbourly etiquette is a constant subject of books on ethics: sayings on neighbourly etiquette were collected in works such as Ibn Abi al-Dunya's Makarim al-akhlaq, and al-Ghazali devoted a separate heading to the rights of neighbours in the Ihya ulum al-din. Behind an everyday habit such as sending food to a neighbour stands this long literature of ethics.

The Law of Neighbours

In Islamic jurisprudence the relation of neighbourhood gives rise to legal rights and obligations alongside moral duties. The Mecelle, applied in the Ottoman state, forbids causing manifest harm to a neighbour and defines it as gross harm (fahiş zarar); things that weaken a building or make it uninhabitable fall within this. Among the examples the Mecelle lists are an adjoining blacksmith's shop or mill weakening a building, smoke from an oven disturbing a household to the point that it cannot be lived in, faulty sewage pipes flowing into a neighbour's house, and the complete blocking of a neighbour's light. Conduct that violates family privacy is also forbidden. The right of pre-emption (şüfa), which gives the co-owner, the holder of an easement or the adjoining neighbour the first chance to buy a property at the same price when it is sold, is accepted for neighbours only by Hanafi jurists, and its basis is the hadith stating that the neighbour of a house is more entitled to it than anyone else.

These provisions are not specific to Amasya; they applied in all Ottoman towns. Still, it is reasonable to consider the importance of neighbours' rights in a town where wooden houses stood in rows along the Yeşilırmak, built against one another; the neighbours Olcay describes, whose two houses were separated by a shared wall, were part of this close fabric. However, since no verified example of neighbour disputes from Amasya's sharia court registers was examined in this study, this should be mentioned only as an inference.

Gatherings of Women and Men

The evening gatherings and conversation circles held on long winter nights are described in traditional neighbourhood life as both a form of entertainment and an occasion for mutual aid. Women gather in one house and, while doing handwork, help one another with the preparation of the trousseau and share knowledge and experience. The men's conversation circles are places where neighbourhood matters are discussed and young people are taught manners; Hacı Hafız Ağa's doorstep gatherings and Nimet Efendi's selamlık are local examples showing how such circles took shape in Amasya. These gatherings serve as a place of learning in which social bonds are passed from one generation to the next. In the records of folk belief and handicrafts in Amasya, women's labour is also seen to have its place in this frame: needle lace is made throughout the region and, besides edging the yemeni headscarf, is used in products such as collar flowers, handkerchiefs, scarves and coin purses; in Gümüşhacıköy sacks, saddlebags and ropes are made from kırnap, a yarn spun from hemp or goat hair.

The women's share in wedding imece is especially pronounced. When there is a wedding, the neighbourhood gathers; dough is rolled out, the cauldron is set to boil, wedding dishes such as börek, baklava, pilaf, sarma and kavurma are prepared together, the tables are laid by joint effort, and the dishes are washed together. The bride's house is prepared together and the trousseau is assembled together. In general accounts of imece it is said that imece has weakened with migration from villages to cities and the decline of farming, but that it continues today in these wedding tasks and especially among women. The wool and tarhana imece of the Nergiz neighbourhood is a present-day Amasya counterpart of this observation.

Solidarity Today

The growth of urbanisation and industry, migration from villages to cities, the shrinking of agriculture and the spread of welfare-state provision have weakened the culture of imece. In emptied villages no young people remain to work, and tasks once done by shared labour have passed to institutions. The field study in Göynücek likewise found that village populations have declined, that most of those who remain are middle-aged or elderly, that young people hold their weddings in the cities, and that many customs survive only in memory. That city dwellers do not even know the neighbour next door is regarded as one of the best known signs of this rupture. Yet one side of imece still survives today. In Amasya, highland festivals are organised by village associations and village people; the highland festivals of the villages of Beden and Kaba-Oğuz in Gümüşhacıköy and of Karasavul, Gürsu and Çakırsu in Taşova are of this kind. The Taşova Anchovy Festival is organised by the Taşova Black Sea Culture Mutual Aid and Solidarity Association.

Amasya is described in official promotional material as a warm and hospitable city. Tatlıpınar's shared iftar table, Alpaslan's night of basket swinging and Nergiz's wool imece show the old order continuing, adapted to new conditions. Even as the form of imece changes, a neighbour's going to help without being asked, sharing a meal, and not leaving a household alone at a wedding or in mourning remain familiar conduct in the daily life of an Amasya neighbourhood.

Chronology

1496: According to the date Olcay remembered, the Mehmet Paşa Madrasa is built; pide is distributed throughout Ramadan from the oven beside it to the townspeople and the poor of the quarter.

1915: Arucuoğlu Karabit Usta, the Olcay family's neighbour across the street in the Sofuzâde quarter, is deported.

2019: The field study recording rites of passage in the villages of Göynücek is completed; it notes that practices such as neighbours bringing food to the house of mourning continue.

2024: In the village of Alpaslan in Taşova, the custom of basket swinging, said to be more than a hundred and fifty years old, is kept alive during Ramadan.

2025: In the Nergiz neighbourhood, women air the wool of their quilts and pillows by imece at the end of summer.

2026: In the village of Tatlıpınar, the communal iftar funded by money the men collect by imece continues throughout Ramadan.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Necdet Kurt, "Amasya ve Tokat Çevrelerinde Türbe ve Yatır İnanç Pratiği Örnekleri ile Velilere (Evliyalara) Bıçak Koyma İnancı", Kültür Evreni, no. 47, 2022. amasya.bel.tr
  • Osman Fevzi Olcay, Amasya Hâtıraları: Bildiklerim, Gördüklerim, İşittiklerim ile Amasya, simplified by Turan Böcekçi and Mehmet H. Seçkiner, Amasya Municipality Cultural Publications no. 8, Amasya 2009 ("Sofu-zade Mahallesi", pp. 28-33; Selağzı workplaces, pp. 48-49; "Mehmet Paşa Medresesi", p. 64).
  • Hüsameddin, Amasya Tarihi, vol. 1, p. 314 (Amasya Municipality e-book, volumes 1-4, p. 178).

Academic studies

  • Rahime Deveci, "Amasya Yöresi Düğünlerinde İcra Edilen Dansların Ritüel İşlevleri", Dede Korkut Uluslararası Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Araştırmaları Dergisi, no. 31, August 2023, pp. 72-101.
  • Biricik Taştan, Amasya İli Göynücek İlçesi Türk Halk İnanış ve Uygulamaları, MA thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University Institute of Social Sciences, Samsun 2019 (chapters on birth, marriage, death and circumcision).

Official sources

  • Amasya Directorate of Culture and Tourism, General Information and local culture pages: amasya.ktb.gov.tr.

Other sources

  • Mustafa Çağrıcı and Ali Şafak, "Komşu", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 26, Ankara 2002, pp. 157-159. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Kadın muhtardan geleneksel dayanışma örneği: Amasya'da yünler imeceyle havalandırılıyor", İşçi Haber (from İHA), 6 August 2025. iscihaber.net
  • "Köyde ezber bozan gelenek: Kadınlar yemek yapmıyor, sofraya erkekler kuruyor", Milliyet (from İHA), 7 March 2026.
  • "Amasya'da 151 yıllık ramazan geleneği 'sepet sallama' sürdürülüyor", Habertürk (from Anadolu Agency), 25 March 2024.
  • Mehmet Taşan, "İmece Kültürü", Anadolu İzlenimleri, 27 February 2025.
  • "İmece", Vikipedi, tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/İmece.

Online sources