The Çekerek River is one of the three great tributaries that feed the Yeşilırmak. Ancient authors call it the Skylax (Scylax), and in Hittite texts a river named Zuliya appears which scholars identify with the Çekerek. It forms the southwestern end of the basin, the side that lies closer to the dry threshold of Central Anatolia than to the humid Black Sea belt. It rises in the highlands of Yozgat, passes through a steep canyon on the border between Yozgat and Çorum, widens in the open valley of Göynücek, waters the Geldingen Plain and joins the Yeşilırmak in front of Kayabaşı, roughly fifteen kilometres southwest of Amasya. The last stretch of the river, from Kazankaya to this confluence, is the part most bound up with the history of Amasya; Hittite cemeteries, a Hellenistic rock relief, a plain that served as an army camp and an island of vineyards at the city's doorstep all lie along this line.

Names and Early Records

The river's name has been written in several forms over the centuries. Hüseyin Hüsameddin notes in the first volume of his Amasya Tarihi that the Çekerek was recorded in ancient times as "Askilakis", and that European travellers, mishearing the local name, wrote it down as "Çöterlik". In the same passage, pointing to the weakness of the river's flow and the fact that it sometimes dries up altogether, he suggests that the old name may be a corruption of the Turkish word "Sengilik". This interpretation rests on no document; it is the author's own guess and has not been accepted among linguists. The identification with the Hittite Zuliya, on the other hand, goes back to the work of Sedat Alp, and Şevket Dönmez, who directs the excavation at Oluz Höyük, also uses this name when introducing the river.

Hüsameddin's short description of the river also reflects how the people of Amasya once regarded the Çekerek. In his words it comes from the direction of Zile, skirts the western side of the Kayabaşı quarter southwest of the city and joins the Yeşilırmak in front of Serçoban Hill. "It is small, like a stream," he says; it swells in spring and sometimes stops flowing entirely. He then adds a verdict that sounds like a folk saying: "When it flows its benefit is great, when it floods its harm is none." Compared with the destructive floods of the Yeşilırmak and the disasters brought by the torrents of the streams inside the city, the Çekerek was remembered in Amasya chiefly as a source of plenty.

Course and Measurements

The sources do not fully agree on the river's source. Basin studies state that it rises on the steppe-facing slopes of the Çamlıbel Mountains between Sivas and Yozgat, while Amasya's geographical inventory points to the Yıldız Mountains about fifty kilometres northwest of Sivas and gives an elevation of 2,500 metres. Two figures also circulate for its length: 200 kilometres in the provincial governorate's data and about 256 kilometres in basin assessments. Foreign sources give values of up to 270 kilometres. The sources do agree that 45 kilometres of the river lie within the borders of Amasya Province.

The river enters the territory of the Çekerek district of Yozgat after crossing the Deveci Mountains. Within the district it receives the Karadere, Göndelen, Akdağmadeni and Görmügöz streams, and it leaves the district at the place called Keleboğazı. Passing about five kilometres north of the Aydıncık district, it winds among the volcanic cliffs of Kazankaya, where the Bakır Çay also joins it. Further north it meets the Çorum Çayı and the Efennik Çayı coming from Çorum. These two streams are the Çekerek's main tributaries within Amasya. The final confluence takes place at Kayabaşı; here the main branch of the Yeşilırmak, coming from the south, merges with the Çekerek into a single bed, and the two flow on together towards the centre of Amasya.

The measured discharge figures show how closely the river is tied to the climate. The average flow is about 20 cubic metres per second, and the total annual runoff has been calculated at roughly 842 million cubic metres. The highest discharge ever recorded reached 362 cubic metres per second, while the lowest stood at just 0.09 cubic metres. Floods occur in March, April and May, the months of heaviest rainfall. By late summer, however, this is the most strained branch of the whole basin; because of heavy irrigation and groundwater use, the current almost stops at some points and the bed begins to look like a chain of linked ponds. In this respect Hüsameddin's remark of a century ago, that the river "sometimes stops entirely", still holds true. Freshwater mussels live in the muddy, slow-moving stretches, and mass die-offs have been reported in drought years. Because the clay and marl layers of the valley floor hinder the seepage of water into the ground, sudden summer downpours can quickly turn into flash floods.

The Kazankaya Canyon

The Kazankaya Canyon is often mentioned together with Amasya, but administratively it lies within the bounds of the village of Kazankaya in the Aydıncık district of Yozgat; its last section ends within the bounds of İncesu in the Ortaköy district of Çorum. About 12 kilometres long, the gorge is the last great pass the river cuts before descending into the Göynücek valley. Some accounts give its length as 10 kilometres. Both sides of the canyon are lined with cliffs that rise like walls; to the south stand the Alan Mountains, 1,363 metres high, and to the west Malbelen Hill. Juniper and oak communities grow on the slopes.

What sets the canyon apart from an ordinary natural pass is the traces of construction it holds. Kazankaya lies among ancient centres such as Alacahöyük, Boğazköy, Şapinuva, Zela (Zile), Maşat Höyük, Tavium and Pteria (Kerkenes). At the narrowest point of the gorge a fortification wall rises across the entire valley. Beyond this wall, the rocks on either side show building remains, beam sockets and stepped open-air rock altars. The most striking of these is a relief of Kybele carved into a niche. The goddess is shown seated on a throne, frontally and wearing a chiton; the relief measures about 3.45 by 1.50 metres (a local publication gives the height as 3.16 metres). Regarded as the largest of the Kybele reliefs in Anatolia dated to the Hellenistic period, it is dated to the second century BC. The relief faces a fortress rising on the rocks on the opposite bank of the river. The altars suggest that the gorge had a religious function, and the wall that it served for defence.

The hills around the canyon point to a much older history of settlement. Southeast of Kazankaya village, Sarıbaba Hill, with its rocky base, drops to the river in steep cliffs and bears finds from the Hittite period. A second hill, separated from it by a deep valley, is known as Rıdvan Kaya Tepe, Rıfat Tepe or Gök Tepe, and material dated to the Chalcolithic period has been identified there. Both hills command the river, the Mümbet Plain and the entrance to the gorge; for this reason researchers regard them as places settled since early times. On a slope called Güllük, south of Karagözlük Hill to the east of the village, lies the Kazankaya Hittite Cemetery. In 1976 Tahsin Özgüç carried out a brief rescue excavation in the cemetery, which was being destroyed by illicit digging, and established that the graves belonged to the Middle Bronze Age, that is, to the period of the Assyrian Trading Colonies and the Old Hittite era. The results were published in 1978 among the studies carried out around the Maşat Höyük excavations; the vessels from the site were later used as comparanda in dating the pottery found in surface surveys in Samsun and Amasya.

The village of Kazankaya has borne the same name since 1485. In the Ottoman period it was counted within the bounds of the kaza of Zile. Hüsameddin mentions two men from Kazankaya who were raised in Amasya. The first is Ahi Mehmed Çelebi, known as Ahi Dede; trained in the service of Pir Sun'ullah Halveti, the sheikh of the Saraçlar lodge in Amasya, he settled in the nahiye of İnepazarı after his master's death, founded a dervish lodge there and died in old age in 910 (1504-05). It is said that Bayezid II, who governed Amasya as a prince, granted him land, and that he farmed it and distributed its produce to the poor. The second is Kazanlı Ahmed Efendi, from the village of "Kazan Kaya" in Zile; he received his licence (icazet) in Amasya from Hacı İsmail Hakkı Efendi of İnepazarı, lived in the Hacı Hamza quarter and died in 1282 (1865-66).

The village was formerly attached to the Çekerek district; when the Aydıncık district was established in 1990, it was transferred to it. Granted municipal status in 1991, the settlement lost that status in 2013 after its population fell below 2,000. In 2020 its population was recorded as 1,311. The village lies about 100 kilometres from the provincial centre of Yozgat and 10 kilometres from the centre of Aydıncık, on the Ortaköy-Aydıncık provincial road beside the Çekerek Çayı.

Above the Canyon: Çekerek and Aydıncık

Before descending to Kazankaya, the river passes through the Çekerek district of Yozgat. The present district centre was once a village called Hacıköy, attached to the Zile district of Tokat. When the district centre moved to Kadışehri in 1924-1925, Hacıköy was attached to it, and a year later the centre returned to Hacıköy; then, when Sorgun became a district, Hacıköy remained one of its villages and in 1928 became a sub-district (bucak) of Sorgun. In October 1944 the sub-district was made a district centre under the name Çekerek, after the river. By Law No. 3644 of 20 May 1990, Aydıncık and Kadışehri were separated from Çekerek as new districts; Aydıncık took 32 villages with it at that time. This is why Kazankaya now belongs to Aydıncık.

Aydıncık has an average elevation of 857 metres and was founded at the foot of the Alan Mountains, the western extension of the Deveci Mountains. Forty-six per cent of its land is farmland and 44 per cent forest; oak, juniper, pine, linden and hawthorn grow on its mountains. West of the Çekerek district, on the Kümbet Plain between Aydıncık-Kazankaya and Bazlambaç, the river makes it possible to grow wheat, onions, sugar beet and other vegetables and fruit. Near Zile on the riverbank, Maşat Höyük is another of the region's Hittite-age settlements. The first excavation there was conducted for a single season in 1945 under Ekrem Akurgal, and a second excavation begun by Tahsin Özgüç in 1973 continued until 1984; building levels from the period of the Assyrian Trading Colonies to the Hittite Empire were uncovered on the mound.

The Göynücek Valley

Emerging from the canyon, the Çekerek enters the Göynücek valley in the southwestern corner of Amasya. Amasya's inventory of landforms describes the valley as a 37-kilometre passage that begins in the Ortaköy area of Çorum and ends at the Geldingen Plain, running between Karadağ and Buzlu Dağ. Buzlu Dağ is bounded by the Zile Plain and the Çekerek River, and its highest point is Beşik Tepe at 1,392 metres. Karadağ rises between the Çorum Çayı and the Çekerek and ends where the Çorum Çayı joins the river; its highest point is Kuş Yuvası Tepesi at 1,524 metres. Between these two ranges the valley forms a floor far wider than the narrow gorge of Kazankaya and well suited to farming.

The valley floor holds one of the largest mounds in the inland part of the Central Black Sea region. Gediksaray Höyük, one kilometre north of the town of Gediksaray, is about 15 metres high and measures 350 by 150 metres; the road to the town cuts the mound in two. Şevket Dönmez's surface surveys of 1997-1999 identified traces of settlement here from the Early Bronze Age II-III, the Late Bronze Age, the Middle and Late Iron Age, and the Hellenistic and Roman periods. A settlement history reaching back to the Chalcolithic shows that the valley was inhabited almost without interruption for thousands of years.

The Geldingen Plain

At the lower end of the valley stretches the Geldingen Plain. Lying south of Amasya's central district at the head of the Yeşilırmak valley, the plain covers 48,400 hectares, about 8.8 per cent of the province's area, and is the most important plain in the province. Its average elevation is around 450 metres; with annual rainfall of only 400 to 500 millimetres it is the driest part of Amasya, and a continental climate prevails. The plain was formed by the erosion of the Çekerek River, the Çorum Çayı and the Efennik Çayı. The Gökhöyük Agricultural Enterprise was also established on this plain; most of its land is still known among local people as the "German Farm". Hans Henning von der Osten, in his surveys of 1926-1927, mentions the farm of a German family that had been living on the plain for thirty-three years and the help they gave him. Water shortage in summer and the pollution of irrigation water have long been the two problems the plain has been unable to solve.

In Ottoman records the plain is called Geldiklan. According to Hüsameddin, at the beginning of the Danishmendid period, around 490 (1097), Baygeldi, one of the chiefs of the Afshar tribe of the Khwarazmian Turks, was settled here with his clan; the area was called "Baygeldi Alan", meaning "Baygeldi's farm", and the name gradually changed to "Geldi Alan" and then to "Geldiklan". This explanation, too, is a folk etymology and is not supported by any other document. In the Ottoman period Geldiklan was one of the four nahiyes of the kaza of Amasya, with its centre at Ortaköy. Hüsameddin traces the names of the nahiye's villages of Afşar, Olus, Doğan, Alikadı, Yağmur, Karlı and Akçakoyunlu to the elders of clans that had broken away from the Afshar and Bayındır tribes. It is recorded that Hacı Şadgeldi Pasha, who ruled Amasya in the second half of the fourteenth century, came from the Akçakoyunlu clan, set the nahiye aside as a property for his own line, and that his descendants withdrew here when their power in Amasya came to an end. Under Şadgeldi, beys such as Abak Bey of Kayabaşı and Ayık Bay are recorded as having been appointed emirs of Geldiklan.

The plain's ancient settlement history has also been documented by excavation. At the 27th kilometre of the Amasya-Çorum highway, within the land of the Gökhöyük enterprise, in the middle of this fertile plain through which the Çekerek passes to the north, rises Oluz Höyük. Measuring about 280 by 260 metres and standing 15 metres above the plain, the mound lies two kilometres northwest of the village of Gözlek and about five kilometres east of the village of Toklucak, formerly called Oluz; the name "Olus" that Hüsameddin lists among the villages of Geldiklan very probably refers to this village. The large mound that von der Osten wrote he had seen in 1926-1927 "on the edge of the Olas plain" is also thought to be Oluz. Excavations begun in 2007 under the direction of Şevket Dönmez have uncovered levels ranging from the Early Bronze Age through the Hittite period, the Phrygian culture, the Persian and Hellenistic ages, and on to the tenth to fourteenth centuries. In work carried out from 2013 onwards, the remains of a fire temple of the Persian period, containing a sacred fire pit, were identified; the excavation director, recalling that fire temples are found mostly in Iran and the Near East, stated that the find points to a monotheistic belief having been practised in Anatolia during the Persian period.

The town of Doğantepe, about five kilometres north of Oluz, is the present-day counterpart of Ottoman Geldiklan; the settlement later took the name Zara and became Doğantepe after 1960. The large mound within the town, about 40 metres high and 300 by 200 metres in extent, is known for a Hittite statuette and a bronze stamp seal found there by chance; surface surveys have found traces of settlement from the Early Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period. The Roman road map known as the Tabula Peutingeriana shows a station called Virasia on the road from Amaseia to Euchaita, 16 Roman miles west of Amaseia. This distance corresponds to about 24 kilometres; the discovery of a Roman milestone at Doğantepe and the slight phonetic resemblance between the names Zara and Virasia have formed the basis for Dönmez's identification of Virasia with Doğantepe. The identification remains a proposal, but it is clear that in antiquity, too, the plain lay on the main road linking Amasya to the west.

Armies on the Geldiklan Plain

Because Amasya's main road from the west crossed this plain, Geldiklan appears again and again in the city's history as an army camp. According to Hüsameddin, the Roman commander Pompey, after defeating Mithridates VI of Pontus, met minor resistance on the Geldiklan plain while marching on Amasya, overcame it and laid siege to the citadel. The association of the plain with this campaign is the author's own account and he does not give its source. For the Umayyad commander Maslama's campaign against Amasya in 92 (711) he gives a more detailed narrative: Maslama came from Ankara by way of Çorum and made the Geldiklan plain west of the city his headquarters; when his assault, launched to descend on the city over the Karaman Mountain, was repulsed with heavy losses, his troops withdrew to the plains of Geldiklan and Çorum.

The plain kept the same role in the Ottoman period. In the days when the Şahkulu rebellion was shaking Anatolia, Grand Vizier Hadım Ali Pasha set out from Istanbul in the month of Zilkade 916 and early in 917 (1511) came down to the Geldiklan plain near Amasya; Hüsameddin writes that the people welcomed the pasha and his army as saviours. Selim I (Selim the Grim), who spent the winter in Amasya after the Çaldıran campaign, left the city with his army on Thursday the fifth of Rebiülevvel 921 (April 1515) and went first to the Geldiklan plain, where the notables of Amasya saw him off with a great ceremony.

During the Celali revolts Geldiklan became a centre of rebellion. The Celali leader Karayazıcı Abdülhalim made Ortaköy, the centre of the Geldiklan nahiye, his "seat of sovereignty" in Rebiülevvel 1008 (autumn 1599), had a royal tent pitched on the plain, took the title "Halim Şah" and began sending out decrees and patents in every direction. The deputy governor of Amasya, Deli Zülfikar Ağa, went to Geldiklan with five thousand infantry and three thousand cavalry and joined him. It was Ahmed Bey, backed by the notables and scholars of Amasya, who drove Abdülhalim from the plain. Among the people of Amasya who joined Karayazıcı was Sefer Şah of the Yardımoğlu family, who believed himself to be of Seljuk descent; after most of the rebel leaders had gone over to the government side, he gathered the remaining brigands around him, proclaimed himself "shah" in Geldiklan, held the town by force for some four years, and finally fell into the hands of Kuyucu Murad Pasha in 1017 (1608). In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in the conflict between Çapanoğlu Mustafa Bey and Mikdad Ahmed Pasha, the governor of the sanjak of Amasya, Çapanoğlu came by way of Zile to the Geldiklan Plain; defeated in a bloody battle on the plain, Mikdad Pasha was forced to take refuge in Amasya.

The Confluence: Kayabaşı

The place where the Çekerek joins the Yeşilırmak is Kayabaşı, counted as one of Amasya's two quarters outside the city proper. Hüsameddin describes the quarter as a triangular island lying between the Yeşilırmak and the Çekerek. He writes that the name comes from Emir Kayabay, who used the place as a farm, and that "Kayabay Çiftliği" gradually became "Kayabaşı". A pleasant spot on the riverbank was called "Pehlivan" because Kayabay's son, Emir Şücaeddin Pehlivan Bey, lived there. Ankebut (Spider) Ahmed Pasha, the commander on Crete who came from the Pehlivanzade family, built a mosque, a school and a lecture hall at this spot in 1068 (1657-58) and endowed his estate at Kayabaşı to support them; in the waqf registers the building is recorded as "the Ahmed Pasha Mosque in the village of Pehlivan". Between Kayabaşı and Karasenir to its north rises a hill called Serçoban. Hüsameddin praises the vineyards, vegetable gardens, butter, yoghurt and cheese of the two quarters, and says of the Kayabaşı watermelon that "it has no equal".

In Hüsameddin's view, this islet between the two rivers must also be the site of the "Cezîre-i Kubâd" mentioned in the sources on the Babai revolt of the mid-thirteenth century. The sources relate that the Seljuk Sultan Gıyaseddin Keyhüsrev II crossed by way of this "island of Kubad" to Çat Bükü and found Baba İlyas in his lodge. The author proposes the identification on the grounds that Kayabaşı resembles an island in shape and is very close to Çat Bükü, but by saying "it must be" he presents it as a conjecture and does not offer it as certain.

Göynücek and Its Surroundings

Göynücek is a district in the southwest of the province, lying midway between the provinces of Amasya, Tokat, Çorum and Yozgat. Elevations range from 450 to 1,100 metres; the district centre stands at about 523 metres. Its area is given in the sources as between 578 and 591 square kilometres. The district has 38 villages, and in 2024 its total population was 10,787. The population peaked at 22,305 in 1980 and then declined steadily to 13,425 in 2007. Karadağ and Tekke Dağı are the district's prominent heights, while the Çekerek and its tributaries are its main rivers.

The district's past reaches back to the mounds of the valley floor. The earliest traces of settlement are found at the Ayvalıpınar and Gediksaray mounds, dated to the Chalcolithic Age (5500-3000 BC); the Kocaman Tepe mound at Ilısu is also counted among the settlements of the same period. In the Middle Bronze Age the region lay within the Hattian cultural sphere. Between 750 and 585 BC it came under the rule of Phrygian, Cimmerian, Scythian and Median-Persian peoples; in 301 BC it remained under Persian-Pontic rule, and in 47 BC, after the Battle of Zela, it was annexed to Roman territory. Byzantium followed Rome, and then in 1175 came Seljuk rule under Kılıçarslan II. The region passed to the Eretnid Beylik in 1341 and to the Ottoman State in 1393. In the Ottoman period the nahiye of Gediksaray was attached to the sanjak of Amasya. Göynücek became a kaza centre in 1922 and was made a district by Law No. 6324 of 4 March 1954. For a time the district belonged to Çorum Province.

The most notable historic structure in the district is Gökçeli Castle, on a rocky hill commanding the Çekerek valley about one kilometre northeast of the village of Gökçeli. Some eight kilometres from the district centre, the castle has drawn the attention of many researchers, from Franz Cumont to Hans Henning von der Osten and from Hubertus von Gall to Mehmet Özsait. It was long described as a Roman garrison, but alongside the small amount of Roman pottery found around it, Iron Age sherds dated to the seventh century BC suggest that the structure was originally built in the Iron Age and was strengthened and used in the Roman period. The castle has a stone staircase of 98 steps and a hidden passage connected to it; this passage has been excavated several times during museum rescue excavations. Stepped tunnels are a well-known feature of the Pontic fortresses around Amasya and Tokat, and Gökçeli has been studied together with these castles. The area around the castle was settled in the Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman periods and is still protected as an archaeological site. In 2015 a necropolis and a tumulus identified within the bounds of Gökçeli and the neighbouring village of Hasanbey were also registered as a first-degree archaeological site.

Another old structure in the valley is the spring bath in the village of Ilısu. The bath and pools built over the spring that rises in the middle of the village and flows at 28 degrees all year round are attributed by district officials to the Roman period, the third century AD; the building was formerly used as a bridal bath for bride and groom, and the village women still keep up the tradition of washing laundry here every Sunday. Hüsameddin, for his part, writes that at the village of Ilıca in the Geldiklan nahiye, over the warm spring that rises in the middle of the plain, Rıdvan Ağa, who had been trained in the palace school (Enderun) and had retired as chief gatekeeper and company commander, built "a lofty bath" in 987 (1579-80) and endowed it, together with the Ilısu farm, to his descendants. According to him the spring later changed its course and began to emerge above the bath, leaving the building on dry ground to fall into ruin, while the water now wells up from a source shaped like a well. Whether the two records refer to the same building, or to two separate springs at different points of the plain, is not certain. Water mills are a more recent legacy of the valley. The mill in the Karapınar quarter of İkizyaka village began working in 1945 and is still standing; these mills carry the traces of the district's traditional ways of production.

Agriculture and Irrigation

Göynücek's economy rests largely on the farming of the Çekerek Plain. The main crops are okra, onions, barley, wheat, poppy and sugar beet; among fruits, apples, cherries, sour cherries, apricots, peaches and walnuts stand out. Göynücek okra has won a reputation of its own in the region, and has come to be remembered in the popular saying "Amasya's apple, Göynücek's okra." The valley's irrigable bottomlands are given over to grain and vegetables, while the steep slopes are left to oak and juniper and to livestock. The fertility of the plain can be traced in old records as well; Hüsameddin notes that many beys of Amasya held farms and fiefs (zeamet) in the Geldiklan nahiye, and that their revenues were endowed to mosques, masjids and tombs in the city.

The valley's water problem stems from the river's summer behaviour, and its solution has been tied to dams. The Gediksaray Dam, opened in 1994 at the village of Gediksaray-Ayvalıpınar in Göynücek, is a small structure irrigating an area of 1,200 hectares. The larger investment is the Süreyyabey Dam, built on the Yozgat side within the bounds of the Çekerek district. Also known as the Çekerek Dam, it was constructed between 1996 and 2004. It is a rock-fill dam 103 metres high, and about 7.5 million cubic metres of material went into its body. With a surface area of 41.34 square kilometres and a volume of 1.31 billion cubic metres, its reservoir is one of the largest bodies of stored water in the region. It has an installed capacity of about 14 megawatts and an annual output of about 51 gigawatt-hours; its main purpose, however, is flood protection and the irrigation of 66,165 hectares. It was named in memory of Süreyya Bedestenlioğlu, who served for many years at the 7th Regional Directorate of the State Hydraulic Works (DSİ). Amasya's geographical inventory states that the irrigation problem of the Geldingen Plain would be largely solved once this dam was completed. The Gediksaray Sığırçayı Pond (2012, 1,440,000 cubic metres) and the Lower Çekerek Plain Irrigation Project are also part of the district's agricultural infrastructure.

The Culture of the Valley

The public library founded in the district centre in 1978 serves readers with about 10,665 books; the district has one kindergarten, six primary schools, six middle schools, two imam-hatip middle schools, one Anatolian high school and one imam-hatip high school. Because Göynücek lies midway between the provinces of Amasya, Tokat, Çorum and Yozgat, it is a transitional zone. Apart from farming, the district has a small industrial estate, a flour mill and bakery production; adult education courses have trained producers in fields such as cultivated mushroom growing.

The people of Göynücek keep local culture alive through traditional folk dances. At weddings, send-offs for military service and festivals, the dances called "Yelleme" and "Mahir Çavuş" are performed in particular. The cuisine, too, draws on the valley's farming. Okra is used in dishes both fresh and dried, while cherries, sour cherries, apricots and walnuts go into sweets and preserves; produce prepared in summer is stored for the winter. The Sunday laundry at the Ilısu bath, and the bathing of bride and groom once held there, are examples of the valley's everyday relationship with water that have survived to the present.

Chronology

5500-3000 BC: Chalcolithic settlement at the Ayvalıpınar and Gediksaray mounds.

2500-2000 BC: The region lies within the Hattian cultural sphere in the Middle Bronze Age.

Early second millennium BC: The Middle Bronze Age, when the Kazankaya Cemetery was in use.

Second century BC: The period to which the Kybele relief at Kazankaya is dated.

47 BC: The region passes under Roman rule after the Battle of Zela.

711 (92): The Umayyad commander Maslama makes the Geldiklan plain his headquarters and besieges Amasya.

1175: Seljuk rule under Kılıçarslan II.

1341: Rule of the Eretnid Beylik.

1393: Incorporation into the Ottoman State.

1485: The name Kazankaya appears in the records.

1504-05 (910): Death of Ahi Mehmed Çelebi (Ahi Dede) of Kazankaya.

1511 (917): Grand Vizier Hadım Ali Pasha comes down to the Geldiklan plain with his army.

April 1515 (921): Selim I sets out from Amasya for the Geldiklan plain.

1579-80 (987): Rıdvan Ağa endows the bath he built over the warm spring in the Geldiklan nahiye.

1599 (1008): Karayazıcı Abdülhalim makes Ortaköy in the Geldiklan nahiye his seat.

1657-58 (1068): Ankebut Ahmed Pasha builds a mosque, school and lecture hall at Kayabaşı.

1922: Göynücek becomes a kaza centre.

4 March 1954: Göynücek is made a district by Law No. 6324.

1976: Tahsin Özgüç's rescue excavation at the Kazankaya Cemetery.

1994: The Gediksaray Dam enters service.

1996-2004: Construction of the Süreyyabey Dam.

2007: Excavations begin at Oluz Höyük on the Geldingen Plain.

2015: The necropolis and tumulus in the villages of Gökçeli and Hasanbey are registered as a first-degree archaeological site.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources