Among the song titles that carry the city's name, this one is shaped like an eleven-syllable line of verse announcing that the snow has gone from the mountain: "Kar kalmadı Amasya'nın dağında", "no snow is left on Amasya's mountain". In the tables where Haluk Yücel sorted the 89 songs he assigned to the Amasya region in 2018, the work stands among the kırık havas, the songs in strict metre, and carries a mark seldom met in the metre column: 10/8. Only three of the eighty-nine rows are shown in this ten-beat metre. No entry of the same name is to be found under the Amasya region in the TRT Turkish folk music repertoire.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; not registered under the Amasya region in the TRT repertoire
  • Region: Amasya
  • Type: kırık hava (Yücel 2018, Table 5)
  • Metre: 10/8 (Yücel 2018, Table 6)
  • Mode (makam): not stated in the source
  • Source performer, collector, transcriber, date of collection: unknown
  • Words and music: anonymous
  • Link: no TRT link; full text of the article in which the title appears

Lyrics

No printed or online publication gives the words of the song; the title in the table is the only line that survives. Read as a line of verse, what it says is plain: there is no snow left on Amasya's mountain. What happened once the snow had gone, who took to the road or who was being waited for, cannot be known without a second line.

Story

The title names the city but leaves the mountain unnamed. Tying it to one of the heights around Amasya would therefore be no more than a guess; nor has any tradition or written record of the song's making come to light.

Musical Features

The other two works in the ten-beat column of the metre table are Dem Be Dem Karşıma Gelen Bülbül from Merzifon and "Bade koydum fincana". In the same table 4/4 is shown with twenty-eight works, 2/4 with seventeen and 9/8 with twelve; beside these, 10/8 remains a small group. The makam table, for its part, has numbers but no song titles, so the scale in which the song is sung cannot be drawn from the article.

Performers and Recordings

The article's abstract says that some of the songs studied are in the TRT repertoire, some on folk song albums and some still live among the people; it does not say to which group this song belongs. For that reason no singer or source performer can be named. Amasya's folk songs and long airs as a whole are surveyed in The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources