Karaali, which lies close to Ezinepazar, was listed in the district bill submitted to Parliament in 2008 not as a village but as one of the central neighbourhoods of the proposed Ezinepazar district. The same closeness is visible a century and a half earlier: in 1845 the temettuat survey of the Ezinepazar sub-district recorded the village as a small karye of nine households, entered in a register of its own. At the end of 2025, 184 people lived in the village, 43 kilometres from the provincial centre.

Two Karaalis

There are two villages of this name in Amasya: one in the Central District, the other in Gümüşhacıköy. Asena Yalnız's study of place names formed with colour words lists them separately and analyses both as a name built from the words "kara" (black) and "Ali"; Yalnız also classifies the name, together with Karaçavuş and Karaibrahim, among compounds whose first element is a compound noun group. On this grammatical reading the name combines a personal name with the epithet "kara"; which Kara Ali the village was named after is not known. Information belonging to the village in Gümüşhacıköy has not been used on this page. The appearance of the Central District's Karaali among the villages of the Ezinepazar sub-district in the older records is a sufficient sign for telling the two settlements apart. According to Bekir Başalan's table, the name of the Central District village has not been officially changed.

The Village of Kara Ali in 1845

Tayfun Soydal's master's thesis examines one by one the twenty-seven temettuat registers of the Ezinepazar sub-district; one of them is the register of "Karaali Karyesi". Nine households are entered for the village; the thesis, assuming five persons per household, calculates the population at 45, which makes Karaali the smallest settlement of the sub-district after Keçili with its single household. All nine heads of household were recorded as rençber, that is, grain-growing farmers. Their bynames include Ömerceoğlu, Kara Ahmedoğlu, Kara Hasanoğlu, Yancıoğlu, Kadiroğlu, Gökoğlu, Celeboğlu and Kürt Haliloğlu.

Small as it was, the village had extensive land. 86 dönüm of sown fields and 92 dönüm of unsown fields, together with 5 dönüm of vineyard, gave a share of more than twenty dönüm per household; this ratio is above the sub-district average. The harvest is recorded as 39.5 kile of wheat and 13.5 kile of barley. The make-up of the livestock, however, sets the village clearly apart from its neighbours: the nine households held only 9 head of sheep and goats, while 46 head of cattle and 2 pack animals were recorded. With five head of cattle to one sheep or goat per household, Karaali suggests a livelihood resting on draught animals and fields rather than on flocks; the register calculates no income from sheep and goats for this village.

The income and tax records place the village among the well-off places of the sub-district. Its annual income was 4,999 kuruş, and at 555.44 kuruş per household it stood clearly above the sub-district average of 424.14 kuruş. The tax taken from the village was 1,688.5 kuruş, of which 1,423 kuruş was the vergü-yi mahsusa, 259 kuruş the tithe and 6.5 kuruş the sheep tax. With a tax of 187.61 kuruş per household, Karaali is one of the thirteen settlements that Soydal notes as paying above the average. Also recorded on the village's land are 44.5 dönüm of fields belonging to people living elsewhere, and these fields lay unsown.

In the registers of the same year the village's name also appears as a family byname. Karaalioğlu Hüseyin, registered in household no. 1 of the village of Abacı in the same sub-district, earned 45 kuruş from the production of cehri. Cehri (buckthorn) is a dye plant used in Amasya for colouring silk fabrics, and it is recorded as grown in the Ezinepazar sub-district only at Morami and Abacı. Whether the byname points to the village of Karaali or to an ancestor named Kara Ali cannot be told from the register.

Proposed as a Neighbourhood of Ezinepazar

In the list attached to the bill submitted to the Speaker of Parliament on 27 February 2008 to make Ezinepazar a district, the settlements are divided into two groups. The townships of Aydınca and Uygur, together with the villages of Eskikızılca, Küçükkızılca, Sarımeşe, Yolyanı, Tatar, Karaali and Halifeli, were shown as "neighbourhoods" at the centre of the district to be founded; the other twenty-five villages were to remain villages attached to the district. The justification of the bill says that some of the listed villages are close enough to Ezinepazar to be counted as its neighbourhoods. Ezinepazar did not become a district; Karaali is still counted among the villages of the Central District in the official village list of 2024.

School, Water and Population

The form kept for Karaali in the public database of village services, archived in 2016, gives the village's distance from the provincial centre as 43 kilometres. The village has a primary school building, but the school is not in use and there is no bussed education either; there is no health post or health centre, there is a drinking water network and a sewerage system, and postal service is run through an agency.

The population has been in slow but uninterrupted decline for forty years. The figure of 483 in 1985 fell to 411 in 1990 and 327 in 2000. In 2007, when annual address-based records began, 295 people appear; losing a few people every year, the number dropped to 185 in 2022. The record rose to 230 for a single year in 2023, then returned to 200 the following year and to 184 in 2025. The latest record shows 85 men and 99 women in the village.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

  • Tayfun Soydal, Temettuât Defterlerine Göre Ezinepazar Nahiyesi'nin Sosyal ve Ekonomik Yapısı, master's thesis, Amasya Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, 2018, pp. 6, 24, 31, 33, 35-36, 38, 40, 50-52, 56, 76. https://acikbilim.yok.gov.tr/handle/20.500.12812/37199
  • Asena Yalnız, "Amasya İli ve İlçelerinin Renk Adlarıyla Oluşan Yer Adlarının Gramatikal ve Bölgesel İncelemesi", Amasya Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi (ASOBİD), 12, 2022, pp. 133-159 (pp. 141, 143, 151-152).
  • Bekir Başalan, "Amasya İlinde İsimleri Değiştirilen Yerleşim Yeri Adları Üzerine Bir İnceleme", Folklor Akademi Dergisi, 7(3), 2024, pp. 1382-1391 (pp. 1385-1386). https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/4249891

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources