The old official name of the village now known as Karaçavuş is Kürtlerkayı, and this name recalls the village of "Kayı Kürtler" that Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar mentions when describing the post-Seljuk beys of Amasya. The population of the village, 43 kilometres from the provincial centre, has stayed steady at around eighty over the last twenty years; at the end of 2025, 82 people lived here.

From Kürtlerkayı to Karaçavuş

Bekir Başalan, who tabulated the changes of place names in Amasya district by district, records the old name of Karaçavuş as Kürtlerkayı. Başalan counts this change among settlements given new names unrelated to the old ones; the new name preserves neither the meaning nor the sound of the old. The year of the change is not stated in the table. Asena Yalnız analyses the new name as a compound of the adjective "kara" (black) and the word "çavuş"; for çavuş she gives the meanings of a responsible person in a position of command and an official serving at various levels of the Ottoman state, and in her grammatical classification she places Karaçavuş beside Karaali and Karaibrahim, which share the same structure. No information has been found on the person or event behind the new name.

Kayı Kürtler

The most meaningful record for tracing the old name is in Hüsâmeddîn Yasar. Listing the leading Turkish beys of the Amasya region, Yasar writes that the Kayı Turks lived in the south-western parts of the city, that their bey was Buşaklu Emîr Bahâeddîn Kürt Bey and his brother Sevincer Bey, and that their father Kayı Bey had been among the intimates of the Seljuk sultan Mesud. According to Yasar, the places where these beys lived are the villages known in his own day as "Kayı, Kayı Kürtler, Sevincer". In his biographical volumes the same author, introducing Emîr İmâdeddîn Süleyman Şâh, grandson of Kürt Bey and son of Hacı Kutlu Şâh, says "the Kayı Kürtler farm is his endowment"; Süleyman Şâh died around 778 (1376-77).

"Kayı Kürtler" and "Kürtlerkayı" are the same two elements in reversed order, and this similarity suggests that the village Yasar mentions may be present-day Karaçavuş. The survival of the name Sevincer as a village name in the Central District today strengthens this reading. Yasar, however, does not describe the location of the village, and no document linking the two names has been found; the identification therefore remains a possibility.

The old name also makes it harder to trace the village in the Ottoman registers. The index of the muhasebe register of 1530 shows villages called Kürtler in several sub-districts of the liva of Amasya, but contains no entry in the form Kürtlerkayı or Kayı Kürtler. The Ezinepazar temettuat registers of 1845 also include a "Kürtler Karyesi" of fourteen households; but since the Central District also has the village of Ardıçlar, whose old name was simply Kürtler, this entry could not be attributed to Karaçavuş.

The Last Forty Years

In the online record compiling the information of village headmen's offices, of which a 2016 archive copy survives, Karaçavuş lies 43 kilometres from the provincial centre. Although the village has a primary school building, the school is not in use and children travel to school by bussed education; there is a drinking water network and a sewerage system, and postal service is provided through an agency. The same record gives the village's population as 342 for 1985, 279 for 1990 and 141 for 2000; within fifteen years the population fell by more than half.

After this rapid decline the series settled. The first figure of the annual address-based records, for 2007, is 88; over the following eighteen years the figure stayed between 69 and 91. At the end of 2025 the village had 82 inhabitants, 40 men and 42 women. Unlike many villages of the Central District, where the decline continues, Karaçavuş has kept for twenty years the small size it reached in the early 2000s.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

  • 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
  • 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, 151-152). amasya.bel.tr
  • Tayfun Soydal, Temettuât Defterlerine Göre Ezinepazar Nahiyesi'nin Sosyal ve Ekonomik Yapısı, master's thesis, Amasya Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, 2018, pp. 6, 31. https://acikbilim.yok.gov.tr/handle/20.500.12812/37199

Other sources

Online sources