All fifteen households entered for Karsan in the 1845 temettuat register of the Ezinepazar sub-district were farmers; Karsan is one of the few villages of the sub-district in which every head of household was recorded under a single occupation. The name of this village south of Amasya, 48 kilometres from the provincial centre, appears in the same form in registers three centuries older. At the end of 2025, 136 people lived in Karsan.

Karsan in the Registers

The oldest known record of the name dates from the beginning of Süleyman the Magnificent's reign. In the index of the muhasebe register of 937 (1530), published in facsimile by the State Archives in 1997, a village called "Karsañ" is shown under the Yavaş sub-district of the kaza of Amasya, on page 375 of the register. No other village of this name appears in the index. As Hüsâmeddîn Yasar relates, Yavaş is the first name of the southern sub-district that came in time to be called Cuma Pazarı, Âzîne Pazarı and finally İnepazar; the appearance of Karsan in the Ezinepazar sub-district three centuries later makes it easier to link this entry to today's village. Still, the index gives no location, and no document has been found stating directly that the two records refer to the same place. Karsan does not appear in Bekir Başalan's table of renamed settlements in the Central District; the name has not undergone an official change, at least in recent times. No study explaining the meaning or origin of the name has been found.

A Farming Village in the Ezinepazar Sub-district

Tayfun Soydal's master's thesis on the Ezinepazar temettuat registers gives Karsan's condition in 1845 in detail. One of the sub-district's twenty-seven registers belongs to this village itself. Fifteen households are recorded, and the thesis, assuming five persons per household, puts the population at about 75. All fifteen heads of household whose occupation is written were farmers; no servant, shepherd or imam was recorded.

By the standards of the sub-district the village's land was of middling size. Against 138.5 dönüm of sown fields, 131.5 dönüm lay unsown; there was no vineyard, mulberry plot or vegetable garden, and each household had 18 dönüm of land. The closeness of sown and unsown land matches the sub-district as a whole; Soydal connects it with a shortage of labour. The harvest is recorded as 62 kile of wheat and 16.5 kile of barley. The livestock consisted of 274 head of sheep and goats, 82 head of cattle and 11 pack and riding animals; the income from sheep and goats was assessed at 935 kuruş.

In earnings Karsan stood slightly above the sub-district average. The village's annual income was 6,859.5 kuruş, or 457.30 kuruş per household, against a sub-district average of 424.14 kuruş per household. The tax taken from the village came to 1,718 kuruş, of which 1,265 kuruş was the vergü-yi mahsusa levied according to each person's income, 439.5 kuruş the tithe and 13.5 kuruş the sheep tax; this amounted to 114.53 kuruş per household.

The same registers hold one more small trace scattered among the neighbouring villages. In the village of Zoğlu, today's Aydınca, one head of household is recorded with a byname that Soydal reads as "Karsaklıoğlu" or "Karsanlıoğlu". If the second reading is correct, the byname may indicate that the family came from Karsan; the register itself offers no explanation.

Village Record and Population

A village information form archived in 2015 records that Karsan lies 48 kilometres from the provincial centre. There is no primary school in the village and no bussed education either; there is a drinking water network and a sewerage system, and postal service is provided through an agency. The same record gives 415 inhabitants for the 1985 census, 311 for 1990 and 255 for 2000. Although the list of the bill prepared in 2008 to make Ezinepazar a district named thirty-four villages and townships around Ezinepazar, Karsan does not appear on it.

In the first of the annual address-based counts that began in 2007, the village had 185 inhabitants. In the early years the figure moved between 160 and 190, after 2014 it settled mostly between 130 and 150, and in 2022 it fell to 122. Having risen again to about 135 over the last three years, the population at the end of 2025 stood at 136, 68 men and 68 women. Having fallen from 415 to 136 in forty years, the village still keeps a size close to twice the population estimated for 1845.

Chronology

937 (1530): The village of Karsañ in the Yavaş sub-district is entered in the register.

1845: The Ezinepazar temettuat register records 15 households at Karsan.

1985: 415 inhabitants at the census.

2025: 136 people are registered in the village.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

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Online sources