The Kelkit River (Kelkit Çayı) is the longest and most powerful tributary of the Yeşilırmak, and the Lykos (Lycus) of antiquity. It rises in the high mountains of the Gümüşhane region, follows a long valley running from east to west across the interior of the Black Sea Region, and joins the Yeşilırmak at the Boğazkesen locality between Taşova and Erbaa. The confluence lies at the northeastern tip of Amasya Province, close to the Tokat border. For both present-day agriculture and water management, and for the old history of roads and warfare in the region, this stretch where the two rivers meet is one of the most important junctions in the Yeşilırmak Basin. Seen from Amasya, the junction stands at the far end of the city's eastern gateway; in Hüsameddin's description, of the three gorges that open between the mountains enclosing Amasya, the one facing northeast looks toward "Sonusa-Taşova", is the widest of the three, and broadens along the river all the way to Taşova.

Its Name and Place in Antiquity

The Turkish name of the river comes from the region's older Armenian designation. Armenian "Gayl get" means wolf river, and the word Kelkit is explained as the Turkish rendering of it. The ancient Greek name Lykos also means wolf. The ancient name of the Yeşilırmak was Iris, that of the Çekerek was Skylax, and that of the Kelkit was Lykos; together these three rivers formed the arteries of the interior of the Kingdom of Pontus.

Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar takes a different path on the question of the name. In his Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya) he lists the Kulahit, Kelkit and Künit clans among the Cuman tribes, writes that the Kelkit clan descended from a bey named Kilki and that the Kelkit district, town and river all took their names from this clan, and connects Kilki with the meaning "great". This explanation finds no counterpart in the other sources consulted; elsewhere in his work the author can be seen tracing other place names to Turkish roots in the same way. He also departs from the accepted view on the name Lykos: in his account of the Mithridatic wars he says that the Lykos "must be the stream we now call the Tersakan" and connects the name with a ruler called İlik Han. Present-day archaeological and historical-geographical studies, by contrast, plainly identify the Lykos with the Kelkit, so what we have here is Hüsameddin's own interpretation.

In the Hellenistic period an important east-west road following the Kelkit valley linked Lesser Armenia with Bithynia. The road ran along the valley to the Phanaroea plain, then crossed the mountains by way of the Destek valley down to Laodikeia Pontika, present-day Ladik, and continued across the Kızılırmak and the Gökırmak through Paphlagonia to Bithynia. The other great route, running north to south, went from Amisos (Samsun) up the Iris to Amaseia, then to Zela and on to Kayseri in central Anatolia. The place where the Kelkit and the Yeşilırmak meet was where these two roads crossed. Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, founded a city just south of the point where the Lykos flows into the Iris and named it Eupatoria after his epithet. It is thought to have stood in or near the village of Çevresu, today part of Erbaa district. Pompey completed the city Mithridates had founded, renamed it Magnopolis, and extended its territory westward toward the Phanaroea plain. Appian refers to the city by both names, while Strabo in one passage calls it Megalopolis.

Hüsameddin mentions the same city within his own chronology. According to him, when "Mithridates IV" became ruler of Amasya 888 years before the Hijra, he built a castle with a small town in front of it at the confluence of the Yeşilırmak and the Kelkit to guard the city's eastern gorge, and named it "Baturya, Paturya"; the town was later known as "Opaturya". The author links the name to the epithet "Batur" (hero), which he believes was given to the king for his valour, and notes that the town of Opaturya no longer existed in his own day. Neither the regnal number nor the date matches the modern chronology; the king who founded Eupatoria is known today as Mithridates VI Eupator, and the name derives from his epithet Eupator. Even so, Hüsameddin's record shows that local historical writing also knew of an ancient town at the confluence and regarded it as a point holding the eastern approach to Amasya.

The Kelkit valley also gave its name to a battle. In 66 BCE the armies of Pompey and Mithridates met in the valley of the Lykos. Mithridates had drawn the Romans into the mountainous interior of his kingdom, tried to cut their supplies by burning the crops, and had finally encamped on a well-watered hill called Dasteira. Pompey entered the camp in a night attack. According to Appian, because the moon was at the Romans' backs, the Pontic soldiers loosed their missiles too early, and the Roman legionaries pushed right into the camp. Mithridates cut his way out with about eight hundred horsemen, leaving at least ten thousand of his men behind. This defeat prepared the end of the Third Mithridatic War, and a few years later, in 63 BCE, the king died in the Bosporan Kingdom in the direction of the Crimea. The exact site of the battle may not lie on the Taşova stretch of the river; the sources mention only the Lykos valley. Even so, the episode shows well the weight the Kelkit carried in history as a frontier, a passage and a campaign route.

The Kelkit Valley in the Bronze Age

The use of the valley as a route goes back far earlier than Pontus. The archaeologist Şevket Dönmez, in a study bringing together the Bronze Age settlements of the interior of the central Black Sea region, counts the Kelkit as the region's most important river and writes that, owing to the favourable geography of its valley, it must also have served as a trade route between the central Black Sea and the Caucasus and western Iran. According to the same study, the western part of the basin between Taşova and Koyulhisar has been well surveyed archaeologically and many Bronze Age settlements have been identified there, whereas the eastern part, covering Suşehri, Şebinkarahisar, Şiran and Kelkit, has not yet been adequately investigated.

In Taşova district, which Dönmez describes as the place where the Kelkit joins the Yeşilırmak and "forms the true Yeşilırmak", he distinguishes two groups of settlements. Ilgıncak I, Bıdak, Korama Pınarı, Çambükü, Çömleklik, Akyazı Tepesi, Umutlu Höyük and Belevi-İkiztepe I were inhabited only in the Early Bronze Age, that is, in the third millennium BCE. Sonusa-Kabayar Höyük, Mülkbükü, Ekiztepe, Kuş Tepesi, Ansar Kalesi, Yenipınar, Kütüklük and Kale-Hızarönü Tepe, on the other hand, have both Early Bronze Age and second-millennium BCE levels. On the other side of the confluence, surface surveys in Tokat show that Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age settlements cluster in the Erbaa Plain in the Kelkit basin, while no settlement of these periods has been found in the narrow valley running from Niksar to Reşadiye. Among the mounds in Erbaa occupied only in the Early Bronze Age is a settlement bearing the name Boğazkesen; the most important Bronze Age centre of the valley, however, is Horoztepe, excavated by Tahsin Özgüç in 1956.

Taşova's place on the Bronze Age map is not explained by the fertility of the plain alone. Dönmez discusses the view that the Hittites used the interior of the central Black Sea region as a buffer zone against the Kaska people to the north. One of the lines proposed by Jak Yakar is the Kargı-Merzifon-Taşova line; Dönmez in turn describes the line he observed as a buffer zone in his own research as Vezirköprü-Merzifon-Suluova-Amasya-Taşova, and notes that the settlements south of this line lived through all the phases of the second millennium BCE without interruption. On this basis it may be thought that the plain where the Kelkit and the Yeşilırmak meet lay at the edge of a frontier belt in the Hittite period as well; the researcher himself presents the buffer-zone view as an assessment drawn from the distribution of settlements and makes no claim to certainty.

Source, Course and Length

Sources give different figures for the length of the Kelkit. The data of the Amasya Governorship give a length of about 400 kilometres and place the source in mountains 2,600 metres high northwest of Erzincan. Another compilation and Dönmez's study give 320 kilometres, and a detailed hydrographic assessment gives 245.5 kilometres. Some sources also state that it rises at an altitude of 1,460 metres in the Çimen Mountains in Gümüşhane and is formed by the union of the Hoşmasat, Dayısı and Balahor streams. With a mouth elevation of about 188 metres, the river on this second account drops more than a thousand metres between its source and the Yeşilırmak. Because the location and elevation of the source differ among the sources, the safest statement is that the river is fed by the high mountain belt between Gümüşhane and Erzincan.

Its course runs from east to west. In Gümüşhane it passes near Kelkit, the district that gave it its name, and Şiran; north of the Refahiye district of Erzincan it receives the Koymat and Seme streams; and south of Giresun it flows near Şebinkarahisar and Çamoluk. It then passes through the districts of Suşehri, Koyulhisar, Reşadiye, Niksar and Erbaa. Near Suşehri it enters Sivas Province, and its stretch in Sivas is about fifty kilometres long. It then crosses into Tokat, where it waters the Niksar Plain as it widens and plays a decisive role in the plain's fertility. After irrigating the Erbaa Plain as well, it joins the Yeşilırmak on the Erbaa-Taşova border, at the locality where the historic Boğazkesen Bridge stands. English-language sources describe the confluence as the village of Kızılçubuk, near ancient Eupatoria. From there the Yeşilırmak enters Samsun Province and empties into the Black Sea at Çarşamba.

The river's valley lies along the North Anatolian Fault. The Kelkit follows this fault for about one hundred and fifty kilometres, from Suşehri to Reşadiye and Niksar. The straight, long and linear look of the valley comes from this tectonic depression. The same line is also the belt of the 1942 earthquake that struck the Niksar-Erbaa area.

Discharge and Regime

According to the Governorship's records, the highest measured discharge of the Kelkit is 905 cubic metres per second, the lowest 47, and the annual mean about 70.5. The mean discharge of the Yeşilırmak in the same records is 121 cubic metres and its highest measured discharge 1,914. Set side by side, the two figures show that the Kelkit supplies more than half of the main river's mean flow; although the measuring points differ, the river's water roughly doubles when the Kelkit joins it. The other two large tributaries of the Yeşilırmak lag far behind: the mean discharge of the Çekerek is 20 cubic metres and that of the Tersakan 3.96. The gap between the lowest discharges is greater still. The 47 cubic metres of the Kelkit falls to 0.09 on the Çekerek and 0.021 on the Tersakan. Even in the driest season the river carries a considerable volume of water.

The river has a complex regime fed by rain and snowmelt. It carries the most water in April and the least in October. Snowmelt from the high mountains swells the flow in spring, and by late autumn the channel narrows markedly. The Çobanlı and Avutmuş streams are among its known tributaries.

The Kelkit is also cited as the first river in Turkey for the quantity of solid matter it carries, at 692 tonnes per square kilometre per year. This load constantly renews the alluvium of the Niksar, Erbaa and Taşova plains, and at the same time poses a serious problem for the economic life of the dams on the river.

The strength of the current also shows itself in floods. In the village of Kızılçubuk, right by the confluence, the Kelkit overflowed after heavy rain and left houses, fields and the village road under water; villagers and livestock were evacuated as a precaution, and an embankment was raised to stop the water rising further. The village headman recalled that the river had also flooded in 1980, when most of the village was submerged. This latest flood was reported in the news as an event that came forty-six years after 1980.

Energy Production

There are about ten hydroelectric facilities on the river with a total installed capacity of roughly 570 megawatts. The Kılıçkaya Dam has 120 megawatts, Akıncı 99, Tepekışla 70, Reşadiye 64, Koyulhisar 63, Niksar 40, Muratlı 38, Çamlıgöze 32, Koçak 25 and Yakınca 19. These plants produce on average about 1,818 gigawatt-hours a year, which corresponds to about 2.5 percent of the country's hydroelectric output.

Downstream of the confluence, on the Yeşilırmak, the Hasan Uğurlu Dam in the Ayvacık district of Samsun draws on the combined flow of the two rivers. This 175-metre rockfill dam, built between 1971 and 1981, was financed with credits from the Japanese government. Its 500-megawatt plant produces about 1,217 gigawatt-hours a year, and the water reaches the turbines through a tunnel cut inside the mountain; no penstocks are used. The dam bears the name of Hasan Uğurlu, the director of the DSİ (State Hydraulic Works) Samsun 7th Regional Directorate, who died in a traffic accident in 1971 during the early stages of construction. According to the Governorship's data, the lowest point of Amasya above sea level, 160 metres, lies in the village of Umutlu in Taşova, where the catchment of this dam's reservoir begins. Within Taşova itself, the Yavuz Hydroelectric Plant, with an installed capacity of 22.5 megawatts, also operates on the Yeşilırmak.

The Taşova Stretch

Taşova is the fourth largest district of Amasya Province. It covers 971 square kilometres, has an average elevation of 241 metres, and in 2021 its population exceeded 30,000. The district stands at the western end of the fertile plain that begins at Koyulhisar in the east and takes in Reşadiye, Niksar and Erbaa. To the east lies the Erbaa district of Tokat, to the west Amasya and the Ladik district of Samsun, to the north the Çarşamba district of Samsun, and to the south the Turhal district of Tokat. The broad valley floor where the Kelkit and the Yeşilırmak meet defines the district's agricultural character.

The ancient name of this valley floor is Phanaroea. The present-day Erbaa Plain extends about sixty kilometres from east to west, reaches a width of at most eight kilometres, and ranges in elevation between 200 and 260 metres. The Niksar Plain, at 260 to 300 metres, is regarded as its continuation to the east. Strabo describes Phanaroea as a region with the best soil in Pontus, rich in olives and vines. David Magie, who studied the economy of ancient Pontus, describes the plains of the Lykos and Iris valleys as "terraces one above another," and notes that Phanaroea was the most fertile of these plains, which gave rich harvests thanks to their mild climate and fertile soil. In the twentieth century the plain produced grain, fruit, vegetables, tobacco, rice and opium poppy. Orchards and vegetable fields still cover the valley floor today, and the alluvium brought by the two rivers has renewed this soil for centuries.

Taşova's farming rests on this valley floor. According to the 2018 district report of the Central Black Sea Development Agency, about seventy percent of the population lives from farming and stockbreeding, thirty-seven percent of the district's land is agricultural, and irrigated farming is practised on only twenty-two percent of that land. The report describes the stretch of the Yeşilırmak valley running from the district centre to the confluence with the Kelkit, some 4,000 decares, as a "little Çukurova" because of its low elevation and fertile soil. In the transitional climate between the Black Sea and Central Anatolia a wide range of crops grows, from industrial plants to fruit and vegetables; economically the most important are okra, cherries, poppy and tobacco. The flower okra (çiçek bamyası), which the report counts as the district's most important gastronomic asset, is also grown on this plain. Yet although the district has many streams, such as the Esençay, Kumluca, Tatlıpınar, Tekke, Özbaraklı and Destek, most of its farmland cannot be irrigated.

The Governorship's inventory divides the Yeşilırmak valley passing through Taşova into two sections. The Onlukköprü Valley begins where the Tersakan Stream flows in, passes through the towns of Ziyaret and Yenice, and ends at the village of Kuzgeçe; it is twenty kilometres long and is known as the valley where the Amasya apple is grown. The Durucasu Valley begins at Kuzgeçe, ends at the village of Çambükü in Taşova, and is eighteen kilometres long. At the exit of this valley the Destek Valley opens. The Destek Stream flows through this thirty-three-kilometre depression, which the North Anatolian Fault crosses, and the valley ends at the point where the Kelkit joins the Yeşilırmak. The Destek Stream, which comes down between Karaömer Mountain and the Canik Mountains, is thirty-five kilometres long, has a discharge varying between 0.5 and 130 cubic metres, and joins the Yeşilırmak at Taşova.

The Boğazkesen Bridge and Castle

The Boğazkesen Bridge is the most tangible witness to the old road history of this confluence zone. Built at the narrowest point of the Kelkit between Taşova and Erbaa, the bridge was made to link Tokat and Amasya. Administratively it lies in the village of Kale, part of Erbaa. In local records the site is also described as the point where the Kelkit and the Tozanlı meet; Tozanlı is the name of the Yeşilırmak along its upper course. According to the account, half of the structure was built in the Byzantine period and the other half in Seljuk and Ottoman times. The lower half of the bridge, made of four large rectangular stone piers, differs in architecture from its upper half; villagers report that a cross is carved on the second pier nearest the village and take it as proof of the Byzantine layer. Some sources speak of two crosses worked into the dressed stone near the waterline of the second pier on the Kale village side. According to what the village elders relate, the bridge once also carried an eagle figure, the Seljuk emblem, but part of the structure was swept away by the water over time. It is said that Yavuz Sultan Selim (Selim I) used this bridge on his campaigns; one version of the story ties this to the Çaldıran campaign of 1514. There is no document for this, and it is passed down as local oral tradition.

In recent years the history of the bridge has been re-examined through archival documents. According to the work of the art historian Nazım Boy of Tokat Gaziosmanpaşa University, the route coming from Taşova and continuing to Niksar, regarded as the main road of northern Anatolia, was called the "Ulu Yol" (Great Road) in the Roman period, while in Ottoman archival records it appears as the "İran Caddesi" or "İran yolu" (Iran Road). Boy states that there was very probably a bridge on this road in the Roman period too, and that material from earlier periods was reused in the bridge. Three archival documents have been found in which the bridge is called the "Sultan Murat Han Bridge"; the researcher thinks the structure was most probably rebuilt in the reign of Murad II, as the region was coming under Ottoman rule. Following this finding, on an application by the Erbaa Municipality, the Sivas Regional Board for the Conservation of Cultural Property changed the bridge's name on 17 April 2026 to "Boğazkesen Sultan Murat Han Bridge"; the new name carries both the name of the locality and that of its builder.

The same documents also explain why the bridge fell. The point where the Kelkit and the Yeşilırmak meet is where the water discharge is highest, and a bridge here can last only if it is built very solidly. Ottoman archives record that between the 1850s and the 1910s the bridge was repaired three times, and that the main cause of these repairs was "tuğyan", in the documents' word, that is, flooding. The floods damaged above all the upper crossing, the deck, and in the late period the deck was repaired in timber rather than stone; this detail emerges both from the material information in the archival records and from images in travel accounts of the time. According to the Republican archives, a flood in the 1940s destroyed the deck and the bridge was never repaired again. In the 1950s a new bridge with a concrete deck on a steel frame was built a little to the north, and traffic began to use it. Today only the piers of the old bridge remain, and according to Boy one of them shows major slippage and splitting; he warns that unless the restoration project prepared by the Highways Directorate is carried out, the piers too will collapse one by one. Some sources name Boğazkesen, together with the Seljuk Talazan Bridge, as one of the two important bridges on the historic trade route of the Kelkit valley.

Just above the bridge, on the hill northwest of Kale village, stand the remains of Boğazkesen Castle. The castle sits on a ridge between the Yeşilırmak valley and a side stream and overlooks, to the south, the gorge where the valley opens onto the plain; the Kelkit joins the Yeşilırmak right in front of this opening. Nothing is known of its history; the present remains appear to be medieval and it is most probably a Byzantine fortification. Its plan resembles a skewed rectangle, its north and east walls follow the line of the rocks, and its straight west wall has two bastions at the middle. The entrance must have been in the south wall. Until the early twentieth century a gate topped by a lintel with a relief was still standing; it was later pulled down by villagers with several pairs of oxen and its stones carried away. A connection between the castle and Eupatoria on the plain seems unlikely, since the ancient city had disappeared in the Byzantine period. That the castle and the bridge guarded the same passage can be read from their positions; this is an inference drawn from their location.

A Short History of Taşova

Like most of Amasya, Taşova and its surroundings passed through Hittite, Phrygian, Cimmerian, Median, Persian, Macedonian, Pontic and Roman rule. According to compilations on the district's history, the area was fully incorporated into Roman territory in 25 CE, remained in Byzantine hands after 395, was taken by the Umayyads in 712, and then returned to Byzantium. After the Battle of Manzikert the settlement of Turkmen tribes accelerated; the area, which fell to the Danishmendids in 1075, was attached to the Seljuks of Anatolia in 1174 under Kılıçarslan II. In 1257 Seyyid Nureddin of the Rifai order, who had come from Khorasan, settled in the present-day town of Alparslan and founded a dervish lodge and a pious endowment (waqf); this endowment lasted until 1901. Hüsameddin also mentions the lodge's endowment deed dated 655 (1257).

Hüsameddin links this lodge to the later political history of the region. According to him, Tâceddin Togan Şah, emir of Niksar, was the son of Alâeddin Savcı Bey and the grandson of Şeyh Nureddin Alparslan, whose lodge, tomb and endowment deed of 655 lay near Sonusa, and the dynasty that the Sivas historian Esterâbâdî calls "the sons of Tâceddin who ruled in Niksar" descended from him. In the troubled years of the Eretnid Beylik, Togan Şah set out from Niksar, marched on Amasya, defeated the Kürt and Taşan Beys at Taşova, and entered Amasya at the beginning of the year 741, that is, in 1340-41. No details of this "battle of Taşova" have been found in other sources. After the Seljuks, the Kadı Burhaneddin State and then the Tacettinoğulları ruled the area. In 1425 Mehmed I (Çelebi Mehmed) ended the Tacettinoğulları Beylik and incorporated Taşova into Ottoman territory.

In the Ottoman period Taşova was organised as a village attached to the Sanjak of Tokat and remained in that position until the end of the empire. In Ottoman records the place appears as Taşâbâd or Taşabat. Hüsameddin lists Taşâbâd first among the districts attached to Amasya in the period when it was the seat of a province. Erek, Karayaka, Sonusa and Taşabat, the most important settlements between Niksar and Amasya, lay close to one another, and from the early eighteenth century Ottoman records referred to them together as "Nevâh-i Erbaa", the four towns, and recorded their taxes under this name; in 1840 the tax collected from the four towns was entered as 47,243 kuruş. Erek, which grew more than the others over time, became a district in 1872, the name Erbaa passed to it alone, and Taşabat, Karayaka and Sonusa came to be counted as villages of Erek. Hüsameddin's frequent use of "Taşâbâd (Erbaa)" must be connected with this shared naming; this is an inference. In the first Ottoman population counts of 1831-1846, Sonisa and Taşabat were entered in the registers as separate districts; Vedat Söyleyici, who published these registers, also discusses the region's Roman road system and milestones and its mounds, tumuli and castles. The population and economy of Sonisa, which today bears the name Uluköy, in the nineteenth century have also been studied separately through the temettuat (income) registers.

The road through Taşova was also used on Ottoman campaigns. According to Hüsameddin, when Süleyman the Magnificent entered Amasya on 3 Dhu al-Hijjah 961 (November 1554) on his return from the Iranian campaign, he gave the Rumelian army leave to rest in Karaman and the Anatolian army on the plain of Taşâbâd. The same work relates that in 1015 (1606) Yıldızlı İbrahim Bey, the dismissed sanjak governor of Amasya, was caught at the end of Amasya's eastern gorge while fleeing toward Taşâbâd and was executed. The northeastern gorge, which the author says broadens all the way to Taşova, was where the road from the city in this direction passed. Taşova's ties with the learned life of Amasya also appear in the records. Hacı Hâfız Ahmed Efendi from the village of Bidevî in Taşâbâd was educated in Amasya, became mufti of Amasya in 1151 (1738), and was appointed to the post several times. Osman Fevzi Olcay, too, recalls that at the beginning of the twentieth century most of the students of the Benderli Madrasa in Amasya came from Taşova, Tekke and Tanoba.

In the early years of the Republic, until 1944, Taşova was attached to the Erbaa district of Tokat and was called Yemişenbükü. Yemişenbükü, which belonged to the Sonusa subdistrict of Erbaa, became the district seat when the Taşova district was established in 1944; Sonusa was attached to Taşova at the same time. Because of the difficulty of reaching Tokat and the delay of services, Taşova was attached to Amasya Province in 1953. Today the population of the district centre is about eleven thousand, the district has sixty-three villages, and Esençay is also a town of the district.

Landslide and Accident Risk

The river's deep, linear valley is an area of active mass movements. In the landslide that occurred in the village of Sugözü in 2005, 12.5 million cubic metres of earth moved, 15 people died, 21 houses were destroyed, mosques were damaged and 375 animals perished. Between 1970 and 2008 eleven villages in the region suffered significant landslides. Lake Boraboy, which also lies within Taşova and was formed by the same fault system, was born as a landslide-dammed lake when water seeping into fault fractures eased the mass movement on tuff and agglomerate. The Kelkit has also caused many deaths in accidents in which vehicles and people fell into irrigation canals and the riverbed; in 2006, 29 people died when an Istanbul-Van bus overturned into the river.

Present-Day Use of the River

The Kelkit is a river on which rafting is practised around Reşadiye. The irrigation of the Tokat, Niksar and Erbaa plains depends largely on its water. At Taşova the willow and poplar stands along the bank shelter shore birds and aquatic life, and the mild climate and low altitude of the valley allow fruit and vegetables to ripen early. According to the 2018 district report, a river improvement project was under way in Taşova providing for stone revetments on both banks along a 4.5-kilometre stretch of the Yeşilırmak and bed grading along 800 metres, to reduce the flood risk and open a recreation area on the bank. Seen across the whole Yeşilırmak Basin, the river's weight is plain. In this great basin, which together with the Çekerek, Tersakan and Kelkit catchments reaches 36,144 square kilometres, the Kelkit is both the longest and the most powerful tributary; its own basin covers 11,455 square kilometres.

Chronology

3rd millennium BCE: Early Bronze Age settlements in the Taşova and Erbaa plains, Boğazkesen among them.

120-63 BCE: Reign of Mithridates VI; Eupatoria is founded where the Lykos flows into the Iris.

66 BCE: The battle between Pompey and Mithridates in the Lykos valley.

25 CE: Taşova and its surroundings are fully incorporated into Roman territory.

1075: The area passes to the Danishmendids.

1174: It is attached to the Seljuks of Anatolia under Kılıçarslan II.

1257: The endowment deed of the Seyyid Nureddin Alparslan lodge is drawn up.

1340-41: According to Hüsameddin, Togan Şah defeats the Kürt and Taşan Beys at Taşova and enters Amasya.

1425: Çelebi Mehmed ends the Tacettinoğulları Beylik and Taşova passes to the Ottomans.

1554: The Anatolian army of Süleyman the Magnificent rests on the plain of Taşâbâd.

1831-1846: In the first Ottoman population counts, Sonisa and Taşabat are recorded as separate districts.

1840: A tax of 47,243 kuruş is collected from the four towns known as "Nevâh-i Erbaa", Taşabat among them.

1850s-1910s: The Boğazkesen Bridge is repaired three times because of floods.

1872: Erek becomes a district seat and takes the name Erbaa.

1940s: A flood destroys the deck of the Boğazkesen Bridge.

1944: The Taşova district is established with Yemişenbükü as its centre.

1953: Taşova is detached from Tokat and attached to Amasya Province.

1971-1981: The Hasan Uğurlu Dam is built on the Yeşilırmak.

1980: The Kelkit floods and most of the village of Kızılçubuk is submerged.

2005: The Sugözü landslide.

2026: The bridge is renamed "Boğazkesen Sultan Murat Han Bridge".

Bibliography

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Academic studies

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