Over the Yeşilırmak, the river that runs the whole length of Amasya, stretches the Alçak Köprü, the "Low Bridge", one of the oldest crossing points in the city. Linking the Hatuniye quarter at the foot of Mount Harşena with the southern bank of the river, it is known as the only bridge in the city surviving from the Roman period, and its age is usually given as around eighteen hundred years. It takes its name from the way the riverbed, rising over the centuries, swallowed its original arches and brought its deck down to just above the water. Anyone who crosses it today is in fact crossing several bridges stacked one upon another: at the bottom are the ancient arches buried in the water, above them masonry piers raised in the nineteenth century, and on top a concrete deck laid in the twentieth. Each of these layers belongs to a different chapter in the city's long struggle with its river.

Location and Place in the City

Amasya is a city set within the narrow valley that the Yeşilırmak has cut between Mount Harşena and the slopes opposite. On the northern bank stand the citadel, the rock-cut tombs of the Pontic kings and the Yalıboyu houses leaning out over the river; on the southern bank lie the bazaar, the mosques and the quarters that grew up later. Of the bridges that carry traffic between the two banks, four are lined up at short intervals in the part of the city regarded as its historic core: the Meydan (İstasyon), Madenüs, Alçak and Hükümet bridges. The Yalıboyu houses are ranged along the northern bank precisely between these four bridges. The Alçak Köprü stands in the middle of the row, between the Madenüs Bridge and the Hükümet Bridge, and at its northern end it comes out onto Hazeranlar Street in the Hatuniye quarter.

The Amasya historian Abdizade Hüseyin Hüsameddin Efendi, describing the position of the bridge, places it "in line with the Kızlar Sarayı". The Kızlar Sarayı, the "Maidens' Palace", is the name of the palace area on the slope of Mount Harşena, just below the monumental rock-cut tombs of the Pontic kings. The area contains city walls from the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods; in 1146 the Seljuk sultan Mesud I built a mosque, a madrasa, a bath and a palace here, and in the Ottoman period the palace built by Firuz Ağa, chief gatekeeper (kapıağası) of Bayezid II, was used for more than a hundred and fifty years by princes, royal ladies and governors. That the bridge lies directly opposite this palace area can hardly be a coincidence. The Alçak Köprü was the most direct route linking the foot of the citadel, where the rulers of the city lived, with the settlement on the other side of the river, and it kept this role for a long time, from the Pontic kings down to the Ottoman princes.

The Name

The name of the bridge is a plain description of its appearance. According to the common account of the sources, the bridge was built of regular cut stone so as to form four high arches. As the alluvium carried every year by the Yeşilırmak slowly filled the bed, these high piers were buried in the ground and only the upper parts of the arches remained visible. When the deck above the arches came very close to the surface of the water, people began to call the structure the "Low Bridge". Hüsameddin Efendi gives the same explanation: the bridge received this name "because it grew lower as time passed". In other words, the bridge was not low on the day it was built; what lowered it was the rise of the ground and the riverbed around it.

This rise was not confined to the river but affected the whole city. Relying on the marble pavements and columns uncovered when wells were dug, Hüsameddin Efendi writes that in the Pontic period the ground level of Amasya lay at least six metres below that of his own day. In his view, the ancient structures seen beneath the Upper and Lower Bazaar on the southern bank of the river, in the soil of the Receb, Şamlıca and Sofuzade quarters, lie at the same depth. The author compares the structure of the Alçak Köprü, which reaches down to the very bed of the river, with these buried remains, notes that the bridge stands at the same level, and concludes that it was therefore "one of the astonishing structures of that age". The observation does more than explain the name of the bridge; it is also a reminder that old Amasya lies several metres beneath the present city.

Views on the Date of Construction

As to the period in which the Alçak Köprü was built, the sources point in the same direction but differ in detail. According to the prevailing view, the bridge was built in the Roman period over the Yeşilırmak, then called the Iris, to connect the citadel and its surroundings, at that time the centre of the city, with the settlement on the opposite bank. Some records narrow the date further and place it in the second century AD. Hüsameddin Efendi, on the other hand, describes the bridge as "a work surviving from the Pontic government", that is, he attributes it to the Hellenistic age when Amasya was the capital of the Kingdom of Pontus.

The testimony that brings these two views closer together comes from Strabo, the geographer who was a native of Amasya. Writing at the end of the first century BC, Strabo says in his description of his home town that there were two bridges over the river, one leading from the city to the suburbs and the other from the suburbs to the outside territory. The researcher Kuzucular has suggested that the bridge linking the city with its suburbs is the Alçak Köprü. If this interpretation is accepted, there was a bridge on this site in Strabo's lifetime, that is, in the period when the Kingdom of Pontus came to an end and Roman rule began. For this reason some researchers think the bridge was originally built in the Pontic period and may have been rebuilt under the Romans. The evidence at hand is not enough to choose firmly between these two possibilities; but whichever is correct, it is clear that the site of the Alçak Köprü has been used as a river crossing for two thousand years.

The existence of the bridge in the Roman age also says something about the extent of the city at that time. In the research carried out for the site management plan, the Alçak Köprü is described as one of the clearest pieces of evidence that in the Roman period there was an ancient settlement spread along the southern bank of the Iris, opposite the Harşena citadel. Had the citadel been merely a refuge, there would have been no need for so solid a bridge; the bridge points to constant and busy traffic between the two banks.

Records from the Seljuk period report that the bridge was also repaired by Sultan Mesud. Hüsameddin Efendi's text, however, contains a notable contradiction. In one place the author says that none of the bridges in the Amasya valley dates from ancient times, yet he plainly counts the Alçak Köprü as a Pontic work. The most reasonable way to reconcile the two statements is to assume that he meant the present superstructures of the bridges had been renewed in the Islamic period and later. Indeed, Hüsameddin Efendi describes the old arches of the Alçak Köprü as the "foundation" of the new bridge and treats the ancient structure as a lower layer.

The Original Structure

Since the ancient part of the bridge now lies largely beneath the water and the fill, the sources that describe it rely partly on conjecture. Present-day descriptions state that the bridge was built entirely of cut or carved stone, with four arches. Hüsameddin Efendi, however, records on the basis of his own observation that the old bridge forming the foundation of the present one was built "of granite, with small openings", and that this could be understood from its form. According to the author, this bridge "was built at a very early time and never needed repair"; what made it unusable was not its own wear but the loss of its openings within the riverbed as the bed filled up.

This description also reveals the secret of the bridge's long life. In Amasya, where floods and earthquakes repeatedly destroyed the city's other bridges and wooden bridges had to be rebuilt every few generations, the ancient arches of the Alçak Köprü have come down to the present without being displaced. The burial of the arches in the fill may in a sense even have protected them; but the same process also reduced the height of the bridge and the clearance beneath which water could pass, making it dangerous to cross in times of flood. All the interventions of the nineteenth century were attempts to find a solution to this shrinking clearance.

The Citadel Gate and the Ancient Road

On the northern bank of the river, the Alçak Köprü opened directly onto one of the gates of the citadel. According to Hüsameddin Efendi's description of the fortress, the Lower Citadel had four gates, and the gate in front of the Alçak Köprü was called the "Saray Kapısı", the Palace Gate. The name of the gate shows clearly that the road crossing the bridge climbed to the palace area inside the citadel. The author relates that this gate, which had an arch of black marble, was demolished by Ziya Paşa. Present-day descriptions, on the other hand, state that at the end where the bridge joined the city there stood a "Karanlık Kapı", the Dark Gate, giving entry to the town, and that this gate has not survived. Whether the two names belong to the same gate, or whether it was called differently in different periods, cannot be determined with certainty from the sources; but both accounts say that the bridge formed a single whole with a monumental gate opening in the city wall.

Kuzucular also discusses the place of the bridge within the ancient road system of the city. In his view, the city walls pierced at the points where the Alçak Köprü and the Madenüs Bridge crossed most probably opened outwards at two further places, one in the east and one in the west, and these gates were connected by a road running parallel to the river. The road following the Alçak Köprü cut across this riverside axis at right angles and climbed to the defensive tiers of the inner citadel and the palace terraces. According to this interpretation, the Alçak Köprü was the link over the river in the main road that reached the palaces inside the citadel and the slope where the royal tombs lay. Its position directly opposite the Kızlar Sarayı also supports this view.

The demolition of the Saray Kapısı marks the end of an era in the bridge's story. The gate and the original form of the bridge were preserved together for hundreds of years, and the bridge was used at its low level and without parapets until 1865. When Ziya Paşa had a new structure built on top of the bridge, the citadel gate was also removed. In this way an important part of the ancient and medieval layout of the city was lost in the course of a public works project intended to make the bridge usable.

The Alçak Köprü through Travellers' Eyes

The most valuable testimony to the condition of the bridge in the sixteenth century comes from Hans Dernschwam, who came to the camp of Süleyman the Magnificent with the Austrian embassy. Reaching Amasya in 1555 in the company of the envoy Busbecq, Dernschwam describes the city as far as he saw it with his own eyes, and often with little pleasure. In his account Amasya had "three stone bridges and one wooden bridge". The traveller paced out the bridges step by step and noted whether they had parapets and whether they were built of stone or of timber. What all the bridges had in common was that they were very narrow and that no cart could cross them. According to accounts based on these records, Dernschwam wrote that the Alçak Köprü was sixty-three paces long, narrow and without parapets. In some sources the date of this observation is given as 1553; that was in fact the year in which Dernschwam's journey began, while the embassy arrived in Amasya in the spring of 1555.

The German traveller Heinrich Barth, who passed through Amasya in the middle of the nineteenth century, likewise records that the bridge had four arches and was from time to time under water. The bridge Barth saw was the ancient structure as it stood just before Ziya Paşa's intervention, its arches largely buried and its deck very close to the water. One more detail can be drawn from the travellers' accounts: in periods when the river ran high, the parapets of the bridge were removed so as not to obstruct the flow of the water. The bridge without parapets that Dernschwam saw was most probably a result of this practice. In a flood a low bridge behaves like a weir over which the water spills; parapets would have formed a screen in front of this water and could have strained both the flow and the bridge itself.

Ziya Paşa's Wooden Bridge

The first major intervention to change the face of the bridge was carried out during the governorship of Amasya by the poet and statesman Ziya Paşa. Ziya Paşa had been sent to Amasya in order to remove him from Istanbul because of his enmity with the grand vizier Âli Paşa; yet in the short time he spent there he launched a programme of public works without precedent in the city. He had government buildings, schools, a secondary school (idadi), clock towers, a prison, a covered market (bedesten) and shops built in the centre of Amasya and in its five districts, and he opened new roads in the city centre. These works are remembered in history as the "Amasya reform". The date at which the pasha, who was transferred to the governorship of Canik in 1865 after rumours of misconduct spread by the mufti of Zile, Feyzullah Efendi, and some of the local notables, took up his post in Amasya is given differently in the sources; some sources give 1863.

The work on the Alçak Köprü was part of this building programme. According to Hüsameddin Efendi, the bridge was used in its old state until 1281 [1864-65]; in view of the danger the river posed in times of flood, Ziya Paşa took the Alçak Köprü as a foundation and had another, wooden bridge built on top of it. Present-day descriptions state that this bridge had eleven piers. According to one account, Ziya Paşa turned the arches of the ancient bridge into the supports of the new structure, using them as columns, had piers of reused stone (spolia) built on top of the arches and set the deck on these piers. Since some sources sum up the work of 1865 simply as "the building of piers on the arches", it is not clear to what extent stone piers were used in this first bridge. Other sources describe the structure as an entirely wooden bridge.

This was not the only bridge Ziya Paşa had built over the river in those years. Hüsameddin Efendi relates that in 1281 [1864-65] the pasha also had a wooden bridge built "in an extremely elegant manner" about twenty-five metres downstream of the Helkis Bridge, in front of the gate of the government building, and that this bridge was destroyed in the flood of 1294 [1877]. The pasha had also had the Madenüs Bridge repaired in the same year. These facts show that the intervention at the Alçak Köprü was not a repair standing on its own but part of a broad urban scheme that reorganised the two banks of the river around the new government building and clock tower.

The Flood of 1881 and the Rebuilding

Ziya Paşa's bridge did not last long. According to Hüsameddin Efendi, it could not withstand the current in the flood of 1298 [1880-81] and was carried away. The ancient arches survived this flood too; what collapsed and was swept off was the new structure set on top of them. This time the bridge was rebuilt with the city's own means. Hüsameddin Efendi writes that in 1299 [1881-82], with the help of benefactors and men of means, the bridge was rebuilt "with masonry piers and a wooden top". Present-day descriptions associate this rebuilding with the time of the district governor (mutasarrıf) Atıf Bey, stating that in 1882 Atıf Bey had stone piers added on top of the arches and that the bridge was rebuilt with a wooden deck and parapets. It is also recorded that the new bridge was built more solidly than its predecessor.

According to the sources, the stones of a disused church were used in building this second bridge. The sources do not say which church provided the stones or where it stood. The reuse of old stones in new buildings was a common practice in Amasya, and the sites of most of the Byzantine church names listed by Hüsameddin Efendi could not be identified even in his own day. The reused stones in the piers of the bridge may therefore be among the rare visible remains of one of the city's vanished older buildings. Hüsameddin Efendi's description of the new piers as "thick, square masonry piers" also matches the massive stone piers seen on the bridge today.

Twentieth-Century Repairs and the 2009 Restoration

The bridge built in Atıf Bey's time remained in use with its wooden deck until the middle of the twentieth century. The dates of the later interventions are given differently in the sources. One group of sources writes that after floods of the Yeşilırmak carried away the wooden bridge in the 1950s, the present concrete deck was laid and the bridge was renewed and strengthened with concrete and steel joints. Other sources state that the bridge was further strengthened in 1965 and that the existing reinforced concrete deck was added at that date. The two dates need not exclude each other; it is possible that an emergency repair after the flood of the 1950s was followed in 1965 by a permanent reinforced concrete deck, but no detailed record confirming this has been found.

The present appearance of the bridge was shaped by the restoration carried out in 2009. With this work the bridge acquired the form known today, with its masonry piers, concrete deck and parapets. No detailed report on the scope of the restoration has been found in publicly available sources. The bridge lies within the boundaries of the site management plan prepared for the UNESCO World Heritage nomination of Mount Harşena and the rock-cut tombs of the Pontic kings. While the plan states that the Madenüs and Hükümet bridges lost their original form and were rebuilt over time, the Alçak Köprü is not counted among these structures; a bridge that has kept its ancient arches despite every addition, it is treated as one of the structures that carry the historical layers of the plan area most clearly.

Present Appearance and Layers

Seen from the bank, the work of three separate periods can be distinguished on the Alçak Köprü. Just above the water, the traces of low arches, in places visible only when the water recedes, belong to the ancient bridge. The large, square stone piers rising above these arches are the product of the rebuilding after the flood of 1881, and perhaps partly of Ziya Paşa's time. The flat deck covering the tops of the piers is the reinforced concrete intervention of the twentieth century. That the bridge looks less like an arched stone bridge than a crossing on piers is the direct result of this history stacked layer upon layer.

The bridge continues today to be one of the crossings most used by pedestrians. From it one sees on one side the royal rock tombs on the slope of Mount Harşena and the Kızlar Sarayı area below them, and on the other the Yalıboyu houses lined up along the riverbank. Together with the houses and bridges lit up in the evening, this view forms one of the best-known sights of Amasya. For this reason the Alçak Köprü is used, in the words of local writers, almost like an open-air studio in the city; it is one of the places most often chosen by photographers, television crews and wedding photographs.

The real value of the bridge, however, lies behind this view. On no other bridge in Amasya are traces from the Pontic or Roman age, from the late Ottoman period and from the years of the Republic gathered so clearly on a single structure. The rise of the riverbed lowered the bridge, but at the same time it preserved the ancient structure beneath it. The Alçak Köprü can therefore also be read as one of the few visible fragments of the old Amasya that Hüsameddin Efendi sought beneath the ground.

Chronology

Late 1st century BC: Strabo mentions two bridges over the river at Amasya, one of them linking the city with its suburbs; Kuzucular suggests that one of these bridges is the Alçak Köprü.

2nd century AD: The date at which, according to some sources, the bridge was built in the Roman period.

Seljuk period: According to the records, the bridge is repaired by Sultan Mesud.

1555: Hans Dernschwam writes that Amasya has three stone bridges and one wooden bridge; he describes the Alçak Köprü as narrow and without parapets.

Mid-19th century: Heinrich Barth records that the bridge has four arches and is from time to time under water.

1865 (1281): The district governor Ziya Paşa has an eleven-pier wooden bridge built on top of the ancient arches; the Saray Kapısı in front of the bridge is demolished.

1881 (1298): Ziya Paşa's bridge is swept away in a flood of the Yeşilırmak.

1881-1882 (1299): With the help of benefactors, in the time of the district governor Atıf Bey, a new bridge with masonry piers and a wooden top is built; the stones of a disused church are used.

1950s: According to some sources, after a flood the wooden bridge is renewed with concrete and steel joints.

1965: The bridge is strengthened; according to some sources the present reinforced concrete deck is added at this date.

2009: The bridge is restored and takes on its present appearance.

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