In the central district of Amasya, 30 kilometres from the provincial centre, Musaköy appears in the written sources mostly in the founding story of its neighbour Akyazı: it was the people of Musaköy who showed the Georgian immigrants arriving in 1881 where to build their new home. There is no study devoted to the village itself; what is known rests on that account, an entry in a register of 1530, village lists and the population series. In 2025 the village had 359 inhabitants.

The Name and the Older Records

Musaköy does not appear in Bekir Başalan's table of renamed settlements in the central district, and there is no record of any official change of name in recent times. An older trace may be sought in the accounting register of 1530. Its index lists a village written simply as "Mûsâ" in the nahiye (sub-district) of Geldiklan-âbâd (register p. 358), and no other village of that name appears in the sanjak of Amasya. If one considers that Geldiklan covered the villages west and southwest of Amasya, this entry may well be present-day Musaköy; but the form of the name differs, and no document has confirmed that the two places are the same. That the name derives from a man called Musa is evident from the word itself; no information has been found as to who this Musa was.

The People of Musaköy and the Founding of Akyazı

Enes Yılmaz's master's thesis of 2021 on the Georgian villages of the Amasya region relates how, after the war of 1877-1878, a small group that had emigrated from the Batumi area reached Zile after years of searching for a suitable place, and stayed there about three years. The people of Zile advised them to look north of the mountainous Amasya road where the Terziköy hot spring lies, and the group, setting out in 1881, passed the village of Kervansaray and liked the land, the waters and the forests they saw. When they began work to found their village at a place called "Abdalpınarı", where they had seen water flowing in abundance, some villagers from nearby Musaköy came and warned them: "Do not trust this water; it flows this strongly once every seven years, otherwise it flows very little or not at all." The people of Musaköy also suggested two alternatives, telling them to build the village around the stream below or at a place called Pınargözü on the Terziköy road. The founders found the advice sensible and built the village beside the stream.

The thesis tells the same story once more, in slightly different words, in the section devoted to the village of Akyazı; both versions present Musaköy as a neighbour that already existed when the immigrants arrived and that knew the waters of the area well. Yılmaz writes that the first immigrants in Akyazı, after living for a while in isolation, established relations with the surrounding villages, Musaköy among them. In a folk poem about Akyazı included in the appendix of the thesis, "Musaköybaşı" is counted among the place names around the village. The name probably refers to a spot where the lands of Musaköy meet those of Akyazı, but there is no explanation beyond the poem.

Population and Village Services

Musaköy has lost more than half its population in the last forty years. The village list of 2012 shows 896 people in 1985, 742 in 1990 and 513 in 2000; the sharpest fall thus came within fifteen years. According to the same record the village had a health post and a primary-school building, but neither was in service; pupils were bussed to school. A drinking-water network, a sewerage system and a postal agency are recorded. The address-based records begin in 2007 with 431 people; the figure rose briefly to 438 in 2012, then fell slowly to 352 in 2021 and stood at 359 in 2025. That the latest count records 201 men against 158 women shows a marked male preponderance in the village's population.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

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