Ottoman provincial administration underwent a deep transformation in the nineteenth century, and its visible face at the sanjak level was the mutasarrıf. Amasya, an important sanjak attached to Sivas, took its place within this order; the mutasarrıfs appointed to the city had to apply reform instructions from the centre to a crowded and long-established town squeezed into a narrow valley. The archival documents speak most fully about the construction of the government house, and the account gives most of its weight to that subject; Ziya Pasha and the clock tower are mentioned only briefly, where they belong.

For a long time the word mutasarrıf meant, in Ottoman usage, a person who held an office or the revenue attached to it; it acquired the sense of an administrator sent to a sanjak only from the early seventeenth century. In the classical period sanjaks were given to princes and sanjak governors. For Amasya the distinction carries extra weight, because until the middle of the sixteenth century the city was one of the principal centres where princes gained administrative experience. After the execution of Prince Mustafa, Amasya lost this character and began to be governed by sanjak governors appointed from the centre. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi records this transition and notes that Ziya Pasha served there briefly as mutasarrıf in the late nineteenth century.

With the Tanzimat the mutasarrıf's duties were redefined. The centre expected the Tanzimat method to be applied in full and all classes of subjects to be treated equally. The powers of governors and mutasarrıfs, set out in an edict of 28 November 1852, were widened by an instruction of 22 September 1858. The placing of sanjak administration in the hands of the mutasarrıf was settled by the Provincial Regulation of 1864; the General Provincial Administration Regulation published in 1871 developed this framework and in particular regulated salaries and travel allowances. Under the regulation the province was run by a governor, the liva, that is the sanjak, by a mutasarrıf, the district (kaza) by a kaymakam, and the village by a muhtar. The mutasarrıf was the governor's representative in the liva and bore first-degree responsibility for general administration and public order; he took office by oath, prepared the sanjak's budget and sent it to the centre through the province, and spent nothing beyond urgent needs such as education and health until approval arrived. He inspected the municipalities within the sanjak, oversaw every construction and repair for which funds had been allocated, and toured and inspected the liva each year. On leaving office he was also expected to submit a report on what he had done and what remained to be done.

Beside the mutasarrıf there was a sanjak administrative council that met under his chairmanship. In Amasya this council appears to have been established from 1870. The record for 1870 lists the mutasarrıf as president; the judge (naib), the mufti, the accountant and the director of correspondence as ex officio members; and one Muslim and one non-Muslim member chosen from among the notables. The regulation required four elected members, so the presence of only two in this list suggests an incomplete entry, and indeed in 1875 the elected members number four, two Muslims and two non-Muslims. The council's remit covered the sanjak's administrative, financial, public works, education, agricultural and commercial affairs, together with administrative disputes. Every decision on public works, whether a government house, a school or a road, passed across the council's table and under the mutasarrıf's signature.

The Administrative Structure of the Amasya Sanjak

From the sixteenth century Amasya was a sanjak attached to the province of Sivas, and this link lasted until the end of the empire. The internal division of the sanjak, however, changed often through the nineteenth century. The records of 1838 attach to it the districts of Amasya, Erbaa, Havza, Zeytun, Zile, Osmancık, Gelgiras, Köprü, Gümüş, Lâdik, Mecidözü and Merzifon. In 1844 names such as Çorum, İskilip and Saz also appear on the list, and in 1855 the tribe of Çorum is added. After the regulation of 1871 the arrangement was rebuilt as the districts of Amasya, Osmancık, Zile, Lâdik, Merzifon, Maden-i Sim, Mecidözü, Köprü and Erbaa. The nahiye unit introduced by the regulation was applied in the sanjak the same year, and in 1871 twenty-four nahiyes are counted under seven districts.

The changes continued in the following years. In 1881 Erbaa and Zile were attached to the sanjak of Tokat on grounds of geographic proximity, and the number of Amasya's districts fell to seven. In 1883 the creation of the district of Havza raised it to eight. In 1894 the district of Maden-i Sim took the name Gümüşhacıköy. In 1896 Osmancık was separated from Amasya and given to the sanjak of Çorum, and after 1912 Mecidözü followed the same path. The sanjak's borders thus narrowed. The orderly hierarchy that the Tanzimat drew on paper rested in Amasya on a map that was redrawn again and again, and the mutasarrıfs' decisions reached, through the kaymakams, a different number of districts in different years.

The Sivas provincial yearbooks give a breakdown of the offices and staff in the sanjak. About 688 officials worked in the Amasya sanjak in 1881, 655 in 1903 and 702 in 1907, and roughly two thirds of this staff was concentrated in the central district. The share of non-Muslim officials stayed between nine and twelve per cent; they served in technical work such as engineering, medicine and pharmacy, in municipal and administrative councils, and sometimes as district governors in the post of kaymakam. In the district of Merzifon, Kostantin Efendi appears as kaymakam in 1911 and Bedros Efendi in 1913. The mutasarrıf stood at the head of this large bureaucracy and carried out his work by relying on it.

The City in the Nineteenth Century

The city in which the mutasarrıfs worked was a settlement divided in two by the Yeşilırmak in a rocky valley, a place hardly suited to growth. According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, Amasya did not grow much physically in the nineteenth century, while its population rose to around twenty-five to thirty thousand and the number of neighbourhoods stood at about thirty-six. The economic crisis of the years in which Ziya Pasha took up his post was also noted by the French traveller Georges Perrot on his journey of 1861. The same Perrot calls Amasya the Oxford of Anatolia and writes that nearly two thousand students were studying in its madrasas.

There was economic vitality as well. Silk production had been an important livelihood since the early nineteenth century. In 1863 Amasya was among the pilot regions in which cotton seed brought from Egypt was tried, and attempts were made at cotton production. Because of the city's commercial liveliness and its closeness to the coast, a fair was founded in 1864, to be held every year from 15 December to the end of the month. According to Cuinet, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Amasya had nearly 2,500 weavers. The mutasarrıfs' efforts in public works and development should be read against this economic background: new roads, market arrangements and the bedesten were investments that strengthened the image of a city suited to trade.

The Old Konak and the Case for a New Government House

Until the nineteenth century no separate public building had been built for administration. Appointed governors and mutasarrıfs lived in a konak set aside or rented for them; this konak was at once the place where the retinue of the household lodged and the place where state business was conducted. With the restructuring of the Tanzimat a distinct building type, the government house, emerged. It housed departments such as the courts, the police, public works, trade and agriculture, education and the treasury, and around it stood structures such as the municipality, the post office, the clock tower, the telegraph office and the prison. This arrangement was established in Amasya too, and the government house, together with the buildings around it, formed the city's civic square.

The konak in use in Amasya in the middle of the nineteenth century was a structure of timber and mud brick, and it had probably come into being when an existing residence was assigned as the government house. A document of 1848 reports that the building needed repair and that, according to the survey, the repair would cost 38,000 kuruş. This sum was judged too high, and if the konak was uninhabitable the renting of a suitable place was requested. The building nevertheless stayed in use for about fifteen more years. By the beginning of 1864 the konak had, in the words of the documents, been left tottering by the passage of time. Because it contained no masonry room, the clerks' papers and ledgers were kept in a stone han at some distance, and twenty thousand kuruş a year went on small repairs, the rent of chest and archive rooms, and the daily carrying of the document chests. The prison on the same site was also in poor condition.

The correspondence presents the case for a new building not only as a necessity but also as a matter of appearance. Amasya was the first large city that travellers going from Samsun into Anatolia would meet, and it was thought unseemly for the government quarter to look ugly. A plan and a survey register were therefore prepared. The projected konak was to have a stone-walled lower storey and a timber upper storey, its exterior plastered with pure mortar and its joinery and ceilings painted. It would house offices such as the land registry, the commercial court and the pious foundations directorate. On the same site were also to be built a stone-walled prison with two wards, a unit with a police ward above it, a stable for the police animals, a masonry section of two rooms for keeping cash and documents, and a timber telegraph office. The whole complex would be enclosed by a stone wall, and the old konak would be pulled down and its usable timber reused.

Cost, Tender and Financing

According to the survey carried out by experts the new konak would cost a little over 213,000 kuruş, to be exact 213,990 kuruş. In the tender that followed, the work was left with a contractor named Ali Efendi at 190,000 kuruş, 23,990 kuruş below the estimate. How the money would be found is also explained in detail in the correspondence. Forty thousand kuruş was to come from selling in parcels, for the building of houses, a state plot on the edge of the city known as the saray yeri, estimated at fifteen to twenty thousand zira. Fifty thousand kuruş was requested from the treasury, and a part of the remainder was to be raised through contributions collected from the population. While the new konak was being built, a large house across the river was also rented at five hundred kuruş a month as a temporary home for the document and council rooms, and approval of this rent by the treasury was separately requested.

The reason for haste was that the winter of 1864 in Amasya was very harsh. Because of continuous frosts, a large block of rock on the mountain behind the konak had split from the main mass, and with the thaws a danger of falling arose. It was decided to send a few stonecutters and break it off piece by piece with gunpowder. The falling fragments broke the tiles and glass of the commercial court and of the police wards, which were already uninhabitable. The building was emptied completely at this time. The correspondence says that building a new konak, once merely obligatory, had now become an absolute duty. The rotting and loss of the ruinous debris, the approach of winter and the possibility that prisoners would escape from the damaged prison are also listed among the reasons. In the contract the debris was left to the contractor.

During 1864 the mutasarrıflık asked for a suitable building engineer to be sent to supervise this work and the roads to be laid out. Construction must have begun at the end of the summer of 1864. It had been requested that the prison, stable, masonry document room and telegraph office be built together with the government house for the fixed sum through the neighbourhood council, and that the necessary register be drawn up and sent once the work was finished. The financing had a cost of its own: in 1866 it is recorded that thirty thousand kuruş of the expense of the government house and the clock tower had been collected from the people of Merzifon as a contribution, that forty thousand more was demanded, and that it was decided to waive it. The money raised from the people is also the subject of the dispute described in a later section.

The Inscription, the Furnishing and the Second Survey

A letter of 10 November 1864 reports that work on the konak had begun and that it would soon be finished. A date was to be written beneath the sultan's tuğra to be placed above the solid masonry gate, and the chronogram verse that had been prepared was sent with a query whether it was suitable. The verse is said to have been written by Ziya Pasha. The text opens with a prayer and praise for Sultan Abdülaziz, says that Amasya was made prosperous in his reign, and states in its final couplet that the gate of government is the gate of justice and that those with claims should come; the date of the verse is 1281 (1864). The inscription was large, set above the arch of the door, and can be made out in old photographs of the konak.

Correspondence on furnishing the konak also went forward while it was under construction. At the end of 1864 fifty thousand kuruş was requested for furnishings and other materials; this sum was found too high and observance of the rules of economy was demanded. The mutasarrıflık argued that the building was being made in a manner that friend and foe alike would admire and that the sum requested was in fact the minimum, and had a new survey register prepared by the liva council and experts. According to it, thick Austrian linen, door and window curtains, covers for cushions and bolsters, winter curtains for the council and mutasarrıf rooms, and twenty-three kilims to be bought at the Zile fair were needed for the eleven rooms on the upper floor and the ten on the lower. The total expense was set at 49,382 kuruş. The items show how the interior of the konak was conceived: the council and mutasarrıf rooms, the clerks' rooms and the guest divans were to be furnished, and curtains were also to be made ready for the winter.

The konak must have been finished in a short time, about a year, by the end of 1865. The second survey, made after completion at the beginning of 1866, was prepared by the engineer Hasan Bahri Bey. The survey report lists twenty rooms, a council room, one large upper and two lower divan halls, three servants' rooms, four basement rooms, two shops, a depot and a document cellar. In the courtyard of the konak are the prison and the police wards; a protective wall had been built on the mountain and river sides, and a quay had been laid out along the riverbank. Beside it a clock tower had also been built at a cost of twenty thousand kuruş. A civic square consisting of the government house, the prison and the clock tower thus arose on the bank of the Yeşilırmak, on the site of today's governorate building. The building was of timber. This feature makes it an exception among the masonry government houses of the period; its plan was also different from the horizontally developed masonry examples common among public buildings of the time, and stood close to large residences.

The Ziya Pasha Period and Tension with Local Powers

The mutasarrıf behind these buildings was Ziya Pasha, appointed to Amasya in 1863. The length of his term varies in the sources between a year and a half and two years; what is certain is that in 1865 he was transferred to the mutasarrıflık of Canik. According to the TDV, he had built in the centre of Amasya and its five districts six government houses, six schools, one secondary school, six clock towers, a prison building, a bedesten and workplaces, and had new roads opened in the city centre; these works came to be known as the Amasya reforms. A memorandum drawn up by the notables of the sanjak describes the city before Ziya Pasha as ruinous, its local revenue weak, its brigands numerous and its affairs slack, and afterwards as a place where public works moved forward, revenue rose, and security and order were established. The size of the konak, however, was judged excessive for the state organisation of the time and was criticised; it is reported that Ziya Pasha replied that the official offices would not fit into the building.

In assessing the documents published by Kenan Akyüz, Halil İnalcık states the source of the problem plainly. Money was needed for public works, the central treasury could not provide it, and the expense was met through local levies. Ziya Pasha took the same road, placing financial burdens on local notables and the ulema and extending these levies to the people as well. Those who resisted included Lûtfullah, who had served for twenty-two years as mufti of Zile, and Hacı Hasan Ağa of the notables of Zile; the TDV gives the name of the mufti of Zile in the same episode as Feyzullah Efendi. Behind them stood Amasya's leading families, its vücûh, its ulema and its merchants. The mutasarrıf claimed that their wealth had not been acquired by lawful means and went so far as to imprison them. They in turn accused the mutasarrıf of collecting levies unlawfully and of pocketing part of the money collected. After they informed the Porte that disorder might break out among the people, Ziya Pasha was transferred to Canik.

İnalcık does not interpret this contest one-sidedly. In his view the methods Ziya Pasha resorted to were entirely those of earlier governors and unsettled the local wealthy and often the people as well. On the other hand, those called hanedan and vücûh were the old ayan class that dominated provincial life; the provincial councils brought by the Tanzimat fell in most places under their influence, and they were skilled at presenting themselves as protectors of the people and of the şeriat against central officials who touched their interests. According to Ziya Pasha the mufti was in appearance acting as mufti but in reality as governor, director and judge all at once. Perrot, on his journey of 1861, had also written that the ayan were useful to the people against the arbitrary rule of the centre. The struggle in Amasya is thus read as a documented example of how the Tanzimat state, in trying to establish its own revenue and authority in the provinces, came face to face with local powers.

Schools and the Education Organisation

The educational undertaking shows the passage between the city's madrasa tradition and the new state schools. According to the information given in the Türk Maarif Ansiklopedisi, the Amasya mutasarrıf Ziya Pasha had the Alaca Yahyâ Madrasa demolished in 1865 and a rüştiye school built in its place; elsewhere in the same entry it is written that the Ministry of Education demolished the Alaca Yahyâ Madrasa in 1864 and had a rüştiye built in its place. The same source adds that the Narlı Bahçe Madrasa, built of timber in 1754, was also demolished by Ziya Pasha in 1865. This disagreement over date and over the name of the madrasa shows that the event is told in different forms in the sources.

According to the Sivas Yearbook of 1870, 718 Muslim pupils were studying in twenty-seven primary schools in Amasya. An Armenian sıbyan school had 195 pupils, and in the thirty-one madrasas of the city twenty-six preachers, twenty-three imams, forty-four teachers and 278 students were recorded. According to the yearbook of 1892 a rüştiye and four primary schools had been opened in Amasya. The Mekteb-i İdadi, for its part, existed at the end of the nineteenth century in only three cities of the province of Sivas: Sivas, Amasya and Tokat. The number of pupils in the Amasya idadi is recorded as 91 in 1898, 72 in 1899, 111 in 1900, 121 in 1901 and 97 in 1903; in 1903 nine of them were non-Muslim. The curriculum included subjects such as geometry, bookkeeping, geography, ethics, religious studies, arithmetic, French, Turkish, drawing, calligraphy and Persian. The Amasya sanjak also held ten of the seventeen libraries in the province.

The Clock Tower

Of the buildings the mutasarrıfs left to the city, the most visible is the clock tower. The tower that Ziya Pasha had built in 1865 was erected beside the government house as part of the same civic square, and was built of timber at a cost of twenty thousand kuruş. It was damaged in a fire soon afterwards, suffered again in the earthquake of 1938, and was pulled down in the 1940s with the idea of building a new one; some sources give the date as February 1940 and link the demolition to work on a new bridge. The present tower was rebuilt faithfully to the original in 2002; it is a minaret-shaped structure of cut stone with a cylindrical shaft on a square-planned base, topped by a timber section in the form of a honeycomb.

Maintenance Correspondence in the Konak's Later Years

The upkeep of the buildings, no less than their construction, made up a large part of the mutasarrıflık's correspondence. In 1888 the painting of the interior and exterior of the konak came up. The reply given to the report sent from the council of the Sivas province was that the treasury could not meet the expense of 16,445.5 kuruş according to the survey, that the interior should be left unpainted and only the exterior painted, and that a new survey and tender should be made. The correspondence continued in 1889 and 1890. In 1892 the Dahiliye Mektubi Kalemi informed the province of Sivas that there were no painters in Amasya to do the work and that three thousand kuruş was needed for the painters' travel costs and paint materials. At the beginning of 1894 it is written that the timber building, which had received no repair in the twenty-eight years since its construction, was falling into ruin, and that if it were not repaired that year a much larger expense would result; it is stressed that so large a building, put up for six or seven thousand liras, could not be left in such a state. The permission of eight thousand kuruş given earlier had not been used because time had passed, and it was planned to bring paint, pitch and linseed oil from Istanbul, or if possible from Tokat.

The security of documents is a separate worry. In 1890 an expense of 24,307 kuruş for building a masonry cellar in the konak came up. In 1894 it was stated that keeping documents in the timber building was risky, and permission was requested to rent a room in the stone han at 130 kuruş and use it as a document cellar, and also to build a cellar room in the konak. In 1898 the building of a document cellar near the konak appears again in the correspondence, and it seems that this work too took a long time. As for the prison, the building in the konak's courtyard had been unable to meet needs since the late nineteenth century, and solutions were sought. The documents record that in 1916 five thousand kuruş was needed for the konak's repair, and that in 1920 the allowance requested in 1919 had still received no reply.

The Fire and the Later Konak

The timber konak completed in 1865 burned down completely in a fire that broke out on its lower floor at about 10.30 on Thursday, 19 December 1946. It had served for roughly eighty years, with small repairs, a long time for a timber public building. Old photographs show that the building had two storeys above a raised basement, an almost square rectangular plan and a hipped tiled roof, that its main facade facing the river had an entrance in the form of a bay carried on two columns, and that the inscription above the arch of the door was as wide as the doorway. It is told that a panel in the konak, known to have been written in Istanbul by the famous calligrapher Mustafa İzzet Efendi, was saved from the fire and taken to the museum; Nurcan Yazıcı, however, was told in 2009 that there was no such panel in the museum.

In its place a stone konak was built on the same site and opened in 1949. It is a symmetrical building of yellow cut stone, two storeys over a basement, in accordance with the standard designs of the period; it is still used today as the Amasya Governorate and was registered as a protected monument in 1992. Yazıcı notes that all three buildings used, or built for the purpose, as the government house since the nineteenth century stand on the same site: the timber konak of 1865 on the cleared debris of the old konak, and after it burned the building of 1949. The municipal building put up beside the government house in the early 1900s also stands there; the Sivas provincial yearbooks record that in 1903 municipal offices, a police office and a branch of the Ziraat Bank were operating in the Amasya sanjak.

The Order the Mutasarrıfs Left

The names and terms of office of the mutasarrıfs who governed Amasya other than Ziya Pasha appear scattered in the yearbooks and archive registers. In the konak correspondence the works are most often referred to not by a person's name but by the title of the Amasya mutasarrıflık, and this explains why this part of the nineteenth century gathers around the Ziya Pasha period. The picture that emerges, however, is clear. The mutasarrıfs were officials who worked through sanjak councils, kaymakamlıks and muhtarlıks, with limited budgets and with spending that depended on the approval of the province and the centre. When the treasury fell short they were obliged to collect levies from the people, and they paid the price of this in contests with the local ayan.

Within this framework the lasting results of the nineteenth-century mutasarrıflık in Amasya are these: the creation of a separate government building and a civic square around it, the placing of institutions such as the telegraph office and the prison around the konak, the beginning of a tradition of state-built schools with the rüştiye and the idadi, and the institutionalisation of sanjak and district councils and municipal offices. The konaks built to show the centralising outlook of the Tanzimat and to announce that the state had reached every corner of the empire served this purpose in Amasya too; the difference was that the building was of timber and shaped to local conditions.

Chronology

1848: A document in the archive records the Amasya government house as ruinous; the 38,000 kuruş reported for its repair is judged too high.

1852: By the edict of 28 November the powers of governors and mutasarrıfs are regulated (widened by the instruction of 1858).

1863: Ziya Pasha is appointed mutasarrıf of Amasya; Amasya is among the pilot regions for the Egyptian cotton seed trial.

1864: Survey for the new government house (24 March), winter frosts and the rockfall, the evacuation of the konak, the start of construction, and the sending of the chronogram verse for the inscription (10 November). A fair is founded in the city.

1865: The konak and the clock tower are completed; Ziya Pasha is transferred to the mutasarrıflık of Canik; the rüştiye school building is erected.

1866: Second survey by the engineer Hasan Bahri Bey; the forty thousand kuruş demanded after the thirty thousand collected from the people of Merzifon is waived.

1870: First entry for the Amasya sanjak administrative council in the yearbook; figures for primary schools, madrasas and sıbyan schools in Amasya in the Sivas yearbook.

1871: The General Provincial Administration Regulation comes into force; the nahiye organisation is established in the sanjak.

1881-1883: Erbaa and Zile are attached to Tokat, and the district of Havza is created.

1888-1894: Correspondence on the painting and repair of the konak; requests for a document cellar.

1896: The district of Osmancık is given to the sanjak of Çorum.

1898-1903: The years in which the pupil numbers of the Amasya Mekteb-i İdadi are tracked in the yearbooks.

1938-1940: The clock tower is damaged by the earthquake and then pulled down.

1946: On 19 December the timber government house burns.

1949: The new government house opens.

2002: The clock tower is rebuilt faithfully to the original.

Sources

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources