On the edge of the Geldingen Plain, south of the road to Çorum and southwest of Amasya, lies Oluz, a village that has given its name to one of the largest mounds in the inland part of the Central Black Sea region. Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar describes it as lying "to the southwest of Amasya"; a village list of 2012 puts it 33 kilometres from the provincial centre. Over five centuries of records the name appears as Olus and Oluz; in the twentieth century it was changed for a time to Toklucak, and today it is Oluz once more. The excavations carried out since 2007 at Oluz Höyük, the mound rising from the plain, have brought to light a sequence of settlements reaching from the Hittite age through Persian rule to the Hellenistic period, and have carried the village's name into the archaeological literature. In 2025 the village had 571 inhabitants.

Olus, Toklucak and Oluz

The earliest known document in which the name appears is the accounting register of 1530. Its index lists a village called "Olus" in the nahiye (sub-district) of Geldiklan-âbâd, and the entry is on page 357 of the register; no other village of that name exists in any nahiye of the sanjak of Amasya. Hüsâmeddîn, too, always writes Olus. At some later date the name was changed to Toklucak. David French published the Roman milestone he saw in the village in 1986 under the heading "Toklucak, formerly Oluz"; Şevket Dönmez and E. Emine Naza Dönmez used the same form, "Toklucak (formerly Oluz)", in their excavation report of 2009. In 2012 the village was still listed as "Toklucak Köyü" in a local-government village database, and its 2011 population there (606) is identical to the 2011 figure in the series now published under the name Oluz.

Bekir Başalan's table of renamed settlements in Amasya likewise gives Toklucak as the new name and Olus/Oluz as the old one. Yet in the same article's list of the villages of the central district, based on Ministry of the Interior data for 2024, the name is Oluz, not Toklucak. The historical name must therefore have been restored after 2012; no document has been found showing by what decision this was done. When and why the name Toklucak was given could not be established either. The only explanation of the meaning of Olus comes from Hüsâmeddîn, who counts village names in Geldiklan such as Afşar, Olus, Doğan, Alikadı and Yağmur as personal names left by the heads of clans that had broken away from the Afşar and Bayındır tribes. This is an interpretation and is not supported by any other source.

A Village, and Once a Nahiye, in Geldiklan

As the register of 1530 shows, in the first Ottoman centuries Olus was one of the villages of the nahiye of Geldiklan, which covered the west of Amasya. When Hüsâmeddîn describes the period in which Amasya was the seat of a province, he lists Olus together with Akdağ, Yenice, Hakala, Arguma, İnepazar and Öz among the nahiyes attached to the city; the village was thus for a time the centre of a small administrative unit bearing its own name. The same thing happened again at the end of the nineteenth century. According to the list Sabit Genç drew from the provincial yearbooks (sâlnâme) and from Cuinet's work of 1892, Oluz was in that year one of the twelve nahiyes of the kaza of Amasya. By 1903 the number of nahiyes in the kaza had fallen to four, and Oluz no longer appeared among them. These sources do not say which villages the nahiye covered or how long it functioned.

Hüsâmeddîn speaks of two different layers in the village's population. In one place, describing the Baba lineage, which he counts among the most numerous families of Amasya and which was held to descend from Baba İlyâs-ı Horasânî, he writes that most of the Turks living in Olus, as in Efte, Moramul and İnepazar, belonged to that lineage. Elsewhere he presents Olus as the home of the Pehlivanlı tribe. These two statements do not exclude one another, but no document has been found that shows in any detail what the village's make-up was in the past. A small nineteenth-century trace comes from the temettuat (income survey) registers of 1845: among the outsiders owning property in the village of Kızılca-i Kebir, in the neighbouring nahiye of Ezinepazar, a Hasan "of Olus karyesi" is recorded.

The Pehlivanlı Tribe and the Kürd Bekiroğulları

The most visible trace Olus left in the history of Amasya is a family that came out of the village at the end of the seventeenth century and rose to high office in the city. According to Hüsâmeddîn's biographies, Ebûbekir Ağa, son of Ahmed Bey bin Ebûbekir Bey, chief of the Pehlivanlı tribe living in Olus, held a zeamet (military fief) in his youth; after his father's death he stayed with İbrâhim Bey, who had become chief of the tribe, and became his son-in-law. On İbrâhim Bey's death he settled in Amasya, attached himself to Mumcuzâde Seyyid Ahmed Paşa, became his steward (kethüda), and during the paşa's governorship of Amasya, in 1098 (1687), served as mütesellim, the deputy who actually ran the city. After Seyyid Paşa's execution in 1101 he spent some time in exile; from 1110 he was a member of the council of notables, and he died around 1117 (1705). The descendants of his sons es-Seyyid İbrâhim Paşa and Sarı Mustafa Bey were known in the city as the "Kürd Bekiroğulları".

The family's most brilliant name is İbrâhim Paşa, whom Hüsâmeddîn calls "of Olus village". Brought up among the fief-holders of Amasya, İbrâhim gained influence in the city by marrying Hanife Hanım, daughter of the notable Murâd Beyzâde el-Hâc Mustafa Ağa; he became alaybeyi (commander of the provincial cavalry) of Amasya in 1119 (1707) and was appointed to the post a second time in 1126. He took part in the Morea campaign as Türkmen ağası, and in reward for his success was made warden of one of the Morean fortresses and, in 1129, governor of Sivas with the rank of beylerbeyi of Rumelia. Over the next twenty years he governed provinces as far apart as Jeddah and Habesh, Tripoli in Syria, Maraş, Aleppo, Shahrizor, Diyarbekir, Konya, Adana, Sidon, Van and Trabzon, and rose to the rank of vizier. Hüsâmeddîn reports from the inventory of his estate that he died at Kefe (Caffa) early in 1151 (1738), and describes him as "a brave, zealous and capable vizier". İbrâhim Paşa's grandson İbrâhim Bey served as steward to Sâdık Mehmed Paşa of Merzifon during the latter's vizierate; after the paşa's dismissal and execution he was exiled to Amasya, where he died in 1198 (1784). In the section on Geldiklan, Hüsâmeddîn also names İbrâhim Paşa separately among the notable men produced by the village of Olus.

The Roman Milestone in the Village

On 6 July 1986 David French recorded a Roman milestone standing in front of the mosque in the village, then called Toklucak. The stone is a reused column of hard grey limestone, broken at top and bottom; its surviving height is 0.95 metres and its diameter 0.49 metres. Two separate inscriptions, partly overlapping, can be read on its surface. The first dates from the end of AD 282 or the beginning of 283 and was set up in the name of the emperor Carus and his sons Carinus and Numerianus, who bore the title of Caesar, under Claudius Longinus, governor of the province of Pontus. The second belongs to about fifty years later, AD 333-335; it names Constantine the Great and his three sons as Caesars and dates the stone to the time of Flavius Iulius Leontius, governor of the province of Helenopontus. French publishes the stone among the records of the road running through Satala and Neocaesarea to Amaseia and on towards Ancyra, and gives Amaseia, that is Amasya, as its starting point. The stone was not found in its original position, but it is one of the witnesses showing that the Roman road leading west from Amasya passed through this plain.

Oluz Höyük

The mound that bears the village's name rises at kilometre 27 of the Amasya-Çorum highway, on land belonging to the Gökhöyük state farm, about three kilometres south of the road. The excavation reports place it within the Geldingen Plain, through whose southern part flows the Çekerek, one of the main tributaries of the Yeşilırmak; the Çekerek was called Zuliya in Hittite texts and Scylax in antiquity. The distance between the mound and the village is given differently in the sources. Şevket Dönmez's articles on his surveys of 1997-1999 place the mound "1.5 km west of Oluz village", whereas the excavation report of 2009 locates it "about 5 km east of Toklucak (formerly Oluz) village". The two descriptions do not even agree on direction, and these publications do not allow one to decide which is correct. The mound itself has more than one name: the report also calls it Yassı Höyük and Tepetarla Höyüğü. Local people call much of the surrounding land the German Farm; H. H. von der Osten, during his journey of 1926-1927, mentioned the farm of a German family that had been living on this plain for thirty-three years, and wrote that he had visited a fairly large mound at the edge of the plain. In Dönmez's view this mound is very probably Oluz Höyük.

At the time of the survey the mound, about 15 metres high and measuring 300 by 250 metres, was presented as one of the largest mounds of the Central Black Sea region. In the pottery he collected from the surface Dönmez saw a sequence running from the Early Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period, and identified in addition traces of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages and of the Middle and Late Iron Ages. Arguing that the Hittites used the inland part of the Central Black Sea region as a buffer zone against the Kaska, the same scholar counts Oluz Höyük, together with Doğantepe, among the important settlements of that belt.

The First Excavations

Systematic excavation began on behalf of Istanbul University between 6 August and 5 September 2007, by decision of the Council of Ministers and with the permission of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. In the first season a topographical map of the mound was drawn with the technical help of the State Hydraulic Works (DSİ), the ground beneath an area of two thousand square metres in the central part was surveyed with geoelectric, geomagnetic and ground-penetrating radar methods, and work then proceeded in two trenches, one at the highest point and the other stepped down the eastern slope. The excavators set out four aims: to build a sound chronology for the region, and to study the second-millennium BC cultures of Amasya, the north-eastward spread of Phrygian culture, and Hellenistic settlement around Amasya, the centre of the Kingdom of Pontus, where no site of that period had yet been excavated. Six architectural levels were identified in the first season.

The uppermost level, "0", was recognised from fragments of glazed pottery dated to the tenth to fourteenth centuries; the excavators thought it represented a small medieval farmstead of one or two dwellings. The level immediately below was dated, on the evidence of a coin of Apameia, to the end of the second or the beginning of the first century BC. The surface soil yielded a Late Iron Age bull rhyton, and the disturbed fill of the second level a painted vessel in the shape of a woman's breast and the fragment of a large krater decorated with stags' heads facing one another. The find on which the report dwells most, however, is a button-shaped stone seal with Hittite cultural features from the fill of the sixth level; in the authors' view this seal, together with the Hittite pottery found on the surface, pointed to an important Hittite settlement on the mound. In the same season twelve skeletons were found in the trenches; some of the adults had been laid with the head to the west and the face to the south, and from this posture the authors assigned the graves to the Islamic period.

The Persian Road, Kubaba and the Fire Pit

The following seasons brought the mound's real character into focus. According to the report by Dönmez and Aslıhan Yurtsever-Beyazıt on the seventh year of excavation, a stone-paved road with an open water channel running from south to north was uncovered in 2009; the excavators named it the "Persian Road". In 2011 and 2012 a stone-paved entrance with stone bases was found where the road ends, a building of many rooms to its east, and a second entrance further north. In the fourth level, dated to about 600-550 BC, the lower half of a statuette of Kubaba (Matar Kubileya), shown standing, was found inside a rectangular building measuring 4.50 by 3.75 metres with thick stone walls. Because of its plan, unsuited to a dwelling, and the statuette inside it, the building was interpreted as a temple; near the temple a bronze fibula came out of a storage jar whose mouth had been closed with a flat stone.

The most striking find of the seventh season, which lasted fifty-three days between 15 July and 5 September 2013, is a round fire pit built of rubble and brick, 1.15 metres in diameter and 0.70 metres deep, uncovered on the southern extension of the Persian Road. Its depth and its position directly on the road suggested that it was not a hearth; the excavators dated it to the last quarter of the fifth century BC and interpreted it as a ritual place connected with a fire cult. The same paper also treats a bronze ladle with a duck-head handle, found in 2011 in one of the pits in which disused sacred objects had been buried, and the skulls of a donkey and of young pigs found in sacrificial pits, as traces of rituals belonging to the early phase of the Zoroastrian faith. According to the authors, Oluz Höyük has made it possible for the first time in Anatolia to study the urban fabric and architecture of an Achaemenid settlement as a whole. This interpretation is the excavation team's own; the report itself acknowledges that little is known about the institutional structure of this faith in the Median and Achaemenid periods.

At the end of seven years' work the excavators proposed a sequence of nine architectural levels. At the top are medieval traces of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. The first level belongs to the Hellenistic period (200-47 BC) and has yielded coins of the time of Mithradates VI, silver coins of the Roman Republic and an iron helmet. Levels 2A and 2B are dated between 425 and 200 BC, to the Achaemenid phase of the Late Iron Age; here Achaemenid bowls, a Phoenician-type glass bead, a gold stater of the time of Alexander the Great and a silver coin of the time of Philip III were found. The third and fourth levels are the Phrygian and Persian layers of 600-425 BC, and the fifth and sixth go down into the Middle Iron Age. The seventh and eighth levels belong to the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries BC, the great-kingdom period of the Hittites, and have yielded a Hittite seal and a sickle. At the bottom, the ninth level, known from a stone mould for casting metal, reaches back to the third millennium BC, the Early Bronze Age.

The Village and the Excavation

Although the mound carries the village's name, the excavation team's everyday ties have been mainly with neighbouring Gözlek; the village headman's office thanked in the reports for its help is also Gözlek's. Oluz itself is mentioned in the reports only when the location of the mound is described. The excavators interpret the small settlement of the medieval layer not as linked to the present village but as a farmstead dependent on Doğantepe to the north. When present-day Oluz was founded, and whether there is any continuity between it and the last settlement on the mound, cannot be traced in the documents; what is known is that the village was registered under the same name by 1530 at the latest.

The Village Today and Its Population

The village record of 2012 shows the population of Oluz, then called Toklucak, in the last three general censuses as 1,105 (1985), 1,124 (1990) and 891 (2000). According to the same record the village had a health centre and a health post building, but neither was in service; the primary school was open, and pupils were also being bussed to school. A drinking-water network, a sewerage system and a postal agency are recorded; the only photograph attached to the record shows the village mosque. That the milestone stood in front of the mosque in 1986 we know from French's note. The address-based records begin in 2007 with 616 people; the figure fell to 534 by 2015, then rose again, reaching 603 in 2023. In 2025, 571 people were registered in the village, 305 men and 266 women. These figures show that nearly half of a population of about 1,100 in 1990 left the village over thirty-five years, but that the decline has largely halted in the last twenty years.

Chronology

937 (1530): The village of Olus is entered in the register among the villages of the nahiye of Geldiklan-âbâd.

1098 (1687): Ebûbekir Ağa of the Pehlivanlı tribe of Olus becomes mütesellim of Amasya.

1119 (1707): Ebûbekir Ağa's son İbrâhim Paşa becomes alaybeyi of Amasya; in 1129 he is appointed governor of Sivas.

1892: Oluz is counted among the nahiyes of the kaza of Amasya.

1926-1927: H. H. von der Osten visits the large mound on the plain.

1986: David French records the milestone in the village under the name Toklucak.

1997-1999: Şevket Dönmez identifies Oluz Höyük during his surveys.

2007: Systematic excavation begins at Oluz Höyük.

2009: The stone-paved road named the Persian Road is uncovered.

2012: The village is still recorded under the name Toklucak.

2013: In the seventh excavation season a pit associated with a fire cult is found.

Bibliography

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Academic studies

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