Özfındıklı is a small village in the central district of Amasya; the village list of 2012 gives its distance from the provincial centre as 55 kilometres. In 2025 only 71 people were registered in the village. No study written about it, no old register entry and no information on any listed building has been found; the only way to get to know the village is to distinguish it from the other places bearing its name and to read the records of the last forty years.

Three Fındıklıs

In the central district the name "Fındıklı" turns up in three separate places. In Bekir Başalan's list, based on Ministry of the Interior data for 2024, Özfındıklı appears as one of the district's hundred villages. The same article counts another Fındıklı among the villages later converted into neighbourhoods; this place is today Fındıklı Neighbourhood, attached to the city of Amasya. The "Fındıklı Köyü" recorded in the village list of 2012 as eight kilometres from the provincial centre is very probably this settlement before it became a neighbourhood. The third is an old name: according to Başalan's table, the old name of the village of Direkli was "Fındıklı/Göndes". Özfındıklı is the same place as none of these; nor has any record been found showing when and why the prefix "öz" was added to its name.

The most striking clue to the village's past lies in the records themselves. Whereas the village list of 2012 gives the results of the 1985, 1990 and 2000 censuses for most villages of the central district, for Özfındıklı there is only a figure for 2000 (148 people), and the village's record number lies outside the series of the other villages of the district. This suggests that Özfındıklı's registration as a separate village may date from after 1990; but no decision showing when its legal status as a village was established has been found. No village called Fındıklı appears either in the Amasya index of the accounting register of 1530 or in the Ezinepazar temettuat (income survey) registers of 1845.

Village Services and Population

According to the record of 2012 the village had no school, no health post and no postal agency, and no school transport was provided; there was a drinking-water network but no sewerage. The same record gives the population as 119 for 2011 and 100 for 2012. The address-based series begins in 2007 with 136 people, reaches its highest point with 151 in 2008, and then falls almost without pause: 104 in 2014, 79 in 2018 and 71 in 2025. In the latest count 38 men and 33 women were registered in the village. The village has lost half its population in eighteen years.

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Primary sources

Academic studies

Other sources

Online sources