Among the documents that show a city's former face most directly, old photographs come first. Written sources describe a building and give its dimensions and date; a photograph records, with complete candour, which street, which river and which slope that building stood on. Photography, which spread through the Ottoman lands from the second half of the nineteenth century, reached Amasya too, and it recorded the mansions lined up along both banks of the Yeşilırmak, the rock tombs on the slope of Mount Harşena, the bridges across the river and the city's skyline with its minarets. Some of these frames were taken by local practitioners working in or near the city, others by travellers and archaeologists touring Pontus. The images we have today are among the most reliable foundations on which Amasya's appearance of a century and a half ago can be reconstructed.

The Arrival of Photography in the Ottoman World

The invention of photography coincided, in the Ottoman state, with the years in which the Tanzimat Edict was proclaimed. The new discovery was announced to the Ottoman public in issue 186 of the Takvim-i Vekayi, dated 28 October 1839. From the early 1840s onward Western travellers, scientists and Orientalists began touring Anatolia, Istanbul and Izmir above all, photographing dress, street life, architecture and archaeological sites. The first commercial studio in Ottoman lands was opened in Pera in 1850 by Vassilaki Kargopoulo, a photographer of Greek origin. Within twenty years Pera had become a centre of photography where names such as the Abdullah Frères and Sébah worked.

Because the Muslim population kept its distance from making images, the first studios were founded mostly by Armenian and Greek photographers. Armenian families sent their children to Istanbul as apprentices to photographers, and in this way the profession soon spread into the interior of Anatolia. The early techniques, which demanded a knowledge of chemistry, offered a ready foundation to Armenian families with a tradition of pharmacy, goldsmithing and chemistry; those trades already possessed the materials and the knowledge needed for developing and printing. The fact that the sultans themselves were photographed eased the acceptance of the profession. The photographing of many corners of the empire on the orders of Abdülhamid II led to the formation of the Yıldız Albums collection, which contains more than thirty-five thousand photographs. The first Ottoman book on photography, the Risale-i Fotografya, was printed in 1866 by Sarkis Torosyan, in Turkish but in Armenian script.

Photographers Working in and around Amasya

Provincial photography was an extension of this central development. Among the Armenian photographers who spread across Anatolia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are names such as Kaspar Tütüncüyan in Adana, the Mugamyan Brothers in Ankara and Salim Hatkayan in Antep. The same lists include three names for Amasya: Ghazaros Kayıyan, Mıgırdiç Najyan and Tornig Terzibaşyan. Where these photographers' studios stood, in which years they worked and how many negatives they left behind cannot be determined from published sources. That their names are known suggests that photography in Amasya was not confined to visiting travellers, and that settled practitioners also carried on the trade in the city.

Recent research on Ottoman photography has concentrated mostly on studios in large cities such as Istanbul, Izmir and Beirut. The lives and images of photographers who worked on the periphery of the empire, in sanjak and district centres, have remained largely unknown. The gap in Amasya's photographic past is part of this general picture. A large share of the old photographs taken in the city consists of frames whose photographer is unknown and whose date can be fixed only approximately. For this reason the best-documented photographic family of the sanjak is one that worked in Merzifon, a district attached to the city.

The Dildilian Family and the Merzifon Studio

The Dildilian family came from Sivas; for generations they had earned their living as blacksmiths, confectioners and shoemakers. The family's connection with photography began in 1888, when Tsolag Dildilian decided to make it his profession. His father Krikor at first objected, then bought his son a large-format camera. Since the move from amateur to professional required darkroom equipment and an experienced hand, Krikor invited Mikael Natourian, a well-known Armenian photographer in Istanbul, to Sivas for a fee he raised by mortgaging the family home. Thus the Natourian-Dildilian studio was founded; its first clients were the notables of Sivas. As the studio's reputation spread to the neighbouring provinces, the partners moved to Merzifon in 1890. Natourian died shortly after the move, and the whole burden of the business fell to Tsolag.

The main reason work was plentiful in Merzifon was Anatolia College, founded by American Protestant missionaries. The college complex also included a seminary, an orphanage and a hospital. Graduation ceremonies, class photographs, yearbooks and promotional publications constantly called for images. The collaboration grew so close that in 1894 Tsolag was hired as the college's official photographer, a post the family held for more than thirty years. As business grew, his cousin Sumpad opened a separate studio in Samsun. Tsolag also had a house in the traditional style built near the college. His brother Aram, born in Sivas, later joined the business, and the family's photography became the shared work of the two brothers.

The family's photographs are not confined to Merzifon. The frames that Tsolag and Aram took over the years in Sivas, Merzifon, Samsun, Konya and Amasya amount to more than six hundred photographs in the family collection. In August 1915, in the days when the Armenians of Merzifon were being deported, the family was able to remain after converting before the mufti on the warning of a high-ranking Ottoman officer; in these years the brothers were also obliged to photograph for the official authorities and the army. With the support of Near East Relief, an American aid organisation, they also opened an orphanage. Having taken refuge in Samsun after further violence in Merzifon, the family learned in November 1922 that a ship was coming to carry refugees and orphans, set out within twenty-four hours, and, giving up personal belongings, took with them as many glass negatives as they could carry. Reaching Athens by way of Odessa and Istanbul, the family later dispersed to Greece, France and America.

The family's photographs, together with the memoirs of Tsolag, Aram and their niece Maritsa Médaksian, have been brought together by Tsolag's grandson Armen T. Marsoobian. An exhibition drawn from this material opened at Depo in Istanbul in April-June 2013 and between 2013 and 2015 travelled to Istanbul, Merzifon, Diyarbakır and Ankara. The Dildilian archive holds a special place among the visual collections that show Ottoman provincial life. No detailed inventory has been published of which buildings and which people the family's Amasya frames show; it is clear, however, that any study of Amasya photographs ought to turn to this collection.

Portraits, Postcards and Images for Sale

Two kinds of photograph produced by provincial studios are of separate value to researchers today. The first is the portrait taken at the customer's own request; that the Dildilians' first clients in Sivas were wealthy notables is a reminder that the portrait was initially seen as a mark of standing. The second is the image showing the city's well-known buildings, bridges and views, sold to visitors and to local people. The place name and studio name written on the back or beneath the photograph became a common practice along with the tradition of postcards and photo cards. Max Fruchtermann, who opened a shop in Galata in 1895 and began publishing postcards, acted as editor for nearly fifty photographers in Anatolia, and through these series the images of Ottoman cities were spread around the world. This circulation must have played a part in making the emblems of a city with as strong a landscape as Amasya, its rock tombs and riverside houses, quickly recognisable.

Amasya through the Lenses of Travellers and Scholars

A large part of the early images of Amasya appears in the publications of Western travellers and researchers who toured the Pontus region for its ancient remains. Among the oldest is the engraving of Amasya in the first volume of the travel account by the American missionary Henry J. Van Lennep, printed in London in 1870; though not a photograph, it shows how the city was presented to Western readers in those years. Among the glass negatives from the journey that the British archaeologist David George Hogarth and John Arthur Ruskin Munro made in Anatolia in 1891 is an image of Amasya catalogued as "Asia Minor: Amasia"; this journey is described in Hogarth's book A Wandering Scholar in the Levant, published in 1896. A copy of the negative is now in the archive of the British School at Athens.

Around the turn of the century images of Amasya were published one after another. An image showing the city and the Yeşilırmak running through it appears in Lord Warkworth's notes on Asiatic Turkey, printed in 1898, and a panorama of the town in Ferdinand Brockes's 1900 book on Asia Minor. There are photographs of Amasya as well in John G. C. Anderson's report on his journey of exploration in Pontus, published in Brussels in 1903, and in the second volume of the Studia Pontica series by the brothers Franz and Eugène Cumont, dated 1906; the Cumonts' frame views the town from a high point in the east. W. J. Childs's book on his journey on foot, printed in 1917, includes the entry to the town, its appearance on the bank of the Yeşilırmak and street scenes. A negative from Frederick William Hasluck's journey in Pontus in 1908, recorded in the British School's register as "Amasia: Seljuk facade in the town", shows a Seljuk façade in the city; the record does not state which building the façade belongs to.

The value of the images in these books lies in their known dates. Unlike postcards whose photographer and year are unknown, the frames in travel books, having been taken no later than the year the book was printed, give a firm measure of the riverside, the bridges and the citadel at a particular date. Comparing images taken from the same spot in different years could help establish when buildings changed; no such systematic comparison has yet been published for Amasya.

In the early years of the Republic this tradition turned into systematic documentation directed at architectural history. The French architect and art historian Albert Gabriel studied and photographed the Turkish-period buildings of Amasya in the 1930s. The results of this work were published in the second volume of Monuments turcs d'Anatolie, which also covers Amasya. Of the negatives Gabriel took for this volume, those showing the Halifet Gazi Tomb, the Mehmed Pasha Mosque and its interior, the Gök Medrese, and the portal and details of the Darüşşifa are preserved in the Boğaziçi University Archives and Documentation Centre as part of the Aziz Ogan collection; the same collection also holds a separate set titled "27 photographs from Amasya".

Amasya in the Provincial Yearbooks and the Archives

Amasya was a sanjak attached to the Province of Sivas, created in 1863 under the Tanzimat provincial system. At the end of the nineteenth century the province consisted of the sanjaks of Sivas, Amasya, Tokat and Şarkî Karahisar. The provincial salnames, the official yearbooks, were voluminous publications recording the educational institutions, officials and population figures of this administrative structure. In time, photographs of buildings began to appear in these yearbooks as well. The Amasya Civil Idadi School is one of the clearest examples of this practice.

The Amasya Idadi, built in the Abdülhamid period, is one of the buildings no longer standing. The costs, plans and correspondence of the building are found in documents dated 1312 (1894) in the records of the Ministry of Education. The photograph showing the building's main façade was printed in the Sivas Provincial Yearbook of 1312. The source, photographer and date of a second photograph showing the north-east façade could not be determined with certainty. Without these two frames, the appearance of one of the most important school buildings erected in Amasya during the period of modernisation would be unknown. According to the records, the school began teaching in 1892, using a rüşdiye building temporarily until its own building was completed.

Studies of the province's educational institutions also show the idadi's place in urban life. At the end of the century there were only three idadis in the Province of Sivas, located in the centres of Sivas, Amasya and Tokat. The number of pupils at the Amasya Idadi was recorded as 91 in 1898, 72 in 1899, 111 in 1900, 121 in 1901 and 97 in 1903. Subjects such as geometry, bookkeeping, natural science and hygiene were taught at the school, and in 1903 nine of its pupils were non-Muslims. Read together with these figures, the yearbook photograph does not remain simply an image of a building; it becomes visual evidence of the state's investment in education in the provinces. That such photographs were given space in the yearbooks suggests that the school was counted among the visible achievements of the province.

The Sanjak's Educational Institutions and Photography

The yearbooks record not only the centre of the Sanjak of Amasya but also its districts. The number of primary and secondary schools is given one by one for the districts attached to the sanjak: Merzifon, Köprü, Gümüşhacıköy, Mecidözü, Ladik and Havza. Merzifon also had foreign schools: the Protestant American co-educational school and the Jesuit French boys' and girls' schools. These foreign institutions may have formed an indirect channel for the entry of the camera and photographic materials into the provinces. That the Dildilian studio survived thanks to Anatolia College's constant need for images, and that Tsolag became the college's official photographer in 1894, strengthens this possibility; the yearbooks and promotional publications of the American school appear to have been one of the most regular sources of demand in the provinces for the sanjak's encounter with photography.

In the centre of Amasya itself there were, besides the idadi, rüşdiyes, madrasas and libraries. In the yearbooks the libraries are listed together with the names of their founders. Endowed libraries such as those of Sultan Bayezid and Pervane Bey appear in these lists. Although no interior photograph of any of these institutions appears in the yearbooks, photographs taken later have preserved the exterior appearance of the library and madrasa buildings.

The Yıldız Albums and the 2026 Exhibition

The Yıldız Albums, which came into being as Abdülhamid II had many corners of the empire photographed, are one of the broadest visual records of the Ottoman lands, with more than thirty-five thousand photographs. Amasya's place in this collection had long not been treated separately. At the opening of the International Amasya Culture and Art Symposium, held on 20-21 May 2026 in the Şehzade Conference Hall with the Amasya Municipality as host, an exhibition titled "Amasya Fotoğrafları Sergisi (19. Yüzyıl Yıldız Fotoğraf Albümlerinden)" was opened. In the second session of the symposium's first day, Halime Boz of Marmara University presented a paper titled "Yıldız Fotoğraf Koleksiyonundaki Amasya".

The full list of the frames exhibited and the text of the paper have not yet been published. If the idadi photograph printed in the yearbook is also regarded as a product of the Abdülhamid period's approach to documenting buildings, it might be expected that the Amasya frames in the Yıldız collection likewise give weight to the new public buildings of the period; this is an inference that cannot be verified until the exhibition catalogue or the paper is published.

The Photogenic Fabric of the City

With its natural and built environment, Amasya was a well-suited city for photographers. The Yeşilırmak divides the city in two; the houses lined up on both banks look onto the water, Mount Harşena rises behind, and on the mountain's slope the rock-cut tombs of the kings of Pontus are visible. River, bridge, house, minaret and rock could all be found in a single frame. The riverside houses were built with the hımış and bağdadi techniques, that is, a timber frame filled with mudbrick and finished with lath and plaster. The bay windows and oriels on the upper floors of these attached houses project towards the river. Given that most of the houses were built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the early photographs also recorded the riverside in the period when it was being built.

Among the subjects most often shown in old photographs of Amasya are the Darüşşifa, the Kunç Bridge, the Bayezid II Mosque and its fountain, the Pir Mehmet Çelebi Mosque, the Taşhan, the Burmalı Minare Mosque, the Alçak Bridge and the riverside houses, the Torumtay and Cumudar tombs, the Hatuniye Mosque, the Hazeranlar Mansion, the rock tombs, the Hükümet Bridge, the Gümüşlü Mosque, the Çilehane Mosque, the Halifet Gazi Tomb and the Hamdullah Dede Tomb. A digital collection that brings these images together holds more than sixty-seven records under the heading of Amasya alone. Many of the images are general panoramas of the city; the photographer preferred to climb above the citadel or the slope towards Saraydüzü to take in the whole city. That the panoramas in the travel books were also taken from the same high viewpoints suggests that the view of the city from this angle had become a kind of convention.

These frames convey to us buildings that have since disappeared or changed, the old layout of the bazaar and the details of daily life. The former state of a bridge, the later lost fabric of a neighbourhood, the arrangement of the buildings around a mosque can be seen only in photographs. Determining which bridge or which neighbourhood a frame of unknown photographer and date shows, however, is often harder than it seems; the presence of several similar bridges on the same river makes identification reliable only when a comparison is made with the buildings in the background.

Turning a Photograph into a Model: Amasya in 1914

The most concrete example of an old photograph's contribution to how the city is perceived today is the Miniature Amasya Museum. Housed in the imaret building of the Bayezid II Complex, the museum opened to visitors on 14 May 2010. The model was prepared on the basis of a photograph of Amasya dated 1914 and completed in two years. In an area of about eighty square metres there are some 1,860 buildings at a scale of 1/150 and about a thousand figures. Buildings such as the Büyükağa Madrasa, the Saraydüzü Barracks, the Bayezid II Complex and the Royal Rock Tombs appear in this model faithfully. The lighting is set to show the night view for three minutes and the daytime view for nine.

This work shows that, besides being a document to be archived, a photograph can also be material for reconstruction. From a single frame the layout of thousands of buildings, their roof coverings and the street pattern could be read and turned into a three-dimensional model. The density of detail in a photograph tells the researcher or the model maker which side of a building faced the river and where a street ended.

The Photograph as Document: From a Court Deed to Mosque Decoration

That photography in Amasya was used not only for views and portraits but also as a means of copying documents is shown by a small footnote in Hüseyin Hüsameddin's Amasya Tarihi. Mentioning a court deed (hüccet) dated 12 Cemaziyelevvel 1143 [23 November 1730], which shows that Köprülüzade Vizier Fazıl Abdullah Pasha gave his grandfather's mansion and large estate in Köprü, the home town of his father and grandfather, to his younger son Ammâr Bey, Hüsameddin writes in the footnote: "Keşşafoğlu Hacı Said Bey, one of the notables of Köprü, had sent me a copy of this court deed taken by photograph. As it was rather long, it could not be written out in full." That a provincial historian at the beginning of the twentieth century could examine the photograph of a document without seeing the original shows that the notables of district centres, too, had access to photography. Where the original document is today is unknown; the only trace left to us is the information the historian gave on the basis of this photograph.

One of the Amasya examples that best shows the weight of photography in architectural-history research is the Gümüşlü Mosque. The city's earliest dated Ottoman building, the mosque has moved away from its original form because of major repairs. Fazilet Koçyiğit's study, published in 2022, rests on surveyed drawings dated 1979 and old photographs obtained from the Samsun Regional Directorate of Foundations, and on frames in the archive of a local studio, Foto Apaydın. According to these images, the tabhane rooms on the east and west sides of the mosque were covered by a sloping roof lower than the prayer hall and gave the façade a two-storeyed movement; when these façades were rebuilt in the 1986 repairs, that movement disappeared. The old photographs also reveal that the muezzin's gallery just west of the portal is used today as a window. Working from these data, Koçyiğit argues that the mosque was originally a building with tabhane rooms, a zaviye-type mosque.

The situation is similar for the mosque's decoration. The present ornament in the prayer hall was made during the 1960 repairs; the decorative programme before those repairs is known only from the photographs in the Foto Apaydın archive. These frames show that the wall surfaces were adorned with Baroque-influenced motifs, the spaces between the windows with large medallions decorated with flowers and curling branches, and that landscape scenes in medallions were painted between the windows of the drum; none of these landscapes has survived. Following Rüçhan Arık's view, Koçyiğit suggests that these paintings may have been made in the 1870s by the folk artist Zileli Emin Usta. The same photographs also preserve the appearance of the wooden houses and the one- and two-storey rows of shops around the mosque before they were demolished in 1986 to connect a ring road.

A similar use can be seen in other buildings. Photographs from the later periods of the Taşhan show that the masjid and the fountain in the courtyard were no longer there; these frames help narrow down when parts mentioned in the written sources disappeared. The Great Mosque of Merzifon, one of the sanjak's former districts, which was destroyed in the great fire at the beginning of the twentieth century, was rebuilt by the General Directorate of Foundations with the help of old photographs and opened for worship on 12 October 2018. In the rebuilding of a mosque whose structure had been entirely lost, photography was the principal basis.

The Republican Period: Studios and Family Albums

In the first half of the twentieth century photography became a common profession in the city. Studio and family portraits, official identity photographs, souvenir pictures of military service, and group photographs of schools and institutions entered daily life as ordinary needs. Seen broadly, the closing one by one of non-Muslim studios in the late Ottoman period resulted in their places being taken by Muslim photographers. There is no detailed publication on how this change in Anatolia was reflected in Amasya, but most of the Republican-period images in the city's archives and family albums are the work of this new generation in the profession.

The names of some of this generation's studios can be traced from the credit notes in books where old photographs of Amasya are published today. That the research on the Gümüşlü Mosque knows the pre-1960 decoration from frames in the Foto Apaydın archive is one example. The old photographs used in the edition of Osman Fevzi Olcay's memoirs published by the Amasya Municipality in 2009 were likewise compiled from the archive of Stüdyo Özden and the private archives of Hüseyin Menç, Hasan Varış and Turan Böcekçi. The editors of this work, which Olcay wrote in 1967 and which describes sixty-five years of Amasya life from the beginning of the twentieth century, call it "a photograph of Amasya taken with the pen half a century ago". These names show that the visual memory of Amasya's recent past is preserved to a large extent in the archives of local studios and in the private collections of people interested in the city's history.

In a sense these images complement official accounts of history. The portraits taken by those going off to military service, finishing school or leaving to work far from home reflect the clothing, hairstyles and social relations of the period. Group photographs of students, sports teams and institutional staff make it possible to identify, by name, the people who hold a place in the city's institutional memory. The historical value of a photograph often lies in a name and a date written on its back; the note on the back of a frame in a family album can sometimes be more valuable than a museum record.

Yet part of the photographic archives has been lost over time. Studios that deliberately destroyed their negatives because of the privacy of women's portraits, glass negatives lost in fires or moves, and the discarding of archives that took up space are among the general losses of the Ottoman photographic heritage. That the Dildilian negatives survived only because the family took them along in 1922 at the expense of their personal belongings also explains why so many provincial studio archives vanished without trace. No study documenting the fate of the studio archives in Amasya is known; for this reason the postcards and album pages that come from the city preserve a small but valuable part of the lost negatives.

The Use of Visual Documents

Old photographs of Amasya are today scattered across museums, institutional archives, digital collections and family albums. They are used as the basis for decisions on faithfulness to the original in the restoration of buildings. During the listing and repair of the riverside houses, old images are documents consulted to check the arrangement of façades and roof coverings. For researchers of the city's history these frames are of great value as well: questions such as which building was demolished on what date, in which years a bridge was renewed, or the boundaries of a neighbourhood are often answered in the background of a photograph.

For photographs to be used with confidence, their date and place information must be verified. Frames whose photographer and year are unknown are dated by comparison with details of the buildings, clothing and written records. Images whose dates are known, such as yearbook photographs, frames printed in travel books and the negatives Gabriel took in the 1930s, serve as reference points in this dating work. Studying the frames held in archives abroad, for example the glass negatives of the British School at Athens or the Dildilian family's collection, together with the collections in Amasya appears to be the most fruitful way of completing the city's visual history.

Chronology

1730: The court deed by which Fazıl Abdullah Pasha gave his mansion in Köprü to his son Ammâr Bey was drawn up (12 Cemaziyelevvel 1143); a copy of the document taken by photograph was later sent to Hüsameddin.

1839: The invention of photography was announced to the Ottoman public in issue 186 of the Takvim-i Vekayi, dated 28 October.

1850: Vassilaki Kargopoulo opened the first photography studio in Ottoman lands in Pera.

1863: Under the Tanzimat provincial system Sivas became a province; Amasya remained one of its sanjaks.

1866: Sarkis Torosyan's book Risale-i Fotografya was printed.

1870: Henry J. Van Lennep's travel account, containing an engraving of Amasya, was published in London.

1888: Tsolag Dildilian took up photography in Sivas; the Natourian-Dildilian studio was founded.

1890: The studio moved to Merzifon.

1891: An image of Amasya was recorded during the Anatolian journey of D. G. Hogarth and J. A. R. Munro.

1892: The Amasya Idadi began teaching in a temporary rüşdiye building before its own building was completed (according to the records).

1894: Tsolag Dildilian became the official photographer of Anatolia College in Merzifon.

1894-1895 (AH 1312): The costs and plans of the Amasya Civil Idadi building were entered in Ministry of Education documents; the photograph of the main façade was published in the Sivas Provincial Yearbook.

1895: Max Fruchtermann began publishing postcards in Galata.

1898-1906: Images of Amasya were published in the books of Lord Warkworth (1898), Ferdinand Brockes (1900), J. G. C. Anderson (1903) and the Cumont brothers (1906).

1908: A Seljuk façade in Amasya was photographed during F. W. Hasluck's journey in Pontus.

1914: The photograph of the city on which the Miniature Amasya Museum is based was taken.

1922: The Dildilian family left Samsun, taking part of their glass negatives with them.

1930s: Albert Gabriel photographed the buildings of Amasya for the second volume of Monuments turcs d'Anatolie.

1960: The present decoration of the Gümüşlü Mosque was made; the earlier decorative programme is known only from old photographs.

1986: The wooden houses and shops around the Gümüşlü Mosque were demolished; their appearance is preserved in old photographs.

2010: The Miniature Amasya Museum opened to visitors on 14 May.

2013: An exhibition of the Dildilian family's photographs opened in Istanbul; until 2015 it travelled to Merzifon, Diyarbakır and Ankara.

2018: The Great Mosque of Merzifon, rebuilt with the help of old photographs, opened for worship on 12 October.

2026: On 20 May, at the International Amasya Culture and Art Symposium, an exhibition of nineteenth-century photographs of Amasya from the Yıldız Albums was opened.

Bibliography

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