Saraycık is one of the villages of the central district of Amasya, 34 kilometres from the provincial centre, and has lost three-quarters of its population in the last forty years, falling to 130 people. The Saraycık Neighbourhood attached to the town of Ziyaret is a separate settlement; in Bekir Başalan's lists, too, Saraycık the village and the Saraycık converted into a neighbourhood are counted separately. The fact that the name is very common in and around the province makes it almost impossible to trace the village's past in old records.

The Saraycıks in the Records

The index of the accounting register of 1530 contains three separate villages called Saraycık in the sanjak of Amasya: one in the nahiye (sub-district) of Argoma (register p. 381), one in Geldiklan-âbâd (p. 360) and one in the nahiye of Yavaş (p. 375). The same register also records a "Saraycık Türkleri" (Turks of Saraycık) community attached to the kaza of Kedegara. Murat Alandağlı's study of the hurufat (appointment) records and survey registers adds still more: the malikâne (revenue estate) of the Saraycık in Argoma belonged to the endowment of Kamereddin, the Fahreddin dervish lodge stood in a Saraycık in the nahiye of Gelingiras, part of the malikâne of the Saraycık in Yavaş was assigned to the endowment of Ali Çelebi son of Ebulkasım, and half the malikâne of the Saraycık in the kaza of Gedegra was income of the tomb of Oruç Bey. The Saraycık nahiye mentioned by Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar, for its part, lies in the kaza of Hacıköyü, present-day Gümüşhacıköy.

No clue has been found showing which of these records belongs to the present village in the central district. Because the boundaries of the nahiyes cannot be laid with certainty over today's village lands, no identification has been made, and the records are mentioned here only to show how widespread the name is. The Ezinepazar temettuat (income survey) registers of 1845 do not record a village of this name either. Saraycık does not appear in Başalan's table of name changes; the village has no other known name.

Village Services and Population

The village list of 2012 shows that Saraycık was poorly provided with services: the village had no school, no health post and no postal agency, and no school transport was provided either; there was a drinking-water network but no sewerage. The same record gives the village's population as 499 in 1985, 407 in 1990 and 274 in 2000. In the address-based records the series fluctuates: the population, 202 in 2007, rose to 258 the following year and to 235 in 2013, then fell again. In 2025, 66 men and 64 women, 130 people in all, were registered in the village. No record has been found that explains these short-term jumps; over the long term the trend is clearly downward.

Bibliography

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