There are three separate Sarayözüs in Amasya Province, and the subject of this page is the smallest of them, the village in the Central District. Sarayözü, where only 61 people lived at the end of 2025, lies south of Amasya in the belt of villages around Ezinepazar. Its namesake in Gümüşhacıköy is mentioned far more often because of the dam that bears the same name; there is also a village of Sarayözü in Hamamözü district. Information belonging to those two villages has not been used here.

Which Sarayözü

The clearest document showing that the Central District village lies in the south is the Ezinepazar district bill submitted to Parliament in 2008. In the list attached to the bill, Sarayözü is written among the villages to be attached to the new district, after Keşlik and before Sarıalan and Sarıkız. In Bekir Başalan's study the village is not among the renamed settlements; that is, the name Sarayözü has not undergone an official change. No study examining the origin of the name has been found. Asena Yalnız, analysing the name of nearby Yeşilöz, gives the word "öz" the meanings of stream, brook and well-watered, fertile ground; the second element of Sarayözü may be the same word, but no such explanation has been offered for this village.

Two Saray-özüs in the Ottoman Records

The index of the 1530 Karaman and Rûm account register lists two villages called "Saray-özü" within the liva of Amasya. One is in the Argoma sub-district (p. 381), the other in the Yavaş sub-district (p. 376). The villages of the Argoma sub-district include the names of Eslemez and Güplüce, which today belong to Gümüşhacıköy; that the village there is the southern Sarayözü of the Central District is a weak possibility. The Saray-özü of the Yavaş sub-district, on the other hand, is written on the same page of the register as Efte, today called Sarımeşe; many villages around Ezinepazar are also recorded in this sub-district. The Central District village therefore most probably corresponds to the Saray-özü of Yavaş, but the match has not been confirmed by any document.

The same duality continues in the endowment records of the sixteenth century. According to Murat Alandağlı's study based on survey and hurufat records, in the 1576 survey part of the freehold share of the village of Sarayözü in the kaza of Yavaş had been assigned, together with those of other villages such as Saru Alan, Saraycık, Kızılca and Kayı, to the endowment of Ali Çelebi, son of Ebulkasım. The Evkâf-ı Rûm register quoted by Alandağlı, by contrast, attaches the freehold share of "the Sarayözü of Argoma" to the lodge of Hoca Ali in Tokat. The second record belongs to the northern village; the first, if the village in Yavaş is accepted as today's Sarayözü, is the village's only known early endowment link.

Present Condition and Population

In the village drinking-water inventory of the 2023 provincial environment report, Sarayözü's network dates from 1985 and is fed from a spring. An average of 2,394 cubic metres of water a year is drawn for the village, and the water is classed as sufficient; the remarks column carries the note "done in 2016". The population the inventory gives for the village is 82.

In the address-based records Sarayözü's population was 99 in 2007. After rising again to 97 in 2014, the figure fell to the seventies over the next ten years and dropped from 73 in 2024 to 61 in 2025. In that last year the village had 29 registered men and 32 women; in eighteen years the population has fallen by about two fifths.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

  • Murat Alandağlı, "Hurufat Kayıtlarında Amasya Zaviyeleri", Turkish Studies, 19(1), 2024, pp. 1-27 (pp. 20-21). https://dx.doi.org/10.7827/TurkishStudies.72905
  • Bekir Başalan, "Amasya İlinde İsimleri Değiştirilen Yerleşim Yeri Adları Üzerine Bir İnceleme", Folklor Akademi Dergisi, 7(3), 2024, pp. 1382-1391 (pp. 1385-1386). https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/4249891
  • Asena Yalnız, "Amasya İli ve İlçelerinin Renk Adlarıyla Oluşan Yer Adlarının Gramatikal ve Bölgesel İncelemesi", Amasya Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi (ASOBİD), 12, 2022, pp. 133-159 (p. 142).

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources