For centuries the social life of Amasya was woven around the bazaar, the mosque courtyards, the bathhouses and the neighbourhood squares. People met while shopping, after prayers, at weddings and at funerals, and news and gossip travelled through these encounters. From the second half of the nineteenth century new places and new habits began to appear alongside this old order. The government house, municipal office and clock tower introduced in the Tanzimat era reshaped the centre of the town; local newspapers appeared with the Constitutional period, and in the years of the National Struggle and the Republic, amateur evening shows, clubs, football teams, People's House halls and the cinema screen became part of everyday life. The coffeehouse and the reading room survived throughout, carrying both the old and the new face of this transformation.

Tracing the marks of this change in Amasya is not easy. Much of what is known about the town's social life lies hidden in scattered newspaper issues, in the eight numbers of the People's House magazine, in the memoirs of local historians and in studies of the surrounding districts. Published sources give no firm dates for questions such as when, and by whom, the cinemas or gazinos were opened; on the other hand, there is fairly detailed documentary information on the history of printing and the press, on the work of the Turkish Hearth and the People's House, on the town's pleasure gardens and on its sports clubs. What follows rests on this documented framework and presents unverified local accounts for what they are.

Traditional Meeting Places

In the Ottoman town the main stage of public life was the bazaar together with the courtyards and surroundings of religious buildings. Architectural historians point out that before the Tanzimat the public spaces of towns were largely confined to these commercial and religious settings. In Amasya, too, the area around the Bayezid Mosque, the bedesten and the bazaar, the hans and the bathhouses fulfilled this role. On the town plans drawn by travellers who visited in the early nineteenth century, the seat of government is shown near the Mosque of Bayezid II. Under the governorship of Ziya Paşa the administrative centre of gravity would shift to the opposite bank of the river, to the Helkıs quarter.

One of the liveliest places of this traditional order was the coffeehouse. The first establishments of the kind appeared in Mecca, Cairo and Damascus in the early sixteenth century, and the first coffeehouses in Istanbul are recorded as having opened at Tahtakale in 1554-1555. For a long time the state regarded these new venues with suspicion and from time to time ordered them closed; yet after every ban the coffeehouses reopened, and by the seventeenth century, in Kâtib Çelebi's words, there was a coffeehouse at almost every street corner. Over time this culture spread from Istanbul to the provinces, down to the small towns and villages. In town quarters and villages the coffeehouse beside the mosque became the main gathering place for men, the setting for conversation and small games. The neighbourhood coffeehouses of Amasya were one link in this broad tradition.

In periods when written culture was confined to a narrow elite, the coffeehouse was one of the chief carriers of oral culture. Religious and epic books were read aloud there, the meddah told his stories, minstrels (âşık) played the saz and competed in verse, and on winter nights the Karagöz shadow-play screen was set up. Because of this educational side, older sources sometimes call the coffeehouse a "school of learning" (mekteb-i irfan). The same place was also where time was passed over backgammon, chess and cards, and it was at times the subject of complaints about gambling. This twofold view of the coffeehouse persisted into the early years of the Republic.

From Coffeehouse to Reading Room

The use of the name kıraathane for coffeehouses that served as reading places dates from after the Tanzimat. The word means "reading house", and in the nineteenth century, in response to criticism that coffeehouses were dens of idleness, it came to be used for establishments that kept newspapers and journals and where conversation took place on a more orderly footing. The first example is usually said to be the Sarafim Kıraathanesi, opened on the Divanyolu in Istanbul in 1857. The appearance of coffeehouses changed in the same period: chairs and tables replaced the traditional raised benches, and tea began to spread alongside coffee. Russian and Balkan refugees who reached Istanbul after the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878 are known to have popularised tea drinking.

There is no documented date for the beginnings of the reading-room culture in Amasya. The arrival in the town of the newspaper, the very reason for the reading room's existence, is, however, quite well established. With the birth of a local press from the Constitutional period onward, the paper read in the coffeehouse became a publication that also discussed the town's own affairs. A newspaper article of the Republican period praising the young men of Merzifon remarks that "the young men of the Union do not sit in coffeehouses", a line that shows clearly how the intellectuals of the day regarded the coffeehouse. It was seen on the one hand as the town's news centre and on the other as a place of idle distraction at odds with the new regime's ideal of the industrious citizen. The reading rooms and libraries of the People's Houses were, in a sense, founded to fill this gap.

Newspapers and the Habit of Reading

The first newspapers printed in Amasya belonged to the town's Armenians. Between 1911 and 1915 the Armenians produced three publications, one of them in Merzifon. In 1911 the weekly paper Abaraj and the fortnightly journal Amassia began to appear. Amassia, parts of which were printed in Turkish in Armenian script, was produced at the press in the Armenian church, and its editor Minas İpekciyan lost his life in 1915. These publications came to an end when the Armenians were sent away from Amasya in 1915. Research by Mustafa Arıkan, based on the Ottoman archives and newspaper collections, has shown that the first Turkish-language newspapers published in Amasya had also begun to appear by 1911 at the latest.

One of these early Turkish papers, Müdde-i Umûmî, belonged to Şükrü Efendi of Kars. Because of his quarrels in Havza, Şükrü Efendi had been exiled for a time to Isparta and then obliged to reside in Amasya. Licensed on 19 April 1909, the paper's first issue came out in Istanbul on 24 May 1909; its 92nd issue, dated 15 June 1912, was by then published in Amasya, from its office in Selağzı. The paper took a close interest in local matters: it followed the case of an examining magistrate investigated for bribery, called on the municipality to deal with the unlit, muddy streets, and wrote about the troubles of the refugees and the campaign against locusts. A report in the same issue speaks approvingly of a play called "The End of Yıldız", staged by a group of young men in aid of the aviation fund. This small note is one of the earliest known traces of plays performed on stage in Amasya.

The other Turkish paper of the Constitutional period was Taşdemir, launched by Mehmet Rıfat Efendi of Tokat on 25 February 1911. Bearing beneath its title the words "It speaks of everything and is published in Amasya every Saturday", the paper cost ten para, and annual subscription was free for villagers. Its single surviving issue describes the hardships of a severe winter, of closed roads and of soaring prices. Never mentioned in earlier studies of the Amasya press, this paper shows that the town's reading life began earlier than had been supposed.

The years of the National Struggle brought great activity to the Amasya press. A paper that came out as a single issue under the name Türközü on 1 April 1920 took the name Yeşilırmak a week later and Emel on 14 April 1920; since its owner, press and format never changed, researchers count these as one newspaper. Emel was published by Mehmet Sırrı (Soğukpınar) Bey, owner of the only printing press in the town. It is known that in the autumn of 1920, for want of paper, it was printed on wrapping paper collected from grocers, and that in support of the National Struggle 1,200 copies a week were distributed free to the towns and villages of Amasya and Tokat. Closed for lack of paper, it reappeared on 24 November 1921 with the support of the General Directorate of the Press and, appearing intermittently until the Alphabet Reform, ran to 264 issues in all. While Emel was closed, Hakikat, which first appeared on 10 March 1921, lived for nine months, and Hak Yolu, with its motto "The voice of the people, the cry of the people", for only a short time.

In the early years of the Republic, Emel, while remaining loyal to the new regime, kept up a sharp opposition to local officials. It targeted the "mütegallibe", the notables who acted as brokers between the peasants and the government, and entered into polemics lasting for weeks with the director of the orphanage, the director of resettlement and even the mayor. Amasya, the official gazette of the province, was by contrast the mouthpiece of the new regime. Publishing laws, official proclamations, market prices and the debates of the provincial assembly, this paper spent weeks after the Hat Reform explaining the finer points of greeting and shaking hands while wearing a hat. The same pages carried reports, quite delightful in language and tone, of football matches between Birlik Güç Yurdu and Albayrak İdman Yurdu and between Albayrak and the Merzifon Youth Union. Read side by side, these two papers show plainly how far the range of subjects debated in the coffeehouse and the reading room had widened.

Pleasure Gardens, Orchards and the Banks of the Yeşilırmak

The open-air meeting places of the people of Amasya were the vineyards, the orchards and the banks of the Yeşilırmak. The local historian Osman Fevzi Olcay (1887-1973) writes in his Amasya Memoirs that the Helkıs quarter was once all vineyards and gardens, that people sat in groups beneath enormous walnut trees, that samovars were boiled and tea brewed, and that this was the choicest pleasure ground of the district. Olcay attributes the quarter's later loss of this character largely to the railway line that passed through it. The railway, opened in 1927, had cut the Helkıs quarter in two. Olcay's recollection is a valuable testimony to how closely the town's habits of leisure and recreation were bound up with the garden culture of its neighbourhoods.

The first ordered space where garden and public life met took shape during Ziya Paşa's governorship between 1863 and 1865. According to Abdizâde Hüseyin Hüsameddin, in 1864 Ziya Paşa bought an old mansion and its garden in Helkıs and built in its place a government house with a prison behind it, while the pasha's reception wing was turned into the municipal office and his two-storey house into a telegraph office. On the rock separating Bağ Helkıs from Sade Helkıs the pasha raised a clock tower visible from every part of the town. In 1894 a municipal pharmacy was added beside the clock house and a police station to the east of the municipal garden. This record shows that Amasya had a municipal garden by the end of the nineteenth century. Together, the administrative buildings, the bridge and the garden formed the town's first square in the new, modern sense.

The clock tower that symbolised this square was not long-lived. Built in 1865, it soon suffered a fire, and in 1940 it was demolished when the adjacent wooden Government Bridge was rebuilt in reinforced concrete. The wooden bridge had been destroyed by a flood that same year and was rebuilt under Governor Talat Öncel in reinforced concrete, 35 metres long and 9 metres wide. The present clock tower was rebuilt faithfully to the original in 2002.

Local accounts frequently recall that the municipal gardens and the riverside pleasure grounds hosted weddings, holiday celebrations and public entertainments. It is also said that musical evenings in these places carried on the town's long-established musical tradition. Although no detailed record of these celebrations is found in published sources, the debate over a children's garden in the People's House magazine shows that the need was keenly felt in the 1930s. In 1938 İ. Ertem, one of the People's House writers, proposed that Amasya should have a properly organised "Children's Garden" where discipline and cleanliness would be taught, so as to protect children from the dangers of the street.

Evening Shows, Plays and the Turkish Hearth

In the early years of the Republic the most striking novelty in the social life of Amasya and its districts was the müsamere, the evening show. Organised by schools, associations and youth bodies, these evenings brought together music, plays, monologues and gymnastic displays. Their proceeds were usually donated to the Turkish Aeronautical Society, to the building of a hospital or to clothing orphaned children. The Amasya Turkish Hearth began its work in November 1923, and the Merzifon Turkish Hearth opened after it. Weekly lectures were given in the Hearth halls, and reforms such as the alphabet and hat reforms were explained to the public through these talks.

Serap Taşdemir's study of Merzifon conveys the atmosphere of these shows from the newspapers of the time. According to a guest who travelled from Amasya to Merzifon, at an evening held in aid of the Turkish Aeronautical Society the hall was packed; the programme opened with a fasıl in the Hüseynî mode and featured boxing, tug-of-war, freestyle wrestling and human pyramids, followed by Ziya Gökalp's verse play Alparslan and the six-act İntibâh-ı Millî (National Awakening). Fasıls in the Hicazkâr and Kürdî modes came in between, and the gazel that was sung drew loud applause. The writer ends his piece by wishing that the youth of Amasya, too, would show the same united strength as the young men of Merzifon. The Merzifon Youth Union had sections for music, sport, drama, guidance and teaching, and more than a hundred and fifty students, apprentices from the trades, attended its evening classes.

The first evenings at which men and women shared the same hall also took place in this period. According to the newspaper Amasya, those who attended a show organised by the regimental officers in Merzifon came with their families. The paper describes it as "this modern and civilised gathering, the first of its kind in Merzifon". The programme included a tragedy called "The Wounded Man's Prayer", written by the painter Captain Tevfik Bey, and two monologues, "The Jealous Husband" and "The Painter's Reverie"; the officers then performed dances such as the foxtrot, the valencia and the tango, while the corps' military band played during the intervals and for the dancing. The Merzifon Turkish Hearth also staged paid theatrical performances; the public, men and women together, watched these plays, whose proceeds went to charities and to clothing orphans. Programmes usually began at seven in the evening and went on until eleven.

The Coming of the Cinema

In the first decades of the Republic the cinema became the provinces' favourite new entertainment. Outside the large cities, in places without concert halls or theatres, it was the main door through which people encountered the fashions, music and ways of life of the wider world. One documented example of this development in the province of Amasya is Merzifon. After the Municipalities Law No. 1580 was adopted in 1930, electricity, a band, a printing press, a library and a light classical ensemble were set up in Merzifon, and a cinema hall was built at a cost of 2,000 lira. The figure shows that for a district municipality the cinema was coming to be seen as a public service that was no longer a luxury.

The name, opening year and owner of the first cinema in central Amasya are not given with a clear date in published sources. Local memory has it that the silver screen reached the town in the first half of the twentieth century and that cinema evenings were an occasion for meeting, especially for families and young people. Films offered more than entertainment, bringing new styles of dress, songs and images of foreign cities to a small Anatolian town. A report carried in 1949 by the Amasya newspaper Yeşilyurt under the headline "A CHP Radio Station in Merzifon" suggests that radio, too, had entered public life to the point of becoming a matter of political dispute. The detailed history of Amasya's cinemas remains a subject awaiting a search of old newspaper collections and oral history work.

The Amasya People's House

After the Turkish Hearths were closed in 1931, People's Houses (Halkevleri) attached to the Republican People's Party were founded in their place. The first People's Houses opened on 19 February 1932; the number of centres that began work on the opening day is given as fourteen in some sources and nineteen in others. The People's Houses worked through sections covering language, literature and history, fine arts, drama, sport, social aid, public classes and courses, library and publications, village affairs, and museums and exhibitions. The drama section aimed to form a company of players from its male and female members, and the sports section to make many branches, from football to wrestling and from swimming to riding, popular with the public. Keeping a reading room and library was one of the conditions for opening a People's House. By 1950 there were 478 People's Houses and 4,322 People's Rooms in Turkey.

The Amasya People's House opened on Friday, 23 February 1934, at 2 p.m. Its purpose was defined as helping citizens to know one another more closely and come together, and raising the national and moral level. The Merzifon People's House began work a year later, on 22 February 1935. In 1946 there were three People's Houses in the province of Amasya: in the provincial centre, in Merzifon and in Gümüşhacıköy. These institutions organised lectures, plays and concerts, offered readers national publications in their libraries, Istanbul newspapers above all, made village tours and opened literacy and vocational courses. The activities of the Merzifon People's House have been described as social programmes that brought men and women, rich and poor, together in the same hall.

The most tangible legacy of the Amasya People's House is the magazine Yeşilırmak, published between 1 September 1938 and 1 April 1939. Issued as a monthly review of literature, ideas and art, Yeşilırmak was printed at the Emel Press, one of the first printing houses in Amasya. Nazım Berksoy held the licence for the first five issues and Alişan Reşit Tanural for those that followed; the cover, illustrations and administration were in the hands of Niyazi Tarman. Its contributors were mostly teachers and civil servants working in the town: Nazmi Çağan, Haşim Nezihi Çuhacıoğlu, İzzet Nihat Orlu, İ. Ertem, Arif Öner and Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar wrote in almost every issue. The magazine managed only eight issues; the February and March 1939 numbers were printed together because the paper order was delayed, the licence holder had gone to Yozgat and the printer Hasan Elmacı had fallen ill.

The magazine's pages preserve small but vivid glimpses of social life in the Amasya of the time. In the first issue İ. Ertem describes a match between the town's two strong football teams, Bozkurt and Halkspor, which was abandoned halfway when the players left the field for some unknown reason. Other articles deal with measures against the dropping of apples and pears, the domestic goods week, the importance of physical education and the raising of children. The second issue introduces the Amasya poets Âfitâbî and Âkif, and Tevfik Akalın's translations of stories from Western languages appear regularly. In Haşim Nezihi's talk on notable people raised in Amasya, the names mentioned include Mihrî Hatun, Zeynep Hatun and Sıracî in literature, Şeyh Hamdullah in calligraphy, Âsım Bey in music, Strabo in geography and Kâmil Hafız in history. The same piece also mentions a hundred-year-old cönk, a manuscript anthology, compiled by Hafız Ahmet Efendi.

The fourth issue was devoted entirely to the death of Atatürk. The speeches delivered at the mourning ceremony in the People's House and İbrahim Rüştü Altıok's poem "Three Minutes Passed, Six Torches Lit" were published in it. The combined issue 6-7 announced the death of Abdizâde Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar, author of the Amasya Tarihi. Nazmi Çağan wrote that "Amasya has lost a precious son" and proposed that the day of his death, 12 February 1939, be commemorated every year as Hüsameddin Yasar Day. The last issue carried the 23 April address of the Director of Education, Alişan Reşit Tanural, and the news that a "Reading Festival" would be held that year for the first time in the first grades of the primary schools. After the transition to multi-party politics the opposition came to see the People's Houses as the cultural arm of the CHP, and they were closed by Law No. 5830, which came into force on 8 August 1951. The Amasya People's House, too, ended its work under this law.

Sports Clubs and National Holidays

Football found a place in the Republican-era social life of Amasya at an early date. From 1925 the provincial newspaper reported matches between Birlik Güç Yurdu, Albayrak İdman Yurdu and the Merzifon Youth Union, and such sports news continued in later years. By the end of the 1930s the town's leading teams were Bozkurt and Halkspor. Matches, holiday ceremonies and school displays were open-air events that women and children could also attend as spectators. While the coffeehouse and the reading room largely remained male spaces, the stadium and the parade ground brought together a much wider crowd.

National holidays were the most visible part of the shared calendar that the new regime brought to town life. Writing in Yeşilırmak, İ. Dağlıoğlu says that national holidays create love of the nation and attachment to the homeland in hearts beating with the same excitement. The People's House, the schools and the associations took part in the ceremonies of 29 October, 30 August and 23 April, and in the evenings shows and commemorations were held in the People's House hall. In a poem written by Zehra Sümbül for the fifteenth anniversary of the Republic, Amasya on the holiday is likened to an acacia in bloom. Though plain as literature, these lines are an interesting testimony to holiday mornings in a provincial town.

Gazinos and Musical Evenings

Local accounts often recall that the gazinos and tea gardens along the Yeşilırmak were the town's meeting places, especially on summer evenings. It is related that classical Turkish music and folk songs were performed there and that ince saz ensembles took the stage. The municipality's founding of a light classical ensemble in Merzifon in the 1930s, and the way the shows opened and closed with fasıls in the Hüseynî, Hicazkâr and Kürdî modes, show that music was an inseparable part of social life in this period. No published document has been found, however, on the names, owners or opening dates of the gazinos in central Amasya.

Today the area around Yalıboyu and the Government Bridge remains the town's busiest meeting place. The Helkıs gardens where samovars were boiled beneath the walnut trees, the issues of Emel printed on wrapping paper, the shows in the People's House hall and the football match abandoned halfway all serve as reminders that this lively riverside life rests on a long and layered past. The social life of Amasya took shape within this transformation, reaching from the Ottoman coffeehouse to the Republican People's House and from the neighbourhood pleasure ground to the cinema hall.

Chronology

1554-1555: The first coffeehouses opened at Tahtakale in Istanbul; coffeehouse culture gradually spread to provincial towns.

1857: The Sarafim Kıraathanesi, regarded as the first reading room, opened in Istanbul.

1864: Ziya Paşa built the government house in the Helkıs quarter; the pasha's reception wing was converted into the municipal office.

1865: The clock tower built by Ziya Paşa was completed.

1894: A municipal pharmacy was built beside the clock house and a police station to the east of the municipal garden.

1909: The first issue of Müdde-i Umûmî, the newspaper of Şükrü Efendi of Kars, came out in Istanbul on 24 May.

1911: The newspaper Taşdemir began publication in Amasya on 25 February; the Armenian paper Abaraj and the journal Amassia began to appear.

1912: Issue 92 of Müdde-i Umûmî, dated 15 June, was published in Amasya.

1920: The newspaper published as Türközü on 1 April, Yeşilırmak on 8 April and Emel on 14 April began its life.

1921: The newspaper Hakikat appeared on 10 March; Emel resumed publication on 24 November.

1923: The Amasya Turkish Hearth began its work in November.

1925: The newspaper Amasya reported matches between Birlik Güç Yurdu, Albayrak İdman Yurdu and the Merzifon Youth Union.

1927: The Amasya railway opened and divided the Helkıs quarter in two.

1930: The Municipalities Law No. 1580 was adopted; the magazine Taşan began publication in Merzifon on 23 April.

1932: The first People's Houses opened on 19 February.

1934: The Amasya People's House opened on 23 February.

1935: The Merzifon People's House began work on 22 February.

1938: The first issue of Yeşilırmak, the magazine of the Amasya People's House, came out on 1 September.

1939: Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar died on 12 February; the last issue of Yeşilırmak was published on 1 April.

1940: The wooden Government Bridge was rebuilt in reinforced concrete and the clock tower was demolished.

1946: The province of Amasya had three People's Houses, in the provincial centre, Merzifon and Gümüşhacıköy.

1951: The People's Houses were closed by Law No. 5830, which came into force on 8 August.

2002: The clock tower was rebuilt faithfully to the original.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

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