Amasya lies on both banks of the Yeşilırmak, in the shadow of Harşena and Mount Ferhat, and it is known as much for the melodies sung there for generations as for its stone and water. Over the centuries the joys and sorrows of the region have been kept above all in its folk songs (türkü), set to the strings of the bağlama and handed down from one generation to the next. In musicological studies, Amasya's türküs are described as the continuation, in the Yeşilırmak valley, of a deeply rooted tradition of instrument and verse that reaches back to Central Asia. As in many other Anatolian towns, the türkü here is played and sung to the accompaniment of the bağlama (saz), and it carries within it the emotional world of the local people and the names and objects of their landscape.

The türküs of the Amasya region are recorded in the Turkish folk music repertoire of the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT). The number of songs listed under Amasya in this repertoire is given as 48; by comparison, the Tokat region has 105 songs in the repertoire and the Samsun region 36. The figure reflects only the part of the region's musical heritage that has been transcribed and entered into the official repertoire. The number of melodies that live on in oral tradition and were never recorded is unknown. The oldest clues to the history of this oral heritage lie instead in the city's biographical and historical records, alongside the names of the people who played the saz, recited epics and composed quatrains.

Early Traces of Saz and Verse

Music at the Prince's Court

Music in Amasya took on a lively character around the court during the centuries when Ottoman princes resided in the city as sanjak governors. Describing the circumcision feast held for the sons of Şehzade Ahmed (Prince Ahmed), Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar lists, beside the poets and their odes, the most famous instrumentalists and singers of Amasya: the oud of Baba Mehmed Çelebi bin İlyas, the tanbur of Sofioğlu Abdî Çavuş, the saz of Beylioğlu Sünbül Ahmed Bey, the melodies of Hâce Kutbeddîn Mahmud, a descendant of Merâgî, and the "Davidic" voice of Süleyman Dede, which in his words made Amasya ring. These gatherings belong largely to the world of modal art music, of the oud and the tanbur, and cannot be identified directly with the folk türkü. They nonetheless show that playing and singing were respected occupations in the city, and even a means of livelihood.

The most interesting figure of this circle is Baba Mehmed Çelebi, known among the people as "Baba Tanburî". According to Hüsameddin he learned the theory of music, called "ilm-i edvâr", from Lâdikli İsrâfilzâde Mehmed Çelebi, played the tanbur beautifully and, being a singer with a moving voice, became one of Şehzade Ahmed's boon companions. A detail recorded by the source also reveals the social function of music in the city: Baba Tanburî composed gazels that would bring the people's troubles and complaints to the prince's ear, sang them in his presence and in this way served the people's affairs as well. The prince's death in 918 (1513) affected him deeply. This closeness between saz and word may be seen as a forerunner of the folk poetry that, in the following centuries, would move from the court to the coffeehouse.

Folk Poets and Plaintive Quatrains

In the section devoted to the Köprülü era, Hüsameddin divides the poets raised in Amasya into two groups. Among the learned poets he names Kelâmî, Türâbî, Abdî, Remzî, Câmî, Zühdî, Şevkî, Hıfzî and Dâniş, and among the folk poets Cihâdî, Hüznî, Seyfî and Izzî, adding: "The folk poets of Amasya were true âşıks, and the manis and melodies they made were deeply plaintive." In the same lines he notes that these plaintive manis had been preserved by being passed from mouth to mouth down to his own time, and that the person who knew them best was Abdal Ağasızâde İsmâil Hakkı Efendi, "a fine bağlama poet". This record is one of the clearest testimonies that the mani and the melody lived together in the region and that the bağlama carried this heritage into the early twentieth century. That Hüsameddin gives no sample of verse by any of these names, and that no text by these poets has been found to this day, is also a reminder of how easily an oral tradition can be lost.

Cavit Güzel's study of the âşık-style epic tradition in Amasya brings together Hüsameddin's scattered records and arranges the city's epic-singing âşıks by century. According to the researcher, two sources fed this tradition: the Janissary corps charged with guarding the princes, and the Alevi-Bektashi culture that formed an important part of the city. The Janissary hearths protected the âşıks as masters of the word who raised the soldiers' morale, while the coffeehouses became the stage of âşık poetry.

Janissary Saz Poets and the Coffeehouses

The first distinct name in this line is Celâlî Mehmed Ağa. The son of Türedi Hüseyin Ağa of Tokat, Celâlî was raised as a sipahi cavalryman, entered the service of Abaza Hasan Paşa and, because he sided with the pasha in his opposition to the grand vizierate of Köprülü Mehmed Paşa, was arrested and executed in 1069 (1659). Hüsameddin introduces him as "a very robust, brave sipahi and saz poet"; he relates that his voice was powerful and stirring, and that in the coffeehouse known as the "Yüksek Kahve" (High Coffeehouse) in the Meydan Köprü quarter he played the saz and the bağlama, recited epics, sang poems and gathered the whole town around him. Osman Fevzi Olcay's memoirs also mention places called a "high coffeehouse" near the Mustafa Bey Bath and in Selağzı; however, there is no record showing that these were the same place as Celâlî's coffeehouse.

The saz poet who rose to fame after Celâlî was Cihâdî Ahmed Ağa, son of the Janissary Hasan. Cihâdî, who rose to the rank of odabaşı, was promoted because he spurred the Janissaries into battle with his epics at the siege of Kandiye (Candia), and he won the favour of the grand vizier Köprülüzâde Fâzıl Ahmed Paşa. He retired in 1086 (1675) and died around 1093 (1682). Hüsameddin passes a brief but telling judgement on him: "His epics, manis and melodies are many." In the same period Âşık Ahmed Çelebi, son of İbrahim Efendi, imam of the Kocacık Mosque, became known as a poet around 1070 (1659-60), was remembered for his passion for saz and verse, and died after 1086 (1675).

Çırçırlıoğlu Âsafî Ahmed Bey, an epic singer who left his mark in the eighteenth century, came from a notable family. While holding a zeamet fief and serving as alaybeyi, he was dismissed from his post for deserting the Russian campaign of 1184 (1770-71) and then turned to the dervish life. Hüsameddin writes that he played the bağlama beautifully, squandered the fortune inherited from his ancestors on pleasure, lived until 1210 (1795-96) as a "coffeehouse poet" in the coffeehouse of Fethullah Ağa near the Tombs of the Princes, and, having become famous among the Janissaries and the Bekrîs, was also called "Destancı" (the Epic Singer). Güzel's study gives Âsafî's year of death as 1770; this date appears to have been confused with the Russian campaign of 1184 mentioned in Hüsameddin's text.

At the end of the century Âşık Mehmed Ağa, grandson of Odabaşı Halil Ağa, played the çöğür and sang epics as a Janissary sergeant (çavuş). According to Hüsameddin's record, being "a consummate folk poet" he proved very useful in battle, and he gathered his friends in the coffeehouse near the Garibler Mosque in Selağzı. He had a beautiful voice and melody and was an epic singer skilled at playing the saz; his house was in İçerişehir near Kırkbedel, and his descendants were called the "Âşıkoğulları". He is recorded as dying around 1220 (1805). The Janissary scribe Şânî Süleyman Çelebi, skilled both in music and in the use of instruments and an epic-singing poet, became famous as "Şanlı Çelebi" or "Şanlı Ağa" and took his pen name "Şânî" from this nickname. Hüsameddin notes that he obtained one of his epics, but that it too was lost in a fire.

The picture drawn by these records is striking: in Amasya, saz poetry developed hand in hand with the Janissary corps, the coffeehouse and the battlefield, and the çöğür and the bağlama were the main instruments of this tradition. Epics, manis and melodies are mentioned together on the lips of the same people. Yet no text of the türküs or epics these âşıks sang has survived, and no documented link can be drawn between these old saz poets and the Amasya türküs in the TRT repertoire.

Collection and Research History

The recognition of a regional türkü across the country often depends on the work of collectors who listened to the melody in a village or a guest room and transcribed it. According to a study of the Merzifon türküs, the collections of Nida Tüfekçi and Muzaffer Sarısözen were decisive in making these songs known beyond the region, and many Merzifon songs were brought into the repertoire by both TRT and the Ankara State Conservatory. "Eşimden Ayrıldım Yamandır Halim", which Tüfekçi collected on 10 November 1969 and entered into the repertoire under number 1804, is one of the known examples of these records. Yücel Paşmakçı is also named in the repertoire records as collector and transcriber; his name appears in the entries for songs such as "Halay Çekin Düzülsün" and "Evlerine Vardım Kapı Sürgülü".

Foremost among the collectors who came from the city itself is Burhan Özbakır. Born in Amasya in 1935, Özbakır joined the Amasya Music Society, revived in 1954, trained many students and also collected the Amasya ilahis (hymns) sung during Ramadan and at various gatherings. A 2019 master's thesis examining his family's place in the city's musical life discusses, along with Özbakır's own compositions, his compilation of many works formerly sung in Amasya. He also influenced the rural âşıks: Âşık Rıza Çulha of the village of Sarıyar (Morami) recounted that he took up the âşık art under the influence of Burhan Özbakır, who had come to their village.

Sources differ on when the region's türküs were first gathered into a book. Fatih Koca writes that Burhan Özbakır's book "Amasya Türküleri" appeared in 1988 among the Amasya Municipality Cultural Publications. Other sources state that the Amasya Municipality published the book "Amasya Türküleri", prepared by B. Özbakır and S. T. Sünbül, in 2010, and that the TRT Music Department prepared a CD of the same name; whether the two dates belong to different editions of the same work or to separate works is not clear. These publications, together with TRT's Turkish folk music archive, have formed the main source for later academic work. Haluk Yücel examined Amasya türküs in 2018 for their lyrical and musical elements, in 2021 from the standpoint of geographical identity, and in 2023 for their Alevi-Bektashi elements; he also assessed the 94 türküs of the Merzifon region separately in 2016. Modal and rhythmic analyses came later: in 2022 Nail Demircioğlu compared the uşşak-character songs of the Amasya and Samsun regions, and in 2024 Yasemin Acaray examined the hüseynî-character songs of the Amasya and Tokat regions.

The Bağlama and the Tradition of Accompaniment

The main instrument accompanying türküs in the region is the bağlama. It is said that the saz accompanied almost every moment of life: in wedding squares, at gatherings in guest rooms, on threshing floors and at grape-harvest festivities. Describing the cherry season at Şeyhcûi, Osman Fevzi Olcay also writes that people moved into their pavilions in this promenade ground, that neighbours invited one another to sit beneath the cherry trees, and that while sazes were played and songs sung on one side, the nightingales joined in with the sound. In the lyrics of the Merzifon türküs the bağlama is mentioned three times, the cura and the cümbüş once each; the same study notes that the bağlama was a common instrument in households, especially in Alevi villages.

Because Merzifon lies geographically in the inland part of the Central Black Sea region, its türküs stand at the edge of both the Black Sea and the Central Anatolian musical cultures. According to the same research, there are musical and thematic similarities among the türküs of Amasya, Merzifon and Çorum, while clear differences appear with the songs of coastal cities such as Samsun and Ordu, despite their proximity. The spread of the bağlama in the villages is also connected with the presence of âşıks who served as zâkir (ritual singers) in the cem ceremonies. According to the source persons Güzel interviewed, Halil İbrahim Alkaç of Gümüşhacıköy was sent in his youth to the zâkirs of the area and learned from them to play the bağlama and to sing türküs in the makam style.

The functions of the songs are as varied as the instrument. Measured melodies known as kırık hava carry the spirit of halays, dances and festivities; dance tunes such as "Babayiğit", recorded from Merzifon, also belong to this group. Some of the melodies transcribed from the region, on the other hand, have the character of laments (ağıt) and semah. The same repertoire contains pieces corresponding to different stages of social life, from the wedding halay to the mourning ceremony.

Subjects and Themes

In thematic studies of Amasya türküs, songs of separation, love and longing come first. They are followed by lament-themed türküs and melodies of semah character. Haluk Yücel's research on some forty türküs shows that Alevi-Bektashi discourse and Sufi themes have also found a place in the region's songs. Religious content here goes beyond belief alone and enters the language of the türküs as an element shaping social life.

A numerical example of this distribution can be seen in a count of the 94 türküs of the Merzifon region. Of these, 28 are of mani character, making up about 30 percent of the total. In mani-style türküs, rhyme and melodic harmony matter more than unity of subject; it is significant in this respect that the old tradition Hüsameddin called "plaintive manis" still holds a strong place in today's repertoire. They are followed by religious pieces with 19 türküs (20.2 percent), love with 16 (17 percent), and separation and death with 13 (13.8 percent). There are five each of türküs narrating an event or a person and türküs voicing grief and hardship, four laments, two songs of quarrel and conflict, and one each on military service and on curses. The researcher also points out that the first and second quatrains of a türkü may move to different subjects, so that classification can only follow the predominant theme.

A typical example of the theme of separation is "Eşimden Ayrıldım Yamandır Halim", collected by Tüfekçi. Each quatrain ends with the refrain "böyl'olur", and the line "Adettir aşığın hali böyl'olur" declares that separation is the lover's fate. Words such as Mecnun, nightingale and rose show that this melody draws on images shared by folk poetry and classical divan literature.

The World of the Lyrics

The lyrics of the türküs can also be read as a document describing the physical and human features of the region. Yücel's counts on the Merzifon türküs make this concrete. The most frequent colour is black (kara or siyah), mostly used for eyebrows and eyes; red (al and kırmızı) describes cheeks and lips, white describes skin, hands and face, and green stands for spring and freshness. Among flowers the rose comes first, among animals the nightingale; in keeping with literary tradition, the nightingale symbolises the lover of the rose. Among animal names the nightingale is followed by the horse, the sheep and the lamb. The tree mentioned most often is the apple, which fits the local economy: the Merzifon climate is well suited to growing apples and cherries, and these fruits are the livelihood of many families and villages.

Among food names, bulgur and honey each occur five times. Among place words, mountain, plain, highland pasture, spring and field stand out; among personal names, alongside religious and literary names such as Ali, Hüseyin, Leyla and Mecnun, Ferhat and Şirin are also mentioned. That these two names appear in the türküs of the Amasya region is to be expected, given the bond the tale of Ferhat and Şirin has with the city. Hüsameddin also relates the popular belief attached to Ferhat Kayası (Ferhat's Rock): people used to say that Ferhat, in love with Şirin, pierced the rock in his path with the force of love while cutting that long water channel to win his beloved. Although the historian dismisses this tale as "superstition", he thereby records how alive the story was on the people's lips.

Word frequency confirms the same picture: in the türküs examined, "aşk" (love) occurs 21 times, "dost" (friend, beloved) 20, "Hakk" (God, the Truth) 13, "yar" (sweetheart) 12, and "ayrılık" (separation) and "gönül" (heart) 11 times each. The same study further notes that names of provinces, districts and villages appear rarely in the Merzifon türküs, whereas the names "Amasya" and "Merzifon" are frequent in the Amasya türküs. Among the türküs recorded from the region in notation archives are some named after settlements such as Merzifon, Hayrettin, Alpaslan, Uygur and Sarıköy, which shows that melodies could be tied to particular villages.

The modal structure of Amasya türküs has been analysed through the notations in the TRT repertoire. Demircioğlu's 2022 study compares the makam and rhythmic values of the 48 Amasya türküs and the 36 Samsun türküs in the repertoire and treats the uşşak-character songs of both regions separately. Acaray's 2024 study finds that 14 of Amasya's 48 türküs are of hüseynî character; for Tokat the proportion is 26 out of 105. The same study shows that the hüseynî songs of the two regions have both similarities to and differences from the hüseynî scale described in music-theory sources. Hüseynî and uşşak are also the makams most often used in the region's religious melodies; the fact that seven of the eleven ilahis collected from one Amasya mevlid singer are in these two makams suggests that the türkü and the ilahi share the same habits of the ear.

One of the transcribed examples is "Halay Çekin Düzülsün". Listed in the repertoire under number 52, its source person is Hanife Karabıyık and its collector and transcriber Yücel Paşmakçı. Performed collectively, the piece is in the karcığar scale, played in 2/4 time, with its final and closing note on la and a range of seven notes; its subject is recorded as love and longing. The lyric begins "Halay çekin düzülsün, sürmeli gözler süzülsün" ("Dance the halay, line up; let kohl-lined eyes gaze languidly"). "Düzülsün" here means "let them line up, form a row". The rest of the first quatrain teases the one who does not join the halay, while the following quatrains tell of someone who goes down to cut mint, bends to drink water, sees the beloved approaching, and of the loneliness of being apart from the beloved. Thus a call to the halay and a love song meet in the same piece. The fact that each quatrain opens with the exclamation "uf aman ey" also suggests that the melody carries a measure of free delivery.

Lament, Elegy and Hymn

The mourning and devotional side of the regional repertoire extends over a wider field than the transcribed türküs. The TRT repertoire includes laments registered to the Amasya region, and the count of Merzifon türküs also includes four laments. The boundary between lament and religious melody grows thin in the mersiye (elegy). Among the works collected from the Amasya mevlid singer Asiye Akbaş is a mersiye titled "Kerbelâ" in the hüseynî makam; this genre, mourning Karbala, shares the same emotional ground as the lament-like melodies sung in Alevi-Bektashi circles.

Fatih Koca's study, published in 2015, also shows through the life of Asiye Akbaş how melody lived on in the homes of the city. Born in 1951 in Çiviköy, attached to Gediksaray, Asiye Hanım became known in Amasya as a reciter of the mevlid and of the Qur'an at home gatherings (mukabele), and because mevlid gatherings followed the practice of meşk, she learned many works by ear from elderly women. She explains that she chose the ilahis she sang according to the type of gathering: gatherings for a birth, a death, a soldier's mevlid, a bride's mevlid, and seeing off or welcoming pilgrims each had their own fitting lyrics. Her remark that she kept most ilahis in memory without writing them down, and that she forgot some as she grew older, shows the fragility of oral transmission in religious melodies as much as in türküs.

The list of eleven works collected from her also gives an idea of the region's makam preferences: five are in hüseynî, two in uşşak, two in hicaz, one in rast and one in gerdaniye. Among them is a lullaby in the hicaz makam. Lullabies sung by women to their children are said to belong to the region's melodic stock; however, no comprehensive inventory of these melodies has been found, and this lullaby is one of the few recorded examples. The work of Burhan Özbakır, who made the first collections of Amasya ilahis, was rearranged and performed on the album "Amasya İlâhileri" published by the Amasya Municipality in 2012.

Uzun Hava

In Turkish folk music the uzun hava (long air) is, in general, a melody sung without fixed metre, that is, in free rhythm. Its main forms are listed as bozlak, gurbet havası, hoyrat, divan, yol havası, arguvan ağzı, çamşıhı ağzı, maya, barak ağzı and müstezat. These airs are not played to a fixed rhythmic cycle; each performer freely extends the melody according to their own breath and inclination. Their subjects are mostly love, longing, separation and yearning, and they are usually performed by folk poets to the accompaniment of the saz. The lyrics are long and emotional, so singing an uzun hava takes time.

Academic studies of the bozlak, one branch of the genre, shed light on the historical depth of the uzun hava. The word bozlak appears in the Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk as "bozladı", meaning to shout and to cry out; the same root is used in the Book of Dede Korkut. Bozlaks are mostly the product of Yörük, Turkmen and Avşar tribes, communities living a life of summer and winter pastures, and they treat subjects such as death, separation, grief and lament. It is noted that the abdals of each Turkmen tribe, who played the drum and the zurna, played an important part in carrying this tradition, sung in various parts of the country and especially in Central Anatolia and Çukurova, down to the present.

None of this information proves an uzun hava repertoire specific to Amasya. No separately published inventory of uzun havas for the region has been found; it is possible that laments and songs of exile were sung in free rhythm in Amasya, but unless a record documenting this is produced, it would not be right to attribute a distinct school of uzun hava to the region. For this reason the uzun hava is described here within the general framework of Turkish folk music. The closest relative of free-rhythm delivery in the region is perhaps the verse sections that epic-singing âşıks sang to the saz while narrating tales and epics.

Epic-Singing Âşıks and Köroğlu

The epic-singing of oral culture took on a new form in the twentieth century. Itinerant epic-selling, which spread in Anatolia after the 1940s, turned events into epics, printed them as single sheets and sold them in market places while singing them to their tune, and it found representatives in Amasya as well. Of the four epic singers identified by Güzel, Halil İbrahim Alkaç of Gümüşhacıköy (1934-1994) had epics printed from 1959 onward on many subjects, from the martyrs of a plane crash near Bafra to the events in Cyprus. The quatrains of his 1959 plane-crash epic end with the refrain "Ana ağlar vatan ağlar kan ağlar" ("The mother weeps, the homeland weeps, blood weeps"). All of Alkaç's epics are built of eleven-syllable quatrains, and the theme of death dominates most of them.

Âşık Ahmet Abacı (b. 1934) of the village of Sarıyar (Morami), attached to central Amasya, is a valuable witness to how itinerant epic-selling worked. As Abacı relates, when news of an event arrived they would go straight to the printing house door and "compose" an epic, put the printed sheets in their bags, and both sing and distribute them in the middle of the crowd. He says they used to carry a bağlama, and later, when tape players appeared, they provided the music with those. Güzel notes that the sale proceeded in order: addressing the crowd, introducing oneself, announcing the subject of the epic, listing the places where it had been sold, and singing the epic to its tune. Âşık Rıza Çulha (b. 1939) from the same village turned the rain, hail and flood disaster that struck Merzifon in 1959 into an epic of thirteen quatrains, and İsa Gedik of Gümüşhacıköy treated a murder in the village of Keşli in 1969. The Nurlar Printing House in Merzifon appears most often as the place of printing of these epics. Alkaç, Abacı and Çulha are known to have been raised in the Alevi-Bektashi tradition and to have served as zâkirs in cem ceremonies; Güzel interprets this as a sign of the cultural continuity reaching from the Janissary âşıks to the epic singers of the twentieth century.

One example of a tale narrated to the saz has been preserved thanks to a tape recording. According to Serdar Uğurlu's study published in 2017, in 1960, in the village of Yeşilöz in the Aydınca subdistrict, Âşık Mehmet narrated a Köroğlu tale at a gathering also attended by Âşık Veysel and his apprentice Âşık İbrahim, and the performance was recorded on a sixty-minute cassette. The tale is a variant of the Aleppo Branch, which is named in reference works but whose text had not been found, and since it bears the features of the Amasya dialect it has been called the "Amasya Variant of the Aleppo Branch". How the verse sections were voiced to the saz can also be followed from this recording. According to the source persons, Âşık Veysel admired the art of Âşık Mehmet, in whose house he had been a guest for three days, so much that on leaving the two exchanged their sazes; Veysel's saz is still in the hands of the same family.

Examples from the Regional Repertoire

Among the türküs listed under the Amasya region in the repertoire records are "Amasya'nın Dağları", "Bulguru Kaynatırlar", "Dedem Beni Bir Bahçıya Gönderdi", "Eşimden Ayrıldım Yamandır Halim", "Evlerine Vardım Kapı Sürgülü", "Felek Şad Olacak Günün Görmedim", "Halay Çekin Düzülsün", "Karşıdadır Evleri", "Kilo Kilo Elmalar", "Pencerede Perde Ben", "Tek Kapıdan Çıktım". The türkü popularly known as "Zilha Gelin" is registered in the repertoire as "Allah Allah Dedik Ata Bindirdik"; its last line ends "N'ettin Kızılırmak Zilha gelini". Some of these are linked in the records with named source persons; for example, Necmettin Kuba is listed for "Kilo Kilo Elmalar", Saadettin Sümbül for "Evlerine Vardım Kapı Sürgülü" and Hanife Karabıyık for "Halay Çekin Düzülsün". Other türküs were recorded as anonymous or entered under the name of a regional ensemble. These titles bring together in a single list the region's cuisine and nature, love and exile, and the main events of social life.

The Present Day

The survival of the türküs today depends as much on those who sing and play them in the region as on the official collection records. A study citing Yücel's 2023 article focuses on Özgür Akkız, one of the transmitters of Alevi-Bektashi music in Amasya. Itinerant epic-selling, for its part, faded after the 1980s as public interest waned; Alkaç is said to have given it up in those years and to have sung türküs and epics only at gatherings of friends. The part of the türkü that spreads only from ear to ear, without ever being written down, is the most fragile part of the repertoire. Joining together in the refrain of a melody and gathering around the saz while dancing the halay continue as forms that strengthen shared experience in local culture.

Chronology

918 (1513): Death of Şehzade Ahmed; recorded as a turning point in the life of his boon companion Baba Tanburî.

1069 (1659): The saz poet Celâlî Mehmed Ağa is executed for having joined Abaza Hasan Paşa.

1669: Siege of Kandiye (Candia); Cihâdî Ahmed Ağa is said to have spurred the Janissaries into battle with his epics.

1093 (1682): Death of Cihâdî Ahmed Ağa (approximate).

1210 (1795-96): The epic singer Âsafî Ahmed Bey is recorded as living until this year.

1220 (1805): Death of the çöğür-playing epic singer Âşık Mehmed Ağa (approximate).

1954: Burhan Özbakır joins the reopened Amasya Music Society.

1959: Printed epics by Halil İbrahim Alkaç, Ahmet Abacı and Rıza Çulha appear.

1960: In the village of Yeşilöz, the Köroğlu tale narrated by Âşık Mehmet is taped at a gathering attended by Âşık Veysel.

10 November 1969: Nida Tüfekçi collects the türkü "Eşimden Ayrıldım Yamandır Halim" from the Merzifon region; the melody enters the TRT repertoire under number 1804.

1988: According to Fatih Koca, Burhan Özbakır's book "Amasya Türküleri" appears among the Amasya Municipality Cultural Publications.

2010: The Amasya Municipality publishes the book "Amasya Türküleri", prepared by B. Özbakır and S. T. Sünbül.

2012: The album "Amasya İlâhileri", based on Burhan Özbakır's collections, is published by the Amasya Municipality.

2015: Fatih Koca publishes the Amasya ilahis collected from Asiye Akbaş.

2016: Haluk Yücel examines the 94 türküs of the Merzifon region in terms of subject, motif and symbol.

2018: Yücel's article on the lyrical and musical elements of Amasya türküs is published.

2020: Cavit Güzel studies the âşık-style epic tradition in Amasya.

2021: Yücel presents Amasya türküs under the heading of geographical identity at a scholarly meeting.

2022: Nail Demircioğlu compares the uşşak türküs of the Amasya and Samsun regions in terms of makam and rhythm.

2023: Yücel publishes the Alevi-Bektashi elements in Amasya türküs and their musical analyses.

2024: Yasemin Acaray examines the hüseynî-character türküs of the Amasya and Tokat regions.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Official sources

Books

Other sources

Online sources