Amasya is a city squeezed into the narrow valley that the Yeşilırmak has cut, between cliffs that rise hundreds of metres on either side. Water has been more than a matter of livelihood or transport here; it has also shaped the stories people tell. The lover who tunnels through a mountain to bring water, the milk that drips from a handkerchief, the cows that announced the flood by their wet legs, the water that seeps out of rock, and the flood that came down the Çakallar Creek after a downpour all settle, in Amasya's memory, on places connected with water. Some of these stories are a literary tradition adapted to Amasya, some rest on the life of a saint, and some grew up around a real feat of engineering, the ancient water channel.

The history of the water channels themselves, the geography of the Yeşilırmak valley and the riverbank improvements are treated in other articles, so the subject here is the stories attached to water. The places that gave rise to them or supplied their material are discussed along the way, because in Amasya every legend lives beside something that still stands: a rock, a fountain, a tomb or a bridge.

The Amasya Branch of the Ferhat and Şirin Story

The story of Ferhat and Şirin has its roots outside Amasya. According to the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, the subject emerged from Nizami Ganjavi's Khosrow and Shirin and gradually became a narrative in its own right. In Nizami, Ferhad is a third figure who enters the love between Khosrow and Shirin late in the story. In later verse romances the centre of gravity shifts to Ferhad. Ali Shir Nava'i was the first to treat the subject under the title Ferhâd ü Şîrîn (1484). In the Ottoman sphere the line is followed by the Ferhâd ü Şîrîn of Şehzade Korkut (Harîmî), a son of Bayezid II, by Lâmiî's Ferhâdnâme, and under Süleyman the Magnificent by Şâmî's Ferhâdnâme. When the tale passed from court poetry into folk literature it was adapted to Anatolia and its historical and geographical frame changed. In the folk version told in Anatolia and Azerbaijan, the action begins in Khorasan and then continues in Amasya. In the classical romance Şirin is the niece of Mehmene Banu; here she is her sister. Şirin's other suitor is no longer the Persian king Khosrow but the son of Hürmüz Shah, the ruler of Amasya.

In the best-known summary of the folk tale, Mehmene Banu has a pavilion built for her sister and gives the decoration to the master painter Ferhad. While adorning the pavilion Ferhad falls in love with Şirin, and she gives him her heart in return. Şirin asks that a stream flow past her pavilion. Ferhad undertakes to pierce the nearby mountain and bring the water of the spring beyond it, and says he can do it in forty days. In the story he finishes in thirty-nine. The detail has passed into the local lore of Amasya as well; Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar notes in his Amasya Tarihi that people say the water channel was made in thirty-nine days. In the next stage of the tale Hürmüz Shah, the ruler of Amasya, steps in. Because his own son has also fallen in love with Şirin, a heavy condition is set for Ferhad: if he pierces the mountain opposite and brings the water to the city, he will have Şirin. Ferhad pierces the mountain. When the water is almost ready to flow into the city, a nurse in the guise of an old woman comes to him and says that Şirin is dead. Ferhad hurls his pickaxe into the air and dies beneath it as it falls. Hearing the news, Şirin kills herself with a dagger.

The version current in Amasya differs slightly in detail. In the local telling Mehmene Banu is the sultan of the city, Şirin is her sister, and the water lies at a distant place called Şahin Kayası. To avoid giving up her sister, the sultan demands an impossible task and requires that he bring the water to the city. In another telling the mountain is called Elma Dağı, and a clay pipe or a mace is named in place of Ferhad's pickaxe. What these adaptations share is that the water's arrival in the city coincides with the lover's death. The water finally flows with all its force, but the one who brought it is gone. The two lovers are buried side by side. According to the tradition a rose blooms on each grave every spring, and a thorn bush grows between them. The summary in the TDV presents this thorn as the nurse who separated the lovers, the same figure who parted them in life.

The same source says that in Anatolia, especially in Amasya and Erzurum, the story lives on attached to certain place names. Its first lithographed edition was printed in Istanbul in 1854, and its first edition in Latin letters appeared in 1930. The tale also entered Karagöz and the orta oyunu. In the Karagöz adaptation the action is moved to Istanbul, Amasya's Elmadağı stands on the stage as a mound of earth, Ferhad pierces the mountain to bring water to a thirsty city, and the play ends happily rather than in tragedy.

Hüsâmeddin Yasar's Reading of Ferhad Rock

The document that shows most fully how Amasya adopted this story is the section on Ferhad Rock in the first volume of Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar's Amasya Tarihi. According to Yasar, the tall, steep rock to the southwest of Karakaya is called Ferhad Rock, and the mountain chain extending east from it is called Ferhad Mountain. The rock is about three hundred metres high, its west face is sheer, its top is flat, and its northern foot is covered with vineyards and gardens. On the southwest slope, about three metres above the ground, one sees an arch-shaped hollow. Yasar gives its width as six kadem and its depth as two and a half metres, and writes that it looks as if it had been cut yesterday. The gorge in which the rock stands is called Ferhad Arası. From the name of the rock, from this hollow and from the fact that the water channel runs on as far as Ahır Önü, people built up the story, and they also attached to Ferhad the lover a grave on top of the rock, five metres long and two and a half metres wide. This grave has also been used as support for the idea that people of old were taller.

Yasar notes that some scholars of the period also believed this tale. The Amasya historian Kara Müftüzâde Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi, asked about the secret of the rock, delivered the fatwa, "Ferhad, who loved Şirin, pierced it." Yasar finds this ruling wrong and gives his reasons. In his view, when the hollow is followed in both directions it leads to a water channel about a metre wide and two metres deep, which begins in front of Şahin Kayası, some fifteen kilometres from Amasya. The channel passes through Ferhad Arası and in front of Memi Dede. It winds through the neighbourhoods of Gökmedrese, Şamlıca, Receb, Çeribaşı, Acem Ali, Uzun Mustafa, Gümüşlüzâde, Mehmed Paşa and Sevâdiye, and in the Bayezid neighbourhood reaches a square-cut hole about four metres across in a rock south of the Kibrithane. By Yasar's reckoning the total length of this masonry channel is about eighteen kilometres. It collected the water of the streams at the foot of Şahin Kayası. The ten-centimetre-thick deposits and dried moss seen inside show that water flowed through it for centuries. Yasar writes that the part running through the Şamlıca neighbourhood is large, and that in the part within the Mehmed Paşa neighbourhood water still flows, rising in spring and falling in summer. This variation suggests that after entering the city other sources joined the channel.

Yasar's objection rests on engineering. Considering how much money and how many years such a great work would take, there can be no doubt that a lone Ferhad could not have finished it in thirty-nine days, or even in thirty-nine years. Even the lime needed for a channel running along a distance of three hours' travel could not be burned in thirty-nine days, and to charge one man with the works cut in the form of tunnels at four or five places in the rock would be naive. It is plain that those who had the channels built must have had great political and financial power. At this point Yasar draws attention to the Pontic kings, above all Mithridates, who is recorded as having had great water channels built at Zile, or to his predecessor, and writes that German, French and English travellers who visited Amasya also attributed the works to the Pontic rulers.

The Debate over the Origin of the Name Ferhad

Yasar also weighs other explanations of where the name comes from. The first is the view that the Ferhad and Şirin story is a corrupted form of Nizami's tale of Khosrow and Shirin. Khosrow is the Persian shah Khosrow Parviz, and Şirin is Maria, the daughter of the Byzantine emperor Maurice. According to an Arabic passage that Yasar cites, one face of Mount Bisotun in Gilan is flat from top to bottom, and behind it, in a cave, there is a water spring and above it the images of Khosrow and Shirin. Yasar reminds the reader that the western end of the Pontic mountain chain is Ferhad and its eastern end Bisotun, and suggests that the name Bisotun may be a corrupted form of Pontus, and that this resemblance may have given rise to the tale in Amasya. He also questions the story's chronology. The tale of Khosrow and Shirin belongs to thirty years before the Hijra, whereas the water channels of Amasya have existed since seven hundred years before the Hijra.

The second explanation is a tradition in a historical compilation whose author and date of composition are unknown. According to it, when Khosrow Parviz invaded Asia Minor he appointed a commander named Ferhad son of Efrûhte as governor of Amasya, the governor repaired the water channels, and the rock took the name Ferhad Rock for that reason. Yasar saw the compilation in the hands of the former mufti of Çorum, el-Hâc Ahmed Efendi, and learned that he had placed it in the library he had built in Çorum. Even if Khosrow's invasion is accepted, Yasar considers it historically doubtful that Ferhad son of Efrûhte was governor of Amasya and repaired the channels. He adds that since Amasya remained under Byzantine rule for about four hundred and seventy years after that invasion, it also remains to be explained how the name of a Persian commander, a mortal enemy of the Byzantines, was preserved until the Islamic conquest.

Yasar finds the third explanation the most plausible. According to the Târîh-i Âl-i Dânişmend, when Melik Ahmed Danishmend Ghazi besieged Harcene, that is Amasya, around 467 AH (about 1074-75), it was thought advisable for the emir Ferhad Ghazi to set out from Helvacı Pınarı, cross the Pontic mountain and descend on the city from the south. Ferhad Ghazi climbed the mountain with his warriors, fell as a martyr in the fighting and was buried there. Yasar thinks the large grave on the mountain may belong to this Danishmendid emir and that his name remained attached to the mountain. He supposes that the grave was later enlarged and attributed to Ferhad the lover.

The same section also records two fountains at the foot of the mountain. Helvacı Pınarı, on the southern slope, takes its name from a fountain built by Helvacı Mehmed Ağa, a former mütesellim of Amasya who died in 1064 AH. In 1210 AH el-Hâc İbrahim Ağa, one of the notables of Amasya, repaired the spring, cleaned its channel and let the water flow, and revived it by endowing several shops. The Bey Pınarı in Ferhad Arası was built in 1164 AH by el-Hâc Osman Bey, a former mirliva of Egypt, who also set the water flowing and arranged its endowments. Yasar writes that in his own time both were in ruins. These fountains are traces of everyday life beside the water channel and make the distance between legend and history visible to the eye.

What Is Known Today about the Ancient Channel

The structure Yasar described a century ago is today a registered cultural asset under the name Ferhat Su Kanalı. According to the Culture Portal inventory, the channel is a water channel made by carving into the edge of a main bedrock mass. It was built in the Late Hellenistic and Early Roman period to meet the water needs of the ancient settlement on the south bank of the Yeşilırmak, and the inventory gives its date of construction as the first century B.C. The known length of the channel is between twenty and twenty-five kilometres. It begins at the water source at the Kırkgöz locality in Meşeli Çiftliği village, which belongs to central Amasya, continues in places underground under vaulting, and ends in the Mehmet Paşa neighbourhood. The part inside the town is about six kilometres long, and the best-observed section is Ferhat Arası, a stretch of about two kilometres that runs alongside the highway. Some sources give the total length as eighteen kilometres, which agrees with Yasar's measure. Another source places the structure in the reign of the emperor Hadrian (117-138). The difference between the two datings leaves open the question of which phases the structure was used and repaired in.

The technical features of the channel show that the work the people attribute to a single master was in fact done by a team, with the surveying knowledge of its day. According to research, a water level was used, the gradient of the line was fixed at seven per thousand, and this gradient is accepted as matching the bed slope of the Çekerek Stream. The sections cut into the limestone are on average 120 centimetres high and 87-97 centimetres wide. On the top of the wall, on both sides, ledges about 20 centimetres wide have been cut; these are where the cover over the channel sat. The channel is vaulted in places. Following the folds of the rock, the line makes turns that approach 360 degrees in places. The wall on the mountain side was trimmed back by an extra 1.5 to 3 metres so that rubble would not fall on it. Over the centuries of water flow, lime deposits formed on the floor. In 1997 the Amasya Museum carried out cleaning and a salvage excavation in the carved section at Ferhat Arası. The surrounding areas were opened to settlement in the Byzantine period, and according to records the water channel lost its function after the twelfth century. A part of the channel has today been interrupted by quarries and the highway.

Amasya's Water in Literature and on the Stage

The story of Ferhat and Şirin has also reached the stage, and on that journey the water motif has been kept. In 1948, between June and October, in Bursa Prison, Nâzım Hikmet wrote the three-act play Ferhad, Şirin, Mehmene Banu and the Water of the Demirdağ Spring. In the play personal love turns into a social ideal, and the action develops in the triangle of Mehmene Banu, Şirin and Ferhad. The events involving Hüsrev and Hürmüz, which form the second half of the traditional tale, do not appear in the play. The work's first performance in the world took place in October 1953 at the Moscow Drama Theatre under the title A Love Story. With music by Arif Melikov and choreography by Yuri Grigorovich it was staged as a ballet, Legend of Love, at the Kirov Ballet in 1961. In Turkey the play was published by De Yayınevi in 1965 and performed the same year at the Gülriz Sururi-Engin Cezzar Theatre. In later years the story was reinterpreted by other writers, and Ertan Akman's 2004 play was titled A Water Tale.

Within this broad literary adventure Amasya holds a special position as the place where the story is set. The most important element of the tale, the condition of piercing the mountain to bring water to the city, finds a tangible counterpart in Amasya. Elsewhere Ferhad's mountain remains a place name, whereas in Amasya there is a rock channel one can walk inside. Yasar saw this resemblance and its error together, and questioned why people had attached the story to a living structure.

Ser Çoban and the Dripping Milk

Another Amasya water story lacks the broad frame of Ferhad's, but passes more easily from mouth to mouth. In the folk legend Serçoban is a man who settled in the village of Karasenir, earned his living as a shepherd and was known for the simplicity of his worship. His brother İğneci Baba works as a shoemaker in Amasya. One day Serçoban ties milk he has drawn from his sheep into a handkerchief and carries it to visit his brother. His aim is to show that the milk he put in the handkerchief does not seep out. He hangs the handkerchief on a nail on the shop wall. At that moment İğneci Baba is taking the foot measurement of a woman. When Serçoban sees the woman's heels and thinks to himself, "how beautiful", milk begins to drip slowly from the handkerchief hanging on the nail. İğneci Baba senses that his brother's intention has been spoiled, but shows nothing. When the woman leaves he says, "Sainthood is not attained on a mountaintop; the miracle is here, in not letting the milk in the bundle drip." According to the story, İğneci Baba's tomb is in the Kocacık Bazaar.

The same collection has a second legend attached to Serçoban. While grazing his flock on the mountain he chases a kid that has run off, saying that he will slaughter it when he catches it. When he catches it he meets the kid's sorrowful gaze, is moved, says "You have worn me out too, blessed one", and lets the animal go. It is told that when Serçoban died every animal in the flock turned into a tree and a forest came into being. The place where the tomb stands is visited as a votive site and picnic ground, and the people of the area believe that cutting the trees there would bring misfortune.

Hüsâmeddin Yasar's account shows the historical figure beneath this legend. According to Yasar, Mevlânâ Bahâeddin Ser-çoban studied the religious sciences and literature in Tabriz under Sheikh Tâceddin Ebû Hâmid Abdurrahman et-Tebrîzî and was a scholar descended from Hazrat Hüseyin. He travelled from land to land, came to Amasya, and was respected by emirs and people because he spread learning there for a long time. Because of the oppression of Kongurtay, who resided in Amasya as overseer of Anatolia, he withdrew into seclusion around Karasenir and made his living as a shepherd, and so was called Ser-Çoban Dede. After Mahmud Ghazan Khan came to the throne and was honoured with Islam, he was respected again, and he died in Ghazan Khan's time. His tomb is on the hill between Kayabaşı and Karasenir. The grave was at first an open place of visitation. In 1292 AH (1875) Hasan Paşa, the commander of the Hijaz and a mirliva from Karasenir, had a wooden mausoleum and cell built over it. On festival days the people of the area gather there, sacrifice animals, cook food and distribute it to everyone. His brother es-Seyyid Alâeddin Ali Dede lies on a hill east of Ser-Çoban Dede, across the river. Yasar counts both among the scholars and the righteous of the Junaydi persuasion.

Its link with water comes from geography. The Çekerek River skirts the western side of the Kayabaşı neighbourhood southwest of Amasya and joins the Yeşilırmak in front of Serçoban Hill. Yasar says that the Çekerek is small like a stream, swells in spring, sometimes dries up entirely, and that if it flows its benefit is great and if it floods its harm is little. Serçoban Hill thus stands at the meeting of two waters. The milk legend is a simple tale about the testing of a saint. The historical Ser-Çoban Yasar describes is a scholar who fled oppression and chose shepherding on a hill by the river. The two accounts should not be confused, because the attribution of the milk legend to this historical figure is not directly documented in the sources.

The Dripping Rock of Veng

Another water story attached to a place name in Amasya is at Veng. According to Yasar, Veng is the name of the northern foot of Ferhad Rock. It is the name of a ridge to the left of the highway going to Tokat, at the end of the Memi Dede Önü cemetery, above Hacılar Meydanı. Both sides are cemeteries of Greek and Armenian Christians. At the end of the ridge is a mass of clay earth in the shape of a rock. Water drips from its outlets without interruption, and its surroundings are barren. To collect the dripping water a small basin of black stone has been made beneath the rock. Yasar writes that the water is bright but tasteless and heavy. For Christians this is a revered place. On Sundays they gather there and make merry, and on returning they rub the surrounding barren earth on their faces and foreheads as "jewel".

There are two separate traditions about the place. The Greeks say that Yovannis, a disciple of the Apostle Peter, came here to call the people of Amasya to the faith, made water flow from the stone as proof of the truth of Christianity, and the place was called Yovannis and later, shortened, became Veng. The Armenians say that the Apostle Ohannis, who lived in Açmiyazin in Revan, hid there to escape his enemies in Amasya on his way to Kayseri, and that after a few days, thirsty, he commanded the stone against which he leaned to release water, so the place took the name Ohannis and later became Veng. Yasar observes that the two traditions come from the same source. They agree on the name and its shortening, and differ on the origin. Historically, he writes, Christianity appeared in Amasya only at the beginning of the fourth century A.D. and spread among the Armenians in the third century, so that monks named Yovannis and Ohannis preaching in Amasya in the first and second centuries is impossible. According to what he records, the use of the cemetery also changed over time. Until about 1300 AH Greeks and Armenians came here rarely and only to visit the dead, but after that date first the Armenians and then the Greeks made it a Sunday gathering place. The stories largely arose to explain this new custom. From the Greek inscriptions on the stones of the Torumtay Mosque and the Halifet Gazi Madrasa, Yasar notes that there was formerly a church and a patriarchate east of the place called Veng.

The Tomb of the Cows and the Flood of Noah

In Amasya water also lives on in the memory of a great catastrophe. In front of the Mehmed Paşa Imaret, on the road, adjoining the Dugrâkiye Madrasa, stands a long tomb with solid foundations, covered by a ridge-backed masonry dome. According to Yasar's record, it holds the Seljuk emir Nûreddin Tugrak, governor of Amasya, his son Şemseddin İnâc, his grandson İzzeddin Balaban and other grandchildren. While the tomb was known as the Tomb of İnâc, those who lay there were forgotten, and because a woman named Selâmet Hatun lived nearby a story was built up. The name Tomb of the Cows (İnekler Türbesi) comes from this.

The story that circulates among the people runs as follows. At the time of the flood brought by the curse of the Prophet Noah, the cows of Selâmet Hatun, who believed in him and knew nothing of the flood, came home on a day when it was not raining with their feet and kneecaps wet. The woman is astonished, asks the reason and learns that the flood has broken out. She gives thanks that her cows have not perished and that she herself is saved. She is called Selâmet Hatun, and near her tomb a tomb is built in memory of her cows. Yasar calls the story false and bases his argument on history. He says that İnâc Bey was a figure of the seventh Hijri century and Selâmet Hatun of the ninth, that it is ridiculous to take İnâc and his children for cows and to regard Selâmet Hatun as someone left over from Noah's time. In another section he relates that Selâmet Hatun was the daughter of the Amasya qadi Nizâmeddin Abdurrahman Çelebi, known as Molla Beylik. In 857 AH she had a zâviye built; the zâviye was later turned into a garden when Şefik Paşa seized it unlawfully, while her tomb was preserved. The historical Selâmet Hatun was a qadi's daughter and endowment-founder who lived in Amasya in the fifteenth century.

Çakallar Creek and the Memory of Flood

In Amasya water is not remembered only for its bounty. Three streams run through the city: the Savakça Creek, the Çakallar Creek and the Karakaya Creek. Yasar writes that the most terrifying of them is the Çakallar Creek, which descends to the river from Selağzı and has caused many disasters. After heavy rain in 1271 AH (1854-55) a great flood came down, carried off the bridges and houses above it, left one of the small dome stones on the dome of the Sinan Bath west of Selağzı, and swept a great many animals, carts, timber and people into the river. The stone left on the dome of the bath was brought down only with much effort and great difficulty. This bath was built and endowed in 917 AH (1511-12) by Sinan Paşa, a former beylerbey of Sivas and one of Hızır Paşa's freedmen. Because the mouth of the creek met the highway running along the river, the danger was constant, and so in 1325 AH (1907-08) the mutasarrıf of Amasya, Ahmed Cevdet Bey, had a tunnel built under the highway and separated the mouth of the creek from the road.

This record is a historical note documenting the wrath of the same water. The duality of bounty and danger that often appears in the people's water stories is also seen in the rivers Yasar describes. The Tersakan River shrinks in summer and swells in spring, and because it overflows and does damage when it rages it is also called Deliçay, "the mad stream". Yasar adds that the factories, mills, vineyards and gardens along its banks benefit from this stream.

The Sources and Limits of the Stories

The water stories of Amasya are fed from different sources. Ferhat and Şirin settled in Amasya as the local branch of a written tradition running from Nizami to Nava'i. The Serçoban and İğneci Baba legends are a saintly narrative tied to the life of a real person. The dripping rock at Veng is an example of two communities attaching different stories to the same place. The flood story of the Tomb of the Cows is the result of a misnaming. The flood of Çakallar Creek, on the other hand, is a documented event.

Some of the stories rest on established knowledge and some exist only in popular memory. There is no firm conclusion on why the rock was given the name Ferhad. The grave of the Danishmendid Ferhad Ghazi, the governor of Khosrow Parviz and the resemblance of the names Pontus and Bisotun are separately advanced explanations. In local tradition place names such as Şirin Tepe and Ferhat Deresi are also mentioned, but their location and source have not been verified. There is also no definitive inscription or document concerning the construction of the channel. In the Culture Portal inventory the inscription and the endowment deed are recorded as "none".

Chronology

1st century B.C.: The date given by the Culture Portal inventory for the construction of the Ferhat Water Channel. The structure is assigned to the Late Hellenistic and Early Roman period.

117-138: The view that attributes the channel to the reign of the emperor Hadrian.

After the 12th century: According to records, the period in which the channel lost its function.

467 AH (about 1074-75): The event in which the Danishmendid Ferhad Ghazi is said to have fallen as a martyr during the siege of Amasya (a report based on the Târîh-i Âl-i Dânişmend).

1484: The date Ali Shir Nava'i composed his Ferhâd ü Şîrîn.

917 AH (1511-12): Sinan Paşa builds and endows the bath near Selağzı.

1854: The first lithographed edition of the Ferhâd ü Şîrîn story, in Istanbul.

1271 AH (1854-55): The great flood down the Çakallar Creek.

1292 AH (1875): A wooden mausoleum and cell are built over the tomb of Ser-Çoban Dede.

1325 AH (1907-08): Ahmed Cevdet Bey has the tunnel built that separates the mouth of the Çakallar Creek from the road.

1930: First publication of the story in Latin letters.

1948: Nâzım Hikmet writes the play Ferhad ile Şirin in Bursa Prison.

1953: First performance of the play at the Moscow Drama Theatre.

1961: The ballet Legend of Love at the Kirov Ballet.

1965: The play is published and staged in Turkey.

1997: Cleaning and salvage excavation by the Amasya Museum in the carved channel section at Ferhat Arası.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar, Amasya Tarihi, vol. 1 (sections on Ferhad Rock, Veng, the Tomb of the Cows, streams and rivers) and vol. 6 (entry on Ser-Çoban Dede).

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources