The history of Merzifon is usually told through its inns, madrasas and wars, yet when one asks where the town found the wealth to build them, the answer lies in the flat land stretching right beside it. Founded on the southern slope of Mount Taşan, at the point where the roads to the Black Sea and to Central Anatolia cross, the town grew as the market of its plain. Wheat sown in the fields, grapes grown in the vineyards, fruit from the orchards and cloth woven on the looms were the main goods Merzifon sent out along the trade routes for centuries. The same flat land served as a halting place for armies, as farm estates for emirs and Tatar lords, and as a source of income for Ottoman endowments; in the twentieth century it took on a new face with its sunflower fields and its industrial zone.

The Plain of a Thousand Villages

Settlement around Merzifon begins with mounds going back to the Chalcolithic Age, around 5500 BC. The mounds of Onhoroz and Büyük and Küçük Küllük in the village of Ortaova, together with the mounds of the village of Hayrettin, count among the most important Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age settlements of the region; archaeological surveys on the plain have identified hundreds of mounds and settlement sites, and the pottery recovered from them shows that the history of Merzifon reaches back to around 5500 BC. With its lakes and fertile soil, suited to hunting as well as farming, this plain had already become a home for people about seven thousand years ago. In the Hittite period the area bordered the capital Hattusa and appears to have been an important centre, and two natural routes are known to have crossed it between about 1700 and 700 BC.

The geographer Strabo referred to this plain by a name meaning "Thousand Villages" because of its dense settlement. Known in ancient sources as Chiliokomon (Binköy), the fertile plain extends from Suluova toward Merzifon, and Merzifon is thought to stand where it begins, on the site of the city of Phazemon. Its place at a junction of roads also played a part in earning the plain this name; the crossing here of the routes to the Black Sea coast and to Central Anatolia created ground well suited to villages strung closely together. It is known that Emperor Hadrian toured the region in the autumn of 131 and ordered the rebuilding of cities ruined by war, the repair of old temples and the construction of new ones. In this period of calm, economic life is recorded to have revived, the walls surrounding Merzifon to have been repaired, and new neighbourhoods to have been added as the population grew.

After the Roman era, the weight the plain carried did not change. Under the Byzantines the old settlements continued as they were; at the beginning of the eighth century the town suffered Umayyad raids and soon returned to Byzantine rule. Bulak Castle, which commands the plain, is said to have been built near the village of Alıcık to secure the trade route. In the eleventh century the region passed to the Danishmendids, in the twelfth, under Kılıç Arslan II, to the Seljuks; the fourteenth century brought Ilkhanid rule and the Eretnid period. Merzifon came under Ottoman rule in 1393 under Bayezid I (Yıldırım) and joined the Ottoman administrative division under the order that Çelebi Mehmed established after 1402.

A Land Where Two Climates Meet

The generosity of the plain comes first from its climate. Merzifon lies in the transition zone between the Black Sea and Central Anatolian climates; summers are dry and rainless, winters and springs are wet, and the average annual rainfall is about 350 kilograms per square metre. The north and west of the district are mountainous: Mount Taşan rises to 1,905 metres in the north, with spurs of Akdağ in the east and Çakır Dağı in the south. The central and eastern parts are flat. Sources give the altitude of the district centre as between 710 and 750 metres, and this height, combined with the transitional climate, allows grain, vines and fruit that prefer cooler places alike. The dry summer also explains why irrigation has always been decisive on the plain; in the months when rain falls short, the life of fields and gardens depends on the streams and wells.

In his Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya), written in the early twentieth century, Hüsameddin describes the town as standing on "a most pleasant hill" on the southern skirts of Mount Taşan, sloping gently toward the flat. In his account the town is ringed by delightful vineyards, while before it, to the southeast, stretches an open plain known by the name "Yedikır". Today the same name lives on in the dam built on the Tersakan. He also gives a detailed description of Mount Taşan, which closes off the back of the town: starting from the Tersakan Stream and running west as far as the Kızılırmak at Osmancık, the mountain is about forty-five kilometres long; it is twenty-five kilometres wide at its eastern end and only eight at its western end, and so resembles the shape of a coffin. Hüsameddin writes that the mountain is "most fertile fields" on every side, with forest and summer pasture on its eastern parts, that Merzifon and Hacıköy lie on its southern skirts and Havza and Köprü on its northern ones, and that many villages and farms stand on it and along its slopes. Plain and mountain thus form a whole in which each completes the other: grain and vines on the flat, fields and pasture on the slopes, and timber and grazing on the eastern side of the mountain.

The Tersakan Stream and Irrigation

The main share in watering the plain belongs to the Tersakan Stream. After leaving Lake Ladik, it flows first west, then south, then east before joining the Yeşilırmak, and its name ("reverse-flowing") is said to come from this contrary course. Hüsameddin, however, links the name to the river's flowing from north to south, and since the same river is recorded in Arabic sources as "al-Nahr al-Maqlub", the "inverted river", he concludes that the Turkish name had been current since the conquest. According to him six streams descending from the summer pastures of Seki, Kızoğlu, Polad and Çakır Gümüş flow into Lake Ladik, and the Tersakan rises from this lake. Near Suluova it merges with the Gümüşsuyu Creek and empties into the Yeşilırmak north of Amasya. The Gümüşsuyu and the Solhan stream, tributaries of the Tersakan, also water the Merzifon Plain.

Hüsameddin's notes also show how the water was used under the old order. The stream flows all year round; it shrinks in summer and swells in spring. Because it overflows its banks and does damage when in spate, people also call it "Deliçay", the Mad Stream. Many factories, mills, vineyards and orchards along its two banks draw on its water. The remark shows that the Tersakan fed the mills and small workshops along its banks as well as the fields. Assessed as irrigation water by today's standards, the stream is in the first class for alkalinity and the second class for salinity, and its average pH is 8.5.

In the modern period the Yedikır Dam was built on the Tersakan, within the borders of Suluova, to regulate this water. Built by the State Hydraulic Works between 1982 and 1985, the earth-fill dam serves irrigation alone. Its height above the stream bed is 28 metres; at normal water level the lake holds 6.3 million cubic metres and covers 5.93 square kilometres. The dam irrigates an area of 7,403 hectares. Redfin, carp and pike live in the lake, which counts among the few lakes on the Black Sea side suitable for angling. There are also fourteen ponds used for irrigation within the district.

Despite these investments, the irrigated area of the plain is still limited. According to a 2018 report by the regional development agency, only 170,280 decares, or about thirty per cent, of the district's 552,970 decares of farmland are irrigated, while dry farming continues on the remaining 382,690 decares. The same report notes that the district lies in a closed basin, so its drinking water is pumped from underground, and that the town's water problem is expected to be solved by the Bakırçay Project. The historical fate of the plain can be read in these figures too: a cereal regime governed by the rain lives on side by side with the orchards and industrial crops that have spread wherever the water reaches.

The Plain as Encampment and Battlefield

A broad, level expanse, the Merzifon Plain was the natural halting place for armies approaching Amasya from the north and west. Recounting the struggle between Kadı Burhaneddin and the Ottomans, Hüsameddin calls this flat land the "Merzifon sahra", the Merzifon plain. While Bayezid I (Yıldırım) was marching on Kastamonu, Kadı Burhaneddin came into the Amasya region for the second time, first descending onto the Merzifon plain and then passing through the Amasya gorge and entering the town. As Ahmed Pasha, the beylerbey (governor-general) of Amasya, held out in the citadel, Yıldırım appointed İsfendiyar Bey to the emirate of Kastamonu, turned back swiftly and encamped on the Merzifon plain. As Hüsameddin relates, Aziz bin Erdeşir, Kadı Burhaneddin's chancery secretary, wrote in his Bezm ü Rezm that the Ottoman ruler came from Kastamonu "with a fearsome and heavy army" and came down onto the Merzifon plain, and that on hearing this his master withdrew from Amasya toward Turhal. Bayezid set out from Merzifon and came to Amasya for the second time at the beginning of the year 793 (between late 1390 and 1391). The choice of the plain in these events as a place where a heavy army could camp and be fed may point both to the breadth of the flat land and to its capacity to supply provisions; this last point is an inference.

More than two centuries later the plain became the scene of one of the last great clashes of the Celali revolts. According to Hüsameddin's account, Kara Said, routed at the summer pasture of Göksun, besieged Amasya in 1017 (1608) with more than ten thousand men and, failing to take the town, set about plundering the surrounding country. Hüseyin Pasha, beylerbey of Aleppo, whom Kuyucu Murad Pasha had appointed commander, divided his forces on entering the Sanjak of Amasya; the column of Canikli Osman Pasha, beylerbey of Sivas, advanced from Ladik while his own column advanced through the Gümüş area, and together they pressed all the rebels into the Merzifon plain. A bloody battle lasting three days followed on the plain; Kara Said suffered a heavy defeat and fled east with the thousand or so men left to him. Kara Said's siege of Amasya and this three-day battle on the Merzifon plain could not be confirmed in general sources; for now the episode stands as Hüsameddin's report. Even so, the account is a reminder that the agricultural wealth of a plain also made it attractive for plunder and war.

The Farms of Tatar Lords and the Subdistricts

The most intriguing information on the land order of the plain again comes from Hüsameddin, though it rests largely on his explanations of names, and whether each is supported by documents is not known. In his day the kaza (district) of Merzifon was divided into four nahiyes (subdistricts), and Hüsameddin ties their names to the great farm estates of the plain under Mongol rule. He writes that the subdistrict of Alıcak, covering the southwest of the district, had borne this name since around 670 (1271-72) because it was the farm of the Tatar commander Alıcak Noyin, the representative of Mongol rule in Anatolia. He relates that the subdistrict of Zoğu in the northeast took its name from the farm of a Tatar lord called Zoğay, the same Noyin's steward, notorious for his cruelty, and that the subdistrict of Gelgiras, which covered the whole south, was at first called "Gelingiras" because Kiras Hatun, daughter of Alıcak Noyin and wife of Pervane Bey, came to own this farm when she was a bride (gelin), and later "Gelgiras" in shortened form. He adds that Kiras Hatun had a bathhouse in the village of Gelingiras, the subdistrict centre, and that this place, once the seat of a district, later declined.

The fourth subdistrict, Gümüştekin, covered the west of the district, and its name was attributed to Gümüştekin Gazi, son of the Danishmendid Melik Ahmed Gazi. A similar explanation is given for the mountain to the north: according to Hüsameddin, the whole of Mount Taşan was the private farm of Taşan Bey, of Seljuk descent. Taking advantage of the turmoil that followed the disappearance of Timurtaş, governor of Rum, in 727 (1327), Taşan Bey founded a small principality, and because he made the mountain his seat it was given his name. The lords descended from him went on living on the mountain, endowed part of its land, and mostly lived in the town of Merzifon. Some of these name explanations may be folk etymology. Nevertheless, the fact that the subdistricts were named after great farms suggests that in the Mongol and principalities period the plain consisted of broad farmlands gathered in the hands of a few powerful families; this too is an inference.

The administrative framework followed the growth of the plain. Merzifon was a kaza of the Sanjak of Amasya, which belonged to the province of Sivas. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the villages of Urumcuk (today Bahçecik), Muşruf (Yakacık), Samadola, Yassıviran, Hırka and Marınca (Karamustafapaşa) were attached to it; Sazlıca and Sarıköy were added later. In the seventeenth century the district of Merzifonâbâd was formed from some villages of the Argoma subdistrict north of Amasya. When this subdistrict-district, centred on the village of Bulak, was abolished in 1880, its villages were attached partly to Merzifon and partly to Gümüş. Hüsameddin likewise writes that the old district of Merzifon was made up of three districts called Merzifon, Merzifonâbâd and Gelgiras, that in the reorganisation of 1296 (1879-80) most of the villages of Merzifonâbâd were given to Hacıköy and some to Merzifon, and that when the district of Gelgiras was also abolished its villages were joined to Merzifon. He states that in his own day the district comprised twenty neighbourhoods, some four thousand households, four subdistricts, about forty-five villages and a population of about thirty-eight thousand.

A Market Town in the Ottoman Period

Under Ottoman administration Merzifon was the seat of a kaza (district). According to the survey of 1520, the town had thirty-four neighbourhoods, twenty-eight of them Muslim and six non-Muslim, with an estimated population of five to six thousand. The same records show that an income of about 82,000 akçe a year from the town's commercial and industrial taxes was assigned to the sultan's estates. In the late sixteenth century 1,783 adult men lived in the town. The names of its neighbourhoods reflect the life of the period: names such as Harmanlar (Threshing Floors), Tarakçı (Comb-maker), Bozahane (Boza House), Tuzpazarı (Salt Market), Sütçü (Milkman) and Neccar (Carpenter) point to a town where field, craft and market were interwoven. The list of neighbourhoods that Hüsameddin compiled from old records also includes names such as Harmanlı, Sütçü, Tuz (Salt) and Lahana (Cabbage); these neighbourhoods, named after threshing floors and vegetable gardens, show how closely the town was bound up with farming life.

The figures Evliya Çelebi gave when he passed through the town in 1648, forty-four neighbourhoods and four thousand houses, look exaggerated when set against the contemporary avarız (extraordinary tax) census. In a census taken toward the middle of the seventeenth century, at about the same time, twenty-eight neighbourhoods, 957 adults and a total of 925 households were recorded in Merzifon, 625 of them Muslim and 300 Christian. The same records show that the Christian population arriving from outside in the first half of the century was concentrated in four neighbourhoods. The district, by contrast, covered only eight villages in 1520; the number later grew and passed 160 in the census of 1860. The villages had 627 registered adult men in 1520 and 943 in 1576, and the most populous village was Marınca. That the registered village population grew by about half between 1520 and 1576 suggests that rural settlement, and probably production, was expanding as well.

In the seventeenth century Merzifon consolidated its economic importance at the crossing of the caravan routes with the covered bazaar (bedesten) and the stone inn (taşhan) rising as part of the Kara Mustafa Pasha Complex. The rectangular, four-gated bedesten has a nine-domed interior with rows of shops around it, and it still serves as the commercial centre of the town. The produce of the plain was bought and sold in this market and carried by the roads passing through it to other towns. Its position on the route linking Istanbul and Ankara with the port of Samsun made Merzifon both a place that sold its own produce and a stop for caravans.

Alongside farming on the plain, weaving also sustained the town. Sources report that from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century Merzifon was one of Anatolia's leading centres of cotton, woollen and dyed cloth production, and that many travellers and reports, from Evliya Çelebi to Vital Cuinet, recorded this tradition. In the tax census of the 1840s, early in the Tanzimat era, 929 taxpaying households were registered in thirteen neighbourhoods of the town, and the occupations show that a large part of the population worked in trades one might call the textile sector. The town's population, about 10,000 in the middle of the nineteenth century, reached roughly 20,000 by the end of the century; Cuinet writes that 13,380 Muslims, 5,820 Armenians and about 800 Greeks lived there. By the census of 1860 the district, with more than 160 villages, had a population of 25,105, and this figure later rose to about 30,000.

Endowments, Waterways and Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha

The town's seventeenth-century appearance was shaped above all by one benefactor. Grand Vizier Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha was born in 1634 in Marınca (today Karamustafapaşa), one of the villages nearest the town. The complex he had built between 1666 and 1679 consisted of a mosque, an inn, a covered bazaar, a library, two baths and shops, and it left its stamp on the look of the town. The mosque his mother Âbide Hatun had built in the village of Bahçekent also belongs to the same century. Hüsameddin, however, places Âbide Hatun's masjid in Marınca, the pasha's birthplace, and writes that the pasha enlarged it into a mosque in 1087 (1676-77) and added a school beside it; whether the two records describe the same building or different ones is not clear.

Waterways were among the pasha's endowments, and Hüsameddin gives the scale of the work plainly. In 1090 (1679) the pasha had a solid masonry mosque built in the middle of the town, with a timekeeper's room, a library, a lecture hall and an ablution fountain in front of it; he also had underground water channels dug over a distance of two kilometres from Mount Taşan, brought water to the town and built some thirty masonry fountains. Hüsameddin describes this service as having "truly revived the town". For a town on the edge of a plain in a closed basin with dry summers, this water brought down from the mountain must have meant a great change both for drinking water and for the vineyards and gardens inside the town; these works certainly brought important changes to the social and economic life of Merzifon. After the pasha, the benefactors of the plain town followed the same path: the former şeyhülislam Merzifonlu Dürri Mehmed Efendi in 1145 (1732-33), Hacı Ali Ağa in 1178 (1764-65) and Hacı Hasan Ağa in 1212 (1797-98) each built a madrasa, and Kara Mütesellim Hüseyin Ağa and Hacı Süleyman Ağa each left a fountain and a school.

The buildings that gave the town its form in earlier centuries were also products of an endowment system. The Çelebi Sultan Mehmed Madrasa was built in 1414, the soup kitchen (imaret) that Çelebi Mehmed's mother Devlet Hatun had built together with a mosque and a lodge in 1419, and the Medreseönü Mosque, built by Murad II, in 1427. Hüsameddin writes that the line of Yusuf Pasha, Devlet Hatun's steward, served as trustees of these endowments for some four hundred years. The oldest monument in the town is the Muînüddin Pervâne Süleyman Mosque, known from its inscription dated 1265. In the nineteenth century the town was renewed in education as well: in 1866 the governor of Amasya, Ziya Pasha, had a clock tower built over the entrance gate of the madrasa, and the American College, founded in 1876, stood at the highest point in the north of the town with its hospital, school, library, laboratory and observatory. Hüsameddin also records that the college included an industrial school for craftsmen.

One of the town's present neighbourhoods recalls the grain of the plain by its name. The place where Hüseyin Gazi, son of the Danishmendid emir İltegin Gazi, stayed for a long time was called Sihâmüddevle and appears as Samadola in the Ottoman survey registers and as Sehmüddevle in the avarız register of 1642. The village became a neighbourhood in 1957 and was taken inside the municipal boundary; today it is known as the Samadolu neighbourhood or, in more recent times, as Buğdaylı (the Wheaty). The origin of the name of the town, called Mersivan among the people, is disputed. The claim that it derives from a Hun Turk named Barsevinç has no basis, and the view that it comes from the Persian words merz and pont and means "border town of the Pontic state" is also doubtful. Hüsameddin discusses both explanations and suggests that the name Barsevinç survives rather in the village of Marınca; this view, too, rests on no document. In 64 BC, when Pompey defeated King Mithridates of Pontus, a settlement called Fazemonid stood on this site, and the name passed through the forms Phamidzon, Famezon, Mazifon and Marsovan to reach the spelling Merzifon found in Ottoman documents.

Vineyards, Fields and Oxen in the Estate Inventories

What the people of the plain lived on at the end of the nineteenth century is shown most concretely by the lists of goods the dead left behind. The 130 estate inventories (tereke) from the years 1883 to 1890 in the Merzifon Islamic court registers have been studied; 81 of them belong to town dwellers and 49 to villagers. The most striking item in the urban inventories is the vineyard: 58 of the 81 people left a vineyard in their estate. This shows that town dwellers drew most of their income from viticulture. Market gardening was far less common and appears in only eight inventories. Although they lived in town, fourteen people owned a cow, five a calf and thirteen a donkey; these animals must have been kept both to meet the household's need for meat and milk and for sale.

In the same records a weaving loom appears in only nine inventories, and a shop in twelve. Given that Merzifon had been known for weaving for centuries, it is striking that the loom appears so rarely in the inventories of the 1880s. This may suggest either that weaving was declining in those years or that loom owners were less often reflected in the inventories; the data at hand do not allow a choice between the two possibilities. It is also clear that the urban estate holders were markedly wealthier than the villagers.

The village inventories show the everyday labour of the plain more plainly. Farm implements recorded as "ploughman's tools" appear in eleven inventories and ploughshares in seventeen; spades and mattocks are also listed. Among animals the ox comes first, in thirty-six inventories, because the fields were ploughed with oxen. It is followed by the cow in thirty-one, the calf and the donkey in twenty-one each, the goat in seventeen, the sheep in fifteen and the kid in six; nine people had beehives. Viticulture was important in the villages too, and twenty-nine villagers left vineyards to their heirs. Twenty-five people owned a cart and harness; such carts must have played a large part in carrying produce to market. Wealth in the villages, however, often came from loans more than from land: in the estate of Çapuroğlu Ali Osman Ağa of the village of Karatepe, worth 113,315 kuruş, the sums owed him by villagers alone came to 18,859 kuruş, and his house and guest room in the village were valued at 16,000 kuruş. The total that Seyfizade Hacı Abdülkadir Ağa of the village of Gülen had lent out and was owed came to 22,710 kuruş. These ağas, who extended credit on the produce of the plain, point to a system of debt that tied up the villagers' harvest in advance.

Vineyards and Wine

One of the oldest products of the plain is the grape. The vineyards of Merzifon are known for the Mercan, İsirge, Tilki, Amasya and Kara grape varieties. Before the Republic the district had three wine factories and thousands of decares of vineyards. The density of vineyards in the estate inventories, and Hüsameddin's description of the town as ringed by "delightful vineyards", show that this picture still held at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Viticulturists regard the district's climate and soil as highly suited to table grapes and especially to wine and juice grapes. Its position linking four main roads, and its airport, also give the district an advantage in transporting and marketing grapes.

In the twentieth century the vineyard area shrank considerably. A study published in 2011 reports that in recent years modern vineyards had been established in the district with Merzifon Karası, a quality wine grape variety, and that efforts were being made to revive an awareness of viticulture in the area. In the first phase of a clonal selection study carried out in the vineyards of Merzifon between 2010 and 2013, 32 candidate clone mother vines were identified, and these were examined for yield and quality in a trial vineyard set up in Bafra in 2022-2024. The researchers consider this work important for restoring Merzifon Karası to the viticulture of the region. Revival projects are reported to have brought 600 decares of new vineyard area.

That Merzifon Karası is the same variety as the Marzemino grape grown in Italy is a claim voiced in the local press. A village headman from Merzifon made the news after learning that this grape was said to have been taken from Anatolia centuries ago, bringing its cuttings back from Italy, planting them in his garden and selling the grapes by the kilo to farmers who wished to grow the same variety. According to the headman, the Italians could not say "Merzifon" and so named the grape Marzemino; however, neither the identity of the two varieties nor any link between the names has been confirmed by a scientific study. The trace of grapes and orchard produce in the kitchen does continue beyond doubt: molasses, fruit leather and köme are said to be made from the same grape, and mulberry and beet molasses, rosehip and hawthorn pastes and cornelian cherry sour are among the winter preparations of the region.

The Plain and Industry in the Republican Period

Merzifon continued to develop in the Republican period. Its position at the junction of the roads linking the interior to the Black Sea, Istanbul and Ankara increased its importance. Besides being the marketplace for the produce of the fertile plain, the town also developed small-scale manufacturing. The urban population was 11,352 in the census of 1927 and passed 20,000 in 1960 (22,096). In 1987 an Organised Industrial Zone initiative was launched, and small and medium-sized privately run factories were established, chiefly in textiles and food. In this zone of 111.8 hectares the textile and electrical machinery sectors gained weight; in 2018, 3,500 people worked in forty-two active firms. The industrial zone, which has developed rapidly in recent years, has given the town the appearance of an industrial city.

Today the district economy is shaped around agriculture, livestock and services. The district has 70 villages and, according to 2024 figures, a population of 76,854. Merzifon is the largest settlement in the province after the provincial centre of Amasya. Area, altitude and the number of villages differ slightly between sources; one gives 971 and another 888 square kilometres, and the number of villages varies between 67 and 70. In a development study carried out in 2004, the district was ranked among the second-degree developed districts on a six-tier scale.

The course of the population also shows the pull of the plain. The urban population of 11,352 in 1927 was spread over twenty-four neighbourhoods; in 1930, by decision of the municipal council, some neighbourhoods were merged and the number was reduced to twelve. When the village of Samandolu west of the town was made a neighbourhood and taken inside the municipal boundary in 1957, the number rose to thirteen, and in 2004 it reached eighteen. In the censuses of 1935, 1945, 1950 and 1955, Merzifon's population even exceeded that of Amasya, the centre of the province to which it belongs. In the 2000 census the district centre had 45,613 people. According to the governorship's records the total district population is 72,277, of whom 58,235 live in the centre and 14,042 in the villages. The district population, 69,093 in 2007, rose to 76,854 in 2024, and the largest annual increases came in 2015-2016 (1,810 people) and 2019-2020 (1,572 people). In 2017 the urbanisation rate had reached 79.48 per cent; since the most distant village of the district lies only 33 kilometres from the centre, the real share of people living in the town is said to be even higher than the statistics show.

Produce of the Plain

Today wheat, sugar beet, barley, sunflower and lentils are the main crops on the plain. To these are added vineyard and orchard produce; among fruits, cherries and apples stand out. The variety comes from the transition zone where two climates meet. Grain and industrial crops rest on the continental climate, fruit and garden produce on damper conditions; the plain allows both.

Over the last half century the most distinctive crop of the plain has been the sunflower. Two thirds of the sunflower production of Amasya province comes from Merzifon, and the district counts among Turkey's important sunflower centres. In 2026 sunflowers were sown on about 70 thousand decares in the district, and as the early-sown fields bloomed at the beginning of July the plain turned to shades of yellow and green. The growing conditions of the plant on the plain have long been studied as well. A trial carried out in 1986 in the village of Alıcık in Merzifon showed that, under irrigation in the Central Black Sea transition zone, the highest yield came from sowing on 20 April, which gave about forty per cent more than sowing on 1 June, and that seed and oil yields fell the later the sowing. The study recommended sowing sunflower in the region during April, preferably in the second half of the month. That the village of Alıcık bears the name of the subdistrict Hüsameddin linked to the farm of the Tatar commander Alıcak Noyin is also a reminder of how the plain's seven-hundred-year land history is interwoven with its present-day fields.

The future of the farmland, however, faces a new problem. The development agency report notes that the division of existing land through inheritance or for other reasons has caused significant changes in the quantity, quality and pattern of produce, and that preserving the integrity of the land has therefore become important. The vineyards and fields divided among heirs in the nineteenth-century inventories can be seen to go on shrinking by the same path today.

The produce of the plain also reaches the table. Keşkek, registered with a geographical indication as the most important dish of the district kitchen, is baked in clay pots with special cracked wheat, meat, chickpeas and water; its being eaten after the dawn prayer symbolises the harvest of the grain coming home. Helle, yoghurted cracked wheat, wrung tarhana soup, madımak, pürpürüm (purslane), dried shelled beans and various pastries also rest on the grain, pulses and livestock products of the region.

Chronology

Around 5500 BC: Chalcolithic settlement on the mounds around Merzifon.

1700-700 BC: Two natural routes pass through the region in the Hittite and following periods.

131: Hadrian tours the region and orders the rebuilding of ruined cities and temples.

1390-1391 (early 793): According to Hüsameddin, Bayezid I (Yıldırım) encamps on the Merzifon plain and Kadı Burhaneddin withdraws from Amasya.

1393: Merzifon comes under Ottoman rule in the time of Bayezid I (Yıldırım).

1520: According to the survey, the town has thirty-four neighbourhoods and a population of 5,000 to 6,000.

1608 (1017): According to Hüsameddin, Hüseyin Pasha and Canikli Osman Pasha defeat Kara Said in a three-day battle on the Merzifon plain (not confirmed in general sources).

1679 (1090): Kara Mustafa Pasha brings water to the town from Mount Taşan through underground channels and builds some thirty fountains.

1860: By the census, the district with more than 160 villages has a population of 25,105.

1879-1880 (1296): The district of Merzifonâbâd is abolished and some of its villages are joined to Merzifon.

1883-1890: The 130 estate inventories in the Merzifon Islamic court registers show the weight of viticulture and of fields ploughed with oxen.

1982-1985: The Yedikır Dam is built on the Tersakan Stream.

1986: A sunflower sowing-date trial is carried out in the village of Alıcık.

1987: An Organised Industrial Zone initiative is launched.

2010-2013: The first phase of clonal selection of Merzifon Karası is carried out in the vineyards of Merzifon, and 32 candidate clones are identified.

2026: Sunflowers are sown on about 70 thousand decares in the district.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources