For centuries the bazaar was the liveliest place in Amasya, in the narrow valley of the Yeşilırmak. Evliya Çelebi writes that in the seventeenth century he counted about one thousand and sixty shops in the city, and at the end of the nineteenth century the French geographer Vital Cuinet records nearly 2,500 weavers working in Amasya. Coppersmiths, jewellers, blacksmiths, weavers, dyers and shoemakers worked in neighbouring shops along the same streets, buying and selling raw material and finished goods in the same market. The moral and legal framework of this order had been drawn by the Ahi tradition and by the craft associations attached to it, the guilds known as lonca. The ranking of master, journeyman and apprentice, the supervision of quality and prices, the limits on the number of shops and the craftsmen's own jurisdiction over their members were the main elements of that framework.

The nineteenth century shook this order to its foundations for the first time. The state abolished monopolies, factory goods from Europe overtook the hand loom, and newly founded councils and chambers tried to take over the representation of the tradesmen. In the early years of the Republic, laws brought into being chambers of commerce and industry and craftsmen's societies, and in the following decades craftsmen's chambers and unions. It is not possible to follow every stage of this transition in Amasya through local documents. Yet when the regulations of the Empire and of the Republic are set beside Amasya's own records, the accounts of travellers and the history of the chamber, it is still clear how the organisation of the craftsmen turned from the guild towards the chamber.

The Foundations of the Bazaar Order

The Ottoman craft associations trace their origin to the Ahi organisation of the Seljuk period, and the history of Ahism is the subject of a separate article. What matters here is the institutional form in which this tradition reached the nineteenth century. At the head of a craft association stood the guild sheikh and the kethüda, assisted by the yiğitbaşı. The members were masters, journeymen and apprentices. A person who wished to learn a craft entered a master's workshop as an apprentice and could not leave his master without the permission of the association. An apprentice who had worked for a certain period and shown competence in his trade rose to journeyman, and the step from journeyman to master was taken in a ceremony. At this ceremony the yiğitbaşı, with prayers, fastened the sash or loincloth on the new master. Ahi fathers and sheikhs kept their position as heads of some craft associations until the first half of the nineteenth century, but their duties no longer extended across associations as in earlier centuries and were limited to the affairs of the association to which they belonged.

The word lonca derives from the Italian loggia and at first described the places around Galata where foreign merchants stored their goods. It began to be used for the craft association in the seventeenth century and became common in documents in the eighteenth. Each association had a regulation recorded by imperial decree or with the approval of the judge, and these regulations set out who could produce and sell which goods, how raw material was to be distributed and within what limits prices were to be held. The state had granted this system various monopoly rights, among them the right of first purchase of raw material and the rights to produce and to sell a given good. The aim was to meet the needs of the people with good-quality production at a fair price and to prevent raw material from leaking, through speculation, to other regions or to foreign merchants.

The Dissolution of Monopolies and Free Trade

From the second half of the eighteenth century this system began to crack from within. Tradesmen relying on their monopolies were pushing prices above the officially set limit and preventing outsiders from producing the same goods more cheaply and at the same quality. When the state concluded that monopolies were the cause of rising prices, Selim III ordered in a decree of 1794 that monopolies other than those on essential foodstuffs be abolished. Under Mahmud II the monopolies on food were also lifted, beginning with the grocers. The monopoly rights that were the real foundation of the craft associations disappeared altogether with the Baltalimanı Trade Convention of 1838.

As the monopolies dissolved, the tradesmen faced foreign competition as well. Cloth, yarn and metalware produced in European factories entered the Ottoman market. Unable to resist this competition, which required large capital, the craft organisation had to content itself with production for the domestic market and the immediate surroundings. After the Tanzimat the gedik and monopoly system lost its practical importance and trade and industry were declared free, but no system was devised to reorganise tradesmen who had been used to living for years within a fixed organisation. In the 1860s the state formed a semi-official Commission for the Reform of Industry (Islah-ı Sanayi Komisyonu) and tried to merge small craftsmen into companies. The commission made some limited progress for a time, but in 1874 its duties were transferred to the Istanbul Municipality and it was abolished. The traditional tasks of the muhtesib, such as the inspection of weights, measures and official prices, also passed gradually to the municipalities during this century.

The Bazaar of Amasya in the Nineteenth Century

In this turbulent century Amasya's economy did not decline but opened into new fields. The weight lay in silk. The French traveller Victor Fontanier, who visited the city in 1829, writes that silk-raising was a developed and rich branch of production in Amasya and calculates the average annual value of its silk output at two million kuruş. According to him Amasya silk thread was, after that of Bursa and Gilan, the most sought-after in the empire, and the silk-weaving centres of the country obtained their thread from Amasya. At the Friday market the producers from the surrounding villages came to the shops of the merchants they knew with their bales of silk, and the silk was carefully weighed and recorded according to its quality. Fontanier relates that the trust between producer and merchant was such that not a single dispute ever arose over weight or payment. Merchants from Syria also loaded the bales they had selected onto mules and took them home. The court registers confirm this account. According to a study covering the years 1838 to 1863, Amasya had 2,258 dönüm of mulberry orchards, and their total income was 353,403 kuruş.

European merchants' interest grew along with this production. In 1840 a Swiss trade agency was opened in Amasya. According to some accounts, a Swiss named Georg Krug, sent by a silk manufacturer in Germany, founded the city's first modern silk factory in 1852, with about fifty looms and some one hundred women workers. Armenian workers employed at the modern water mill that Krug operated on the bank of the Yeşilırmak around 1858 learned the technique and later built mills of their own. An article in an Istanbul newspaper of 1898 reports that more than a hundred mills were working along the Yeşilırmak and neighbouring streams. In 1863 Amasya was among the pilot regions in which cotton seed brought from Egypt was tried. In 1864 a fair was established in the city, starting each year on the fifteenth of December and lasting to the end of the month.

The 1288, 1292 and 1301 issues of the Sivas Provincial Yearbook report that in Amasya, besides silk and thread, linen made of thread, bed ties, sheets resembling the Diyarbakır sheet and kerchiefs in the Istanbul manner were produced. According to Cuinet's figures, in the early 1890s some 3,000 looms in Amasya and 2,500 in Merzifon wove cloth with thread brought from Europe. According to Armenian recollections, coppersmithing was concentrated mostly in Tokat and Merzifon, and Amasya had about eight coppersmiths' workshops. A survey of 1890 published in the Armenian press counts in the city about 300 drapers' shops, fifty shoemakers' workshops, twenty tailors' workshops, thirty blacksmiths' workshops, ten carpenters' workshops and some twenty modern mills. These figures show that the city was lively in industry and trade, but since they rest on a single source they should be read as approximate values.

The Owners of the Bazaar and the Period After 1915

Armenians and Greeks held a very large place among the tradesmen of the bazaar. In Armenian recollections the Armenians of Amasya are described mostly as craftsmen. Tailoring, blacksmithing, carpentry, shoemaking, weaving and tinsmithing were among the most numerous trades. Greeks worked in shoemaking, tailoring and the cloth trade. The owners of the large enterprises, such as the silk and cotton factories, among them the Ipranosian brothers who ran a silk factory with fifty-five looms in 1907, were Armenian families. The dyer's weed from which the yellow dye of the dyers was made was widely grown, and part of the product was sold to Europe; in later years cheap chemical dyes arriving from Germany ended this production. A small community of Germans and Swiss also lived in Amasya at the same time, engaged in milling and silk-raising.

Osman Fevzi Olcay's Amasya Hâtıraları (Memories of Amasya), in which he describes the bazaar of his childhood and youth, completes this picture from the Turkish side. According to Olcay, in about twenty of the drapers' and tailors' shops on both sides of the street running from the Taş Han towards the Saraçhane quarter and the Kileri Süleyman Ağa Mosque the tradesmen were mostly Greek and Armenian, while three or five shops were worked by Turkish and Muslim tradesmen. The Taş Han itself, according to the Sülüs inscription on its gate, was built in 1698-1699 by Hacı Mehmet Paşa. Olcay writes that with the Armenian deportation of September 1915 and the removal of the Greeks after the war these economic activities passed to the Turks and that this caused a sudden change everywhere. The editors who prepared the same text for publication note that Olcay's population figures are not exact and that in the Sivas provincial yearbooks the non-Muslim population appears at about seventeen percent in Amasya and its surroundings. After the deportation the ownership of the bazaar changed, but neither the number of shops and workshops nor the tradition of mastery vanished at one stroke. In Olcay's recollections, shop and han owners from among the immigrants from Batum, Bosnia and the Caucasus are frequently mentioned in the bazaar.

From Society to Chamber

To the question of what to put in the place of the guild, the state sought an answer in the idea of chambers of commerce and industry, following Western examples. Soon after the Tanzimat the founding of commerce and agriculture societies in Istanbul and in the provinces was considered, and after 1879 the word society (cemiyet) in the regulations of these bodies gave way to the word chamber (oda), adapted from the French. The date of the founding of the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce is given differently in the sources. The TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam states that it opened in 1879; according to the documents on which Meltem Tekerek relies, a draft regulation of eleven articles was prepared in 1880 and the chamber held its first meeting in January 1882. The founding regulation was adapted from the statutes of French chambers. The twenty-four members were chosen by an electoral board of twenty persons, half named by the Ministry and half by the merchants. The task of the chamber was to report to the government the measures needed for the development of trade.

After Istanbul the chambers multiplied rapidly. It is stated that by the end of 1884 seventy-eight chambers had been founded in the Ottoman Empire. Among the places where they stood are provincial centres such as Konya, Kastamonu, Adana, Trabzon and Bursa, and also the sanjak of Samsun and the district of Havza, which belonged to the sanjak of Amasya. The city of Amasya itself is not named in the list, but the list gives only the principal chambers. It therefore cannot be established from these sources whether a chamber of commerce existed in the centre of Amasya in the Ottoman period. The general picture is clear: there were about one hundred chambers in 1889, 115 in 1897 and more than 160 in 1908, but apart from Istanbul, Izmir, Salonica and Bursa most of them remained on paper. Registration in the chamber was not compulsory, they had no legal personality, their duties and powers were unclear, and they received no financial support.

The Second Constitutional Era tried to change this picture. The Regulation on Chambers of Commerce and Industry of 13 June 1910 provided for merchants and industrialists to be organised under the same roof and recognised the chambers both as representatives of the members of the profession and as consultative bodies of the government on professional matters. According to this regulation the council of a chamber in the provinces consisted of twelve persons, and governors took the place of the Ministry of Commerce. A separate provision was made for tradesmen. The Instruction on Craftsmen's Societies of 1910, issued after the Law on Associations of 1909, applied only to Istanbul and provided that tradesmen would form societies in place of guilds. In 1912 an instruction of the same name extended this practice to the whole country. The societies were under the close supervision of the city prefecture or the municipalities. A new instruction published in 1915 provided that a responsible clerk be appointed to each society by the municipality. After these developments the gedik and guild system was formally abolished in 1913.

The Law of 1925 and the Craftsmen's Societies

After the founding of the Republic the legal basis of the chambers was reorganised. About two years after the Economic Congress held in Izmir in 1923, on the grounds that chambers of commerce had been unable to form anywhere in any real sense, the government had a short bill drawn up. Law no. 655 on Chambers of Commerce and Industry was adopted by the Assembly on 22 April 1925 and published in the Official Gazette of 2 May 1925. The TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam gives the date of this law as 1924, while studies based on the parliamentary minutes say 1925. The law gave chambers legal personality, made registration with the chamber of the place compulsory for those holding the status of merchant and provided monetary penalties for those who did not register. The regulation adopted on 27 September 1925 and the Instruction on Craftsmen's Societies of the same date entered into force when published in the Official Gazette on 21 November 1925.

The first provision of the instruction ended a centuries-old institution in a single sentence. All craftsmen's kethüdalıks were abolished. Each branch of the crafts could form a separate society, the society's six to twelve honorary members would be elected for two years, and half of them would be renewed each year. The societies were attached to the chamber in places where there was a chamber of commerce and industry and to the municipality where there was none, and reported their records to them. The municipalities were obliged to hand over the old society records to the chambers within a month. In this way the tradesmen were for the first time brought entirely under the roof of the chambers. The same 1925 legislation used the term esnaf to cover both the small craftsman and the small merchant. The Turkish Commercial Code of 1926, in turn, exempted small merchants from obligations such as using a trade name, keeping commercial books and registering in the trade registry.

The Founding of the Amasya Chamber of Commerce and Industry

According to the institution's own history, the Amasya Chamber of Commerce and Industry was founded in 1926 through the efforts of the draper Hasan Tahsin Efendi. This date falls about a year after Law no. 655 came into force. The chamber began its first activities in a two-storey wooden building rented from Şıhlarlı Osman Efendi. The first board included Temiz Ali Efendi, Salih Hafız (Kılıçaslan), Çavuşoğlu Ahmet Efendi, Baytarzade Hacı İsmail Efendi, Kontratçı Hasan Efendi, Azgınzade Hacı Halil, Hacı Süleymanzade, Hacı Hafız Mustafa, Gevrekzade Nurettin, Veysibeyzade Sıtkı Bey, Rıfat Kazanasmaz and Göztaş Seda Cemal.

Some of these names are known from the history of the bazaar as well. In Olcay's descriptions of the bazaar there appear Gevrekzade Osman Efendi's drapery shop, the large grocery of Sıdkı Efendi of the Veyisbeyzade family and the grocery and spice shop of Gözdaşzade Ahmet Efendi. A kinship may be supposed between these families and the names Gevrekzade, Veysibeyzade and Göztaş seen on the board of the chamber, but we have no record that confirms it. In any case the first generation of the chamber, while carrying out the registration and representation work required by the new legislation, consisted of people who had grown up in the old craft order of the bazaar. The chamber thus became the place where the tradesmen and merchants of the bazaar were reorganised according to the new legislation.

At its founding the number of members of the chamber was limited, and it grew as the number of those engaged in trade increased. According to the chamber's own history, 1,094 merchants and industrialists in 15 professional groups are registered today. On 30 November 1954 Nurettin Kütükçü, who had been elected chairman of the board for the second time, took the initiative for the construction of the first chamber building and carried out the purchase of the plot. Five years later, in 1959, under the chairmanship of Kemal Kelez, construction of a four-storey building began on a plot of 250 square metres. In 1967, in the time of Nihat Özdemir, a second four-storey block was added on the adjoining 250 square metres. The service building thus came to occupy an area of 500 square metres, and the number of workplaces rented to tradesmen rose to twelve. As the building no longer met the needs, extensive renovation was undertaken in 1999 under the chairmanship of Enis Özdemir. Özdemir and his group did not win the elections held as the building was being completed. The new board under Muammer Gedik took over in 2000 in the new service building, which consisted of ten rented workplaces and offices. Gedik renewed the confidence placed in him in the elections of 19 March 2005, remained in office until 2013 and handed the chairmanship to Murat Kırlangıç in June 2013.

Craftsmen's Chambers, Unions and New Legislation

The 1925 arrangement placed the small tradesman under the same roof as the merchant, and in time this union caused problems. The number of craftsmen's societies had risen to 191, and the instruction had come to contain scattered and contradictory provisions. The credit needs of small tradesmen were a separate problem. The reasoning of the government's bill of 1933 states that outside the large cities the interest rate of banks had risen to thirty-eight percent and that moneylenders charged between five and ten percent a month. On this ground Law no. 2284, adopted on 8 August 1933, created the People's Bank and the People's Funds, and the credit needs of small tradesmen and craftsmen were to be met by the state.

Law no. 4355 of 1943 on Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Craftsmen's Chambers and Commodity Exchanges gathered the tradesmen for the first time in separate chambers. According to the law, a tradesman was an owner of a craft or trade whose trade depended more on physical labour than on cash capital and whose earnings were just enough to make a living, and he was obliged to register with the craftsmen's chamber of his place. The reasoning of the law particularly stresses that the craftsmen's chambers were established to secure professional ethics and discipline. This emphasis suggests that the ethical and disciplinary outlook of the Ahi and guild tradition was meant to be carried over into the new institutions. However, the following have been listed as reasons for the failure of this system: the trade chambers and the craftsmen's chambers worked like opposing bodies rather than complementing each other, the old societies continued where no craftsmen's chamber was founded, the law contained no provisions to secure solidarity among tradesmen, the secretaries-general of the chambers were appointed by the ministry and endowed with broad powers, and the bodies did not receive sufficient administrative and financial support.

Law no. 5373 on Craftsmen's Associations and Craftsmen's Unions, adopted on 25 April 1949, abandoned the chamber system and moved to a system of associations and unions, and the first independent organisation of tradesmen was achieved by this law. In 1953 the Confederation of Turkish Tradesmen and Small Craftsmen was founded in Ankara, in 1964 Law no. 507 was adopted, and the present framework is drawn by Law no. 5362 on Craftsmen's Professional Organisations of 2005. Chambers of commerce and industry, for their part, were reorganised by Law no. 5590, adopted on 8 March 1950. The law came into force in April 1951, allowed merchants and industrialists for the first time to form separate chambers, and took geographical representation rather than branch of trade as the basis of organisation. State tutelage was eased and the way was opened for the founding of the Union of Chambers and Exchanges. This framework is the basis of the structure of today's chambers of commerce and industry. In Merzifon, the largest district of Amasya, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry was founded on 1 April 1949.

The Chamber's Field of Work and the Continuity of the Craft Tradition

Today the function of the Amasya Chamber of Commerce and Industry extends from looking after the common interests of the tradesmen and merchants it represents to the promotion and registration of local products. In 2021 a promotional programme was held for Amasya Çöreği, which was registered with the cooperation of the Amasya Governorship, the Yeşilırmak Basin Development Union and the chamber. Speaking at the programme, the chairman of the chamber said that the province had until then had four products with geographical indications, Çiçek Bamyası, Merzifon Keşkeği, Amasya Beji Mermeri and Amasya Misket Elması, and that with the addition of Baklalı Dolma and Amasya Çöreği the number had risen to six. It was also stressed at this meeting that the çörek is produced by a tradition passed from father to son. The guild's control of quality and origin is, in this example, being continued with new legal instruments, through geographical indication and registration.

Chronology

1794: Selim III issues a decree abolishing the tradesmen's monopolies other than those on essential foodstuffs.

1829: The French traveller Victor Fontanier estimates Amasya's silk production at two million kuruş a year on average.

1838: The Baltalimanı Trade Convention provides for the abolition of all monopoly rights.

1840: A Swiss trade agency is opened in Amasya.

1852: Georg Krug founds Amasya's first modern silk factory.

1864: A fair starting each year on 15 December is established in Amasya.

1874: The duties of the Commission for the Reform of Industry are transferred to the Istanbul Municipality.

1882: The Istanbul Chamber of Commerce begins operating.

1910: The Regulation on Chambers of Commerce and Industry is issued, and the Instruction on Craftsmen's Societies is issued for Istanbul.

1912: The Instruction on Craftsmen's Societies is extended to the whole country.

1913: The gedik and guild system is abolished.

1925: Law no. 655 on Chambers of Commerce and Industry is issued and the craftsmen's kethüdalıks are abolished.

1926: The Amasya Chamber of Commerce and Industry is founded through the efforts of Hasan Tahsin Efendi.

1943: Law no. 4355 establishes the craftsmen's chambers.

1949: Law no. 5373 introduces the system of craftsmen's associations and unions in place of chambers; the Merzifon Chamber of Commerce and Industry is founded.

1950: Law no. 5590 is adopted (it enters into force in April 1951).

1954-1967: The service building of the Amasya Chamber of Commerce and Industry is built and enlarged.

2005: Law no. 5362 on Craftsmen's Professional Organisations is issued.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Osman Fevzi Olcay, Amasya Hâtıraları, Amasya Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources