After the Armistice of Mudros, most of Anatolia came under the threat of occupation, and the weight of that threat was felt most heavily in towns and villages. The Turkish War of Independence is usually told through congresses, circulars and fronts, yet the burden of the struggle was carried in small provincial centers, in village guest rooms, in district offices and in post offices. Amasya is a two-layered example in this respect. The provincial center hosted Mustafa Kemal Pasha, and the Amasya Circular was issued from it on 22 June 1919; the surrounding districts and sub-districts took on the everyday and exhausting work of public security, provisioning, soldiers and transport.

Most of the districts that belong to Amasya today were not separate administrative units in those years. Merzifon and Gümüşhacıköy were districts (kaza). Suluova was a settlement known as Alevi, which became a sub-district (nahiye) in 1903; Hamamözü was a small sub-district attached to Gümüşhacıköy. The Taşova area lay within the Sanjak of Tokat and was administered as part of Erbaa in the early years of the Republic. Göynücek was attached to Mecitözü through the Varay (Gediksaray) sub-district, and thereby to the Sanjak of Amasya; it first gained district status in 1922, lost it in 1926 and became a district again in 1954. For this reason the share of the districts in the War of Independence must often be sought not under their own names but within the records of the administrative units to which they belonged.

The Security Problem After Mudros

When Mustafa Kemal Pasha landed at Samsun on 19 May 1919 as Inspector of the Ninth Army, the Black Sea region was in a serious security crisis. The roots of the problem go back to the years of the First World War; during the war, bands made up of deserters and of various communities had engaged in theft and murder, and after the armistice, when the armies shrank and much of their weaponry was collected, no force remained to defend the local population. Studies based on archival documents record that the Greek bands organized around the Pontus idea became more aggressive in this vacuum and raided Muslim villages. Among the thirteen district centers that were the scene of the bands' attacks were Amasya, Merzifon, Gümüşhacıköy, Havza, Köprü (Vezirköprü), Ladik, Erbaa and Tokat.

The report that Mustafa Kemal Pasha sent from Samsun on 25 May 1919 paints the picture plainly. According to him, after the armistice the Greeks had gathered around Greek national aspirations, and all the bands, bound to an orderly program, had acquired a political character. The Muslim majority, meanwhile, was "in a timid state," anxious about the security of its property and its future; villagers appealed to him in tears, and some hesitated even to name their attackers. In a second report sent from Havza on 5 June 1919 he writes that there were twenty-one Greek bands within the borders of the Sanjak of Amasya, and adds that in the Sanjak of Tokat, east of the Ladik district of Amasya, in Erbaa and partly in Niksar, there were five more bands with strong followings. According to the recorded figures, the number of murders committed in Amasya town alone between the armistice and the end of 1920 was around twenty-three; twenty-five Muslims were killed in them, four were wounded, and seventeen villages were raided and had goods and animals seized.

Most of the records on the bands were kept by the Turkish authorities of the time and later gathered in compilations, so the figures cannot be individually verified in an independent way. On the other hand, Mustafa Kemal Pasha's own reports and the clash records of military units together show that a real security problem persisted in the region from 1919 to 1922.

The Amasya Circular and Merzifon

Mustafa Kemal Pasha arrived in Amasya on 12 June 1919. On 14 June the notables of the city, meeting at the Atik Âli School under the chairmanship of the mufti Hacı Hafız Tevfik Efendi, founded the Association for the Defense of Rights, and the circular issued on 22 June set out the method of the national struggle with the sentence "The independence of the nation will be saved by the nation's own resolve and decision." The circular called for a national congress to be convened at Sivas and for three representatives to be sent from each sanjak. The districts were the places where this call found its response in towns and villages.

Merzifon was the district that responded earliest and most visibly. The town was occupied by the British on 15 March 1919. At a large rally held on 16 June 1919 the occupation of İzmir was protested, and Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who was in Amasya at the time, reported the rally to the Ministry of War in a telegram. An Association for the Defense of Rights was founded under the chairmanship of the mufti Vehbi Efendi. The British withdrew from Merzifon on 27 September 1919.

Gümüşhacıköy

Gümüşhacıköy was a district on the trade route between Anatolia and Rumelia, known for its covered market (bedesten) and the silver mine nearby. During the War of Independence this town, lying right next to the foreign presence in Merzifon, was one of the first places to face such tests. According to an account based on M. Metin's research, on 15 May 1919 Mister Getchell, one of the teachers of Merzifon Anatolia College, came to Gümüşhacıköy with an officer and some twenty-five armed British soldiers, gathered the officials in the hall of the government house and said: "We are the victors, you are the defeated. You will carry out whatever we order." The mufti among the listeners replied: "We know no victor or vanquished. We are bound to obey the orders given by our government." According to the same account, Getchell also demanded that the Armenians in the district who had become Muslims be gathered in the church and return to their former faith, and that Armenian women married to Muslims do the same.

The visit was not counted as an occupation in the town, because no attempt had been made to take control of the district governorship, the municipality or any other institution. Local accounts nevertheless agree on one point. The British group, whose arrival had been learned in advance, entered the town amid the protests of a crowd that, at the municipality's call, had lined both sides of the street with picks, shovels, axes and rifles; it went on to Gümüş, returned in the evening along the same road amid the same reaction, went back to Merzifon and never came again. Part of these accounts rests on oral tradition and they differ in detail; yet they agree that the event was not an occupation but a brief show of force, and that it met an organized local resistance.

Gümüşhacıköy's contribution to the national struggle was not limited to this reception. While Mustafa Kemal Pasha was working in the Saraydüzü Barracks in Amasya, he needed a reliable telegraph clerk with a clear hand. The name the postmaster proposed was Abdurrahman Rahmi (Erden) Bey, who had spent his childhood in Gümüşhacıköy and begun his first post at the district's post office; his mother was the head teacher of the Gümüşhacıköy Girls' School. His name appears under the Amasya Circular as the clerk who encrypted it for the civil authorities.

Gümüşhacıköy was also part of the regional organization. Twenty-four delegates from the districts of Gümüşhacıköy, Vezirköprü, Havza, Ladik and Merzifon attended the Merzifon Congress, convened on 3 July 1920 to organize the Central Black Sea National Forces. Gümüşhacıköy was represented by District Governor Şeref, Müftüzade Şükrü, Kılağuzzade Hilmi, Becenzade Necip, Yusufzade Namık Necip and Karslızade Rıza. One of the deputies who represented Amasya in the First Grand National Assembly in Ankara was also a son of this district. Ali Rıza Özdarende, born in Gümüşhacıköy in 1876, was elected deputy for Amasya in the first term while serving as the district's mufti, continued in the second term and worked in the committees on the Fundamental Law and on Sharia affairs; he died in 1952.

Material support was not lacking from the district either. During the defense of Maraş, regarded as the first great resistance of the War of Independence, 300 lira was sent from Gümüşhacıköy in 1920; the number of places that gave aid at that time was only twenty-two provinces and districts, and the total amount was 21,864.23 lira. In 1921 the Gümüşhacıköy merchant Kilimzâde Halil Efendi, after paying his share of the National Levies (Tekâlif-i Millîye), undertook to make five thousand bridle reins, to be delivered at a thousand a month, and was thanked by the Ministry of National Defense for this sacrifice. The district branch of the Red Crescent showed an income of 2,199 kuruş in a record dated 14 March 1921. In the Ottoman archives there is a record dated 9 August 1919 that provisions were carried by ox cart from Gümüşhacıköy to Samsun; the document does not make clear whether the shipment went to military supply depots or to the port of Samsun.

When the war ended, the reaction of the district's people was also recorded. After the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, the special Gümüş and Hacıköy issue of the Amasya newspaper Emel, dated 24 July 1923, describes the celebrations in the town in detail: free sweets and Turkish delight handed out by the bazaar tradesmen, shops and schools decked with flags, a torchlit procession of thousands of lanterns at night, fires lit on mountaintops and, between Gümüş and Gümüşhacıköy, children carrying tortoises with candles lit on their shells. The young merchant Şakir Efendi had music played in his shop in honor of the peace and gave out money on behalf of the orphans of the fallen. The telegram that reached Hâkimiyet-i Millîye in 1924 reports that the first anniversary of the Republic was celebrated with the same enthusiasm.

A note on the district's multicultural character should also be included. According to oral testimony given in 2016 by an Armenian-origin family living in Gümüşhacıköy, during the First World War and the War of Independence the notables of the town met anti-Armenian groups at the turn-off of the old Çorum road and did not let them into the town, so that no Armenian was harmed. This is a testimony and carries no documentary weight on its own; it does suggest, however, that during the war years the district experienced not only a military mobilization but also a search for social balance.

Taşova and the Northeastern Valleys

Unlike the other districts, the story of the Taşova area in the War of Independence is told through direct clashes. Organized in the Ottoman period as a village attached to the Sanjak of Tokat, Taşova remained attached to Erbaa in the early years of the Republic and became an independent district only in 1944; in 1953 it was separated from Tokat and joined to Amasya. In the War of Independence the area was a target of attacks by Greek bands. According to the account given by the municipality and by local historians, the bands attacked Turkish villages and killed many people without distinguishing women, children or the elderly; in response the people armed themselves and began to resist. The same account adds that after the national struggle succeeded, military forces were sent to the region and that the area was cleared of the bands by armed struggle. The records compiled from archives, however, show that clashes took place intensively well before this clearing, between 1920 and 1922.

Local records based on Hüseyin Menç's compilation Millî Mücadele Yıllarında Amasya and on Pontus Meselesi, published by the Grand National Assembly, list the events in Taşova and its surroundings village by village. In May 1920 one person was killed at Kozluca, and 65 cattle, 170 sheep and goats and a thousand measures of grain were taken. In the same month several people from the villages of Bidevi (today Esençay) and Boladan were shot dead in a clash around Gökçukur. On 20 January 1921 Rıfat Efendi, the commander of the Destek sub-district's gendarmerie post, was killed, and on 2 June 1921 the Destek sub-district director was killed as he returned from the tarawih prayer. In June 1921 four people from the village of Karsavul and five whose identities could not be established were killed; in September 1921 several people were killed at the village of Karlık, more than a hundred buffalo and cattle were taken and twelve houses were burned. In August 1921 people were killed in the villages of Boraboy and Halamaz and hundreds of animals were seized. The same records state that in January 1922 Boladan (today Kumluca) was raided and plundered, the village of seventy households was burned, and eleven people who could not get out of their houses, six men and five women, burned to death.

The military units sent to the area against these attacks paid a heavy price. After the Battle of the Sakarya, the units in the Amasya, Samsun and Tokat region were reinforced; Cemil Cahit Bey, commander of the 5th Caucasus Division, was appointed to command the 15th Division at Samsun and resumed the pursuit of bands in the region where he had served before. According to the records, the bands moved in groups ranging from a hundred to eight hundred men and set ambushes at the passes. Foremost among these passes were the Cubi (Cobu) Stream near Destek and the Dazlı Pass near Erbaa. The many caves around the Dazlı Stream made it easy for the bands to hide and to control the stream bed. After March 1921 a unit made up mostly of soldiers from Amasya was ambushed and eleven soldiers were martyred. In the four days of fighting at the Dazlı Stream from 18 to 21 January 1922, nine soldiers fell and one officer and nineteen soldiers were wounded. On 2 February 1922 a gendarmerie company sent out to inspect the terrain was attacked at the Cubi Stream; four were killed and eight wounded. Two days later, in a clash in the same area, nine privates were killed and one officer and nineteen soldiers were wounded. The bands abandoned the valley after this clash; among the weapons they left behind were many Russian rifles and stick grenades of German make.

The account in the notebook of reserve officer Rifat Erdal, who took part in the operation, vividly describes the attack on the valley from three directions. Serving in the first battalion of the 65th Regiment at Erbaa, Erdal writes that about a hundred bandits had taken position on the rocks toward Kâtıralanı and opened fire on the 6th Cavalry Regiment coming from the Destek Pass, that his company broke this resistance with flanking fire, and that Şeref Efendi, a reserve lieutenant from Amasya, was killed by a bullet as he entered the firing line. He also states that they combed the broad area from Çarşamba to Bafra and from Erbaa to Samsun for nine months. These records show that the clashes around Taşova were less a local event than part of a military operation fed from Amasya, Erbaa and Samsun.

Suluova, Hamamözü and Göynücek

In those years Suluova was a sub-district known as Alevi and was attached to the central district of Amasya. The role of this settlement, which lies in the middle of the plain west of Amasya, in the War of Independence stems from its being a transit route. According to local accounts, when Mustafa Kemal Pasha crossed from Havza to Amasya in 1919, his car broke down so often that he stopped and rested at Suluova. This account rests on oral tradition rather than on a document. The economic importance of the plain also grew in these years: the lignite found at Eski Çeltek in 1911 first met the heating needs of the army and, from 1927, was operated by the State Railways.

The picture is even more limited for Hamamözü and Göynücek. Hamamözü was founded in 1887 when a group of sixty Circassian households, who had migrated from the Caucasus, bought the farm of two notables from Gümüş and settled on it, and it continued as a sub-district attached to Gümüşhacıköy. Since it had no separate administrative identity during the War of Independence, its memories are intertwined with the records of Gümüşhacıköy. Göynücek, too, was not a district at that time; it received district status for the first time in 1922. No separate resistance document, band record or list of congress delegates for these two settlements could be found in the sources surveyed. For this reason the share of the two districts has to be assessed within the mobilization burden of the districts to which they belonged and of the Sanjak of Amasya.

The Burden Carried to the Front

After the Government of the Grand National Assembly was established and took over the administration of the country, resources flowed continuously to the front from Amasya, from a wide area that included its districts and villages. Under the Domestic Supply-Line Organization (Yurtiçi Menzil Teşkilâtı), established by an order of the Ministry of National Defense dated 28 July 1921, a Recruitment Command and a 200-bed military hospital were opened in Amasya, attached to the Çorum Supply-Line District Inspectorate. Among the routes fixed on 27 July 1922 under the Military Transport Obligation Ordinance of 7 May 1922, the transport vehicles of the Amasya, Erbaa and Zile areas carried materiel sent to the front on the Samsun-Çorum section of the Samsun-Çorum-Sungurlu-Yahşihan-Ankara line.

The National Levies Orders (Tekâlif-i Millîye Emirleri) that Commander-in-Chief Mustafa Kemal Pasha issued in August 1921 placed specific obligations on every household. According to the figures compiled for Amasya by Prof. Dr. Mehmet Evsile, under Order No. 2, 3,446 suits of cloth, 10,130 sets of underwear, 124 pairs of boots, 185 pairs of slippers, 14,141 pairs of rawhide sandals (çarık) and 14,584 pairs of socks were collected and delivered to the commission. Under Order No. 10, which set aside twenty percent of the transport vehicles in people's hands for the army, 93 two-horse carts, 125 mules and hinnies, 119 saddle and draught animals, 352 donkeys, 3,093 oxen and water buffalo, 14 sprung horse carts and 1,708 sprung carts were taken into front-line service. These figures were not published broken down by district; the source contains no district breakdown.

Most of the items on the list are rawhide sandals, socks and underwear. The needs of the front consisted largely of things that a village household could sew or weave. The fact that the number of oxen and buffalo far exceeds the number of horse carts also shows that transport in the region depended mainly on animal power.

What the Sources Show and Do Not Show

The place of the districts in the War of Independence can be read today on several levels. The first is the security crisis of early 1919: the attacks of the Pontus bands, Mustafa Kemal Pasha's reports and the military units massed in the region. The second is political organization: the Associations for the Defense of Rights, the Merzifon Congress and the deputies sent to the Assembly. The third is the everyday burden of mobilization: sandals, socks, transport animals, financial aid and a telegraph clerk working in a post office. The weight of these three levels varies from district to district. For Merzifon and Gümüşhacıköy the political and administrative record is abundant, for Taşova there are records of clashes and losses, and for Suluova, Hamamözü and Göynücek there is only indirect information.

Identifying all of the Greek and Armenian communities in the region with the bands is a generalization that the sources do not support; the Gümüşhacıköy example is a reminder that neighborly relations were also decisive in the war years. Establishing the true picture in the districts depends on comparing these records village by village and district by district.

Chronology

15 March 1919: Merzifon is occupied by the British.

15 May 1919: Mister Getchell comes to the government house at Gümüşhacıköy with an officer and some twenty-five armed British soldiers.

19 May 1919: Mustafa Kemal Pasha lands at Samsun.

25 May and 5 June 1919: Mustafa Kemal Pasha sends his reports on band activity in the Sanjak of Amasya from Samsun and Havza.

12 June 1919: Mustafa Kemal Pasha arrives in Amasya.

14 June 1919: The Amasya Association for the Defense of Rights is founded.

16 June 1919: A large rally protesting the occupation of İzmir is held in Merzifon.

22 June 1919: The Amasya Circular is issued.

9 August 1919: Provisions are recorded as carried by ox cart from Gümüşhacıköy to Samsun.

27 September 1919: The British withdraw from Merzifon.

3 July 1920: The Merzifon Congress convenes; Gümüşhacıköy is represented by six delegates.

1920: Gümüşhacıköy sends 300 lira in aid to the defense of Maraş; Ali Rıza Özdarende becomes deputy for Amasya in the first term.

28 July 1921: The order is issued to establish a Recruitment Command and a 200-bed military hospital in Amasya.

August 1921: The National Levies Orders are issued.

18-21 January 1922: Clashes take place around the Dazlı Stream.

2 February 1922: A gendarmerie company is attacked at the Cubi Stream.

24 July 1923: The special Gümüş and Hacıköy issue of the Emel newspaper reports the Lausanne celebrations.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Hüseyin Menç, Millî Mücadele Yıllarında Amasya: Portreler-Belgeler, Yeşilırmak Kitabevi, Ankara 1992.

Official sources

Books

  • Yılmaz Kurt (ed.), Pontus Meselesi, TBMM Yayınları, Ankara 1995.

Other sources

Online sources