Amasya is a land made fertile as much by its mountains as by its plains, and as much by its high pastures as by its valleys. Directly above the rich lowlands opened up by the Yeşilırmak and its tributaries rise massifs such as Akdağ, Tavşan Dağı, İnegöl, Karaömer and Sakarat, and roughly one eighth of the province is classed as yayla, or upland summer pasture. Here stock-raising has for centuries formed the basis of a whole way of life, and transhumance, known in Turkish as yaylacılık, has always been its most distinctive and deeply rooted part. A long-established form of animal husbandry among the Turks, yaylacılık is the age-old way of making the best use of high-altitude grazing: the flock that winters in the village or on the plain climbs to cool pastures when the weather warms and comes down again in autumn. Since the geography of the uplands, their altitudes and their vegetation are described in other articles, this one deals only with the culture that grew up around this seasonal migration: its historical roots, its calendar, the labour of the shepherd, the produce of the summer pasture and the customs that are still alive today.

Yaylak and Kışlak: The Roots of the Concept

The words yaylak and kışlak reach back to the oldest layers of the Turkish language. From the Orkhon inscriptions onwards, Old Turkic texts use kışlak for the place where winter is spent and yaylak for the place where summer is spent. In the Dîvânü lugāti't-Türk, Mahmud al-Kashgari recorded that these words derive from the roots "kış" (winter) and "yay" (summer), and Besim Atalay, who translated the work into Turkish, explained the suffix as +la-ġ. Used in the same sense for more than a thousand years, the two words are defined in Ottoman-era dictionaries as the two complementary halves of semi-nomadic life. In some works published at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, yayla was confused with the physical-geographical term "plateau", and the error found its way onto many maps. Yayla is in fact a term of human geography, and it denotes less a particular elevation than a place of settlement to which people go and in which they live during the summer.

The distinction between semi-nomadism and full nomadism is also important for understanding this culture. Nomads are communities that move constantly according to the season and to economic conditions, whereas semi-nomads (konar göçer) move between fixed places. Such communities keep permanent shelters in their winter quarters, often farm there, and in summer go up to particular pastures. The geographer Necdet Tunçdilek wrote that in Turkey neither relief, nor climate, nor vegetation directly determines the formation of a yayla, and that any place which can be added to a village's sphere of livelihood and supply part of its people's living takes on the character of a yayla. In his view the yaylas arose from the villages' need for a second source of livelihood elsewhere. Most yaylas in Turkey are "climbed-to" pastures in the mountains above the village; there are also "travelled-to" yaylas on the same level ground in the plains of Central Anatolia, and "descended-to" yaylas lying lower than the town, as in the case of Karabağlar near Muğla. Amasya's yaylas clearly belong to the first group: the flocks of villages on the plain and in the valleys go up to the high flats of the mountains in summer.

In legal terms a yayla is high ground allotted to the people of one or more villages or towns so that they may go up with their animals, spend the summer there and graze their flocks. Yaylas generally belong to village communities, but privately owned, title-deeded yaylas also exist. According to a classification used by agricultural researchers, the grazing season lasts 140 to 160 days on low yaylas between 900 and 1200 metres, 100 to 140 days on middle yaylas between 1200 and 1600 metres, and 60 to 80 days on high yaylas above 1600 metres. Because Amasya's yaylas range across a broad span from 1200 to 1850 metres, all of these grazing calendars can be found side by side within the province.

The Semi-Nomadic Past of Amasya

The Turks who came into Anatolia after the victory at Malazgirt in 1071 brought with them the semi-nomadic way of life they had known in Central Asia, and from the earliest period they took up winter and summer quarters in places that suited them. Although some of them soon settled down, semi-nomadism remained significant throughout the Seljuk and Beylik periods. Ottoman tax registers show that in the sixteenth century about fifteen per cent of the population of Anatolia was semi-nomadic. Amasya and its surroundings, together with Sivas and Tokat, were among the regions where these communities were most numerous.

Throughout history the yaylas of this region were a valuable and at times a contested asset. Describing the mid-thirteenth century, when the Ilkhanids dominated Anatolia, Abdîzâde Hüseyin Hüsameddin writes in his Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya) that Tatar beys and tribes poured into the province of Amasya, seized the best yaylas and fields and drove out their rightful owners. According to the same account, the governor of Amasya, Seyfeddin Haydar Bey, protected the landowners in property disputes and did not hesitate to punish those who attempted plunder. Hüsameddin also records that Taşan Bey, who ruled between Köprü and Havza, lived in the high mountains and yaylas between Köprü and Merzifon, and that these mountains came to be called "Taşan Dağı" after him; a yayla could thus be more than a pasture for flocks, serving also as the summer seat of a local lord.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries one of the largest semi-nomadic bodies in Anatolia was the community known as the Ulu Yörük. Parts of it were found around Antalya and Ankara, but its main mass lived in the regions of Sivas, Tokat, Amasya, Çorum, Yozgat and Kırşehir. According to the researcher Davut Şahbaz, the community's older name was Etrak-ı Büzürk, and it was a legacy of the Turkic and Tatar semi-nomadic groups that the Ilkhanids, after taking control of Anatolia following the Battle of Kösedağ, brought to the region and granted lands. Erhan Afyoncu states that in 1574 there were 590 Ulu Yörük communities with 20,137 households and 18,019 unmarried adult males. The Ulu Yörük were divided into three branches, the Yüzde Pâre, Orta Pâre and Şark Pâre, and these in turn consisted of divisions such as the İlbeyli, Çepni, Akkuzulu, Gökçeli, Çungar, Karakeçili and Akçakoyunlu. At the beginning of the sixteenth century all of these divisions were also farming in their winter quarters.

The principal obligations of the semi-nomads towards the state were assessed on the pastures they used and on their flocks. Their basic taxes were the summer and winter pasture dues (yaylak and kışlak resmi) and the sheep tax known as âdet-i ağnâm, which in the sixteenth century was collected at one akçe for every two sheep. When flocks were seriously reduced by epidemic or by bandit raids, a new count was made at the request of the tribes. The summer and winter grounds of every semi-nomadic community were fixed by the central government, which in this way sought to prevent quarrels between tribes. To keep flocks from mixing, every family had its own mark or brand. The semi-nomads sold their animals and produce to the settled population when they came near the towns or at the yayla markets, and sent their sheep to the great cities through drovers known as celep. They were also obliged to supply the army on campaign with meat, milk, cheese and butter.

The Gökçeli Yörüks: The Summer and Winter Grounds of One Community

One of the best illustrations of the historical depth of transhumance in Amasya is the Gökçeli community, which settled on the Karadağ range lying today between the district of Göynücek and the Çorum district of Mecidözü. According to Sabit Genç's study, based on Ottoman population and temettuat (income survey) registers, the community belonged to the Orta Pâre branch of the Ulu Yörük. The earliest Ottoman document concerning it that has come to light dates from 1486; there the Gökçeli appear as "Cemaat-i Gökçeli Tabi-i Sivas" within a Yörük group registered as Etrak-i Sivas, and no village name is yet given. In 1576 the community's winter quarters of Gökçeli, Yassıkışla and Sığırçayı were recorded as villages of the kaza of Geldigelen in the sanjak of Amasya. In the register of 1695, Karayakub, Göynücek, Kavakalanı, Yassıkışla, Gökçeli, Eski Kışla and other villages are listed under the name Kabile-i Gökçeli; the word "kışla" in the village names is a clear trace of their former use as winter quarters.

The members of the Gökçeli community used as winter quarters the sites of the present-day villages of Damlaçimen, Karayakub, Gökçeli, Göynücek and Yassıkışla, strung from south to north along the eastern slopes of Karadağ, and in summer they took their flocks up to the flats on the summit of Karadağ. The people of Sığırçayı, who belonged to the same community, settled east of the Çekerek River and used as their summer pasture not Karadağ but Buzluk Dağı, which forms the eastern edge of the Çekerek basin. Genç finds that after the seventeenth century the community had to share its yaylas with large Kurdish tribes such as the Milli, Kavilli and Şeyh Bezenli that came into the region. The fact that Karadağ was not extensive enough to support large flocks must have helped keep the community's numbers of sheep and goats limited.

The temettuat survey of 1844-45 lays out the economic picture of this semi-settled life in detail. Of the 206 households in the community's seven villages, 159 paid the tithe, meaning that most households were by then regularly farming in their winter quarters. Stock-raising, however, had not been abandoned: the villages kept 1,264 head of cattle, 996 of them ordinary cattle and 268 water buffalo, and 3,440 sheep and goats, 904 of them sheep and 2,536 goats. The number of small livestock per household was 16.69. The marked preference for goats over sheep is striking; the goat moves more easily over steep and rugged ground and adapts more readily to life on the summer pasture. That the goat was the mainstay of herding is a well-known general feature of the Yörüks, and Genç regards this preference as a sign that the influence of the old life between summer and winter grounds was still alive.

The same registers show how skilfully the community made use of its terrain. The high ground that served as the villages' summer pasture was given over to sheep and goats, while the wet and marshy stretches beside the Çekerek River close to the villages were reserved for large animals such as water buffalo and cattle. Donkeys were used to carry loads and people; there were 154 donkeys in the 206 households, and donkeys were kept in every one of the seven villages. Beekeeping, by contrast, was little developed: only one household in the village of Köseeyüb was recorded with five hives. The kaza of Orta Pâre, to which the Gökçeli belonged and whose centre was Zile, was abolished in 1853 after the Tanzimat, and the Yörüks attached to it were placed under the kazas in which they lived for administrative, judicial and fiscal purposes. The administrative framework of semi-nomadism thus disappeared, but the habit of going up to the yayla survived as part of village life.

The Pastures of Akdağ and the Dairy Produce of Amasya

Hüsameddin, who wrote his history of Amasya at the beginning of the twentieth century, gives a special place to transhumance in his description of the nahiye of Akdağ, which encircles the east of the city. This district, whose centre was the village of Akviran, took its name from the mountain long famous as Akdağ, at whose foot it lies. According to Hüsameddin, because this mountain has abundant summer pasture, convenient winter quarters, plentiful water and an exceptionally healthy climate, most of the sheep flocks of the sanjak of Amasya graze there in summer; its butter, cheese and yoghurt are prized and enjoy an extraordinary reputation throughout the Pontus region. This short note shows that a century ago the Akdağ pastures were already a centre feeding the flocks of the whole sanjak, and that their produce was known beyond the region. That so respected a spiritual guide as Sheikh Muhyiddin Mehmed Akdâğî came from the village of Baş Alan in the same district is also a reminder that the mountain villages never lost their ties with the cultural life of the city.

Hüsameddin also relates that the quarters of Karasenir and Kayabaşı, just outside the city, had the look of prosperous villages, that their vineyards, market gardens, butter, yoghurt and cheese were much admired, and adds that the manners, bearing and livelihood of these quarters were exceedingly pure and simple and that the custom of the old Türkmens still prevailed there. This testimony shows that stock-raising and dairying were a living tradition even on the edge of the city, and that the local people saw them as a continuation of their Türkmen past. Today the association of the villages around Akdağ traces its own history to the same roots: according to a speech given by its president at a yayla festival, the Akdağ villages were founded in the fourteenth century by people of Yörük and Türkmen stock who came from the Üçok branch of the Oghuz. This is reported here as local tradition, and confirming it from documents would require separate research.

Milk lies at the heart of what is produced on the yayla. Grazing on cool pastures through the summer both keeps the animals healthy and raises their milk yield. Milk drawn in the cool of the morning is made into cheese, yoghurt and butter; these products, accumulated over the summer, are carried down to the village in autumn and added to the winter stores. Şamil Soyal, one of the herders who took their flocks from Taşova up to the yayla in the spring of 2024, explains in his own words why the yayla matters to the animals: down on the plain there is farmland, but the yayla, as its name says, is pasture; in the heat the sheep suffer from ağrıma, a heat-related ailment, but in the cool of the yayla they do not; and anyone who wants to milk can do so and take his cheese and milk. These plain sentences show clearly why transhumance was never abandoned over the centuries.

The Calendar of the Migration

In the traditional folk calendar of Anatolia the year was divided into two great seasons. Under the old calendar, the 186 days from 23 April (6 May) to 26 October (8 November), called the "days of Hızır", made up the summer, and the remaining 179 days, called the "days of Kasım", made up the winter. Hıdrellez was celebrated as the day on which winter ended and summer began, while 8 November was regarded as the beginning of winter. Many archival documents show that in the Ottoman period even affairs of state were planned according to these two periods, "from the day of Hızır to the day of Kasım" and "from the day of Kasım to the day of Hızır". The calendar of shepherding and transhumance largely followed this twofold order too, with the flock's ascent to the yayla associated with the beginning of summer and its return to the village with the beginning of winter.

A field study of Yaylacık Dağı in neighbouring Tokat shows how this calendar lives on among the people. There, depending on the weather and the state of the snow, sheep and goats may go up to the yayla with the shepherds before May, while the families generally move between 15 and 21 May. This date is connected with the customary value attached throughout Anatolia to the day called "mayıs yedisi" (the seventh of May), Rumi 7 May, which corresponds to 21 May in the Gregorian calendar; older herders still use the expression for the time of going up. The researcher notes that mayıs yedisi refers less to a fixed day on which everyone sets out than to a period in which each family leaves when it is ready. Before the move, the yayla houses are repaired and made ready for use.

In Amasya the timing of the migration varies from year to year with the weather. Recep Taş, a stockbreeder in Taşova, related that in the spring of 2024, because of drought and temperatures far above the seasonal norm, he had to set out with his family's five hundred sheep for the Başyurt Yayla on Akdağ forty to forty-five days earlier than usual. In April the temperature had reached thirty degrees, and the flock's journey took twenty-four hours. Taş describes the hardships of the road as sleeplessness and long walking, and says that the flock must stay on the yayla until 15 October, after which they will come back down to the village the same way. This calendar shows that the old order, which divided summer from winter by the days of Hızır and Kasım, persists today with the flexibility that the climate demands.

A Calling Passed from Grandfather to Grandson

For those who raise livestock in Amasya, the migration of the flocks to the yayla is a tradition inherited from their forebears. The work lives on as a chain of knowledge and responsibility handed down from grandfather to father and from father to son. Recep Taş describes this chain through his own family: after his grandfathers his father did this work, now he and his kin do it, and he says their children will do it too. Şamil Soyal takes the roots of the tradition further back still, saying that they have been on the move since Central Asia and that their origins are Yörük. These statements reflect family memory, yet in the light of the five-hundred-year record of the Gökçeli community and the strong presence of the Ulu Yörük in the region, they cannot be said to lack a historical basis.

When transhumance is carried on as a farming activity, it may involve several members of every family in the village or only the flocks of a few families. Most of those who take part in the move are children, women and shepherds. To some yaylas the families do not go at all and the flock goes up with the shepherd alone; the Tokat study likewise identified yaylas to which only shepherds go. In this second arrangement the shepherd's knowledge and trustworthiness directly affect the livelihood of the whole village; the loss or sickness of a flock can put the winter of many families at risk.

The Shepherd's Labour and Life

The shepherd is seen as more than a keeper of the flock: he is a master who reads nature, senses the weather and knows the grass and the water. Knowing which slope turns green first, which plant disagrees with the animals and from which direction a storm will come is the fruit of experience handed down from generation to generation. The shepherd, who is paid for his seasonal service, also receives food and clothing from the owners of the animals. In the village he lodges in unused houses or in shelters built specially for shepherds; on the yayla he stays beside the flock, in simple huts or in small structures next to the folds. The months spent on the yayla create a quiet but enduring partnership between the shepherd and nature.

The shepherd's faithful dog, the flock's second guardian, is the inseparable companion of these migrations. Guarding the flock against wolves, gathering strays and keeping watch around the fold at night, the dog also shares the shepherd's solitude. The layout of yayla settlements, too, was shaped by the needs of this life. The yayla houses described in the Yaylacık Dağı study in Tokat, a type also common on other Tokat pastures, give an idea of the upland architecture of the neighbouring region: mostly single-storey buildings consisting of a one-room house with a byre beside it, and in front of the byre an open fold of branches and thorny brushwood called "çevrik" or "çevirme". Inside the house there is a hearth or stove on which all the cooking is done; processing milk and draining the whey from cheese and yoghurt are the chief occupations of these cramped spaces.

Life on the yayla is not confined to grazing the flock. The folk songs sung and the stories told around the fire on cool nights turn the loneliness of the mountain into shared conversation. The months spent on the yayla become stories to be told and songs to be sung until the following spring, and they fill the village's winter gatherings. With the first chill of autumn the yaylas empty and the flocks come back down to the plain. This return marks the completion of a year for the animals fattened all summer on mountain grass and for the people carrying down the summer's produce.

The place of shepherding in the folk culture of Amasya is reflected in its legends as well. Outside the city, the hill between the quarters of Karasenir and Kayabaşı takes its name from Serçoban, who is believed to lie buried there. According to local tradition, Serçoban was a man of learning who fell out of favour under Mongol rule, withdrew to the neighbourhood of the village of Karasenir and earned his living as a shepherd. In one legend told among the people, Serçoban, while grazing his flock on the mountain, chases a runaway kid for a long time and, when he catches it, means to slaughter it, but he is moved by the animal's gaze and lets it go, saying, "You have tired me out too, blessed one." According to the story, when he died every animal in his flock turned into a tree and a grove grew up around his grave; the local people believe that cutting these trees brings misfortune.

A similar legend is told in Osmancık, a neighbour of Amasya, about Koyun Baba: grazing sheep at the foot of Adatepe, the Baba chases a runaway sheep nine times around the hill and, when at last he is exhausted, takes the sheep in his arms and kisses its eyes. A story of the same pattern is known about Piri Baba, who is buried in Merzifon, and his brother Çoban Baba. These legends convey less a historical event than a set of values: looking upon animals with patience and compassion, and upon the flock as a trust. That is why, in the eyes of the people, shepherding did not remain merely a means of livelihood but entered the lives of the saints as a symbol of patience and humility.

Yayla Festivals

Every year many yayla festivals are held across the province of Amasya. In the past these festivals were held to turn the migration to the yayla and the work done there into an occasion for celebration; today, with the growth of tourism, they have become events where people from elsewhere also gather. This change shows that while the economic weight of transhumance has declined, it lives on as cultural memory. Most of the festivals are organised by associations founded by people from the villages that share a yayla who now live in the cities or abroad; the yayla thus becomes a place where families who have left the village meet once a year.

The Kuzoluk Yayla Festival, organised since 2011 by the Amasya Akdağ Association, is one of these events. According to the association, the festival brings together the people of some 42 villages around Akdağ and aims to make the younger generations love the yaylas and to unite past and future; the programme includes competitions and folk dance performances. The Kabaoğuz Yayla Festival, organised in Gümüşhacıköy by the association of the Kabaoğuz villages, is with its thirty-year history one of the oldest yayla gatherings in the province. The three-day festival opens with drum and zurna, halay dances begin when the festival fire is lit, and the most popular part of the programme is the traditional karakucak wrestling. The festival fire, the halay and the wrestling are forms in which the old holiday spirit of the yayla migration has been carried into the present.

The Present Situation and Its Problems

Today transhumance has declined greatly compared with the past, both in Amasya and throughout Turkey. According to the herders interviewed in the Yaylacık Dağı study in neighbouring Tokat, 951 families went up to the yaylas of that mountain with their animals in the 1970s, whereas by 2004 the number had fallen to 409; over the same period the number of sheep and goats taken up to the yayla also dropped sharply. The researcher names migration from the villages to the cities as the foremost cause of this decline. Across Turkey, too, almost all winter quarters have disappeared, and some of the summer pastures are now used more for holiday homes and tourism than for stock-raising.

Soyal points out that their way of making a living is vanishing day by day and says the state must urgently provide support. According to Soyal, an annual ear-tag subsidy of one hundred lira per animal is paid, but this is not enough; what the herders want is security such as insurance and a salary, and they believe that only in this way could the number of animals be doubled or tripled. The yaylas themselves are under pressure. Excessive use of agricultural chemicals and fertiliser, overgrazing and the clearing of land for fields have damaged part of the yaylas, and on the upper slopes the bedrock is almost exposed. In the forests at the edges of the yaylas young trees are failing to replace the old ones, and the tree line is steadily moving downhill.

Despite this picture, the herders of the region strive to carry on the heritage they received from their forebears. Every spring the flocks that set out from Taşova and from the Akdağ villages show that a way of life bearing the accumulated experience of centuries still continues in the mountains of Amasya. This continuity, reaching from the fifteenth-century records of the Gökçeli Yörüks through Hüsameddin's Akdağ cheese to the early migration of 2024, makes transhumance one of the most deeply rooted traditions of rural Amasya.

Chronology

1071: After the victory at Malazgirt, the Turkic communities arriving in Anatolia bring their semi-nomadic way of life to their new homeland and begin to take up winter and summer quarters.

Mid-13th century: According to Hüsameddin, in the Ilkhanid period Tatar beys and tribes seize the best yaylas and fields of the province of Amasya; the governor Seyfeddin Haydar Bey protects the landowners.

1486: The Gökçeli community appears for the first time in Ottoman records, within the Yörük group called Etrak-i Sivas.

1574: 590 Ulu Yörük communities are recorded, with 20,137 households and 18,019 unmarried adult males.

1576: The Gökçeli community's winter quarters of Gökçeli, Yassıkışla and Sığırçayı are registered as villages of the kaza of Geldigelen in the sanjak of Amasya.

1695: Karayakub, Göynücek, Yassıkışla, Eski Kışla and other villages are recorded under the name Kabile-i Gökçeli.

1831: A male population of 527 is counted in the seven villages of the Gökçeli community.

1844-45: In the temettuat survey, 1,264 cattle and 3,440 sheep and goats are recorded in the community's 206 households; 2,536 of the small livestock are goats.

1853: The Ulu Yörük kaza of Orta Pâre is abolished, and the Yörüks attached to it are placed under the kazas in which they live.

2011: The Amasya Akdağ Association begins organising yayla festivals.

2024: Because of drought and high temperatures, the migration of flocks from Taşova to the Akdağ pastures begins in April, forty to forty-five days earlier than usual.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Abdîzâde Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar, Amasya Tarihi, Amasya Municipality Cultural Publications (the nahiye of Akdağ, the quarters of Karasenir and Kayabaşı, events of the Ilkhanid period).

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources