One of the villages of Hamamözü district, Umarca is a settlement whose name lives on in official records in two forms. The Hamamözü Municipality's list of muhtars and the recent studies listing the district's villages write "Umarca"; the address-based population results and the village list of the 1990 law that made Hamamözü a district record the same village as "Omarca". Both spellings refer to the same place; the form Umarca, used by the municipality, has been adopted here. Home to 47 people in 2025, the village belonged until 1990 to the Gümüş sub-district of Gümüşhacıköy and, when the district was created, became one of the seven Gümüş sub-district villages that passed to Hamamözü. No published information has been found on the mosque, school, road or produce of the village, whose muhtar (headman) is Bekir Bayraktar.

Ömerce in the 1530 Register

The village's name may have left its earliest traceable mark in Ottoman records in the accounting register of Karaman and Rûm dating from 1530. In the published index of the register, a village named "Ömerce" is recorded among the villages attached to the Gümüş province, with a reference to page 389 of the register. Among the villages of the same province appear Kızılca-viran, the old name of Kızılcaören, today part of Hamamözü, and a village called Obruk; the Gümüş province, in other words, was an administrative unit that included some of today's Hamamözü villages. The similarity in sound between Ömerce and Omarca is plain, and the fact that the village belonged precisely to the Gümüş sub-district until 1990 supports the match. Even so, the index does not show where the village lay, and the facsimile page of the register has not been read here; that Ömerce is today's Umarca is a strong possibility, but it should not be treated as an established fact.

No official change was made to the village's name in the Republican period: Umarca is not in Bekir Başalan's table of the settlements in Hamamözü whose names were changed. No explanation has been found, however, of which of the forms Omarca and Umarca is the older or of where the difference between them arose.

Population

Umarca's population has declined more slowly than that of most Hamamözü villages. In 2007, 78 people were registered, in 2010, 80, and the figure stayed above 70 until 2015. Falling to 64 in 2016, the population rose to 69 in 2017-2018, dropped to 50 in 2019, climbed again to 62 in 2021 and stayed around 60 until 2024. The 47 of 2025 is the lowest value in the series. What stands out most in that last year is the distribution by sex: of the 47 people registered in the village, 30 are women and 17 men. No data explains this imbalance.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • 387 Numaralı Muhâsebe-i Vilâyet-i Karaman ve Rûm Defteri (937/1530), II: Dizin ve Tıpkıbasım, Ankara: General Directorate of the State Archives, Prime Ministry, 1997, index ("Ömerce k., Gümüş vt.", register p. 389; "Kızılca-viran k." and "Obruk k.", register p. 388).

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources