Yağmur is a small village on the western side of Amasya, in the area that formed the Geldiklan sub-district in Ottoman times, and today it has fewer than a hundred inhabitants. Small as it is, its name turns up often in the written past of Amasya: Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar links the name to a Turkish bey of the late thirteenth century, in the early Ottoman period the fief of the castle wardens was paid partly from the tithe of this village, and in the seventeenth century a professor known by the nickname "Yağmurköylü" and his descendants served for three generations in the colleges and courts of Amasya.

The Origin of the Name

In the sub-district section where he explains that the name Geldiklan arose as a corruption of Baygeldi Alan, Yasar lists seven villages that he believes carry the names of clan elders, and Yağmur is one of them; neighbouring names such as Karlı, Akçakoyunlu, Olus and Doğan appear in the same series, and in his view all these clans had broken away from the Afşar and Bayındır peoples. A few lines later he gives a more specific explanation for Yağmur: the village is named after Nûreddîn Yağmur Bey, one of the Turkish beys who became famous around 690 AH (1291), and among his descendants the beys Nâsıreddîn Mehmed and Şerefeddîn Mukbil were well-known figures. In Yasar's account of the fourteenth-century emirate of Amasya, members of a family called "Yağmur Beyzâde" also appear: Emîr Sâbıkeddîn Ebûbekir, trusted by Hacı Kutlu Şah, and Sârımeddîn İbrâhim Bey, who was made candar at the end of 762 (1361) and soon afterwards had to flee to Egypt, belonged to it. Yasar does not explicitly connect this family with the village, and the explanation that the name derives from a bey rests on his account alone. Yağmur does not appear in Bekir Başalan's list of renamed settlements; the village keeps the oldest name known for it.

In Registers and Endowment Records

The index of account register no. 387, dated 1530, contains the entry "Yağmur k., Geldiklan-âbâd n.: 361". No other village of this name exists in the Amasya liva, and the sub-district is the very area in which Yasar places the village; it is therefore highly likely that the entry refers to present-day Yağmur. The index gives no household or tax figures for the village.

Two separate sources show to whom the village's revenue was assigned. Speaking of the wardens of Amasya castle, Hüsâmeddîn Yasar writes that the fiefs of Hasan Bey, castle warden at the beginning of the Ottoman period, and of his successors were drawn from the tithes of the villages of Moramul (present-day Bağlarüstü) and Yağmur, and that this fief rose in time to 13,000-33,000 akçes. Murat Alandağlı's study of the hurufat records, drawing on the tahrir register of 1576 and later endowment records, shows that half of the mâlikâne of the village of Yağmur in Geldiklanâbâd was assigned to the endowment of the Ahi Saadeddin Zâviye, located in the Ahi Saadeddin quarter inside the castle. According to the same study, the zâviye was built in 871 (1466-67) by the imperial secretary Sadi Efendi.

An Inscription of the Byzantine Period

The third volume of Studia Pontica, the collection of Pontic inscriptions published in 1910, includes an inscription from the fountain of a village called "Yaghmour-Keuï". The editors did not see the stone themselves but used a copy made by a local man; Henri Grégoire dates the text to the minuscule Byzantine script of the eleventh century, just before the Seljuk conquest, and reads it as a prayer beginning "And protect, O Lord, our faithful emperors, your servants". The editors, however, describe the village only as lying "west of Amasya" and note that its location is unknown and the name doubtful. That the inscription belongs to present-day Yağmur therefore remains a possibility.

Scholars from Yağmur

The man who chiefly kept the village's name alive in Amasya is el-Hâc İsmâil Efendi. According to Hüsâmeddîn Yasar, he was the son of Ali, a native of "the village known as Yağmurköyü on the western side of Amasya". He memorised the Qur'an in Amasya, studied under Şeyhü'l-Harem el-Hâc Sinan, Bahşîzâde Fâzıl Yahya and Müeyyedzâde Pîrî Ahmed efendis, and taught in the town for many years. In Safer 1036 (1626) he became professor of the Hızır Paşa Medrese at sixty akçes a day, and he died in retirement in Zilhicce 1038 (1629). Yasar describes him as a jurist, preacher and devout scholar. Among those who studied with him and Kadızâde Küçük Mehmed Efendi, the two teachers being named together, are such figures as Hacı Müderris Ayâs Efendi, professor at the Ayâs Ağa medrese, and Kâtibzâde Hasan Efendi, judge of Amasya. Sandûkîzâde Abdülcelîl Efendi, twice mufti and judge of Amasya, who died in 1053 (1643), was both his pupil and his son-in-law.

İsmâil Efendi's line also stayed on the path of learning. His son Abdurrahman Efendi served as a judge, and Abdurrahman's son İsmâil Efendi (Yağmûrîzâde) became professor at the Yörgüç Paşa medrese in 1067 (1656-57) and at the Sultan Bayezid medrese in 1070 (1659-60), served as mufti of Amasya in 1071 and judge of Sivas in 1078, and died in 1083 (1672). Abdurrahman Efendi's other son, Rahmî Mehmed Efendi, was also a judge in provincial towns and died in 1091 (1680). Another man whose direct tie to the village is stated is Halîl Efendi: according to Yasar he was the son of Hasan from Yağmur village, was trained in the Enderun palace school in his youth, signed one of his books "Halîl bin Hasan Yağmurî", became secretary to Hacı Beşir Ağa, chief black eunuch, during the latter's tenure, and in 1143 (1730-31) entered the ranks of the hâcegân of the Imperial Council as accountant of the Haremeyn. Yasar remembers Halîl Efendi, who died in 1149 (1736-37), as a secretary and calligrapher who wrote the ta'lik script.

Water and Population

Water reaches the village through a network belonging to the Special Provincial Administration, built in 2006 and fed from a spring and a well. The village list in the 2023 environment report records that an average of only 1,445 cubic metres a year is drawn from this network; this is less than in the great majority of the villages in the list, and the table marks Yağmur as "insufficient", noting that the facility is inadequate too. The same table gives the village's population as 99.

In the address-based records Yağmur had 117 inhabitants in 2007 and 139 the following year, the highest value in the series. Having fallen to 104 by 2010, the population has settled at around a hundred since 2012, between 95 and 110. At the end of 2025, 96 people lived in the village, 54 men and 42 women.

Chronology

c. 690 (1291): According to Hüsâmeddîn Yasar, the period in which Nûreddîn Yağmur Bey, who gave the village its name, rose to fame.

871 (1466-67): The Ahi Saadeddin Zâviye, to whose endowment half of the village mâlikâne would be assigned, is built.

1530: Register no. 387 records the village of Yağmur in the Geldiklan-âbâd sub-district.

1576: In the tahrir register, half of the village mâlikâne appears as assigned to the Ahi Saadeddin endowment.

1036 (1626): el-Hâc İsmâil Efendi of Yağmur becomes professor of the Hızır Paşa Medrese; he dies in 1038 (1629).

1143 (1730-31): Halîl Efendi-Yağmurî becomes accountant of the Haremeyn.

2006: The village's drinking-water network is built.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources