Along the northern bank of the Yeşilırmak, a row of timber houses stands shoulder to shoulder, and if a single image had to stand for Amasya it would be this one. With their whitewashed walls, projecting bay windows and tiled roofs, the houses are mirrored so completely in the water that the river seems to carry a second row of buildings beside its own current. Amasya is described as the only city in Anatolia that has no coast on the sea or the Bosphorus yet lines its waterfront with mansions. Behind them rise the royal rock tombs carved into the slope of Mount Harşena; in front of them flows the Yeşilırmak. Known as the Yalıboyu Houses, this row was built in the 19th and 20th centuries and is the most coherent surviving example of traditional Ottoman domestic architecture in Amasya. It defines the old core of the city in the Hatuniye quarter.

Location and Layout

The houses occupy a narrow, elongated strip of land between the Yeşilırmak and Mount Harşena. Here the river has cut a valley through the Canik Mountains; about eighty kilometres from the Black Sea and at an altitude of roughly 400 metres, the valley has a climate that lies between the Black Sea and continental types. The stretch beneath the citadel, running east to west, has been the core of settlement in every period. The Yalıboyu Houses stand exactly at this core, on the northern side of the river (some accounts place the houses on the southern bank; the row stands on the northern bank, while the southern bank is the walkway that faces it), between a succession of bridges. Researchers list among them the Alçak Bridge from the Roman period, the Hükümet and Magdenüs bridges of the Byzantine period and the Seljuk-period Meydan Bridge, all of which were repaired repeatedly over the centuries.

The northern bank gave the houses a clear advantage. Had they stood on the southern side, they would have had to face either the sun or the river view. Here the main façade looks both at the river and to the south, so the eaves admit sunlight in a way that follows the seasons, and large windows carry the view into the rooms. Because the houses are built in a continuous row, their river fronts read as a single composition; bay windows, window sequences and the roofline set up a rhythm along the bank. Seen from the opposite shore, the Yeşilırmak, the houses and the rock tombs behind them appear as one joined whole.

Houses Built on the City Walls

The most distinctive feature of the Yalıboyu Houses is that they sit on the surviving stretches of the citadel wall facing the river. Descriptions of the Hazeranlar Mansion in the Hatuniye quarter note that the roughly one-kilometre outer wall of the inner citadel of Harşena bears traces of the Roman, Eastern Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman periods. The houses used this old wall as the wall of their lower storey, which gave them a solid foundation and protected them against river floods. In a sense, this position passed the defensive past of the city on to civilian life: a wall once raised for military purposes became the base of the mansions in which families lived in the 19th century.

The civil architecture that survives in Amasya today belongs largely to the 19th century. Because the city lies in an earthquake zone, because fires broke out at various times and because timber is not long-lasting, no older examples of houses are found. The Yeşilırmak has also flooded countless times, and the 1939 Erzincan earthquake caused damage in the city. The history of the houses seen today therefore does not reach back beyond some two hundred years, but the ground they stand on is far older.

Structure and Materials

The houses are built in the hımış technique. Sun-dried brick (kerpiç) infill is placed between the timber frame, and in some examples the bağdadi technique is used, in which plaster is applied over laths. The buildings rise one or two storeys above a basement and are mostly arranged in a continuous row. The lower floors are kept more closed and traditionally served as service space, while the wider upper floors, raised on the timber frame, are the living quarters. Roofs are hipped or gabled and covered with ribbed alaturka tiles. The eaves are wide on the south front facing the river; in some houses the underside of the eaves is left open, in others it is boarded.

The dampness of the river basin also determined the choice of materials. The façades received a lime plaster mixed with hemp and a mud plaster mixed with straw, and the timber eaves and joinery were protected with an ochre-based paint known as aşı boyası. These were tried methods that were known to cope with moisture. The timber frame, wide eaves and rooms arranged around a sofa that make up the common form of the traditional Turkish house in Anatolia and the Balkans were adapted here to local conditions. Since the material of the infill between the frame varies from region to region, the mud-brick infill of Amasya houses also gives these buildings a local identity. With their projecting upper floors, timber craftsmanship and restrained ornament, Amasya's mansions are kin to the houses of Kastamonu, Kula, Safranbolu and Tokat; descriptions of the Hazeranlar Mansion single out the resemblance of its plan and façade arrangement to those towns.

Bay Windows and Façade Composition

The most conspicuous element of the houses is the bay window formed by projecting the upper storey outward. Especially in the houses built on the wall, the projection is supported by diagonal timber braces called eliböğründe. This method gains a wider interior on the upper floor and gives the façade a plastic movement. The projections make the upper floors brighter and more open to the outside, which allows more windows than on the lower floors. The windows are of the sash type and arranged in groups of three. According to studies, the proportion of the openings was designed as 2:3 on the first floor and 1:2 on the upper floors. On openings facing the street, wooden lattices prevent anyone from seeing in from outside.

Some houses have a kiosk-like room, called a şahniş or şahnişin, on the upper level, lit by windows on three sides. This part of the room projects toward the street or the courtyard and is open to both view and light. The outward appearance of the houses is generally restrained and plain; ornament is concentrated inside, in woodwork and in painted, plaster and metal decoration.

Courtyard, Harem and Selamlık

The Yalıboyu Houses mostly have courtyards and gardens. The narrow, elongated plots required the buildings to be arranged as two masses. The larger mass, nearer the river, was used as the haremlik (family quarters) and the smaller mass, nearer the street, as the selamlık (reception quarters); this arrangement allowed male guests to be received in a section close to the public realm without passing into the inner parts of the house. The courtyard between the two masses provides a cool outdoor space in the shade of the larger building. For this reason the haremlik becomes a wholly private area and the houses take on a closed appearance toward the street; in some examples this closure is reinforced by a high garden wall.

The courtyard holds a large place in daily life. A water well and a hearth are generally the first elements one notices, and in some examples an oven was built for baking bread. Being beside the river did not always make access to drinking and household water easy, so the well offered an important solution. Thanks to the hearth and the well, the courtyard became a place of production and neighbourly exchange, and the connection between the inside and outside of the house formed an uninterrupted whole. In Amasya's summer heat, which can reach 40 degrees, the household carried out its daily tasks in this cooler courtyard, which doubled as a workshop; the word hayat ("life") for such a space comes from exactly this function. At Hazeranlar the courtyard has, in its western corner, a large hearth alcove that also served as a summer kitchen, together with a double-sided stone staircase rising to the haremlik floor, and in front of the stairs a water well and a spinning wheel.

Interiors and Plan Types

Daily life takes place in the rooms arranged around the central sofa, also called the hayat. Studies identify in the Yalıboyu Houses the plan types of the traditional Turkish house known as the inner sofa with a "split-aubergine" (karnıyarık) layout, the outer sofa, the corner sofa and the central sofa. The rooms contain functional units such as a hearth, şerbetlik, yüklük, shelves and a sedir. Open shelves above the hearth or in part of the yüklük, where small everyday objects were kept, are called lambalık or şerbetlik. Wall shelves known as sergen serve a similar storage purpose.

That the rooms were not assigned to a single function is the main feature shaping life in these houses. The same room could serve for sitting, eating and sleeping during the course of a day; bedding was put away in the yüklük cupboards, a floor table was laid and cleared, and the sedir (divan) served both as a seat and a place to lie down. At the Hazeranlar Mansion this arrangement is recreated in the museum display: in the ground-floor sitting room a floor table is set with a copper tray and copper dishes, while in the upper-floor parents' room a canopied brass bed and a wooden cradle stand beside the sedir and the yüklük. Heating also depends on the room's hearth. In the mansion the embers of the wood burned in the hearth are moved into a copper brazier and carried into the room; one room also has a ceramic European stove. The upper-floor south room, where women gathered for neighbourly visits on long winter nights, shows the social side of the house. The shift of daily life to the courtyard in summer and to the rooms with their stoves and hearths in winter is the seasonal side of this use.

In most of the houses there is no separate bathroom. To make up for this, part of the large yüklük cupboards in the rooms was arranged as a gusülhane. Apart from a few examples there is no independent gusülhane; a small compartment opening off the yüklük served for both ablution and washing. This detail gives an important clue to the domestic culture of the period and to the multi-purpose use of space.

Who Lived in the Houses

For centuries Amasya was a sanjak seat in which Ottoman princes were raised, and this past is reflected in the city's 19th-century houses. Researchers consider that these dwellings were used by the valide sultans and pashas who came to the city with the princes and lived a kind of exile there. In the literature one also finds more romantic interpretations which say that the close relationship with the river grew out of longing for Istanbul. No documentary basis has been shown for these claims, and they remain at the level of tradition. What is certain is that the present buildings date from the second half of the 19th century and were used as the dwellings of the city's established families.

One of Amasya's old mansions, the building known today as the Emin Efendi Mansions, preserves a trace of this everyday life. According to the account, Emin Efendi, born in 1904, grew up in an old mansion in Yalıboyu, moved from cobbling shoes into trade and in 1946 bought a mansion about two hundred years old. The mansion is arranged as a haremlik and selamlık. The haremlik has four rooms, and the selamlık one room with a water cistern beneath it; the house is entered through a door opening under the selamlık, and bathrooms are placed inside the yüklük storage cupboards. One of his grandchildren repaired the mansion and added eleven more buildings around it, creating today's guesthouse arrangement.

Hazeranlar Mansion

The best known of the Yalıboyu Houses is the Hazeranlar Mansion in the Hatuniye quarter. The mansion was built in 1865 by Hasan Talat Efendi, treasurer (defterdar) of Ziya Pasha, then the mutasarrıf of Amasya. Hasan Talat was the son of Aziz Mahmut Bey, who had served at the Ottoman palace as an alchemist or chemist before being appointed treasurer of Amasya and settling in the city. According to some accounts the building was constructed between 1864 and 1872; the inscription "Maşâllahu Kâne" and the date H. 1283 (1872) were painted in the pediment facing the courtyard above the haremlik entrance.

Three different explanations of the mansion's name are reported. According to the first, Hasan Talat's sister Hazeran Hanım lived in the building for many years. According to the second, Hazeran Hanım's husband traded in rush chairs called hazeran. The third account says that Hasan Talat, described as a poet, lived in the mansion with three nieces, and that one of them, Hatice Hanım, and her daughter stayed there for many years. Which of these is correct has not been established with certainty.

The mansion is a typical example of the traditional Turkish house plan: on both floors of the haremlik a central-sofa plan with four eyvans was used, with a room placed at the corner of each eyvan. This plan scheme is regarded as the provincial echo of the layout that spread through the pavilions and kiosks of Istanbul in the 18th century and after the reign of Mahmud II. The central sofa was turned from a square into an octagon to gain a more spacious room, and this wide space was used for communal events such as weddings, henna nights and iftar meals. The mansion has eleven rooms in all. Built over a basement in the hımış technique, with two storeys, its upper floor is projected outward on eliböğründes; there are two bay windows with triangular pediments on the south façade and one each on the west and north. Every façade except the east is animated by these bays, the whole underside of the eaves is boarded in timber and all the windows are of the sash type. The selamlık was added to the west façade as an elongated rectangular plan and kept separate from the haremlik. The mansion has two main entrances, one to the selamlık and one to the haremlik. On the northern pediment of the selamlık room above the selamlık entrance, inside a laurel wreath, the tughra of Sultan Abdülaziz (1861-1876) is drawn by hand, with a branching, naturalistic rose in the upper right corner.

The main room, in the south-west corner of the selamlık, faces the Hatuniye Mosque and the Yeşilırmak and looks across to the city on the opposite bank. It is where the owner received his most important guests and where long conversations were held, and it is the largest and most ostentatious room of the mansion. A hearth stands on its north wall, with a plaster sherbet niche above it and wooden cupboards on either side. Today the room is furnished with 19th-century rugs, carpets and curtains, a floor table, a copper brazier, a samovar, an Ottoman-period mirror, a rifle and a sword, and two mannequins on the sofa recreate an evening of conversation with the host and of poems and mevlid recitations. In the haremlik the western iwan of the four is a double-sided landing that connects the stairs with the selamlık, the eastern iwan holds the washing and toilet units, and the southern iwan is a summer sitting unit overlooking the Yeşilırmak, the front garden and the southern view of the city. The mansion's former hayloft and camel stall are now a picture gallery. In the front garden beyond the wall stands a boathouse section where five timber posts are joined by a Bursa arch; this timber-carrier façade is a rare solution among Amasya's old Ottoman houses.

The mansion's story in the 20th century also shows the dangers the Yalıboyu Houses faced. The building was damaged in the 1939 Erzincan earthquake and was affected by the Yeşilırmak floods of 1944, 1948 and 1952. Its owners divided the interior to let it out, the mansion fell into neglect for a long time and it was sold in 1968. The new owners began secretly demolishing the mansion from inside in order to build a reinforced-concrete structure in its place. When this was noticed, the General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums of the Ministry of Culture expropriated the building in 1976. Restoration began in 1976 and was completed in 1979, and on 12 June 1984 the building opened to visitors as an "Ethnography-Museum House".

Conservation Efforts

The protection of the Yalıboyu Houses is the best known example of the effort to save the city's traditional fabric. The first step was taken by the 1979 decision of the High Council of Immovable Antiquities and Monuments; by this decision the city was divided into seven urban conservation areas, the zone containing the Yalıboyu Houses was designated "Area No. 2", and all construction activity other than minor repairs was halted until a conservation plan could be prepared. In 1981 the council adopted the "Amasya Historic Urban Conservation Areas Transitional Period Conservation Plan Decisions" and imposed limits on storey height and façade openings for the Yalıboyu Houses.

By a decision taken on 5 May 1992, the Ankara Regional Conservation Council for Cultural and Natural Heritage divided the buildings into civil and monumental categories and provided for the registration of 126 civil buildings to continue. The houses are protected under Law No. 2863 on the Conservation of Cultural and Natural Property. In 1994, through the combined efforts of local government and civil initiative, the Yalıboyu Houses Conservation Project (YABEP) was formed and 80 houses were registered. In 1996 the Amasya Foundation for the Conservation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (AKTAV) was established as an extension of the project, so that a conservation model involving the governorate, the municipality, civil society organisations and citizens could be built. After 2000 the Yalıboyu Coastal Promenade was built on the southern bank of the Yeşilırmak directly opposite the houses, followed by the Pirinççi Promenade on the eastern bank of the river. The promenade, the river, the unified silhouette of the houses and the royal rock tombs forming a backdrop make a single urban focal point in the Hatuniye quarter.

Use Today

Most of the houses are privately owned. Some dwellings are still used by families, and some mansions have been restored and turned into boutique hotels, cafés and restaurants. This new use has been a way of maintaining the houses and has contributed to the tourism economy of the city. Buildings that are private homes are visited only from the outside, respecting the privacy of their owners, while mansions run as hotels and restaurants are entered as customers. The exteriors of the houses may be photographed, but pictures that capture private living areas are expected to be avoided.

The best place from which to see the Yalıboyu Houses as a whole is the walkway on the southern bank of the river, and the evening lighting along the shore makes their reflection in the water more pronounced; it is suggested to walk the path twice, by day to see the timber craftsmanship and after sunset to see the lit houses reflected in the river. It has been reported that the Hazeranlar Mansion has been closed to visitors since 11 November 2024 for repair and display work, so the current situation should be checked before going. The city is said to be mentioned within the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List, but this information could not be verified from an official document.

Chronology

1865: The Hazeranlar Mansion was built by Hasan Talat Efendi, treasurer of Ziya Pasha, mutasarrıf of Amasya (according to some accounts construction ran from 1864 to 1872).

1939: The Erzincan earthquake caused damage in the city; the Hazeranlar Mansion was also affected.

1944, 1948, 1952: Floods of the Yeşilırmak affected the Hazeranlar Mansion.

1968: The Hazeranlar Mansion was sold and its new owners began demolition.

1976: The Hazeranlar Mansion was expropriated and restoration began.

1979: The city was divided into seven urban conservation areas; the Yalıboyu Houses were designated Area No. 2. Restoration of the Hazeranlar was completed.

1981: The Amasya Historic Urban Conservation Areas Transitional Period Conservation Plan Decisions were adopted.

1984: The Hazeranlar Mansion opened to visitors as an "Ethnography-Museum House".

1992: The Ankara Regional Conservation Council grouped civil buildings by registration decision.

1994: The Yalıboyu Houses Conservation Project (YABEP) began; 80 houses were registered.

1996: AKTAV was established.

Sources

Academic studies

  • Karacalı, Atlıhan Onat. "Amasya Yalıboyu Evlerinin Mimari Özellikleri Üzerine Bir Değerlendirme ve Bir Öneri." Uluslararası Disiplinlerarası ve Kültürlerarası Sanat Dergisi (IJIIA), 2021, vol. 6, no. 13, pp. 15-25. https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/ijiia/article/1056726

Official sources

Books

  • Doğanbaş, M. Amasya Evleri. Ankara: Doğuş Matbaa, 1996 (cited in Karacalı's article). amasya.gov.tr

Other sources

Online sources