Yemişen is a village in the Hamamözü district of Amasya Province, home to 87 people in 2025. Its name turns up once more within the province: there is also a neighborhood called Yemişen in Taşova district. Although the two lie in separate districts, their names are easily confused in the sources; the place described here is the village attached to Hamamözü. Until 1990 the village belonged to the Gümüş sub-district of Gümüşhacıköy district, and when Hamamözü was established as a district it joined the villages attached to it.

Neighbors and the Road

The village's ties to its surroundings show most clearly in two places. The district's undated official description states that all village roads had been asphalted except the four-kilometer stretch between Yemişen and Tekçam, which remained a stabilized gravel road; the road to Tekçam, the smallest village of Hamamözü, passes through this village. The other trace comes from a dialect study. In Gülşah Gödek Arslan's doctoral thesis on the dialect of Gümüşhacıköy, an elderly man recorded in the Gümüşhacıköy village of Korkut, asked to name the nearby villages, gives the names Kışla and Yemişen. Since there is no settlement called Yemişen among the villages of Gümüşhacıköy, it is clear that he means the village in Hamamözü; the recording, however, does not say which place Kışla is or how far apart the villages are. It is a brief piece of testimony, yet it shows that Yemişen belongs to the everyday geography of the villages on the other side of the district line.

The Name and Older Records

Yemişen is not one of the four settlements in Hamamözü whose names were changed; the table Bekir Başalan gives for this district contains only Damladere, Dumanlı, Kağnıcı and Kızılcaören. For the Ottoman period there is only a single clue. In the index prepared for the publication of the provincial accounting register of the year 937 (1530), from the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, a village called "Yemiş" appears among the villages attached to the Gümüş province, with a reference to page 389 of the register. Kızılca-viran, the old name of Kızılcaören, now part of Hamamözü, is recorded in the same province. The resemblance between Yemiş and Yemişen suggests a connection, but the forms of the names are not identical and the index does not give the village's location; the Yemiş of 1530 can therefore be mentioned as today's Yemişen only as a possibility.

Population

In 2007 Yemişen was a village of 217 people. Over the next eighteen years the figure fell with hardly any rise: 188 in 2010, 167 in 2013, 134 in 2016, 124 in 2019 and 112 in 2022. With 97 in 2023 the village dropped below one hundred for the first time; 94 people were registered in 2024 and 87 in 2025. There is no single sharp break in the series; the loss is spread across the years. In 2025, 43 men and 44 women lived in the village. The municipality's list of muhtars gives the name of Süleyman Balcı as muhtar (headman). Not a line has been found written about the village's mosque or school.

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 ("Yemiş k., Gümüş vt.", register p. 389; "Kızılca-viran k.", register p. 388).

Academic studies

  • Gülşah Gödek Arslan, Gümüşhacıköy Ağzı (İnceleme-Metinler-Sözlük), doctoral thesis, Bursa Uludağ University, 2024, p. 422 (text 73, Korkut).
  • Bekir Başalan, "Amasya İlinde İsimleri Değiştirilen Yerleşim Yeri Adları Üzerine Bir İnceleme", Folklor Akademi Dergisi, 7(3), 2024, pp. 1386-1387. https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/4249891

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources