Where the Yeşilırmak enters the province of Amasya, the station at which the provincial agriculture directorate measures the river's water every three months is recorded under the village of Yeşildere. The name of this small village of the Central District of Amasya also describes a green stream; but written sources say almost nothing about its past. What is known is limited to present-day administrative and statistical records, together with a grammatical study of the name. At the end of 2025, 90 people lived in the village.

The Name

In her study of place names formed with colour words in Amasya, Asena Yalnız analyses Yeşildere as an adjectival compound made of the adjective "yeşil" (green) and the noun "dere", meaning a small stream. Yalnız considers it probable that a geographical factor played a part in the place receiving this name, and cites the village as one of the examples in which the natural appearance of the area is reflected in its place names. Villages of the Central District with names of the same structure include Sarıalan, Sarıkız, Sarımeşe and Sarıyar; the province's other "green" names are the villages of Yeşilöz in the Central District, Yeşilören and Yeşiltepe in Merzifon, and Yeşilyurt in Taşova. Yeşildere does not appear in Bekir Başalan's list of renamed settlements in Amasya. No entry under this name was found in the Ottoman tahrir index, in the volumes of Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar or in the studies of the 1845 temettuat registers; whether the village was recorded under an older name cannot be settled with the documents available.

A Measuring Point on the Yeşilırmak

The "Central District Yeşilırmak Provincial Entry" station, first in the nitrate monitoring network of the Amasya Provincial Directorate of Agriculture and Forestry, is shown in the environment report with Yeşildere as its village. The point where the river leaves the province is at Taşova, and the provincial entry of the Tersakan is at Suluova; Yeşildere is the village where the river enters Amasya territory. Samples taken from the surface water are analysed every three months and the results are entered in the national nitrate information system.

Hamlets, Water and Population

The village's drinking-water network was built in 1997 and is fed from a spring; according to the 2023 report an average of 2,957 cubic metres a year is drawn and the supply is judged sufficient. The inventory gives the village's population as 54. Two small settlements attached to Yeşildere, the hamlets of Ahmetkoltuğu and Karakaya, have separate networks built in the same year; the inventory shows eight people at Ahmetkoltuğu and eleven at Karakaya.

The TÜİK series shows the village's population falling almost without interruption for thirteen years. The village had 151 registered inhabitants in 2007; the figure dropped to 101 in 2013 and 78 in 2015, reaching the lowest value of the series, 65, in 2020. In 2023 the population suddenly rises to 125; the sources do not explain this jump, and over the next two years the number falls again, to 102 in 2024 and 90 in 2025. In the latest record the village had 45 men and 45 women.

Bibliography

Academic studies

  • Asena Yalnız, "Amasya İli ve İlçelerinin Renk Adlarıyla Oluşan Yer Adlarının Gramatikal ve Bölgesel İncelemesi", Amasya Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi (ASOBİD), 12, 2022, pp. 133-159 (Yeşildere: pp. 142, 152-153).
  • Bekir Başalan, "Amasya İlinde İsimleri Değiştirilen Yerleşim Yeri Adları Üzerine Bir İnceleme", Folklor Akademi Dergisi, 7(3), 2024, pp. 1382-1391 (pp. 1385-1386). https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/4249891

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources