Yıkılgan, twenty-one kilometres from Amasya, is described in the introduction of its village school as a small village squeezed among fruit orchards at the foot of Akdağ. In the Ottoman period it belonged to the Akdağ sub-district, and in the 1530 register it was probably written under the name Anduz. Early in the seventeenth century a timar of 5,500 akçes at Yıkılgan became the first fief of an Amasya sipahi who would later fall in the Cretan war. At the end of 2025, 358 people were registered in the village, which belongs to the Central District of Amasya.

The Akdağ Sub-district and the Name Anduz

Listing the four sub-districts of the kaza of Amasya, Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar puts Akdağ first: in his account this sub-district, taking in the whole east of the town, spread over the slopes of Akdağ, where with its summer and winter pastures most of the flocks of Amasya grazed in summer, and its central village was Akviran. In the index of register no. 387 of 1530, Yıkılgan appears in this sub-district, though not as an entry of its own: the record "Yıkılgan k., bk. Anduz k., Ak-dağ n." sends the reader to the village of Anduz, written on page 364 of the register. This cross-reference suggests that the village was recorded in the register under the name Anduz, with Yıkılgan added as its second name; without seeing the original register, this reading cannot be confirmed. Yıkılgan is not among the renamed villages in Bekir Başalan's list; the index contains two more villages of the same name, but one is in the Fîrûz sub-district and the other in the Çepni province, that is, outside the Amasya liva.

Habîb Ağa's Timar

The village's name occurs in Yasar's biographical volumes within the life of a sipahi. Habîb Ağa was the son of the mirliva Şeyhî Mehmed Bey, one of the notables of Amasya and of the Aydın Beyzâde family. When Mehmed Ağa, one of the çavuşes, died in 1027 (1618), his timar of 5,500 akçes in the village of Yıkılgan was granted to Habîb Ağa, who thus entered the ranks of the sipahis. After distinguishing himself in battle he became kethüdayeri of Amasya, mütesellim of Sivas in 1053 (1643), and voyvoda of Tokat and trustee of the public treasury in Amasya in 1055.

Sent to the Cretan war in 1056 (1646), Habîb Ağa rose the next year to the post of ağa of the sipahis through his feats. According to Yasar, in 1058 he was charged with taking a fortress, attacked again and again, and fell as a martyr at the beginning of 1059 (1649) as he captured the fortress and entered it. Yasar remembers him as very brave, skilled in soldiering and devout; his sons were the beys Ali, Hasan and Hüseyin, and Hüseyin Bey was in 1081 (1670) one of the naval commanders living at Kasımpaşa in Istanbul. The work does not say who held the Yıkılgan timar after Habîb Ağa.

Orchards and School

According to the village primary school's own introduction page, the people of Yıkılgan make their living from fruit growing and from summer pasturing; the produce named is walnuts, apples, figs, quinces and cherries. The school is a primary school with combined classes, two teachers and nineteen pupils, three classrooms and a library of 451 books, and is heated by wood and coal stoves. The 2023 environment report states that the village's drinking-water network was built in 2006, is fed from a spring and supplies an average of 21,922 cubic metres a year; this is more than most villages in the inventory, and the supply was found sufficient.

Population

Throughout the address-based series the population of Yıkılgan shows a slow but steady decline. From 482 people in 2007 it fell to 429 in 2017, rose briefly to 455 in 2018, and then fell faster, to 405 in 2022 and 358 in 2025. In the last year women outnumbered men in the village: 184 women and 174 men.

Bibliography

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