West of the city, above the vineyards behind the castle hill, Yuvacık is today a small village of the central district with forty-six inhabitants; before its name was changed, however, it bore one of the best-known place names of Amasya. In Bekir Başalan's table comparing new and old names, Yuvacık's former name is given as "Şeyhcui". The name comes from the Mevlevi shaykh Cemâleddîn Mehmed Cû'î Çelebi, who received the village as his property at the beginning of the fifteenth century and built a mosque, a Mevlevi lodge, an imaret and a tomb there. An old village record containing data up to 2012 places Yuvacık 3 kilometres from the provincial centre.

From Kelkis to Şeyh Cû'î

According to Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar, the old name of this area is Kelkis. The author explains that where the northern and western mountains of Amasya meet they form a bow-shaped circle; the whole of this arc was formerly called Kelkis, while its middle later became known as "Şeyh Cû'î". He adds that in the time of the Umayyad caliphs Walid and Hisham and of the Hamdanid Sayf al-Dawla, Muslim raiders attacked the city from this side, which is why Arabic histories record the place as "Kalis" and the vineyards as "Batn-ı Kalis", and that the bodies found in the vineyards are a memory of those wars. That the vineyards were known as Kelkis until the time of Şeyh Cû'î he bases on the shaykh's endowment deed: when the shaykh settled here for a long time and built charitable works such as a mosque, a Mevlevi lodge, a school and a tomb, the area came to be called after him and the old name was forgotten.

The index of the Karaman and Rûm accounts register of 1530 catches a half-finished moment of this change of name. For "Şeyh-Cû'î village" the index refers the reader to "Kelkis village", and Kelkis is entered on page 354 of the register among the villages attached not to a sub-district but directly to the city of Amasya. The same index also records a "Şeyh-Cû'î zaviye" in the city of Amasya itself (p. 380). It follows that in the first half of the sixteenth century the official record still used the old name, while the shaykh's name had become the village's second name in common use. The village later received the name Yuvacık; Başalan does not give the date of this change.

Şeyh Cû'î Mehmed Çelebi

The shaykh who gave the village its name is described in a detailed entry in Yasar's biographical volumes. He was a native of Amasya and the son of the scholar Mevlânâ Fahreddîn Osmân bin Abdullah et-Türkmânî. He studied under Hüsâmeddîn Hasan Hoyî, the Mevlevi lodge's shaykh Celâleddîn Mehmed and Nusretzâde Cemâleddîn Habîb Çelebi of Zile, taught the Mesnevî for years at the Mevlevi lodge of Amasya, and became its shaykh on the death of his own shaykh Hüsâmzâde Celâleddîn Mehmed Dede. In the reign of Çelebi Sultan Mehmed his lessons in hadith, Qur'an commentary and the Mesnevî became so famous that the sultan attended them from time to time, and the village of Kelkis west of Amasya, together with all its vineyards, was granted to him as property by the sovereign.

In this village the shaykh built a mosque, beside it a Mevlevi lodge and an imaret, and a tomb for himself; in 817 (1414-15) he endowed his properties for the upkeep of these buildings, appointed his son-in-law Şeyh Ahmed Yoğurtçu Dede to the shaykhdom of the lodge, and died in the month of Zilhicce 819 (January-February 1417). Yasar presents him as a pious man, a man of letters and a poet as well as a müderris; he says that he took the pen name Cû'î because of his severe ascetic exercises, that he read and taught the work on legal theory called the Telvîh thirty times, and that he wrote a commentary on the Qur'an. According to a passage Yasar quotes from the Aleppine historian Ibn al-Hanbali's Dürrü'l-habeb fî târîhi Haleb, Şemseddîn bin Bilâl, a student of Burhâneddîn İbrâhim el-Karsevî, who came from Kars and settled in Aleppo, said that one of his teacher's teachers was Şeyh Cû'î er-Rûmî, author of the commentary known as the "Shaykh's Commentary", and that this man had read the Telvîh from beginning to end thirty times. Yasar states that the shaykh improved the village with great care, adorned its vineyards with flowers and fruit trees, and that he had seen the shaykh's endowment deed and certificate of succession with his own eyes.

There is a small inconsistency within the source. In the biographical entry one of the shaykh's teachers is named Nusretzâde Cemâleddîn Habîb Çelebi, while in the first volume, where Yasar describes the Mevlevi lodge, the Mevlevi shaykh of Şâdgeldi's time appears as "Zilevî Nusretzâde Şeyh Cemâleddîn Ahmed Dede", and Cû'î Dede is counted as his deputy. According to the same section, when Cû'î Dede built a Mevlevi lodge in his own village and withdrew there, Mecdeddîn Küpeli Dede succeeded to the shaykhdom of the Mevlevi lodge in the city.

The Lodge and the Vineyards

In his list of the lodges of Amasya, Yasar places the "Şeyh Cû'î Lodge" northwest of the Şeyh Cû'î vineyards, below the village near a pond, and presents it as a Mevlevi lodge built by the shaykh himself in 817. The first shaykh of the lodge was its founder Mehmed Cû'î Dede, then his deputy Pîrî Ahmed Dede, known as "Yoğurtçu Baba", then Ömer Âhî Dede. The later shaykhs were recorded under the title "mesnevîhan"; Yasar's list begins with İsmâil Dede in 1154 (1741-42), continues with İbrâhim Dede, Feyzullâh Dede, Seyyid Hasan Dede and Seyyid Mustafa Dede, and records that in 1204 (1789-90) the post passed to Ahmed Efendizâde Feyzullâh Efendi, shaykh of the Mevlevi lodge in the city, and that it changed hands several times in the following years. The author's verdict for his own time is brief: no trace of this lodge now remains.

The vineyards below the village are the first of the spring pleasure grounds Yasar lists. People called these vineyards west of the castle hill "Cığcığı"; the vineyards below were watered with the surplus of the water the shaykh brought to his village, and the water, the village and its farmland were counted as endowment property. When spring came, the notables and wealthy families of Amasya moved out to these vineyards from the twentieth of April and stayed there until the end of May. The author mentions their air, their famous cherries and their elegant pavilions; in his list the Ziyâre, Kirazlıdere and Derbend vineyards come after them. To the south of the vineyards, the land stretching towards the eastern foot of Mount Karaman was called "Akbilek" after 931 (1524-25), from the nickname of Molla Bahşî Halîfe, who was buried there.

A Master of Qur'an Recitation from the Village

One of Yasar's biographies belongs directly to a scholar "from the Şeyh Cû'î village of Amasya". Hacı İbrâhim Efendi was the son of Yahyâ bin İbrâhim of the village. He memorised the Qur'an in Amasya, studied the science of recitation under the master of reciters Hâfız Hacı Yûsuf Efendi and Halîl Efendi of Amasya, and the religious sciences under Hacı Mustafa Efendi of Akdağ, and taught recitation and the sciences at the Sultan Bayezid Mosque. He became shaykh of the Sultan Hatun school of Qur'an recitation, müderris of the Feyziye Madrasa in 1151 (1738-39) and head of the guilds in 1163 (1749-50). Accused of being among the instigators of an incident arising from the oppression of the governor of Sivas, Zaralızâde Mehmed Pasha, he was exiled to the fortress of Famagusta in Zilhicce 1171 (August 1758) together with the mufti Hacı Mehmed Efendi and two other Mehmed Efendis; he was pardoned and returned in Muharrem 1173 (August-September 1759), his posts were restored to him, and he died in Zilhicce 1179 (May 1766).

The Village Today

Yuvacık's decline appears as a sharp break in the figures available. The same village record gives 1,218 people for 1985, but the number fell to 213 in 1990 and 137 in 2000. A loss of more than a thousand people in five years cannot be explained by ordinary migration; one may think that part of the village was joined to the city in those years, but the source says nothing on the matter. In the address-based records the village had 66 people in 2007; the number fell as low as 39 in 2020, moved between 44 and 48 in recent years, and stood at 46 in 2025. Of these 46 people, 28 are men and 18 women.

According to the village drinking-water inventory in the provincial environment report for 2023, Yuvacık's water network was built in 1996; the water is pumped from a spring, an average of 2,519 cubic metres is drawn each year, and the supply is regarded as sufficient. The inventory gives the village's population as 46. No published study could be found on what survives today of the mosque, lodge and tomb the shaykh built, or on whether the village's present mosque stands on the site of the old building.

Chronology

817 (1414-15): Şeyh Cû'î Mehmed Çelebi establishes an endowment for his mosque, lodge, imaret and tomb in the village.

819 (1417): Şeyh Cû'î dies in the month of Zilhicce.

1530: The village is entered in the register as the village of Kelkis, attached to the city of Amasya; the Şeyh Cû'î zaviye is recorded separately.

1171 (1758): Hacı İbrâhim Efendi of the village is exiled to Famagusta.

1996: The village's drinking-water network is built.

Bibliography

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