BİR ANTİK SU YOLU BELGELEME YÖNTEMİ: FERHAT SU KANALI, AMASYA

The Ferhat Water Canal was built in the Late Hellenistic - Early Roman Period, with the objective of meeting the water needs of the town of Amasya, by boring into the rock and building stone-vaulted canals that run across the riverbeds (1). H. Hüsâmeddîn mentions about the origin: It is an 18km long canal that starts in front of the ‘Şahin’ Rock located at a distance of about 15km to the south of Amasya, which passes the front of ‘Ferhat Arası’ and ‘Memi Dede’, winding around the ‘Gökmedrese’, ‘Şâmîce’, ‘Receb’, ‘Çeribaşı’, ‘Acem Ali’, ‘Uzun Mustafa’, ‘Gümüşlü-zâde’, ‘Mehmet Paşa’ and ‘Sevâdiye’ districts and reaches a hole of square crosssection, 4 meters at sides at ‘Kibrithane’, which is in the ‘Bayezid Paşa’ district. (Hüsâmeddîn, 1911-12, 36-37). The major part of the 6 km section of this canal, which runs from the ‘Helvacı’ District (the Prison Point) at the west of the town to the ‘Bayezid Paşa’ district’s old industrial zone ‘Kibrithâne’ on the east, runs as a tunnel under the present city settlements. The portion of the canal which is around 675 meters in length, runs around a curve at the ‘Ferhatarası’ point, located at the eastern foot of the ‘Ferhat’ Mountain, lying above the ground. This open part of the canal was registered as “a monument and an immoveable cultural artefact” (T.R. Ministry of Culture the High Committee for Ancient Real Estate and Monuments, 1975; T.R. Ministry of Culture Ankara Commission for the Conservation of Natural and Cultural Entities, 1988) (Figure 1, 9). However, the monument was not the object of any analytic investigation since its registration in 1975 and no study was carried out for its preservation until 1997. The Amasya City Governor, the Amasya Mayor and the Amasya Museum Director in 1997, all aware of their responsibility of preserving cultural heritage of the city, initiated the studies for the preservation of the over ground and registered section of the canal and assigned this task to the Gazi University faculty members Işık Aksulu and Gediz Urak, to obtain the ‘Amasya Ferhat Water Canal Preservation Proposals and the Environmental Reorganization Project’ (Aksulu and Urak, 1998) (2). This project was realized for the 675m long registered portion of the canal that is located in the Central Amasya ‘Helvacı’ District’s ‘Ferhatarası’ region, which runs parallel to the Amasya - Tokat highway, and is the most suitable part for the canal preservation and for reorganization purposes. The initial analyses were carried out prior to the start of the project, to identify the canal’s inherent potentials; a problem defining outline and a field-research project was developed in order to preserve all the potentials, proposing solutions for possible problems. In this context, the below mentioned potentials and problems of the Ferhat Water Canal and its location were determined as below: • The over ground and registered portion of the Ferhat Water Canal, which is the scope of this project, has an important location recognized as the entry of the Town of Amasya from the Tokat direction. • The large piece of land between the canal and the road may provide convenient recreational space for the Town of Amasya, which is topographically restricted between two mountains and the river of Yeşilırmak, offering a linear urban settlement. • The area is easy to reach, because of its proximity to the town. • The study area poses a rare cultural entity, as an object of the World Cultural Heritage, that documents the urban history, the historic waterway planning, the old technology and the materials employed, and even, the environment approached as an object of aesthetics during the Late Hellenistic and the Early Roman periods. • There is a local plant cover, or the specific flora. • The preservation of the canal could help develop the cultural and preservation consciousness of the townspeople and its future generations, once they are acquainted with their cultural heritage. • The preservation of the canal environment and opening it to publicuse could contribute the increase of potential in urban touristic development. The above defined as the inherent potentials, where the below constituted the possible problems: • Currently, the area between the canal and the road that are occupied by functions incompatible with preservation and the historic site. These are a quick-lime plant, an auto service station, a tile and brick storage yard, and a sand-sieving plant and their office buildings with storage facilities, which are visually and functionally disturbing. • Parts of the Ferhat Water Canal is covered with debris, parts of it over ground but filled with loose materials, cracked, caved, and even plant covered at places. • There are cracks inside the rocks at the canal’s hill slopes, which pose a threat to human safety. • The canal does not have a linear axis, but a curving shape in plan, posing problems in defining the method of measurement. As the canal and its environment posed multi-faceted potentials and problems, a need for an interdisciplianary team study arose, starting with the architectural survey, to be adopted in the selection of techniques for detailed procedures of documentation, laboratory analyses, damage assessment, geological and rock mechanics analyses, for the identification and preservation of the material properties (chemical, visual and technical analyses of the materials) and the botanical analyses. This realized, the cleaning of certain portions of the canal that were filled with stones and earth at places followed, and excavations were conducted at places where the canal was totally filled with debris. Findings from these surface studies were used in developing the proposal for the preservation of the canal, as well as the stages of intervention. In this context, the project proposal comprising the documentation to implementation stages was prepared with a report and drawings at 1/50, 1/200, 1/500 and 1/10 scales, in accordance with the international rules and techniques, regarding the specific conditions presented by the structure. The field work and the reports were completed from June 1997 to June 1998.