Reference overview
Geçmişten Günümüze Beyşehir Gölü Mada Adası’nda İskân ve Beşerî Faaliyetler
Hüseyin Muşmal · Yalova Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi
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Mada Island
The lake’s largest island, home to fisheries, island agriculture and traditional life.
Mada, Kazak and Kumluca are names attached to the same inhabited island in the northern part of Lake Beyşehir. Each opens a different historical perspective: an older place-name, the memory of Don Cossack settlement, and the sandy shoreline associated with Kumluca. The island lies near Gedikli and belongs administratively to Şarkikaraağaç in Isparta. Lake geography connects it with Beyşehir, but the town’s name should not obscure that different administrative setting.
The island’s human history began long before the Cossacks. Hüseyin Muşmal’s 2024 settlement study draws on Ottoman registers, earlier scholarship and accounts of island life. A register from 1507 records both Muslim and non-Muslim households. Those categories describe the administration’s entries at that date, not an unchanging population across the following centuries. Fresh water, cultivable ground, grazing and access to fish help explain why successive communities sought a livelihood here.
The word Kazak requires translation with care. In this story it means Don Cossack, not a person from modern Kazakhstan. The migrants were part of the wider Cossack movements through the Ottoman world, including the Old Believer and Nekrasov histories studied around Lake Manyas. Old Believers preserved earlier Russian Orthodox rites after seventeenth-century church reforms; the Nekrasov name recalls the leader followed by Cossacks who left the Don region after the conflicts of 1708. Religious practice, political conflict and community autonomy all shaped those journeys. The Chechen families later associated with Mada belonged to a different migration history; proximity on a map does not make them one people.
The local chronology centres on the mid-1860s. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism describes the settlement of 30–40 Don Cossack households in 1866. The 2024 study also discusses an account of a journey from Manyas in 1865, while other scholarship places settlement in the winter of 1866–1867. These accounts should not be compressed into a falsely exact arrival date or treated as identical headcounts. Together they establish a movement from the Manyas community towards the Beyşehir lake basin.
The journey account includes livestock, carts and young fruit trees among the belongings carried south. Such details change the image of migration: people were transporting the means to establish a household and a working landscape. Mada offered fresh water and land alongside access to the lake. Settlement nevertheless depended on links beyond the shore, because tools, trade, official decisions and family connections could not all be supplied within an island community.
Fishing occupies a prominent place in both the official account and the historical research. Large wooden boats known as karakayık form part of the remembered material culture of Cossack fishing on these lakes. Their significance lies in the relationship between craft, fishing knowledge and transport. This does not mean fishing began on Lake Beyşehir with one incoming group. It identifies a contribution within a much longer history of people making their living from the water.
Island life combined several activities. Agricultural plots, animals, boats and landing places belonged to a connected working environment, rather than separate picturesque scenes. A calm view across the water can conceal the effort of transporting provisions or taking produce to market. Historical descriptions of weather, disease and economic difficulty remind us that the same lake could provide resources and complicate daily life. The island’s history is therefore also a history of dependence on the surrounding shore.
The Cossack population did not remain unchanged. Research describes illness, returns to Manyas and movement towards the Akşehir area; by the 1920s the island community’s circumstances had altered substantially. Some Cossacks continued to fish on Lake Beyşehir after relocating. The well-known departure from Manyas in 1962 belongs to that other community’s later history and should not be used as a blanket date for the end of Cossack settlement on Mada.
Later accounts record Chechen families on the island, followed by Yörük settlement, including families identified as Tırtar. The 2024 study describes changes of residence and landholding in the 1930s and subsequent settlement. These episodes belong together in a history of the island, but not in a single ethnic origin story. The accompanying article Chechens and Ingush in Beyşehir: Hamidiye’s Memory follows the better-documented town settlement and its cemetery evidence.
Names and ruins need the same care. Nearby Kirse or Kilise Island is a separate place, and historical interpretations of its remains are not unanimous. It should not be silently merged with Mada or with the better-known Kız Kalesi site elsewhere on the lake. Nor does the name Kazak prove the age or use of every surviving wall. Archaeology, travel accounts and oral traditions can illuminate one another without being interchangeable forms of evidence.
Mada is also a place where people live and work. Its homes, fields and waterfront spaces are not an open-air set left behind by a vanished community. Any visit depends on current local arrangements, weather and permission where land is private; the historical use of boats does not establish a scheduled passenger service. This article is cultural reading, not a verified island walking route, and it makes no recommendation to cross frozen water.
Read the wider lake article alongside this history to connect settlement with shorelines and transport. Water and City: Beyşehir’s Waterfront History then shifts attention to the town outlet and its irrigation works, while the palace article introduces a very different form of lakeside occupation. Together these stories show why an island cannot be understood from one label alone: inhabitants, livelihoods and connections changed, while the lake remained the shared setting for those changes.
Chechens and Ingush in Beyşehir: Hamidiye’s Memory
A journey from Grozny in 1901, settlement in Hamidiye, further arrivals in 1934, and Ottoman inscriptions preserving family histories.
Beyşehir’s history extends beyond its medieval monuments. Hamidiye carries the memory of families who arrived from the North Caucasus in the early twentieth century and established new lives beside an existing Ottoman town. Their story joins the familiar lake and stone bridge to less conspicuous evidence: house-building correspondence, agricultural allocations, family recollections and inscriptions in two neighbourhood cemeteries. Together these sources reveal a settlement process that took years, rather than a single arrival followed by effortless integration.
Historian Hüseyin Muşmal and art historian Mustafa Çetinaslan use the name Chechen–Ingush for the community they studied. Ottoman documents often say “Caucasian migrants” or “Chechen migrants”; descendants interviewed for the study described both Chechen and Ingush ancestry. These terms are not interchangeable with every other North Caucasian identity. In particular, the familiar umbrella label Circassian should not erase the specific communities recorded here. Nor were these families the Don Cossacks associated with Mada Island.
The study traces a group of 120 households that left Grozny in 1901 and reached Istanbul. The party divided: one group went towards Uzunyayla, while around 60 households continued to Konya province and Beyşehir. This documented journey gives the local story its clearest starting point. The much broader history of nineteenth-century Caucasian displacement forms its background, but a description that dates this particular Beyşehir settlement directly to 1864 misses the evidence for the later arrival.
Initial accommodation was close to the watercourse. Correspondence and oral accounts describe difficulties around the low-lying settlement, including malaria, before families established themselves on higher ground at Üçler Tepesi, roughly 500 metres from the channel. The new neighbourhood took the name Hamidiye, referring to Sultan Abdülhamid II. House construction, land arrangements and health problems appear in documents from different years in the early 1900s; “settlement” therefore describes a sequence of decisions rather than one perfectly documented moving day.
Building a home required more than allocating a plot. The archival material discusses state-funded houses, the acquisition of more than 450 dönüms of agricultural land, and assistance with draught animals and farming implements. These practical details show how housing and livelihood were connected. They also make the newcomers visible as households negotiating unfamiliar conditions, not simply as an anonymous population added to a census or an idealised picture of an instantly prosperous new community.
Migration continued after the first settlement. In 1934, ten households comprising forty people came to Beyşehir from Burhaniye in the Ereğli district, according to the same research. They were the remaining members of a community previously settled there. This later movement matters: families could relocate within Anatolia after an initial Ottoman allocation, and the history of Hamidiye developed across generations. A single arrow from the Caucasus to the lake cannot represent all those journeys.
The researchers recorded 38 grave monuments: 33 in the Lower Cemetery and five in the Upper Cemetery. The stones provide individual names and dates alongside the larger administrative account. Of the 36 examples with readable death dates, fourteen fall between 1903 and 1906. The dated group runs from the first years of the new settlement into 1930. This is a surviving sample, not a complete demographic register, and it cannot establish the cause of every death.
The inscriptions are in Ottoman Turkish using Arabic script, carved into local tuff. Some lettering is raised and some incised; the generally restrained decoration directs attention to the written surface. References to the Caucasus and to places of origin preserve connections across distance. The authors discuss material resources and local workmanship when interpreting these monuments. It would be misleading to turn every shape or ornament into a timeless ethnic signature shared by all Chechen or Ingush families.
The stones and the housing records answer different questions. An official letter can reveal the cost of settlement or a request for help; a grave inscription records a named person within a family’s commemorative world. Oral history adds memories that official paperwork may omit. Reading the evidence together produces a richer account of work, illness, belonging and remembrance, while keeping the distinction between a dated document and a later recollection visible.
There is also a connection with Mada Island, but it needs careful naming. Research on the island records a later Chechen presence after its nineteenth-century Don Cossack settlement and before subsequent Yörük settlement. These were distinct communities whose histories intersected in the same landscape. The article Mada Island: Cossacks, Migration and Lake Life follows that sequence and explains why the Turkish island name Kazak refers here to Cossacks, rather than to Kazakh people or to Chechens.
Hamidiye adds another layer to the town described in Water and City: Beyşehir’s Waterfront History. The older nucleus around Eşrefoğlu Mosque and the neighbourhoods along the outlet developed in different periods; the migrant neighbourhood belongs to the town’s more recent expansion. Looking at them together changes the scale of a visit. Beyşehir becomes a place repeatedly made and remade by residents, housing needs, employment and water, as well as a collection of celebrated monuments.
This remains a history of families and lived neighbourhoods. If visiting a cemetery, follow local access arrangements, keep paths and graves undisturbed, and ask before photographing people. The published survey is a useful starting point for reading inscriptions, not an invitation to clean, rub or move stones. Continue with the lake and waterfront articles to place Hamidiye within the wider landscape, while recognising that the study’s interviews describe the community at the time of research rather than a present-day census.
Mada Island: Cossacks, Migration and Lake Life
Don Cossack arrivals in the 1860s, later Chechen and Yörük settlement, and the layered history of an inhabited lake island.
Mada, Kazak and Kumluca are names attached to the same inhabited island in the northern part of Lake Beyşehir. Each opens a different historical perspective: an older place-name, the memory of Don Cossack settlement, and the sandy shoreline associated with Kumluca. The island lies near Gedikli and belongs administratively to Şarkikaraağaç in Isparta. Lake geography connects it with Beyşehir, but the town’s name should not obscure that different administrative setting.
The island’s human history began long before the Cossacks. Hüseyin Muşmal’s 2024 settlement study draws on Ottoman registers, earlier scholarship and accounts of island life. A register from 1507 records both Muslim and non-Muslim households. Those categories describe the administration’s entries at that date, not an unchanging population across the following centuries. Fresh water, cultivable ground, grazing and access to fish help explain why successive communities sought a livelihood here.
The word Kazak requires translation with care. In this story it means Don Cossack, not a person from modern Kazakhstan. The migrants were part of the wider Cossack movements through the Ottoman world, including the Old Believer and Nekrasov histories studied around Lake Manyas. Old Believers preserved earlier Russian Orthodox rites after seventeenth-century church reforms; the Nekrasov name recalls the leader followed by Cossacks who left the Don region after the conflicts of 1708. Religious practice, political conflict and community autonomy all shaped those journeys. The Chechen families later associated with Mada belonged to a different migration history; proximity on a map does not make them one people.
The local chronology centres on the mid-1860s. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism describes the settlement of 30–40 Don Cossack households in 1866. The 2024 study also discusses an account of a journey from Manyas in 1865, while other scholarship places settlement in the winter of 1866–1867. These accounts should not be compressed into a falsely exact arrival date or treated as identical headcounts. Together they establish a movement from the Manyas community towards the Beyşehir lake basin.
The journey account includes livestock, carts and young fruit trees among the belongings carried south. Such details change the image of migration: people were transporting the means to establish a household and a working landscape. Mada offered fresh water and land alongside access to the lake. Settlement nevertheless depended on links beyond the shore, because tools, trade, official decisions and family connections could not all be supplied within an island community.
Fishing occupies a prominent place in both the official account and the historical research. Large wooden boats known as karakayık form part of the remembered material culture of Cossack fishing on these lakes. Their significance lies in the relationship between craft, fishing knowledge and transport. This does not mean fishing began on Lake Beyşehir with one incoming group. It identifies a contribution within a much longer history of people making their living from the water.
Island life combined several activities. Agricultural plots, animals, boats and landing places belonged to a connected working environment, rather than separate picturesque scenes. A calm view across the water can conceal the effort of transporting provisions or taking produce to market. Historical descriptions of weather, disease and economic difficulty remind us that the same lake could provide resources and complicate daily life. The island’s history is therefore also a history of dependence on the surrounding shore.
The Cossack population did not remain unchanged. Research describes illness, returns to Manyas and movement towards the Akşehir area; by the 1920s the island community’s circumstances had altered substantially. Some Cossacks continued to fish on Lake Beyşehir after relocating. The well-known departure from Manyas in 1962 belongs to that other community’s later history and should not be used as a blanket date for the end of Cossack settlement on Mada.
Later accounts record Chechen families on the island, followed by Yörük settlement, including families identified as Tırtar. The 2024 study describes changes of residence and landholding in the 1930s and subsequent settlement. These episodes belong together in a history of the island, but not in a single ethnic origin story. The accompanying article Chechens and Ingush in Beyşehir: Hamidiye’s Memory follows the better-documented town settlement and its cemetery evidence.
Names and ruins need the same care. Nearby Kirse or Kilise Island is a separate place, and historical interpretations of its remains are not unanimous. It should not be silently merged with Mada or with the better-known Kız Kalesi site elsewhere on the lake. Nor does the name Kazak prove the age or use of every surviving wall. Archaeology, travel accounts and oral traditions can illuminate one another without being interchangeable forms of evidence.
Mada is also a place where people live and work. Its homes, fields and waterfront spaces are not an open-air set left behind by a vanished community. Any visit depends on current local arrangements, weather and permission where land is private; the historical use of boats does not establish a scheduled passenger service. This article is cultural reading, not a verified island walking route, and it makes no recommendation to cross frozen water.
Read the wider lake article alongside this history to connect settlement with shorelines and transport. Water and City: Beyşehir’s Waterfront History then shifts attention to the town outlet and its irrigation works, while the palace article introduces a very different form of lakeside occupation. Together these stories show why an island cannot be understood from one label alone: inhabitants, livelihoods and connections changed, while the lake remained the shared setting for those changes.
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2024, 14(2) 150–162