Fatsa - History

History

The history of Fatsa goes back to antiquity, when the coast was settled by Cimmerians, Persian people and Ancient Greek colonists in the centuries BC, followed by Alexander the Great and his successors. The town grew in importance under the Kingdom of Pontus, particularly during the reign of Pharnaces II the ally of Pompey against Julius Caesar in the 1st century BC, who built the city here. Following the demise of Pontus the area passed into Ancient Rome and Byzantine Empire hands.

Turkish peoples came to the area in the 11th century following the Battle of Manzikert and the Black Sea coast was quickly conquered by the Danishmends emir Sevli Bey, and settled by Turkish immigrants. In the 13th and 14th centuries Genoese traders established trading posts along the coast, Fatsa became one of the most important of these, and there is a stone warehouse on the shore built in this period. She was shortly occupied by Empire of Trebizond. The Genoese presence in the Black Sea ended with the fall of Constantinople but Fatsa later thrived again under the Hacı Emir Oğulları Anatolian Beyliks in the late 14th century and became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1427. She was part of Canik sanjak until 1921.

In the 19th century the population increased as Armenians, Georgians and Caucasus Turks migrated to the coast to escape the wars between Russia and the Ottomans. The Greek Christian community remained and thrived as craftsmen and bureaucrats until the Population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, when 770 families of Turks from Greece were settled in the town and villages of Fatsa. In this period the town remained a port and trading post, there was no coast road to Ünye or Ordu and the port thrived. Corn, rice and other grains were grown in the hinterland and from the 1920s onwards hazelnuts were planted, when rice growing ceased as the coastal swamps were dried up by irrigation works and the town grew.

In the 1970s Fatsa municipality was controlled by the left wing mayor Fikri Sönmez and his Devrimci Yol organisation of local committees under the slogan "The red sun will rise in Fatsa". During that time a communal management of the city was set, where the different aspects of life and administration were discussed. The committees were formed by the people of the municipality and had power to recall government authorities. A major incident in this period was the kidnapping by the THKO in 1972 of three British technicians from the radar station ın Ünye. This era ended when, upon the initiative of the MHP supporting provincial governor, the mayor and 300 others were arrested in the "Nokta Operasyonu" of July 1980, two months before the 1980 Turkish coup d'état. Throughout this period Fatsa lost a significant number of its people as they migrated away to jobs in Turkey's larger cities or abroad, including a large proportion of the Turkish community in Japan.

Today the municipality is controlled by conservative AK Party and her mayor is Hüseyin Anlayan.