Mesudiye Village biography
Çotuk Ahmet Efendi
Founding Facilitator (~1907, Durayda)
A local figure remembered as the person who discovered the Durayda land and invited his community to settle there — the catalytic role in the 1907 founding of Mesudiye village.
In the early 1900s, scouting for suitable settlement land in the Karaman region for incoming Karabağlar muhajirs from Bulgaria, Çotuk Ahmet Efendi identified the Durayda — a tract that had been documented in Ottoman tahrir registers since 1500 but stood mostly empty by the late Ottoman period.
His invitation brought 94 households from the village of Çayır (Hacıoğlu-Pazarcık, Bulgaria) to the Durayda land. By autumn 1907, the settlement was complete and the new village named Mesudiye.
The Çotuk family — descendants of Ahmet Efendi — produced two later muhtars (Kadir Çotuk 1962-63, Abdurrahim Çotuk 1968) and remains one of the village's defining lineages.
Related pages
- • Full Turkish biography page with photos and detailed story
- • All 11 biographies
- • Deutsche Version