[10] The history of Fatsa goes back to antiquity, when the coast was settled by Cimmerians, and Pontic Greeks in the centuries BC.

[13] Discovered in 2021, the ruins of a monastery dedicated to Saints Constantine and Helena and dating back to the 5th or 6th century were excavated in the following years.

[14] Following the Turkish conquest of Anatolia by the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum and later by the Ottomans, Muslim settlers arrived at Fatsa in the middle of the 14th Century.

[18] In 1999, a religious worship complex that serves to both Alevis and Sunni Muslims was opened in Fatsa, which was unprecedented in Turkey.

[19] In the second half of the 19th century, Fatsa's Sunni population increased significantly, as some of Chveneburi (Sunni Muslim Georgians) from Batumi and Kobuleti (Turkish: Çürüksu), who fought in the Ottoman army against the Russian forces in Russo-Turkish War (1877–78) under Ali Pasha of Çürüksu[15] and some of the Abazins and Circassians,[20] who were forced to leave their ancestral land in North Caucasus after the end of the Caucasian War in 1864, were settled in Fatsa and in the surrounding villages.

[11] Fatsa's Christian population during the Ottoman era was made up by Pontic Greeks and Armenians,[21] who thrived as craftsmen and bureaucrats.

The book titled Literary Publications, Testimonials and Narratives in Pieria (1918 - 2010) (Greek: Λογοτεχνικές εκδόσεις, μαρτυρίες και αφηγήσεις στην Πιερία) includes chronicles of some of Fatsa's Pontic Greeks on their exodus from Fatsa to Katerini, including an anecdotal account by Chalkidis Ef.

[27] Sönmez and his Marxist–Leninist organisation Devrimci Yol, which was made up by local committees under the slogan "The red sun will rise in Fatsa", controlled the municipality until 11 July 1980.

[28] After his election as the mayor, Sönmez divided Fatsa into eleven regions and created people's committees, which had power to recall government authorities.

[26] Sönmez was blamed creating a new state inside the Turkish Republic by the prime minister of Turkey at the time, Süleyman Demirel.

[31] Throughout this turbulent period, Fatsa lost a significant number of its people as they migrated away to jobs in Turkey's larger cities or abroad.

[33] Fatsa is located on a strip of coastline between the Black Sea and the Janik Mountains (Turkish: Canik) and watered by the rivers of Elekçi, Bolaman, Yapraklı and Belice.

From the 1920s onwards, the coastal swamps were dried up by irrigation works, rice growing ceased and the town grew.