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been ploughing, in the mid afternoon, and collected in the village meadow,
whence the two oxherds take them away in separate herds to pasture until
early morning. They are then brought back to the village, and the villagers
take them off to work. Since this is much more arduous than the cowherd’s
task, the annual reward is the same for a much shorter period. The buffaloes
are pastured for the same period, and in a similar way. The rewards for this
work can be reckoned out. The village owns at least 100 cows, 200 oxen, and
70 buffaloes, and each villager pays one third of his dues to the herdsman in
wheat, one third in rye, and one third in barley. The average value of a
measure is very roughly 1 T.L. Two measures equal 1 and one third sinik, so
that the reward in each case is about 200 T.L. per annum, rather less for the
buffalo herd.
The cow herd for 1950 was Haci (AG 2) who has some 50 donum, which his
women folk help to work. He seems regularly to take on herding, and to
enjoy it, and I am not quite clear what his motives are. One oxherd, Muhtar
in 1938-42, and the son of a man highly respected in the village, also owning
50 donum of land, took the job because the bad harvest had reduced him to
difficulties. The others, two men and two boys, were from really poor
households with 25 donum or less. One of our villagers, probably the poorest
man in the village - a middle-aged man with seven children, with no land and
very little wit - because shepherd in the next village at 130 sinik for the
season. In two other neighbouring villages, the shepherds received a cash sum
of 300 T.L. for the season; in both cases this is said to be an innovation,
replacing the old custom of payment in kind per beast.
The functions, therefore, are undertaken for very low reward by men who are
either unwilling or unable to go to town for work, and who cannot make a
sufficient living from their own lands. Such work carries with it a slight
stigma, is a sign of poverty, and makes a man a servant of the village. “Look
at Arif”, they would say, “his father was a big man, and now he has come
down to being a shepherd”.
Three other persons in the village receive public payments. The muhtar is
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paid 300 T.L. per annum, intended merely as an entertainment allowance.
This sum probably does no more than meet expenses; certainly, at least, it does
not attract men to the job. The other two persons are both specialists:- the
imam and the schoolmaster. The imam is supported by village contributions,
amounting to about 200 T.L. worth of grain a year, plus fees and charges for
services, such as marriages, deaths and the making of charms. He may be a
native of the village in which he works, though often he is not. In Sakaltutan
the schoolmaster is paid 400 T.L. by the state for part time teaching from
November to May.
Besides these public services, poor villagers are employed in the village
privately. There is a slight demand for labour for building; last summer, in
combination with partners outside seven labourers from Sakaltutan, and three
from the next village, were employed for about three weeks, at 2 T.L. a day
with food. Two young men from one of the richer kabile (DT), were
working as unskilled labour on an extension to the school, employed by Duran
(DS 3), a skilled mason, after the main pressure of the harvest was over.
Since villagers with land which they cannot themselves plough let to a share-
cropper, casual labour is not usually employed for agricultural work.
Ibrahim, (SI 3), the plumber did claim to have had his fields ploughed in this
way, but since his supposed employee (SK) was his wife’s brother, I doubt his
statement. The only time when casual labour is employed to a considerable
extent for agriculture is at the harvest. When speaking of unskilled labour in
the ordinary way, the villagers use the work “amele” - labourer, or simply use
the word for work - “calismak”. But a labourer at the harvest is called
“irgat”, and the harvest is referred to as “irgatlik”. “Irgat” is given in the
dictionary as labourer, but, as far as I observed it is confirmed in the village
to harvesting. Harvesting means to the villager work on a different scale to
work at other times - a sixteen-hour day, and, when there is a good moon,
even longer. It seems, therefore, not surprising that such work should have a
different name, and different conditions of employment. The pay is 2 and a
half or 3 T.L. day, and the labourer gets all his food in the fields, and a feast
when the harvest is in, which he is entitled to eat with the family employing
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him. Several of the villagers without land of their own to harvest did this
kind of work, often for neighbours who were but moderately landed
themselves, but who, for reasons of health or family, had insufficient labour
of their own. On one occasion I found a landless man (C 1) scything “yonca”,
translated “clover”, for the village carpenter, Zubeyr. Answering my
questions, he said that they had struck no bargain; Zubeyr had asked for
someone to reap it, and he had volunteered. “What if he does not pay
anything?” I asked. “Whatever he gives, he gives, he is my neighbour”, he
replied. In fact, they came from opposite ends of the village, and had no
kinship ties.
The labour force of a household may be strengthened in another way. Richer
households sometimes take on a man, usually a young and unmarried man
from a poor family, as a fulltime servant. He receives his keep, including
clothes, eats and sleeps as a member of the family, and in addition is paid an
annual wage, customarily 150 or 200 T.L. per annum. Such a man is called a
“cirak”, the word also used for an apprentice to a trade. In Sakaltutan,
examples were rare, but the arrangement is fairly common in these villages,
and elastic. As with servants in the West, it is temporary, and may be
terminated at any moment by eitherside. It may last a year, it may last until a
man’s marriage, or it may survive marriage and last a lifetime. In the past it
seems to have been one of the occasions for a shift of population between
villages. Gn village has, within twenty minutes’ walk of it, a smaller village
whose lands are not extensive, and form, so to speak, a salient within the lands
of the larger village. This situation, it was explained to me, came about by the
foundation of a separate village for the cirak of the landowners of Gn.
Similarly, in Kb village one kabile, which still represents half the village,
claims to have been the original owning family, around which ancestors of the
rest of the present village population are said to have gathered as cirak. In
Sakaltutan, the present village watchman (BY) had been cirak to two different
families, to the first (SA 2) for one year and to the other (DT 1) for five
years. Another young man, (S 2’s son), twenty-five years old but still
unmarried, of poor parents, is cirak to a rich villager in a village about ten
miles away. Although, if satisfied, a man may stay for a life time with his
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aga, the institution may, I think, be regarded chiefly as a method for the poor,
and especially the landless, to find a means of livelihood for young adult sons.
Within the circle of local villages, certain skilled services are exchanged.
Every man is able to repair his own plough and cart, but other skills are
specialised. Two or three nearby villages have village smiths, who serve
several villages, making adzes, bolts, iron bars for repairs to broken tools, and
so on. Others tour the villages shoeing oxen, and seem, in fact, to belong to a
separate profession, though sharing the name “ironworker”. In Ac village, I
found a visiting smith shoeing oxen, while the resident iron worker was busy
in his shop on other tasks. There are resident carpenters at work in both Gn
village and in Sakaltutan, who both found plenty of orders to keep them going,
even in a bad year when many households had no spare cash. The carpenter in
Gn village claimed that he had learnt his trade in the village and never been to
town for work. He owned no land at all, and made, for his trade, a living
with which he seemed perfectly satisfied. The Sakaltutan carpenter, Zubeyr
(SI 4), owns a moderate quantity of land, which he and his brother farmer
jointly. He went to Izmir for three years in his youth, where he learnt and
practised his trade. There are four other skilled carpenters in his kabile, all of
whom go to town for work. In Sakaltutan there was also a glazier, serving the
village in this capacity and also doing some rough carpentry.
In all villages one finds skilled masons and builders. These skills, though not
identical, are usually combined in the same person. Such men may go
frequently to town for work, or may use their skill in the village and go
seldom. Two masons in Sakaltutan, for example, Hasan (PA 1) and Galip (FB
2) both moderately well off, only do building when opportunity offers in the
village. Partly due to the increase in population, partly to the growing
dissatisfaction with the traditional type of house, especially the caves, new
houses are numerous, and several families were in process of building during
my stay, despite the bad harvest.
It is not easy in every case to estimate precisely how much these skills are
worth to their owners. When working in the village a builder gets 5 T.L. a
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day, or is paid by contract at a comparable rate. The only example I was able
to investigate of the carpenter’s profit revealed a startlingly high rate. At the
harvest, Zubeyr and his kabile were making threshing boards for many
households in Sakaltutan and other villages. A craftsman can make two or
three boards a day; his materials cost him about seen T.L. and he sells for 18
to 20 T.L. A threshing board is made of a stout plank, into the underside of
which a large number of small sharp flints have been embedded. I am told
that putting these fints into the board securely, without breaking or blunting
them, is a highly skilled task, but even so, a profit of 20 to 30 T.L. a day in
the village seems out of all proportion to the village economy. I can only
suggest by way of explanation, that this family held a monopoly in the area,
and that since they were selling on credit for immediate use, the very high
price invluded implicitly a charge for credit. When I asked my friends about
this they simply remarked that the job was a highly skilled one. The carpenter
in Gn village mentioned above was not able to do this work.
Two or three of the old men of the village had reputations for a knowledge
about animal illnesses, but for the most part, as far as I could observe, they
gave advance free. On one occasion one old man (VA 1) was called to the
next village to see a sick buffalo, and in this case he would receive a fee.
Other old men, with reputations for knowledge of the Koran and thus for
dispensing charms, would charge for professional services of this kind.
The only artifacts made in the village and sold in the towns were made by the
women of the village - saddle bads and rugs, which were woven on upright
looms. The rugs and bags are made from home grown wool, dyed with dyes
brought from the town. By far the bulk of these are made for home use, or
for the girl’s trousseaux but some may be sold, especially in a bad year.
Sometimes they are sold after a wedding, by the parents of the groom. The
income from this source is small. Six households, to my knowledge, each sold
a pair of prayer mats for about 25 T.L., but no household sold more than one
part a year. Something must be allowed for the cost of the dyes, the wool
itself has considerable value, and it takes a skilled woman a long time to make
one pair, so the profit is small.
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