Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE DOMESTIC CYCLE
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Page 145
during our stay. But his existing family house betrayed his recent povrty, and his lowliness was too well remembered for his wealth to earn him much respect. His sons in turn will inherit only modest-sized holdings, which they will have no possibility of expanding except by direct purchase.
Haci Bayram's two elder sons had been by a different mother, and were a great deal older. One had left in the village another set of four brothers with sharply different degrees of wealth. The eldest, Mahsud, a man of about fifty, had about as much land as Hayip; the others barely enough to keep the household going. I failed to check on the history of this disparity, but as Mahsud had only three sons, the eldest of whom was only twenty, this case does not fit my model. Possibly it was Mahsud's father who had taken the initiative, and somehow, as elder brother, he had retained the extra land which his father had acquired, and restricted the division to the patrimonial estate.
Elbashï also provided one example of a personal rise to real pre-eminence, and the corresponding extinction of this power with the death of the holder. Kara Osman (Ax) it was said, had `held the whole district in his hand', and had been a friend of Ataturk. Quite what this meant I am not sure; but plainly during the War of Independence and in the early days of the Republic he must have had great political influence in the area. He had had one successful son who must have been born early in his married life, for he had married and left a grandson senior to Kara Osman's other sons, two more of whom must have been adolescent in the mid nineteen-twenties. Thus he had at least four descendants to work for him. He may have had others who died without issue.
In I923 Turkey agreed with Greece to transfer to Greece all Christians of the Greek Orthodox Church. A large village standing below Elbashï, on the stream which irrigated a wide belt of meadow and crop land, was emptied of its population. Kara Osman moved in, and took over a large area of land, said to be a thousand dönüm . This might mean anything from l00 ha. (250 acres) to 250 ha. (over 600 acres). He was in any case very much wealthier than anyone else in the village. `At his gate,' they said, `there were ten labourers.' He was one of the first in this part of Turkey to own a tractor and a combine harvester,
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