Ethnographics Gallery University of Kent

Turkish Village

Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.

Paul Stirling
CHAPTER SIX

HOUSEHOLD AND FAMILY STRUCTURE

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Page 102


share the land between them and are likely to proe very difficult to dispossess. Moreover, marriage is a vital and essential step to adulthood, and it is always arranged and financed by the father, if he is alive. Serious quarrels between father and son never to my knowledge preceded the son's marriage.

Such quarrels certainly occurred. Hüsnü of Sakaltutan wanted his married son to go away to learn a plasterer's trade and earn money - the household was by no means a wealthy one. The son did not want to go. This matter came up several times in the headman's guest room - the current headman was a kinsman, whose guest room this family normally used (p. 243) but people seemed to make a joke of it. The son complained that the father did none of the household farm work, but kept all the proceeds. One day e helped himself to money from his father's money box. His father upbraided him, and the son drew a knife. He was not bluffing. Earlier that spring a man had been carried through the village over the snow to die in hospital in Kayseri from a bullet wound inflicted during a quarrel with his father - accidentally, according to the version of the incident that reached me. Hüsnü was separated from his son by the timely intervention of his own brother. I chanced to call the next day, when the headman (in the role of a kinsman, not of the headman), was presiding over a family conference to reconcile the pair. Round the tandir were sitting Hüsnü, the headman, another close neighbour and kinsman, the headman's mother, -and the children. My entry produced silence, then suddenly Hüsnü, ignoring me, burst into an unrestrained tirade against the vile inhuman ingratitude of such a son. The son was crouching against the wall of the room with his back to the others. Embarrassed, I did not stay long. The quarrel was settled, and in the spring the young man with other young men from the village went off to work, and came back by the harvest, already a plasterer, with money in his pocket.

Ömer, blessed with six sons, had trouble with his second. This young man had become a plasterer young, and had enjoyed his taste of town life with money to spend in his pocket. His father, by Sakaltutan standards, was well off for land, but very much a villager, who went to town as little as possible. He married this son to a daughter of the Hüsnü mentioned above, in January, with due ceremony. Only a fortnight later, in spite

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