On a later visit, I was told that Haci Osman had registered all the land of his household in his own name when he was headman of the village at some point in the past, and he himself said that he had formally adopted his informally adopted dead son's son as his heir under the Turkish Civil Code. But neither of these facts seemed to be generally known in the village.
Ironically, the wife of the younger of these two brothers is also formally entitled to land, through her mother, from the comparatively well-to-do family of Haci Omer (D). Her mother's father is said, plausibly, to have been in his day one of the wealthiest and most important men in the village. His three sons divided the land between them and are still comparatively influential and comfortable. Their sisters got nothing. Since there are four surviving sisters, any rearrangement would be disastrous for the three brothers. Yet whenever I asked about this, those who were in a position to make formally justifiable claims would say `of course they will give - it is the law.'
Brothers divided their land in this way in many cases, indeed in most, unless there were more complicated factors. Nevertheless, the right of daughters to inherit equally with their brothers was publicly acknowledged, and in some cases they do so inherit. Omer (G), for example, told me that he had a large outstanding debt to his sister, who had married to another village, for her share of the land.
Where women inherit, they often do so because they have no brothers. In most cases, where a girl has left her natal village, she sells any land to which she is entitled to her closest kin, but if the land is near the village boundary with the village to which she has married, she may keep it. Enough cases of this type existed for much land close to but within the village boundary to belong to households of other villages. Very rarely, rights to more central plots will be retained, and worked on a sharecropping basis, or rental for cash.