One striking but complicated case illustrates female inheritance, and at the same time the opportunism of village inheritance. Ismet (T) had come to the village as a boy with a widowed mother. He had thus no agnatic rights to land. He had married a daughter of a prolific lineage, all the men of which were victims of the wars from 1911 to 1922. Among them was her brother, who left an infant son Yakup, the only male survivor of the lineage. Ismet managed to arrange for the widow, Yakup's mother, to marry his second son, who was only a boy and very much her junior. Ismet was thus in a very strong position. His wife's rights to inherit her lineage lands were naturally recognised. Yakup, the only surviving male of the lineage, was a member of Ismet's household, being step grandson (son's wife's son) and nephew by marriage (wife's brother's son) at the same time. Four other women of the lineage appear either to have been ignored or bought out. In 1949, the immigrant Ismet was the largest landowner in the village, although Yakup was by then married with a reasonable sufficiency of land of his own, and his mother and another son also formed a separate household with a little land said to belong personally to her. How the details of what land passed to whom were worked out, and how customary rights, de facto possession and plain seizure were blended, I do not know and cannot reconstruct. But plainly Ismet took his opportunity with both hands.
Figure 7
A case from Elbashï illustrates a similar disregard for formal and complicated rules. Sükrü, a man with a sufficiency of land, died in the winter of 1952. During the summer, shortly before my departure, his heirs were disputing the division of inheritance.