Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE DOMESTIC CYCLE
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Page 146
before these became familiar sights in the Turkish countryside.
I was told that twelve people claimed shares in his estate and that they had taken the case to the courts. I have records only of eleven, one grandson, five sons, (two of them still children), two daughters and three widows, who were certainly not all married to him under State law. By 1955, four years after his death, the matter was still unsettled though the brothers claimed to be reconciled. I suspect that in the end the four household heads, the grandson and the three adult sons, reached agreement which the rest were unable to upset. But whatever the outcome no single heir could in any way rival his father's pre-eminence.
Conclusion
In general then, over much of Anatolia, the village social system worked against the maintenance of wealth in any one household or line of households through more than one generation. Broad was the way and easy the path to mediocrity or poverty, through the division of the land, illness, premature deaths, the birth of too many daughters, the barrenness of wives or the death of oxen. But strait as it was, the gate to prosperity was open, through the successful rearing of many sons to provide economic resources and fighting men for the expansion of household power and wealth. Land shortage closes this gate; the downward path is now even easier to tread but there is no way up again. Fathers still profit from large families of sons but the more successful they are in breeding them, the smaller their sons' holdings, and the more hopeless their sons: prospects of attaining importance in the village.
The second model with its prospects of hopelessness applies to the present situation in Turkey only in so far as the villages are forced to solve their problems within themselves. But already the villages are part of the national economy, and from the outside there is hope, at a price. To feed a family, many men must go away to work. Even the better off can only hope to acquire the extra resources to establish importance in the village by going outside. But the very need to move out for long periods into a different world makes the achievement more difficult, and, at the same time, as the contestants become aware of
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