Sakaltutan is fourteen miles farther east, the last village of the Talas nahiye. Only two years before our arrival, a rough village road had been made just passable for motor traffic, joining Tomarza, the next nahiye centre out, in the kaza of Develi, to Kayseri. Passing through the village to the north of Talas1 this road climbed across steep valleys and sharp hills as far as Sakaltutan, which lay at the foot of the slopes rising towards Erciyas, at about 5,500 feet, some twenty miles from Kayseri. Thence the road swung south-east round the base of the mountains and slowly fell towards Tomarza.
Another fork of the road, also just passable for lorries, branched off at Sakaltutan and ran slightly north of east, down into a wide valley, through three or four villages until it reached Elbashï, the next nahiye centre, at about 4,000 feet, and only about four miles from an alternative main road from Kayseri, through Bunyan to Pïnarbashï. Elbashï was attached administratively to Bunyan, about fifteen miles away, and over forty miles by the main road from Kayseri. In village terms, Kayseri to Sakaltutan was six hours, Talas to Sakaltutan four or five hours, and Sakaltutan to Elbashï four or five hours. Although the lorries and the new roads had rendered this way of measuring distances obsolescent, it was still the normal way of talking about distances.
Sakaltutan was of medium size - about one hundred households and just over six hundred people. Elbashï was well above the village average for the area, with over two hundred house-