Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
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Page 185
mother's brother's son, soon after marrying him, and that his famiy were likely to start shooting if they knew of the new marriage. The girl turned out to be practically blind, and incapable of work, and probably this whole story was poppycock.) We drank a brief coffee with her father and the go-between and set off on our return; as we entered our own village one or two of our company fired shots into the air, and the escort, which included only one woman (yenge), sang songs. We all, bar the bride and the yenge, went to a guest room, and I responded to a call for coffee and cigarettes. An elderly neighbour with a reputation for religious and magical knowledge was invited to pronounce the nikah. He offered us a range of qualities of nikah at various prices, and a price was chosen. We then all provided the groom with wedding clothes by a whip-round on the spot of the most respectable garments in the company - my trousers were a little small for him, but no one seemed worried - and off he went to his bride.
This example must represent the extreme of exiguity. Though no secondary marriage ever has public festivities, normally some gifts, formal visits and meals for kin are exchanged on a small scale.
Bride Price
The transfer of a woman from her natal to her marital household is accompanied here, as in many other societies, by exchanges of wealth. Among these is the cash payment which I have called bride price, known in these villages as `head thing', bashlik.
It has been argued, sometimes fiercely, that the payment of bride price, or marriage payment as it is often called, is not sale. It is therefore interesting that the villagers normally use the ordinary Turkish word for to sell, satmak (Koshay (1944) p. ix), in speaking of the marriage of a girl. Moreover, the ordinary words for give and take, vermek and almak, which are commonly used in Turkish for buy and sell, are also commonly used in the villages for giving and taking in marriage; in some contexts at least they seem to imply an idea of buying and selling.
Yet in fact the villagers themselves insist fiercely that this is no ordinary sale. `Are our daughters cattle that we should sell them?' Nowadays, the bride price is often regarded, especially
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