Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER TWO
THE SETTING
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gives an easily worked rock for cave-making. Willows and straight poplars, so common in the villages of central Tur, grow along the stream in considerable numbers and give it the distant appearance of a green oasis in a treeless waste. The disorderly array of flat-roofed and irregular houses in local stone give the villages a half tumble-down appearance. This impression is not altogether false. Much new building is in progress, and many older houses have been abandoned, and their valuable roof timbers removed. On closer inspection, most of the houses are occupied and solidly built. The streets are haphazard - people have built as and where they chose. In.both villages, and especially in Elbashï, many of the new houses are well away from the village centre, and some of them have their own wells, being too far from the village fountains. The village mosques were in neither case remarkable. They looked from the outside like larger versions of village houses, except that an outside staircase ran up to roof level, ending in a platform covered by a small pinnacle which constituted the minaret. Inside, the floor was covered with rugs, where the faithful came shoeless to perform their ritual prayers or to listen to the Holy Koran.
Many villages now have one red-roofed school building, conspicuous with its new white walls. But Sakaltutan had not achieved this distinction; its school building was a stone, flat roofed building, two unused rooms of which became my home.
Elbashï, by contrast, had four public buildings; an old flat roofed stone school dating from the nineteen-twenties, a new red-roofed school, a house, not occupied, for a village health officer (Sihhat Memuru) and an older tin-roofed building which acted as headquarters for the nahiye, and housed four gendarmes and a sergeant.
Village Houses
The stone houses vary in size and layout, depending mainly on the size of the household and its wealth. One or two families in Sakaltutan still lived in caves. One cave had been newly made for a young couple. Caves, after all, are not only cheaper, but better insulated against heat and cold, do not leak in heavy rain - most flat-roofed houses do - and require no upkeep. The
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