Two weddings in Sakaltutan, while I was there, involved a comparatively prosperous household in an alliance with a poor one, but in both cases the girl's father, though poor because of the dividing of the land, was treated as respectable and an equal by the majority of the villagers.
In view of the rapidity with which a household could in the past gain or lose land, and the ease nowadays with which a household can acquire cash by skilled wage-earning, it is not surprising that some existing affinal connections bridge very considerable gaps in the present social hierarchy. But though leading households were sometimes tied to middling ones, and middling households to very poor ones, no direct affinal links existed even in Sakaltutan between the top and the bottom.
For marriages outside the village, considerations of relative rank are more complex. Some men, especially when forced to obtain a replacement wife without ready resources, are not concerned with her standing in her own village. Moreover, a few men had obtained wives by elopement, or cheaply in other ways, and most of these came from outside. On the other hand, those few households which obtained and sought to retain leading positions in the village often intermarried with similarly powerful households in other villages.
Marriages to towns - or for small villages, to more sophisticated villages-are rare. Women very seldom marry down across community frontiers, respectable women never. But village girls may go to town. While we were in Elbashï one girl of refugee family married, by arrangement through kin, a young Istanbul architect. In another case, a village woman's sister was married to a judge. Plainly, influential affines are useful and bring prestige; but they are rare.