The Turkish Civil Code of 1928 lays down the procedure for registering marriage. The couple must establish their identity by the production of valid birth certificates, they must submit to a medical examination, and the marriage must be registered by the appropriate official. Divorce by a court is not difficult to obtain, except in so far as anything involving lawyers and courts is always difficult. The Civil Code completely replaced Islamic law, so that all religious ceremonies are legally irrelevant.
But to the villagers it is the Civil Code which is irrelevant. They do not regard people who have been through a civil ceremony as married, they never have recourse to courts for settling disputes over the rights and duties of spouses, and nowhere in Turkey did I find a villager who had divorced a wife by legal process. Officials bring pressure to register first marriages which are celebrated with conspicuous weddings, and if any kind of welfare rights - marriage allowances, for example - are involved, then the villagers register their marriages cheerfully. But whether they do so or not makes not the slightest difference to their view of the morality of a union. To them, registration is not a rite within their system, but a meaningless piece of bureaucratic mumbo jumbo.
Legitimacy for the villages still rests solely on the nikah, the religious rite performed by anyone of sufficient religious learning to know the formula. They claim to marry according to the Seriat, and to regulate the rights and duties of spouses accordingly. In fact, they do not do so, not even to the point of their own knowledge of Islamic Law.