Skilled men earn from twice to three times as much as the unskilled. Labourers are generally paid by the day; skilled men by the job. Traditionally, men of skill, carpenters, smiths and masons, are known in the village as usta. The distinction between skilled and unskilled was sharp. No single word in normal usage covered both; a man was either amele or usta. The word usta is often used as a sort of title, for example Ahmet Usta, with an implication of dignity, and I was sometimes called usta because of my skill with a pen. Quite apart from the great financial advantage young men were anxious not to remain amele, though the village was not in practice prepared to accord the title usta as a matter of general usage to every young man who became a migrant plasterer or painter.
I expected at first to find that the skilled migrants would be those with little or no land, those, that is, who had nothing to keep them in the village; and that the unskilled would be those with land who needed relatively little extra income and had little time to spend learning crafts. But in fact the migrants from better-off households tend to become skilled, and the migrants from the poor or landless households to remain unskilled. A few of the better-off farmers, when they face special needs, go to work, shamefacedly, as unskilled labourers, and one or two of the poorest households have sons who become skilled men. But on the whole the correlation holds.
The retail trade covers a wide range of social positions. At the lowest end, peddling with a donkey for example, it was definitely a despised occupation. But the well-dressed outsiders who arrived on horseback to sell cloth - including a man of Sakaltutan resident in a village nearer Kayseri - were obviously persons of higher standing. Again some of the shopkeepers who had no other source of income seemed to rank at the lower end of the village scale, but some shops were run by men with land