Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GROUPS, FEUDS AND POWER
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Page 250
produced violence soon after my departure from the village
V and S were küs during my stay, and I heard a lot from each about the short-comings of the other. Bektesh (V) told me that, the year before, S lineage `attempted to kill us', but I did not establish any clear details. In the summer of 1951 a plumber who was a member of S, was knifed on a building site in a city by a member of V. A young man of S was accused of having approached the wife of a young man of V. Next, according to his own account, the plumber advised an employer in Adana against employing a plasterer, without knowing that the man in question was from V lineage. When V lineage found out, they assumed the act was deliberate. They caught him on a site and knifed him in the stomach. The youngest amongst them confessed and received a light sentence because of his age. According to the story the blow was actually struck by another young man of a different lineage, whose father had been wounded in a fight with S in the village the year before. No further major violence had occurred between these lineages by 1955. S declared themselves to be willing to make peace but I doubt if this is to be taken seriously.
During my stay at the village V and M lineages were also küs. Both lineages used the K guest room, but no member of V lineage ever used either of the M guest rooms. Then at some point after I had left a young man of V `insulted' the wife of a young man of M, perhaps in retaliation for some previous affront. Close young agnates of the household of the aggrieved young man attacked the house of the young man of V by night, and shot him in the jaw. Some time later, Durdu of V fell into a public dispute with a member of the other main M household. He went and fetched a gun, and was standing outside his opponent's house challenging him to come out, when another villager (T), not concerned but an affine of M lineage, came along and urged him to stop. Durdu, I was told, turned his gun on the newcomer but failed to release the safety catch. This brief delay enabled the intervener to draw his own gun in self-defence. He shot Durdu dead and duly went to prison for homicide. The day after the shooting the victim's daughter, who was married within her own lineage, beat up the mother of the man of M who had refused to come out. Two weeks later the woman died, but her assailant was subsequently exonerated
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