This law is almost wholly ignored in the villages which I knew. The election of a headman and a council of elders, and the appointing of a watchman are enforced by the administration and are carried out. Boundaries are in fact registered. The headman's duties to arrest criminals and to question any stranger who appears in his village are known and enforced. But for the rest the law is a dead letter. The few points of the law that the village carries out, it carries out from custom, and not because they are in the law. I have never heard anyone in Turkey raise the question of the village using its powers under the law to enact local regulations. Even the District Officers did not give the impression of knowing the contents of the law. They did not even use it, as they could easily have done, to bring pressure on the village by threatening to enforce its more awkward prescriptions. In fact no one I met seemed to know more about it than that it existed.
Most prosecutions of villagers before the criminal courts are for assault or violence, and on the whole sentences are light. On one occasion the topic of Kayseri jail came up in the course of a guest-room conversation. Almost all the seven or eight men present had had experience of it, all for breaches of the peace. They complained of the discomfort, especially the sanitation, but prison has no social stigma, and a short sentence is a trivial matter. The social sanctions within village society which require a man to be intransigent and virile are incomparably stronger than the state sanctions against violence and disorder. Young men generally receive lighter sentences than older men, so young men are encouraged to carry out any necessary lineage business of a violent sort. Sometimes they are put up on false evidence to answer for the acts of their elders.
Under the Turkish Civil Code, as under the Swiss Civil Code