Within relationships of this personal type some degree of intimacy, exchange of ideas, and mutual help is possible. But this is not the case with the single-purpose relations, those with officials, professional men, politicians and merchants. Even these vary according to context. When the villager, often shabbily dressed and usually uncertain of himself and his village manners, visits the townsman he is very much at a disadvantage. It is easy in Turkey for anyone to walk into any office, including that of the Vali, with a request, but a villager is unlikely to receive much consideration unless he has a pull, or an exceptionally well presented case. Doctors, dentists, and lawyers too, treat village clients with a lofty air.
When the official visits the village, where he is more or less compelled to receive village hospitality, he is on more equal terms. He automatically meets the village leaders, men confident of their local superiority, and he is not surrounded by telephones, desks and messengers. Under these circumstances, even the Vali or a member of the National Assembly may appear to be on easy terms with his hosts. But such visits are rare, brief, and so covered by a formal politeness on both sides that the degree of real communication is strictly limited.
While senior officials, especially after the Democrat victory in 1950, were often polite, junior officials were more obviously paternalistic. On my first visit to Sakaltutan, the local District Officer who accompanied me explicitly and publicly spoke of the assembled company of village elders as his children, whom he, on behalf of the government, cared for like a father. After the 1950 harvest, which was poor enough to justify a moratorium on debts due to the Agricultural Bank, the visit of an official commission to assess crops for this moratorium coincided with a routine visit of the tax collector, who complained by way of conversation that he was having some difficulty in a neighbouring village. The senior official of the visiting party promptly lectured the villagers present as if they had been schoolboys, on the moral duty of paying taxes, threatening that if the tax collector had occasion to complain about them he would see to it that there would be no moratorium.