Differences of prestige among neighbouring villages did not prevent a great deal of social intercourse. People visit, hire craftsmen, seek advice on religious or technical problems, commission magical services, borrow money or food, search for oxen to buy, buy up animals for market, take grain to be milled. In the past, before the petrol engine, longer journeys, especially journeys to town, compelled the traveller to put up for the night with kinsmen or friends on the road. Now people congregate in the villages which serve as boarding points for lorries and buses to Kayseri, gossiping and often visiting as they pass through. The villages are too similar in production for intense economic exchange between them, but social contact is nevertheless constant and lively.
Beyond the occasional conflict over territory, and some traditional enmities, political relations between villages as groups are unimportant. In this area, all the villages were sunni and Turkish-speaking, so that the issue of ethnic or language differences did not arise. No one village nowadays has the slightest hope of dominating others, whatever may have been the case in the past. Fighting is rapidly suppressed by the gendarmerie. Feuds did not seem ever to be pursued between whole villages.
The villagers are right. This economic unity is the most fundamental fact about a household. Only through membership of a household does an individual take part in the economic life of the village. Otherwise survival is possible only by begging.