Ethnographics Gallery University of Kent

Turkish Village

Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.

Paul Stirling
CHAPTER FOUR
THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

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Page 48


hard baked ground - even before, if the rains are late - the men must plough again and sow their winter rye and wheat. By November there remains for the men only a visit to town to lay n supplies of coffee, paraffin, salt and so on, and perhaps cheap vegetables for the winter months of isolation, and then idleness again until the spring. One villager, unsolicited, told me that the peasants only work for four months a year - a month in the spring, a month in the autumn, and two months at the harvest. He was overstating his case and, as someone commented, in two months' harvesting they do four months' work; but the idea of having, like an English agricultural labourer, to work for wages day in and day out all the year round was greeted with horror.

In all the villages of this area, a two-year fallow system operates. One-half of the village land is sown one year, and the other left fallow and used for pasture (de Planhol (1958) pp. 3I7 ff.). The village herds and flocks are transferred from one side to the other after the harvest, to glean the harvested fields and eat the stubble. Soon after the completion of the harvest, autumn ploughing and sowing on the fallow land begins; the fields from which the crops have been reaped become fallow for the next year. This system prevents any individual from planting the same fields in successive years, except for a few walled fields immediately adjoining the village, where manuring and special crops make it agriculturally advantageous, and the animals can easily be kept off. Each man farms his own plots quite independently of his neighbours, so that he is free to plough and sow when he wishes, and to sow what crops he pleases. He may, should he wish, miss one or more turns of the cycle; that is, he can leave land fallow for three, five, or more, years instead of one, so long as he sows it in a year when it is part of the village pasture. On the other hand, he dare not lag behind his neighbours at the harvest, lest the flocks and herds are turned on to the land before his crops are reaped and away.

Land Tenure

Each village has a territory surrounding the village settlement, over which it has formal administrative rights. This territory acts as a symbol of village political identity. The economically

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