households were well-off for land but most of the household holdings of both villages
ranged from moderate to very poor. I did not attempt in either village to measure
holdings, and I found people unwilling, and often genuinely unable, to gve accurate
figures of their extent. Sometimes they gave figures for the amount they worked in
a single year of the two-year fallow cycle, sometimes they included their holdings
`on both sides'. Where the household land was owned by more than one person, or where
some land was legally owned and additional land had been acquired by ploughing village
pasture or borrowed for share-cropping, it was not easy to sort out the meaning of
the figure I was given.
To make matters worse, the units of land measurement are by no means fixed. The
common unit is a dönüm, (from dönmek to turn) traditionally the amount
of land a man can plough in a day. The government has fixed the dönüm for
official purposes as equal to one decare, about a quarter of an acre. But the village
dönüm varies not only from village to village, but also from man to man,
and field to field. Most informants in Sakaltutan and the surrounding villages said
the dönüm was forty paces by forty paces, but in Elbashï people said
sixty by sixty or eighty by eighty, and one man even said a hundred by a hundred.
They had not, I am sure, grasped that the smallest of these areas, very roughly one
decare, is about one-sixth of the largest. Informants stated that a village dönüm
was twice or three times a government dönüm. I have therefore taken the
Sakaltutan dönüm as two decares (half an acre), and the Elbashï dönüm
as two and a half decares (five-eighths of an acre). I managed to get an estimate
in dönüm for every household in Sakaltutan, and these I give in Table 3.
In Elbashï, only a minority of households gave me such estimates, but by use
of the village system of classes for assessment of village tax (p.
32)1 have worked out figures in which I feel reasonable confidence.
The total quantity of land a man owns is not, of course, a direct index of his wealth,
since land varies in value. But it can be fairly safely assumed that the greater
part of the village arable land is poor and dry, and that with a few exceptions the
valuable irrigated and manured land is roughly divided among the owners.in proportion
to their total holdings.