Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER FIVE
THE HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY
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Page 91
utensil repairs and so on, can be curtailed or postponed, and at a pinch animals and equipment sold. Almost every villager is in debt, and debts can be allowed to remain, or even be increased. Butafter a run of poor harvests urgent needs accumulate, and credit becomes exhausted; serious hardship may turn to disaster.
Debt
People remarked to me more than once that no villager ever has ready cash. Urgent cash needs constantly run ahead of current income, and people borrow to meet the immediate situation. Debts are of four main kinds - loans from the Agricultural Bank or Credit Co-operative, loans from moneylenders at illegal and exorbitant rates of interest, casual borrowings among neighbours and kin, and outstanding credit for purchases. Debts of this last kind are mainly owed to village shops, but also less frequently to itinerant vendors of oxen, to kin for land, and occasionally to affines for the balance of a bride price. Accurate information on this topic is almost unobtainable. Even when precise and plausible answers were given to questions one had no means of checking them.
In both villages, a large proportion of households had loans from the Agricultural Bank (p. 75). Although the loans were not large or numerous enough to meet all credit needs, neither village as a whole used the service fully. A few men said that fea of what the government might do if they failed to pay kept them from accepting.
On illegal and commercial debts I was able to gather only superficial information. The technique in practice for usury is the familiar one of obtaining a signature for the receipt of a larger sum than the actual sum advanced so that the interest is concealed and the creditor can enforce collection in a court, if necessary. An illiterate peasant is easily tricked. One such case came to my notice in Sakaltutan, and I heard of two other cases of private debts of this kind, carrying about 100 per cent interest per annum. Such loans are for a fixed period, and the interest is predetermined. It does not grow automatically with the passing of time, but the debt is stepped up if the date of repayment is not kept. Commercial debts are even harder to check. People often
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