| All cultivated land is privately owned by individuals in the village, the rest of the village land belongs to the village as a whole. What proportion of land is cultivated I have no means of saying accurately; me own guess, allowing for the general tendency to over-estimate, would be about half.(1) Close below the village is the meadow, “cayir”, and above it the threshing floor, “harman”. both are common land and, in fact, used for both pasture and threshing. Every household has a traditional place on one or the other as its threshing floor, but the grazing is not restricted in any way. The meadow, with the village fountain and the pond, is far richer grazing land. The steep slopes and outcrops of rock, and the bare hill top where the land is too barren for cultivation, make up most of the common land of the village. In the spring, these areas are used from common pasturage. Besides these, there and several small patches of rich grass in little valleys watered by springs. These patches are cultivable, and would be fruitful, but the villagers say the land is needed for pasture, and belongs to the village - no one may plough it up. Some villages, to the east of Sakaltutan, have cultivable land not under cultivation, which nominally belongs to the state, but which can be ploughed by villagers who have insufficient land of their own. Information as to how this land is allotted was conflicting. Some villages also own communally mountain side, sometimes adjacent to, sometimes separate from, the fields round the village. Cultivated land is personally owned in permanent and full possession. Each household works its land in common, and its produce is thought of primarily as providing directly for the needs of the family. Cash cropping is common, but secondary. Wealth consists not in money - for money, the villagers say, is easily spent - but in land and animals. The unit of land measurement used in the village is the “donum”, the amount a pair of oxen can plough in a day. This highly variable unit is in practice |
| roughly standardised as sixty paces by sixty paces. Taking a pace as a yard, this makes a donum 3,600 square years, or three quarters of an acre. The Government donum is a decare, roughly a quarter acre. The villagers say that their donum equals two government donum, which would indicate that three quarters of an acre is too high, so I take one donum as two thirds of an acre. Land is divided in shares among a man’s children. Usually, to prevent any unfair discrimination due to differences in value of the land, each separate plot is divided. Thus there is, generation by generation, a steady process of reduction in the size of plots held. By this system every landowner owns some good land near the village, and some bad and more distant land. Bilal (VT 1), with some thirty donum (twenty acres) held twenty plots, and Mehmet (T 1) and his sons, with about 150 donum, said they had forty or fifty plots. Plots vary in size from a few square feet to several acres. The smallest plots are found very near the village, because these are valuable plots which brothers have divided meticulously. The greater accessibility of the land near the village means not only easier working, but also that this land, constituting but a small fraction of the village lands, gets regularly manured. The ash from the tandir, any other refuse, and human excreta are taken to the fields in the spring, but the quantity is so small that only the fields close to the village benefit. These fields are thus of much greater value. They are generally use for vegetables rather than grain crops. Often the meticulous division of the separate paternal plots was described to me as an invariable custom, but occasionally the villagers, recognising the inconvenience of such division, will instead come to some arrangement for taking whole plots when they can agree about the approximate equivalence of value. Table no. 2 gives the distribution of holdings by households. The figures are based only on verbal enquiries and verbal checking, not on any measure. The villagers does not always know exactly the extent of their land in donum, and usually underestimate for caution’s sake; or, rarely, overestimate to impress me. Nevertheless, the figures are roughly correct, and the margin of error is unimportant. |
| Table No. 2 | Distribution of Land Holdings in the Village |
| 6 households own | no land |
| 10 households own | 5 donum or less |
| 9 households own | between 5 and 15 donum |
| 31 households own | between 15 and 30 donum |
| 31 households own | between 30 and 50 donum |
| 11 households own | between 50 and 80 donum |
| 5 households own | between 100 and 150 donum |
| It is clear that the majority, roughly 60%, of the households own from about 20 donum, (13 acres) to 50 donum (34 acres), and that the landless, or almost landless, at one end, and the comfortably landed at the other end, are comparatively few. The extent of the land is not a precise measure of its value, since the value of land close to the village is vastly greater than distant and poor land bordering on the uncultivable pasture, and one set of 30 donum may provide a much better living than another. This factor is partly counteracted by the strip system of tenure, by which everyone holds some good and some poor land. I was not able to collect full details in other villages, but such information as I was able to gather pointed to a similar pattern of distribution. In Kb village, I was given some statistics which are consistent with my own in Sakaltutan. In Kz village, the holdings seemed to be higher, partly due to an anomaly, namely the acquiring by one kabile of the village of the lands of Elmali, a village which moved two generations back to the plain beyond Kayseri. In Gn village, one man claimed to hold and to work 400 donum, but he was admitted to be highly exceptional. |
| 3. | Inheritance and Impoverishment |
| All cultivable land within the village boundaries is now in use. this situation is comparatively new. So long as there was uncultivated land which could be ploughed, the consequences of division of land among children was not |
| serious. The children, receiving a share of their father’s valuable lands near the village, could then go and acquire fresh lands father out, and plough as much as they are able. Wealth depended, not on ownership of land, but on the area a given household was capable of ploughing, that is, on the number of draught animals, on man power - up to a point on personal industry. How the acquisition of new land was controlled I do not know. The land of each village kabile lies together, that is, not only brothers but distant paternal relatives find their plots bordering on each others, which suggest that there may have been a recognised right for certain families to farm new land in certain directions. Against this, the most recent arrivals in the village (T), whose residence there dates from the father of Haci Mehmet (T 1), are the wealthiest family; also, and perhaps this is the explanation of their wealth, the most acquisitive and industrious. The grandfathers of the present generation, in most cases, are stated to have owned at least 100 donum for each household. It would seem likely, therefore, that the process of impoverishment through division of fully cultivated village lands cannot long have been in operation. Some seventy years ago, a substantial amount of land was acquired by Sakaltutan from a neighbouring village by purchase, according to my informants, on the occasion of a mass emigration from that village. This undoubtedly helped to postpone the impoverishment of the village. No one in the village speaks of ancestors owning large areas of land above 150 donum. Speculation supports this information, since one household would by unlikely to possess the oxen and man power to plough more than half that area each year, and so long as land was plentiful, no one would bother to claim land he did not actually wish to use, that is, ownership would be identified with use. While any man with oxen could plough unused land, the supply of labour for hiring, by which a man could farm more than his own family labour could cope with, would be strictly limited. Since it takes one team of oxen to cope with each forty donum, it is unlikely that any household could own more than 150 donum, which would require four teams of oxen and four adult men working at once to use them. Moreover, it can safely be assumed that, before the railway and the motor lorry, growing more grain than could be consumed by the |
| household would serve no purpose, since Kayseri, the only possible market for grain at that time, could easily satisfy its needs from lands more accessible to it. The point I wish to emphasise is this, that only recently has the problem of land shortage in these villages become acute. The society is still adjusting to the situation. In the villages to the east of Sakaltutan, the transfer of the Christian population in the 1920’s has left vacant a considerable area of land. Several villages in this area have thus unploughed land, and this land can be acquired for a small rent by villagers who are in need. Thus wealth depends not only on owning land; the poor, if they can only get themselves oxen, can easily raise their position. This is the situation which must have existed in Sakaltutan three or four generations ago. When a man dies, each of his sons takes an equal share of the land. It is of vital importance that the shares be precisely equal, to prevent ill-feeling, and this rule is felt to have the backing of Islamic law, that is, of religious sanction. |
| Division between four brothers |
| If one asks about this, any villager will at once draw a rectangle in the dust, and then divide it by the requisite number of lines, and will insist that each separate plot of land must be divided thus. Wealth in land in the village families at the moment is in inverse proportion to the fertility of the families in the last two or three generations. Compare, for example, two families, AM and VA. Abdil, the head of AM family is about seventy years of age. He is his father’s only son, and only has one son himself. This household owns about 100 donum, is fairly comfortable by village standards and is likely to remain so. Hasan, (VA 1), on the other hand, a man of eighty-two, is one of five brothers, and his household is the senior of thirteen households of his kabile.(2) Of these, eight own less than 20 donum, five between 20 and 40 donum, none more. Probably the two fathers of these two families were roughly equal in land: AM is now represented by one well-to-do family, VA |