lines to Adana and the south east runs within seventeen miles. Also the main roads from Ankara and Istanbul to Erzurum and the east, and to Adana and the south east, pass through Kayseri, though present plans for arterial road construction will provide alternative routes to both these areas. It contains two factories, one an aircraft repair shop, the other the largest cotton mill in Turkey, built here for political reasons, to provide work for the area. The cotton has to be brought by rail all the way from Adana. It employs about three thousand men. This factory is typical of government enterprise in Turkey, in that the workers are given good conditions, free medical attention, reasonably hours, cheap meals, accommodation for bachelors, free cinema, even clothes to work in, but have no union and are subject to firm discipline and heavy taxation. Part of the population are landowners and agriculturalists living directly off the land near the city, or off land in the nearby villages. Kayseri is also famous as a centre for rug making. Otherwise, the town lives by serving the rural area. Manufactured goods, mostly imported, are sold in shops and in the covered market - enamelware from Eastern Europe, paraffin pressure stoves, glassware, bicycles, tools and so on, almost indefinitely. There are large numbers of small craftsmen making such things as copperware, sheet iron stoves, wooden trunks from brides, cradles, silverware, shoes. On the other hand, Kayseri is the market for the village farmers, for vegetable, eggs, chickens, livestock, and the government centre for buying and transhipping grain. It is the seat of government and contains the only hospitals and the main supply of doctors in the province. As one leaves Kayseri going due east, there is a good motor road for about four miles, to the nahiye centre of Talas, which lies mostly at the foot of a steep escarpment, but partly above it, where the land climbs up towards the foot hills of Mount Erciyas. Talas itself is in part a village living off its own fields, but many of its five thousand inhabitants either work in Kayseri or earn a living by providing semi-urban services for the villages. Not far from Talas are many fairly rich villages all of which are suburban, not in the sense that people go to town to work daily, though this is true of several of them, but in the sense that they contain the summer houses of Kayseri families, are within regular and all weather reach of the town, and have town style houses and such amenities as shops and coffee houses. This belt of village continues to the north, following the valley, into the nahiye of Gesi. In all these villages one finds a high proportion of migrant skilled building labour. Beyond these villages, more inaccessible, are the poorer and more agricultural villages, seldom visited by middle class towns-people, unless for purposes of |
administration, and cut off for a period each winter from wheeled communication with the town. People living in the suburban villages refer to these more remote villages scornfully as villages, as though in this context their own villages were felt to be part of the town. In one of these, Sakaltutan, Plucker of Beards, I settled for my work. |
2. | Sakaltutan |
Sakaltutan lies about twenty miles east of Kayseri on the main route between Kayseri and the nahiye centre Tomarza, and further fifteen miles or so to the south east. This route, by which many villagers reach Kayseri, was in 1948 widened, improved and made possible, if barely so, for motor transport. Sakaltutan lies at the highest point on this route, at something like 5,500 feet above sea level. The rock, close to the surface and frequently visible, is volcanic, deposited by Mount Erciyas in ancient days. The gradual undulating expanse of plateau, visible from any hill top, is deceptive, for it is cut up by sharp escarpments and valleys, where the hard, level top layer suddenly ends in a steep slope covered with huge chunks of rock which have broken off and rolled down. These escarpments provide access to the softer under-layers, wherein men can easily hollow out a habitable cave. Like most of the nearby villages, Sakaltutan is built on one of these breaks, though, in the case of Sakaltutan, it is a small one; the sheer drop is only forty feet or so and is now hidden by a front of old houses. The ground slopes away into a shallow valley, watered by a flowing fountain from which the people drink, and containing the village meadow. The present village was probably founded by people who made a temporary summer camp here for their upland pasturage, and finally, braving the rigours of winter, settled permanently and began to plough. Like most of its neighbours, this village has spread down from original caves at the top of the slope into stone built houses on the slope, a process which is still continuing. There are graves in the rocks which the villagers say are Christian and very old, providing previous occupation of the site, long before their village came there. The earliest building is a tomb, the turbeh, said to be the burial place of a Moslem commander, one Mehmet Miktat, killed in a nearby battle between Byzantine and Islamic forces. Another small enclosed burial ground is said to contain heroes of lesser importance who fell in this holy battle. All agree that this tomb is far older than the village. Village history is not remembered. In several cases village elders, men of about sixty, told me the name of their grandfathers grandfather, said to have |
lived in the village. The village must, therefore, have existed for at least 150 years, reckoning by generations. My informants also claimed that the village was founded by four brothers, but no one knew their names or their relation to the present village families. The local sergeant of gendarmes commented that Sakaltutan was not an old village, his guess being about 200 years, which seems as likely to be right as any other. The village contains about 103 houses and 640 people. All were born of villagers and brought up in the village. The houses are of stone with flat roofs, made of flat stones covered by mud supported on timbers. Floors normally are of mud, rarely, in guest rooms only, of stone or wood. Until lately, windows were not normally made except in guest rooms, but all the newer houses have one or two - small, because glass costs money and in winter warmth is precious. The village has no systematic lay out, and such village streets as there are have come about by haphazard growth. The main lorry route goes through the village, cutting off some thirty houses from the rest of the village. A few families still uses caves, one such cave being made only four or five years ago. Against the drawbacks of lack of light and air, caves are cheaper, need no maintenance, do not leak and are better insulated against the climatic extremes of heat and cold. At the other end of the scale, there are two-storey houses, airy, and light. The best built of all are the guest rooms, the odalar, of the richer families. The wealthier homes consist of a group of buildings, or a large block centred on a yard, surrounded by a high wall. Off this yard, on the ground floor, are usually stables and the samanlik, the straw store. Above this, in the second storey, one would find several rooms. The ev is a large room with one or two small windows and a smoke hole, also used for a roof light, fitted with a cover on the end of a pole, like an umbrella, which can thus be opened or closed. In one corner, sometimes on a raised dais, will by the tandir the oven. These are brick ovens let into the mud floor, beehive shaped and open at the top, with the draught supplied by a pipe. In these ovens, dried cakes made from straw and dung are burnt, and they serve for all cooking purposes and for warmth in winter. The care of the tandir is entirely a feminine responsibility, and it is the social centre of the home. Only once or twice did I see a tandir set in a chimney recess, and then only in newer houses and only used in the summer. During the winter, the dense acrid smoke, which dung cakes make on being ignited, is borne for the greater heating efficiency of a tandir, set out in the room, where people can sit around in a circle. It is covered with a heavy, home-woven rug, and the family and their guests sit around with their legs under the rug, facing the concealed tandir in the centre of the circle. Straw mats and woven rugs are spread on the floor, for people |
to sit on. Usually a pile of bedding-mattresses, quilts and pillow-stands against a wall or in a recess, and pots and pans made of tinned copper or earthenware stand around on shelves. Large wooden boxes form the store for flour or grain, and somewhere in the room will be a pair of upright beams for fitting up the loom. The other type of room built for human use is the oda. These rooms contain a sedir, a built-in divan. In the traditional pattern a pair of these face each other, leading like tram lines from the door to the hearth. One of the pair runs along the wall, which invariably contains a good window. Behind the other is a raised wooden platform for sleeping on, for prayer, and for accommodating a surplus of guests, usually the younger boys, at weddings. Small types of oda, and also the newer ones copying perhaps town patterns, have the sedir round two or three sides of the room. Sometimes a small oda acts as the entrance hall, so to speak, for a larger one, and is used for making coffee and an overflow of guests at weddings. The larger odalar are often entered by a lobby of some kind, thus preserving warmth in winter. Cupboards, fitted with locks, are built into the thick stone walls, and often in one corner is a special place fitted with a drain to the outside for washing. Drinking water is large wooden or earthenware containers stands also in a specially built recess. The sedir are covered with straw or reed mats, in turn covered with woven rugs or even pile carpeting, and along the back, the lean against, are rectangular straw cushions, with perhaps one or two softer ones from the use of guests. In the larger odalar one finds coffee cups, perhaps a small spirit or paraffin stove, and a Turkish coffee pot; bedding for guests will be at hand, and also a large round tray of wood or tinned copper which is set on a stool to make a low round table for feeding. No furniture is necessary, though occasionally there is a table and even a few chairs. Formerly the oda would be heated by an open fire in a hearth, but recently this method has been almost entirely superseded by small sheet iron stoves, burning wood or dung. These odalar are the special preserve of men; young men and sometimes older married men sleep here; the men of the household often eat here; male guests are entertainment, and neighbours come in to talk. The men squat round the room on the sedir, sometimes two deep if there is a crowd. The wealthier homes, in addition to these two rooms, will also have one or two spare rooms, used as stores for food, extra pots and pans, spare rugs and so forth, or for married sons and their brides to sleep in. Though usually of the ev pattern, these are sometimes fitted with built-in sedir, like a small |
oda. The poorer the home, the less it corresponds to this description. Some of the middle homes own a small oda purely for family use, but poor homes do not have an oda at all, and the ev in these may be small and without windows. In a few cases, the ev and the stable are still one room, an arrangement once much more common, as is shown by disused tandirlar in rooms now used as stables, which are often to be seen in the older houses, especially along the escarpment at the top of the village. Frequently, the stable and samanlik are caves behind or below the house, reached by a passage through the ev. The internal layout of the homestead varies a great deal, and so indeed does the shape of both ev and oda. Almost invariably the oda has a separate entrance; in several cases it stands quite apart from the ev. Variety in shape, equipment and lay out renders a generalised description inadequate, even false in details. But the central contrast remains clear between the ev, where women with their children busy themselves preparing food, making clothing, or chatter round the tandir, and the oda where the men squat on carpeted sedir, in a clean and dignified atmosphere, to discuss their affairs. The village contains only two public buildings - the Mosque and the school - which were built about ten years ago by government initiative. The political head, the muhtar, does not normally in these poorer villages have any sort of office or special rooms, but simply uses his own oda. The Mosque is in the centre of the village, next to a square open space with houses all round it. It is simply a square building. The minaret is on one corner of the roof, approached by a flight of steps, so that the imam when giving the call to prayer is on roof level. The imam looks after it, gives the call to prayer at the correct times of day if he happened to be in the village, and usually, but by no means always, leads in prayer those of the villagers who come to the Mosque to say their namaz. On fridays, he conducts the appropriate ceremonies which a good number attend. The school is down by the rood. It is built with cement, instead of mud plaster, like all the other village buildings. Here Ali Osman (BK 1), the schoolmaster, who had had a six month course in the army, gave lessons in reading and writing to the village children for about four hours a day in the winter months. Below the school, the meadow, watered by the spring, which, channelled and divided between two fountains, keeps the village supplied with sweet fresh water, provides pasturage for odd animals at all times, and at the harvest becomes a threshing floor. The spring runs into a pond, artificially enlarged |