Villages in Turkey, 1911
From Turkey and the Turks by Z. Duckett Ferriman, 1911.
Location: Turkey
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Turkey and the Turks by Z. Duckett Ferriman, 1911.
Among the Turks of Asia Minor, the nomadic, semi-nomadic, and settled life are all three in existence. The nomads are represented by the Turkomans and the Yuruks, and the semi-nomads are those Turks who in summer betake themselves to the yaila or upland pastures, deserting their villages. Their huts are rude, of wood or stone, according to local circumstances. In construction they are much inferior to those of the Turkomans, domed erections of wattle, mud, and reeds.
These semi-nomads are the shepherds one meets resting at noontide, moving at night, spectral figures in their stiff white capotes of thick felt, distended to an abnormal breadth at the shoulders by an inserted stick. Their legs and feet are wrapped in sheepskin fastened by thongs of the same material. Slung across their shoulder is a sheepskin forage-bag and a gourd for water. These, with their arms—a long gun and a yataghan—form their equipment. But there is one thing more, a little flute, used to call the sheep. With this and certain cries, well understood by their charges, they have their flocks under perfect control.
The dogs, fierce creatures with shaggy coats of creamy white, only protect. They do not “shepherd," like our collies and sheep-dogs. When the flock is moving they march in flank and rear. When it is at rest they lie down. Thus, the shepherding is done without bark or scuffle. The shepherd is always in front. He can call out any units he wishes from his ovine battalion. In watering, for example, he only allows a few to come at a time. There is no hitch in the manoeuvre. One batch drinks and the others follow in orderly succession. This is the most primitive life of the Turks, though that of the settled peasantry is almost as simple.
The hovel is of mud and wattle, its roof of reed thatch or branches of trees and brushwood, plastered with a layer of earth, on which the grass grows high. I have seen villages in the valley of the Hermus, between Magnesia and Menemen, looking like a rather hillocky field of mowing grass.
The furniture consists of yorgans or wadded coverlets, a stool or two perhaps, cooking-pots and a pan, and a handmill, the simple upper and nether-stones for grinding corn. There is no table. The thin round discs of bread baked on the stone hearth are dining-tables when the repast consists of anything but bread.
On very rare and festive occasions it may be pish-mish a savoury compound of rice, onions, sour milk, and fat. Spoons of wood or horn complete the inventory. Knives and forks are as unknown as bedsteads or artificial light. To bed at dusk and up at dawn is the rule. In summer the roof is the bedroom.
Nobody undresses; as they get up so they lie down. Being Mohammedans, they wash their hands before and after eating, and they bathe occasionally, but the morning tub does not come into the day's life. The household washing is done at the well or a neighbouring stream.
The peasant's only luxuries are coffee, which he takes at dawn and eve, and his chibouk or pipe, a bowl of red clay, and a stem a foot or so long of cherry wood or jasmine. It has no mouthpiece, and probably he has fashioned it himself if the materials are found in the neighbourhood.
He works hard, for his sons are probably doing their military service. His wife ploughs, sows, and reaps, and his daughters help, if he has any, but as a rule they do not take such an active share in field-work as Eastern Christian women. Both sexes share like labours. The husband, as well as the wife, spins, knits, or cooks and bakes on occasion. The Turkish peasant has only one wife. The nomad Yuruk, on the other hand, is a polygamist. He has several helpmates who work hard, whilst he does comparatively nothing but superintend. Polygamy is general only among the Yuruks. They represent an earlier condition of society like the Bedawin Arabs. Inured to hardships, their women may be seen at work with the babe that was born yesterday slung at their back. Their mode of life leads to the survival only of the strong.
The more prosperous among the settled peasants have two-storey houses, built of sundried bricks. In this case the ground floor is the stable and the upper floor the dwelling. The richer country folk occupy a chiflik or farmstead. A chiflik is sometimes a large wooden house, sometimes a tower with windows only in the upper storey, bat it is almost invariably surrounded by a high-walled yard containing stables and sheds.
The garden is large, and in it flowers and vegetables grow promiscuously. There are no neat parterres, but there is a wilderness of exuberant climbers and abundance of fruit. There is always a verandah with swallows nesting in the eaves.
On the apex of the roof is a stork's nest. Haji Baba, as the Turks call him, is almost one of the family. Solemn, with measured step, clattering his long bill, he moves fearlessly among the human inmates of the household. He is older than any of them, and probably knew their great-grandfathers. His person is held sacred like that of the swallow. No Turkish village would be complete without one stork family; there are usually several. And few are the village mosques whose tiled roofs are not surmounted by the stick and twig dwelling of Haji Baba. He is a good Mussulman, and goes on pilgrimage every year. The peasants welcome him on his return, and from his demeanour and what he carries in his bill augur a prosperous or an unlucky season.
The chiflik is simply furnished, but there are always soft carpets and piles of cushions and wadded quilts on the divans which run round three sides of the rooms. There are long coffers for clothes, or perhaps a tall cupboard or two. The coffee service is the most elaborate thing in the house. If the owner is rich it is choice and of considerable value.
The bowls and goblets in which sweets and water are served to guests as a preliminary to coffee are also often of fine workmanship. Prominent also are the leyen and ibreek, the basin and ewer for washing hands before and after meals. The latter has a thin neck and long curved spout; the basin has a perforated cover, and in the centre a cavity for the soap. The water, poured over the hands, trickles through the perforations.
However scant of ornament the rest of the household belongings may be, there is always a certain elegance attaching to the apparatus for the service of coffee and ablutions. The first is a symbol of hospitality, and the second is a religious duty, so that both partake of a semi-sacred character, and are attended with the ceremonial befitting the observance of a function in the domestic ritual.
The towels and serviettes are another important feature. There is always an abundance of them, and more care is bestowed on their adornment than in Western lands. Soft and of fine quality, they are white or pink, or light blue in tint, heavily fringed, and the edges are often embroidered with gold and silver threads.
The Turkish village has no inn. If it is on a frequented road it may boast of a kaveh, a humble sort of hostelry, built of mud or sun-dried bricks, and always provided with a rude though spacious verandah, with a roof of brushwood supported on the boughs of trees. Here travellers can procure fodder for their animals, coffee and sugar for themselves, and sometimes bread.
The place of the English village inn is occupied by the musafir oda, the guest-chamber. Here the wayfarer is lodged, and here the village elders congregate to smoke and talk. Their conversation is limited to local topics, except on such occasions as the arrival of a guest, or the return of a native from military service. The Turk is not an eager questioner like the Greek, but he is a ready listener, and he expects as a matter of common civility that the stranger will afford him information about what is going on outside his own little world.
The musafir oda supplies nothing, not even coffee or tobacco, not even bedding, for that the traveller always carries with him. The village life of the Turks offers even fewer distractions than that of their Christian neighbours, who have at least their local feasts and dances. Human activity ends with daylight, and the village sinks into the silence of repose.
With regard to the women, customs vary. In some places they are closely veiled, in others they only make a pretence of veiling, and in others, again, they do not veil at all. There are districts in which the women stare at the stranger unabashed, and others where they turn their backs when they meet him. But, generally speaking, the village women converse more freely with strangers than those of the towns, where a man can hold no communication with them whatever.
In the streets they are shrouded impersonalities, and none can know anything of their life within their latticed houses. In the villages sometimes the women will talk, even with a man, in such matters as the purchase of eggs or chickens, and there is less mystery in their simple lives. Among themselves they gossip, as elsewhere, and at the well or the washing-place discuss their neighbours and the local happenings.
What strikes the Western about their lives is not so much their hardness—one never meets with the destitution of Europe—as their dullness. But they have known no other, and certainly they do not look unhappy. Of their domestic relations a man has no opportunity of judging, and Western women, though many of them know something of the harems of the upper classes in Constantinople, are totally ignorant of the life of the provinces.
There is one notable exception, however. Lady Ramsay for many years accompanied her distinguished husband in his researches in Asia Minor, in districts unvisited by other Europeans. There in the real heart of undiluted Turkish life she had unique opportunities of becoming acquainted with the condition of the women. Speaking of their marital relations, she says: “Cases of brutality on the part of a man towards his wife are a hundred times commoner among the lower classes of this country "(Great Britain)“ than they are in Turkey." That is the testimony of an entirely impartial observer. The slighter knowledge of the author, so far as it goes, confirms it.
Ferriman, Z. Duckett. Turkey and the Turks. James Pott & Co., 1911.
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