Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER TWO
THE SETTING
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Page 18
holds and about 1,200 people, and was exceptionally well endowed with la
Sakaltutan has more severe winters and cooler, breezier summers. It has a natural spring greatly superior to the stagnant wells on which some surrounding villages rely, but this does no more than provide a small pond for the buffalo, and dampen a few fields immediately below the village meadow. Other small springs emerge at various points in the village territory, making green dells of fresh pasture, and patches of more productive ground. Elbashï is much less snowbound in winter, but unpleasantly hot in summer. It boasts a major spring of water, which not only supplies fountains in the village, but furnishes a considerable permanent stream, irrigating the wide fields of the floor of the valley in which the village stands. Beside this stream stretches a long strip of water meadow.
But most of the land of both villages is either dry arable land, given over. to extensive cultivation of cereals, mainly rye and wheat, or else uncultivable and rocky pasture. For Alïshar, (p. 134) Morrison found only fifty-five per cent of the land cultivable (Morrison (1938) Chap. II), and I would guess roughly the same to be true here. From any hill-top a vast undulating plateau can be seen stretching away to mountains. To th south and east are the distant ranges of the Taurus, snowclad most of the year. Much closer, to the south-west, stands Mount Erciyas. Here and there a small group of trees, or a vineyard climbing up a hillside indicate the site of a village. This undulating appearance is deceptive, for the plateau in this region is cut by sharp valleys and escarpments, where the hard layer of rock ends abruptly in a steep slope covered, often, with chunks of rock which have broken off and rolled down. These escarpments provide access to softer underlayers, wherein it is easy to hollow out a cave, or to excavate and use the hillside as one wall of a house. Like most of the villages, Sakaltutan lies against one of these escarpments, on the edge of a shallow valley. The vertical break in this case is only about twenty to thirty feet high, and is now hidden behind a front of old houses. The ground slopes away, dotted with newer houses, to the meadow in the bottom of the valley.
Round Elbashï which is not quite visible from Sakaltutan, the country is flatter. The village sits on a small rocky bump, which
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