Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
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Page 196
met one case among the existing marriages, but there were one r two more recorded in genealogies. In a number of other cases, widowers had taken kinswomen or close neighbours for a second wife.
More often, however, secondary marriage is with a stranger, even someone fairly remote. A middle-aged head of a simple household with young children in Sakaltutan, who lost his wife just before I moved in, replaced her within a week by a stranger, an unmarried girl from a nearby village. He paid T.L.500, which he was compelled to borrow. During 1949-50, he was working as a shepherd, and using his eldest daughter to help with ploughing, in order to earn extra income to meet the debt. Another man Musa (K), lost his third wife in April, but he was very poor, and even strenuous efforts both among kinship contacts and strangers failed to discover a suitable and willing woman at a price he could afford. He spent four miserable months. At first, his married daughters by his first wife came to keep house in turn, but they could not stay more than a few days each because of their own domestic responsibilities, and after this his household was run by a twelve-year-old daughter. His late wife's tiny baby daughter died. In the end, he took a girl who turned out to be almost blind (p. 184). By 1955, after a steady job in the mill (p. 71), he had divorced her and taken an unmarried girl, for a normal bride price
A widow is not in the same situation. She depends on her husband not for immediate day-to-day tasks but for long-term support - for tilling the fields, for defending her, for making necessary contacts with towns and officials. She may remain in her husband's house, either more or less independently, or under the protection of his or her own father or brothers: or she can return to her own father or brothers. Naturally, what she does depends on her personality, her age, what kin and affines she has, and how they are placed. Quite a number of widows maintain their late husband's households intact, either shouldering the burden of tilling the land, or letting it out to a share-cropper. In this case, a woman needs male kin to protect and help her in her business arrangements, and with some of the toughest jobs in the annual cycle of work. Growing sons are of course a great asset.
One young widow in Elbashï, who had four daughters, had
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