Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER TWO
THE SETTING
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Page 23
that four brothes founded the village, though no one could give their names or genealogical link with the present inhabitants. The longest genealogies were six generations above elderly living men. Assuming that the first man named was, as they claimed, born in the village, and that a generation averages about twenty-five years, this would take us back over two hundred years without arriving at the original four brothers. The local sergeant of gendarmes commented that Sakaltutan was not an old village, and guessed two hundred years - which may not be far out.
Elbashï is undoubtedly much older. Again, no one knew much about village history. One village story of an imperial visit implied its existence in the reign of `Murad Padishah', presumably Murad IV, who reigned from 1623 to 1640. In recent times, it has been an administrative centre, and several recent ancestors of village households were said to have held the office of local müdür. It certainly has a good deal more land than most other villages in the area.
In both villages, the population has apparently expanded rapidly in the last generation and is still increasing. Sakaltutan, now just over one hundred households, is remembered by old men when it was only sixty households, and a middle-aged man in Elbashï spoke of a population of four hundred and fifty in his childhood, whereas it now has about twelve hundred. In Sakaltutan, this increase was natural. The three most recent male immigrants were two old men and a middle-aged man, all of whom had been brought to the village as children by widowed mothers. Apart from similar cases of casual immigration through some kinship connection, Elbashï had eighteen refugee households descended from war refugees from Eastern Anatolia, who had failed to return home in 1877 and 1915, following the Russian invasions. But in general the male population of both villages was remarkably stable, many men having their houses on the ancestral site, and almost all in the ancestral village.
Education and Urbanity
Although, weather permitting, three or four lorries on their way to Kayseri ran through Sakaltutan every day, it was still
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