Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GROUPS, FEUDS AND POWER
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Page 238
Guest Rooms
Every household contains a living room but only the better off can afford a guest room. The full name of such rooms is misafir odasï, guest room, but in practice the villagers simply call them oda, in contrast to ev, the women's part of the house. Traditionally, a guest room was a fairly large room with a built in sedir or divan but nowadays many households are building smaller guest rooms.
To possess a guest room of any kind is a mark of wealth and standing. They are normally built by craftsmen and hired labour, and in Sakaltutan, in 1950, a new oda was said to cost at least T.L. 1,000 (£250, $700). Moreover, the owner must be able to provide fuel, either wood which is scarce and very expensive, or a plentiful supply of cakes of dung and straw, which depends on a fairly large household with surplus materials and female labour. The standard word for putting or keeping a guest room in use is yakmak, to burn or kindle.
A count of guest rooms is a little misleading because some of the better-off households had rooms built on the guest room pattern, that is with sedir and without tandir, but used them as a part of the ordinary household living space, as a room for a young married couple and their children, or for storage. Sakaltutan possessed roughly sixteen guest rooms in 1950, though several people wanted to build them, and by 1955 at least six new ones were in use. In 1949-50 the greatest number of these sixteen in use on one occasion was twelve. One large, old, guest room standing by itself was never used at all, and one or two of the others hardly ever. All were owned individually except the unused one which was owned by two brothers, and one other, an old one which was jointly owned by a lineage.
The guest rooms are used at any time of the year for special occasions such as weddings, meetings, and for entertaining important guests, and some also serve as the male part of the households to which they belong. But primarily, they are clubrooms for the village men. In autumn, as the evenings get chilly, the men retire to the guest rooms after their evening meal, which they take at sundown in the ev, or in their own guest room. They normally sit till the time of the last prayers, formally one and a half hours later. As winter draws in, work both in the
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