Turkish Village

Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.

Paul Stirling
CHAPTER TWO
THE SETTING

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Page 24

in 1950 a remote village. It had no telephone, and in the winter was often snowed up for two months or so. The winter of 194 to 1950 was severe and no Iorries passed from the end of December to the end of March. Elbashï, close to a metalled road, with no hills close by, was cut off only for a few days at a time. Sakaltutan was still completely a village. During my stay, no one had had more than three years of the most elementary type of elementary schooling (p. 275)). Some of the older men could read the old script, and many of the younger ones could read the new Latin script. Plenty of people had been away to live in towns for months, even years at a time, and three villagers had been on the pilgrimage to Mecca. But they remained villagers, whose central interest was the village. Even Ahmet (K) the schoolmaster had been born and bred in the village. Following his military service, he had been given a few months' training under a special government scheme. He enrolled a fresh class of mixed age every three years, so that he only had one class at a time. His last class before he was replaced in 1951 by a young, trained, schoolmaster (p. 275), included a few girls. Only one woman in the village was literate. Elbshï was more sophisticated. Quite a number of its inhabitants could read, including a few women. It contained a local tax collector, whose two sons were officers during their military service, an inspector of village schools who had considerable knowledge of the world, and one man who worked in the Kayseri central offices; and it had produced about six village schoolmasters trained in the Village Institutes (p. 275), three of whom taught in the village. It is also said to have produced its own local istrict officers and other local officials in the past. One man; Kara Osman (Ax), whom I met when I was still in Sakaltutan, was of great wealth and power. He is said to have been a friend of Ataturk and to have held the whole area `in his hand'. I never questioned him closely, for he died just before I began work in Elbashï. But presumably he had been the local ruler - officially or otherwise - during the disturbed days of the early twenties.

Elbashï's greater wealth, education and outside contact seemed to make surprisingly little difference to the way of life of the majority of its population, and the two villages were for the most part remarkably alike.

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