Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
Paul Stirling
CHAPTER FOUR
THE VILLAGE ECONOMY
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Page 74
Livestock also provided a number of commodities for sale. The sheep provided wool, marketed direct in Kayseri. Finished carpets, rugs and bags were also sold in Kayseri direct to the retail shops. Cheese was sold, and people in Elbashï sold sheep's -milk to itinerant collectors while the ewes were in milk after the lambing season. Lambs, mainly the male yearlings, were sold for meat. No household breeds cattle deliberately for market, but calves surplus to needs are sold, sometimes to neighbours, sometimes to dealers, sometimes direct in Kayseri. Eggs are mostly bartered in the village, but a man going to town often takes eggs and a chicken or two to sell. The system is flexible, since the household can consume more or less, and is free to time the sale of livestock and their products to suit its needs and interests. Animals represent a sort of bank balance.
No one in the village runs a regular business as a dealer in major supplies such as seed - this is either part of last year's crop, or obtained direct from the local branch of the Ministry of Agriculture - or fertiliser, which is not used. One or two men, however, traded intermittently in animals. Ziya (S) the carpenter occasionally went off on a village trip to buy sheep and cattle in small numbers and ship them by lorry to Kayseri for sale. Another man in Suleymanli village told me of expeditions some years before by train to Istanbul with cattle he had bought up in the villages. Clearly, however, trade of this kind was a very minor part of the village economy.
The State
Although the village still produces much of what it consumes and officials appear to play only a small part in the lives of the people, in fact the village economy is dependent on the national economy and is largely shaped by government policy. The government decides taxes, cereal prices and credit policies, and directly or indirectly determines the prices of consumer goods.
Under the Ottoman Empire, tax collecting had been auctioned to contractors, who had been entitled to a fixed proportion of everyone's crop. The possibilities of extortion and of evasion under such a system are obvious, but what the villagers complained of most bitterly was the deterioration of the crops while waiting for the collector to arrive. The Republic finally
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