54% of the national population is rural in Turkey. In rural Turkey the focus of life is agriculture. In a typical village, houses with their courtyards are built around a central place. Land for agriculture surrounds the village. In each village, there is usually a mosque, a school, a coffeehouse, guest rooms and some small shops. Village life starts very early, usually before sunrise. After cleaning and tidying up the house, the animals are taken care of. Milking the sheep or cows and eating breakfast are early morning tasks before the serious work starts.
Only after all this do children go to school and people to the fields to work. The large majority of Anatolian villages are self sufficient. They produce their own food according to their production range and for winter they prepare food grown in the summer or autumn months. Among the foods they prepare are flour, bulgur (pounded wheat), oil, kavurma (preserved fried meat), dried vegetables and fruit, yufka (dried thin layers of pastry), macaroni, jam, pickles, tomato paste, molasses, cheese, butter, etc.
They obtain their other needs like clothing from bigger settlements in the vicinity. The tools used in daily life are clearly very old in design. The light wooden plow, or saban in Tr., is drawn easily by one pair of oxen. It has an iron tipped share but no moldboard so that it does not turn a furrow. Sowing is traditionally done by hand and reaping with a sickle or scythe. The crops are carried to the village for storage on four wheeled horse drawn carts or on the traditional two wheeled oxcart, the kagni.
Threshing involves driving an ox drawn sledge about five feet long over the crops, round and round, day after day. Flint teeth on the underside of the sledge break the grain from the ears and chop the straw into chaff. This mixture is winnowed by hand with wooden forks and put into woolen sacks. In homes, people sit on rugs or mats spread on the floor. Houses have built-in divans running along the walls and very often a stone or wooden floor. Tables and chairs, once rare, are now becoming more common.
Most peasants wear cloth caps and the famous Turkish baggy trousers which are exceedingly full in the seat. Shepherds, whose work may involve withstanding intense cold, wear a special large cloak, kepenek, made of felted wool and a hood with attached scarf that winds around the head and protects the ears. Village women still generally prefer traditional costume. They wear some locally customary combination of baggy trousers, skirts and aprons. In many areas it is still possible to identify a woman’s town or village and her marital status by her dress; village women in Turkey have never worn the veil, but they have traditionally covered their heads and mouths with a large scarf.
Most village areas contain weavers, masons, carpenters and smiths including tinsmiths. Some villagers go to town for craft services and a number of craftsmen travel around the villages particularly specialists, such as sieve makers or sawyers. Women are measured by rigid standards of purity; sex is a forbidden topic between close kin; and a young couple is forbidden to show any interest in each other if anyone else, even a member of the household, is present. A man leaving for a trip does not say good bye to his wife publicly, nor does he greet her publicly on his return.
Most Anatolian villages can be described as economically homogeneous, differences in wealth are small with many Turkish villagers owning their own land. The frequency with which large landowners once dominated the socioeconomic structure diminished significantly in the early republican period. Where large landowners do exist, they dominate the political, economic and social life of the village by linking it with national life. The criteria for social ranking are usually wealth, descent, occupation and social conformity, among which wealth is coming increasingly more important.
Although there are village headmen from an administrative point of view, they may not be the real leaders in places where wealthier people are eager to be dominant or in control. The relationship between wealth and social rank is nowhere better seen than in the institution of the guest room. Perhaps only 10% of the houses have guest rooms, because only the wealthy can afford them. Most evenings men gather in these rooms and spend much of their time there, particularly during the winter months.