1. For an exception, see my account in chap. 2 of the school secretary, who transformed our coffeehouse conversation into a kind of sermon, but on an occasion when the audience was composed mostly of youths. For another exception, see my account of the rehearsal speech for Liberation Day, given in the Town Square Coffeehouse.

2. In translating the Turkish word millet as "public," I have in mind similar usages in Of. On the occasion of the departure for the pilgrimage, when hundreds of Oflus were boarding buses in the town square, I heard the remark, "the public is going on the pilgrimage" (millet haca gider). On an occasion when large crowds of men were strolling along the coastal highway, I heard the remark, "the public is taking its pleasures" (millet keyfeder). To emphasize how Oflus associated with one another when they left the district to work in cities, an interlocutor observed, "We stick together" (milletçileriz).

3. When I attempted to use census records in the government building as the basis of family genealogies, I discovered that most daughters and wives were registered under one name, "Eve" (Hawa).

4. Some now claim that anthropologists overstated the significance of this practice because they did not understand that the word for "child" (çocuk) was gendered, referring only to boys. So they had unwittingly asked, "How many boys do you have?" While the point is well taken, it remains the case that a common word used to inquire about children was gendered as male rather female.

5. Otherwise, my wife was able to pass on to me valuable observations about the social relations of townswomen.

6. I have not determined when he opened this shop. I am assuming that it preceded his publication of the newspaper, which is mentioned below.

7. The newspaper continued to appear sporadically until 1957. It consisted of two to six pages, each about half the size of the page of a regular daily newspaper.

8. The province of Rize began to be an important center of tea cultivation sometime around 1938. I was told that the Of Tea Producers' Assistance Cooperative had first been organized by ten individuals, four of whom were Selimoğlu. They had all been members of a large tea cooperative in the town of Rize that had once had fifty thousand members. I was told that this tea cooperative had been left with only twenty thousand members after splits in the 1950s.

9. The sons and grandsons of Ferhat Agha benefited from more extensive experience as public officials, while the sons of Reşat Agha had benefited from more experience as farmers. This probably explains why the former were able to organize the first cooperative, and the latter were able to develop the best tea gardens.

10. I mistakenly wrote in an earlier paper (Meeker 1994a) that Ferhat Agha had himself received petitions in the Town Square Coffeehouse. I have since discovered an entry in my notes that indicates otherwise. However, it is probable that Ferhat Agha did receive visitors nonofficially in the Town Square Coffeehouse.

11. Umur (1949, 18–19) noted that some individuals and families chose not to affiliate themselves with parties (fûrka) even during the period of decentralization, "the time of the aghas" (see chap. 1).

12. General Cemal Gürsel was the leader of the military coup in 1960 and the president of the Republic from 1961 to 1966 (Zürcher 1993, 356–57).

1. Since its founding in 1955, four other cooperatives had been organized in the district of Of. Three of these were located in areas that were not under the influence of the Selimoğlu (Eskipazar, Taşhan, and Dumlusu). The fourth, organized in 1965, was located in the town of Of by a group of members who were separating from Hüseyin's cooperative. I shall eventually have more to say about this schism, which was taking place at the time of my residence.

14. The organizing capital of the cooperative was officially listed as 2,247,000 Turkish lira by obligation. Of this, 784,000 Turkish lira had been paid by the members as of the last accounting before January 1967. These were very considerable sums of money at the time. See chap. 1, note 8, for currency equivalents and annual per capita income estimates.

15. I was told that the market price of a bag of fertilizer was about 80 Turkish lira in Akçaabat, where it could be used for growing tobacco, while the subsidized price in Of was about 20 Turkish lira. The reselling of cooperative fertilizer was another way of raising cash, but not necessarily for investment. Some claimed that the profits from illegal fertilizer sales were used for frivolous purposes, saying "They eat it."

16. A young member of the Muradoğlu was able to win election to the National Assembly some years later by a different strategy than that adopted by Hüseyin. He resided in Ankara for several years, worked as a bureaucrat, and had connections in the national party headquarters. The support of his agnates, relatives, friends, and clients could win him electoral support in the district of Of, but this was not enough. He needed a broader political backing and experience in order to attract voters elsewhere in the province of Trabzon and gain a seat in the National Assembly.

17. These family lines were agha-families and merchant-families whose members had been part of the core of the coalitions traditionally composed by leading individuals from the Selimoğlu. When I visited the offices of the new cooperative I found a son of Rasih Efendi (Selimoğlu) lounging about the office, but neither he nor his two brothers appear to have been in the leadership.

18. During the meeting, I heard one man shout, "Fertilizer, fertilizer, we don't want anything else but this" (Gübre, gübre, başka bir şey istemiyoruz).

19. Süleyman had replaced Yusuf as headman of the central quarter of the town in 1952, continuing to serve until 1960 (see fig. 2). During my residence, his first cousin, also of the Selimoğlu, but not of the descendants of Ferhat Agha, had become the headman of the central quarter of the town. As for Süleyman, he would remain the director of the new cooperative for many years, after which he would follow in the footsteps of Yakup Selimoğlu, successfully running for mayor in 1984.

20. One successful trader in the market spelled out this analysis for me in 1967 (almost thirty years before I realized the significance of what he was telling me). He explained that political power and influence had become diffuse in Of. It was no longer possible for one man or a group of men to gain control of the affairs of the town, and certainly not the district. He said this was an entirely new development that had only recently come about and would have not been true twenty years previously.

21. Actually, the owner of the Crystal Palace Hotel was "from the aghas," but he had chosen to lease his property to my companions.