1. According to the conventions of showing respect, younger men do not eat or talk before senior male relatives unless bidden by them to do so, standing ready to perform any task that might be asked of them. [BACK]

2. Muradoğlu and Selimoğlu are not the actual names of the families in question. In an earlier publication (Meeker 1972) I used other fictitious names, Karahasanoğlu and Hadjimehmedoğlu, for the same two families. I have adopted the new names because they are easier to print and read. [BACK]

3. The population of the town of Of was in the range of one to two thousand during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, after which it began to soar. [BACK]

4. See the Trabzon yearbooks (salname) from the late Ottoman period, in particular, the re-publications supervised by Emiroğlu (1993–95). [BACK]

5. I use the words "republican" and "ottomanist" to refer to attributes of the new and old regimes, respectively. [BACK]

6. Lewis 1961, chap. 8, and Zürcher 1993, chap. 11. [BACK]

7. The district center had been a municipality as early as the 1870s, but its financing was limited. See Emiroğlu 1993–95. [BACK]

8. The exchange rate was 9 Turkish lira to $1 U.S. during the mid-1960s. Robinson (1963, 207) cites estimates of the average annual per capita income for 1953 and 1956 as just over 500 TL. By this estimate, the average annual per capita income during the mid-1960s would have been somewhere between 500 and 1,000 TL. [BACK]

9. Local branches of other political parties had been opened in the town of Of starting in 1945, but they were still of little importance to the town during the 1960s. [BACK]

10. The People's Houses were based on the Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocağıı), an early nationalist club first founded in 1912 (Lewis 1961, 376). [BACK]

11. After the Democrat Party defeated the Republican People's Party in the national elections of 1950, the government abolished the People's Houses and seized their assets (Zürcher 1993, 233). [BACK]

12. The one exception, a father's brother's great grandson of Ferhat Agha, was a significant departure from usual practice. See the analysis of the tea cooperatives in chap. 11. [BACK]

13. In 1986, one of the villages of the Muradoğlu just to the west of Eskipazar was incorporated as a municipality, rather than Eskipazar itself, by then a town center. See chap. 12 for the significance of this move. [BACK]

14. The patronymic suffix is usually expressed in the singular, but sometimes in the plural, "sons of" (oğullarıı), as in Selimoğullarıı or Muradoğullarıı. [BACK]

15. This is a paraphrase of the analysis of large family groupings in the district of Of that appears in my dissertation (Meeker 1970). [BACK]

16. The new province of Trabzon is bounded by the provinces of Rize in the east and Giresun in the west. [BACK]

17. One can say that women come from the group of males designated by a patronym, for example, "His wife is from the Muradoğlu" (Ailesi Muradoğlundan) or "She is from the Mehmet Muradoğlu group [of the Muradoğlu]" (Mehmet Muradoğlunun takıımıından). For other examples of local patronyms, see Umur (1951, 1956). [BACK]

18. The contrast is described in my dissertation (Meeker 1970), but my attempt to explain it there is flawed. [BACK]

19. Ibid. Elsewhere in rural Turkey, the word "akraba" normally referred to kinsmen, relatives or family in the broadest sense, that is, both males and females, including relatives by both blood and marriage. This means that the word "akraba" did not refer to any kind of bounded collectivity. Elsewhere in rural Turkey, the word "sülale" was commonly used to refer to "descent line" but without the meaning of a "descent group" as in the expression, "He is from my family line" (sülalemdendir). I rarely heard this word in the district of Of, probably because they were more preoccupied with descent groups than with descent lines. [BACK]

20. Ibid., 159–60. The households are assumed to be headed by a descendant of the putative ancestor of the patronymic group. The households are otherwise of variable composition. They might include a couple and their unmarried children or a couple, their married children, and their unmarried children, or they might include other relatives of the household head, or even relatives of his spouse in some instances. [BACK]

21. In rural areas of central and western Turkey in the 1960s, by contrast, patrilineages consisting of more than 100 households would have been considered extraordinary. [BACK]

22. Meeker 1970, 158–59. The estimate, which is a conservative one, applies to the villages of the district of Of as newly constituted in 1948. It is based on interviews, a partial census of the Selimoğlu, official census results by village, and official vote counts by village. [BACK]

23. The local usage of the word "akraba" seemed to confirm that this was so since it indicated that the clan was a basic unit of the social system. [BACK]

24. This was sometimes asserted to be a fact of life in the district of Of: "Here among us large families crush small families" (bizde büyük akrabalar küçük akrabalarıı ezilir). [BACK]

25. The classical statements of these anthropological theories are to be found in Evans-Pritchard (1940, 1949) and in Evans-Pritchard and Fortes (1940). [BACK]

26. I use the phrase "post-classical period" to refer roughly to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Later, in chap. 4, I will also use the phrase "period of decentralization," following Hourani (1974, 71) and ıınalcıık (1977). [BACK]

27. Meeker 1970, 158. [BACK]

28. I have argued elsewhere (1976a; 1976b) that marriage at a distance was more common in the eastern Black Sea region than in other parts of Turkey. The logic of my analysis depended on the inability or reluctance of women to press their legal right to property inheritance, both under the Ottoman and Republican legal code. Since the probability that women may press their claims to property is increasing, endogamous marriages may be increasing accordingly, as a device for maintaining male control over property. Cf. Hann and Beller-Hann (2001), who conclude that marriage to close kin is common in the Lazi districts from Pazar to Hopa. [BACK]

29. In the 1960s, one encountered these large caravans along the coastal road from Rize to Trabzon during the warmer months. I do not know if they were also typical of the coastal districts further east or further west. [BACK]

30. The use of firearms during wedding celebrations was illegal, but the gendarmerie looked the other way during the 1960s. [BACK]

31. The patronymic groups in Of were sometimes associated with one or more village quarters, or one or more entire villages. This was a stronger relationship of patronymic group and a specific territory than usually existed in the villages of western Turkey at the time (Meeker 1970, 147, 149). [BACK]

32. The tradition of religious study in the district of Of is the subject of chap. 2. [BACK]

33. See Fortes (1953) for a discussion of unilineal descent groups as "corporate groups" and "effective lineages" and Stirling (1965) for a limited application of these concepts to villages in central Anatolia. [BACK]

34. The word "ağa" is translated in English-Turkish dictionaries as "chief," "master," or "lord." Cf. Meeker 1972. At the time of my fieldwork, I assumed that the aghas of the nineteenth century were local elders and leaders. I failed to understand they had been appointed and titled by state officials, who assigned them certain governmental tasks in designated groups of villages. See chaps. 6, 7, and 8. [BACK]

35. Umur 1949, 18. [BACK]

36. I have chosen not to publish this list of twenty family names, all of them of the "oğlu" form, but I shall be using the list to evaluate historical documents in later chapters. I have preserved the families' anonymity in order to avoid associating family members, who are many in number, with the activities of leading individuals, who are few in number. [BACK]

37. He wrote down the name of one patronymic group under both parties, saying that its members had recently split between the groups. [BACK]

38. I carried out a census of a large number of households from the Selimoğlu. This census confirmed that leading families from the Selimoğlu had repeatedly intermarried with leading families from other large family groupings of the Five Party in the district of Of (Meeker 1970). [BACK]

39. Umur 1949, 18–19. Umur later conducted an extensive program of archival research on the district of Of. He may well have revised his views after completing this research. [BACK]

40. Ibid. Umur uses the Turkish word "tribe" (kabîle) instead of "family" (akraba) to refer to the clans, thereby choosing to emphasize their extra-state character. [BACK]

41. I saw five such mansions in the old district of Of and heard reports of a few others that had fallen into ruins. For a description of one of the old mansions east of the town of Trabzon, see Winfield et al. (1960). [BACK]

42. See the analysis in chap. 3. [BACK]

43. Nonetheless, Sümer (1992) has argued that prominent individuals and families along the eastern coastal region were traceable to the late arrival of Çepni Turkic peoples. [BACK]

45. See the analysis in chap. 3. [BACK]

46. I use the English phrase "family line" as a translation of the Turkish word "akraba" but with its special meaning in the district of Of, that is, a descent line which is also a descent group. See note 19, above. [BACK]

47. I retained the terms "family grouping" and "patronymic group" as two translations of the broader and narrower meanings of the local term "akraba." [BACK]

48. This problem will be examined in chap. 6. See Van Bruinessen (1978) for an assessment of the relationship of local elites and the state system among the Kurdish-speakers of eastern Anatolia. [BACK]

49. See chaps. 6, 7, and 8 for a fuller discussion of French and British consular reports. [BACK]

50. Fontanier may have received this idea from P. Fourcade, who preceded him as French consul in Sinope. See chap. 7. [BACK]

51. Fontanier 1829, 17-18. [BACK]

52. MAE CCCT L. 3, No. 11, Jan. 1831. British consul Brant reported a similar assessment, PRO FO 524/1, Jan. 26, 1831. [BACK]

53. The first, Selimoğlu, already known to us, is remembered as the preeminent family line of the old Five Party. The second, Cansıızoğlu, is remembered by some as the preeminent family line of the old Twenty-five Party during the time of Osman Pasha. [BACK]

54. The exception is the Fatzanoğlu. I do not know if this family line is today a large family grouping in the vicinity of Hopa. [BACK]

55. MAE CCCT L. 3, No. 11, Jan. 1831. [BACK]

56. Ibid. British consul Brant had reached the same conclusion (PRO FO 524/1, Jan. 26, 1831). [BACK]

57. PRO FO 524/2 p. 29, Feb. 1833. Brant acknowledges the reports of a force of twelve thousand but believes that it is a force of only six thousand. [BACK]

58. See chaps. 6, 7, and 8. [BACK]