Twenty-five years ago, when anthropologist Paul Stirling did the fieldwork for his bookTurkish Village, he tried to find out what the villagers of Sakaltutan knew about the origin and history of their village. The villagers apparently had very little sense of their past, and the longest genealogies covered only six generations. On the basis of their information and other observations and opinions, Stirling estimated the age of the village at about two hundred years and suggested that the village ‘was probably founded by people from villages nearer Kayseri, who had made a temporary summer camp there for pasture, and later decided to settle permanently and plough’.