THE PEOPLE OF SIRINCE
The 700 inhabitants of Sirince are descendants of Turkish immigrants who left their homeland near Kavala, in Greek Macedonia, in 1923. The physical appearance of many villagers - and many of their traditions, such as winemaking - reflect their Balkan origins.

The first two generations after immigration lived in difficult times. The hardships of a new environment were compounded by poverty, official indifference, and local rivalries. Hunger and disease were rampant in the early years. A majority of the 4000 immigrants who were settled in Sirince in 1924 moved on to seek better opportunities in Selçuk (where Sirince families now dominate most trades and professions) or in Izmir. Old houses in the village fell into disrepair. The upper neighborhoods, which appear full of beautiful old houses in early photographs, were abandoned and turned into ruins.

It was only in recent years that tourism began to turn the tide of decline.

A small handful of outsiders went off the beaten track to visit Sirince in the 1980s. The village road was paved in 1986 (an automatic telephone exchange did not arrive until 1993). In the '90s, some tour operators serving the region of Kusadasi/Ephesus "discovered" Sirince as an attractive, authentic village. Tourist buses became a frequent sight in the village square. With them came restaurants, a few guesthouses and many souvenir shops. Local women began to sell their needlework to visitors. Homemade wine and olive oil began to bring in a small but steady income. The village prospered.

For the first time since the 1920s, young people chose to stay and work in Sirince rather than move to the town. There was a new (if still limited) awareness of the village's architectural heritage. Attempts were made to maintain or restore the beautiful old houses which a few years ago seemed doomed to collapse. Collective drives helped to improve streets, to build a bridge over the seasonal stream, and to plant trees.

AGRICULTURE
Despite tourism, Sirince remains at heart a farming village. The main sources of income are products of the land: peaches, grapes and olive. Tobacco, formerly an important crop, has all but disappeared since the withdrawal of government subsidies - a victim of the worldwide drive against smoking. Figs, another traditional product, are no longer considered profitable. Tangerines grow well in the plain of Selçuk, but do not thrive in the harsher winters of Sirince.

Village life is organized around the rhythms of nature. In spring families move to the vineyards to prune the winestocks and treat them with sulphur. In summer the peaches (some of the best in all Turkey) require watering, spraying, picking and crating. Grapes are gathered and pressed into wine in autumn. In winter villagers keep busy picking and preserving the olives - an extremely time-consuming job. Modern machinery is rarely used, and agricultural techniques have hardly changed since ancient times.

Most households own several small plots of land scattered around the village. They cultivate a variety of different crops, balanced so as to keep them busy through the cycle of seasons. Labour is provided by members of the family and neighbours, because few people can afford to hire outside hands. (Each year, a dozen farm workers come to seek jobs in Sirince from far-away Konya.) Many villagers grow their own vegetables, sometimes producing a surplus to sell at Selçuk's Saturday market.

Cows are expensive and sheep are considered difficult to feed (and pigs are unthinkable in a Muslim community), so the most popular domestic animal is the goat, which people keep for its milk and meat - with disastrous consequences for the environment! Donkeys, which until recently formed the chief means of transport, are now being replaced by tractors and Dodge trucks.

Rural traditions of self-sufficiency persist: people make their own cheese and soap; they pickle and preserve winter vegetables and often bake their own bread. Olive oil is pressed at the commercial olive press which is set up in the village each winter. Homemade pekmez, a kind of molasses obtained from grape juice, is used as a substitute for sugar.

TRADITIONS
A remarkably solid family structure is the basis of social life. Elder children often live with their parents even after they are married and have children of their own. Most families in the village are interrelated, although outside marriages (typically with people from Selçuk or nearby towns) are also common.

Women were traditionally barred from public roles: in the past, women would never set foot in the village's only "shopping" street. They are still never seen in the three cafés and two barber shops, the principal venues of public life. At home, by contrast, women have a dominant position. In many households they control economic decisions, and grown-up men often fear and obey the maternal authority.

This traditional division of roles, however, is facing change. Several shops in the main street are now run by young women (but none yet by married women)! A sign of changing times is the traditional dress which older women still wear, but very few of those younger than 30 will want to be seen with. This consists of baggy trousers of colorful floral prints (salvar) and a white embroidered headscarf (yemeni), often topped by a shoulder-length shawl of cotton or wool. For younger people this is an embarrassing sign of backwardness, so the interest that some visitors take in old-style village dress is viewed with surprise or consternation.

Marriage customs also run into changing times. Marriages traditionally involve the formal consent of the parents and a long period (typically two or three years) of engagement. This is still the ideal, but too often reality veers from the norm. Most marriages are now contracted through "abduction" -boy "kidnaps" girl, sometimes with a show of force but almost always by prior agreement; the lovers come back after a couple of days; there is crisis and tears in the family, but her parents eventually agree to the marriage (she would otherwise have little chance to marry again). A wedding party is held in the village square after a decent interval.

A wedding party is among the top events of the village social calendar. It is typically held in late summer, when the peach harvest is in and coffers are full of money. Everyone who happens to be in the village is invited, regardless of acquaintance. Food is provided free by the party-giver. Musicians are hired from nearby towns - in the past they used to sing traditional music on ancient instruments, now it is more fashionable to play the latest tunes of Turkish pop with electronic amplification. Only girls will dance during the early hours of the evening, but toward midnight men, too, will gather the courage to join the floor.

A similar party is held also for the circumcision ceremony, which usually takes place when a boy is between 3 and 12 years of age. Before the event, the boy is dressed in a fancy prince's uniform and parades village streets, accompanied by a drummer and piper, collecting tips and gifts. The actual cutting is performed in public, usually by a licensed paramedic.

Public drinking of alcohol is disapproved even at such festive occasions - although most villagers make wine at home and like to taste it from time to time, if not more often. The Muslim religion, of course, considers wine-drinking a grave sin. The people of Sirince, being good Muslims, agree with this in principle - but practice is something else, and the best efforts of the good imam occasionally fail to stop the villagers from putting their immortal soul in peril.

POLITICS AND INSTITUTIONS
The fundamentalist variety of Islam which has become popular in other parts of the country has found little support in Sirince, as in the rest of Aegean Turkey. The village votes largely social-democratic at election time - unless, that is, a rival party promises to repave the tarmac or to cancel farmers-cooperative debts. The mosque remains under-attended except at funerals and on religious holidays.

Public authority in the village is embodied by the muhtar, an elected official who holds office for five years. He is assisted by a council of four unpaid aldermen, whose job involves mediating in property disputes, pressing civil servants in Selçuk and Izmir for various government services, and dealing with the complex bureaucratic issues that arise from the village's historic heritage status. Two uniformed night watchmen keep law and order.

The village school has two teachers appointed by the ministry in Ankara. They attend to some 40 pupils in five grades. After fifth grade, nearly half of the children go on to middle school in Selçuk or to vocational school in one of the regional towns. A very small handful of them take their studies on to university in Izmir.

ARCHITECTURE
One of the greatest assets of Sirince is its traditional architecture, which has been preserved reasonably intact through difficult times. In recognition of this fact, the village was placed under protective legislation in 1986. All new construction since then has to conform to traditional standards - at least in theory if not always in practice. Few ugly cement buildings disturb the harmonious panorama of the village.

The old houses which give Sirince its character date mostly from the 19th century, although they draw on older traditions. They typically have two stories. The ground floor, built with thick stone walls, serves as animal shed and storage space. On the upper floor are the living quarters, built of wood and mortar: these often jut out on timber consoles in typical Balkan or "Turkish" fashion.

Chestnut was the most common type of wood used in traditional construction, as it weathers the elements well. But now the depletion of chestnut forests makes this impossibly expensive, and pine - worse, poplar - has become the favorite construction material.

The windows, all uniformly large, elegantly proportioned and set in strongly accentuated horizontal rows, add to the visual harmony of the houses. Many facades are decorated with stucco or paint, reflecting the wealth of the original owners.

The living floor is divided into many small rooms - a response to the harsh winters of Sirince. One room is usually set aside as the winter room: it will be the only one that is heated in cold weather. The wooden ornaments which formerly decorated the interiors have largely disappeared since 1924 - in the past they made good firewood, now they fetch good prices from the antique dealers of Istanbul.

A curious feature of Sirince's architecture is hidden passageways which interconnect entire rows of houses. Mostly blocked up by present owners, these passages provided access to members of extended families living in neighbouring houses.

HISTORY
There are traces of Roman presence - note Roman funerary urns used as village fountains, and the Roman waterworks at a nearby spring which once supplied water to Ephesus via an aqueduct. The ruins of a 12th century Byzantine monastery are located about 3 km (2 miles) from the village. But the settlement itself seems to date from the late 18th century.

The original inhabitants were Greeks - perhaps settled here by Ottoman imperial policy, to re-cultivate a bandit-infested and lawless land. Although the area was under Turkish rule from the 13th century onward, the Greeks lived on as a more or less autonomous community under Ottoman law. They had their own churches and schools, and their elected muhtar.

In the 19th century Sirince (then called Kirkinje) enjoyed an economic and cultural boom. The export of figs and Turkish tobacco brought money. Entrepreneurs from the village established fig-packing businesses in Izmir (Smyrna). They built an impressive school in their native village - now revived as a restaurant, it is the finest historic school building of any rural village in Turkey.

The Greek author Dido Sotiriou, in her novel Bloodied Land, published in 1962, describes a childhood spent in Kirkindje - then a prosperous town of over 1000 Greek households. Selçuk (then called Ayasuluk) was a poor, malaria-infested village of several huts - it only grew into a sizeable town after the eradication of malaria in the 1930s.

During the Balkan wars of 1912, some Greeks of Kirkinje agitated for the Greek national cause. The Ottoman government responded with harsh reprisals, which grew harsher during the First World War. When Greece invaded western Turkey in 1919, the men of Kirkinje joined local Greeks to fight against their Turkish neighbors. They were defeated in 1922, and next year, a treaty between Greece and Turkey obliged all Greeks of Asia Minor to abandon their homeland in exchange for Turkish refugees from Greece.

Descendants of the old inhabitants of Sirince now live in various parts of northern Greece, notably in the town of Nea Ephesos near Thessaloniki in Macedonia. Some visited their ancestral village in recent years and were given a friendly welcome by the present inhabitants of Sirince.

CHURCHES
Two former churches - along with the school building and the old village houses - are reminders of Sirince's Greek past.

The church of St John the Baptist was built in stone in 1805, according to the inscription over the gate, after the destruction of an earlier building on the site. The building is structurally in good shape, but the interior is bare except for parts of some frescoes. The George B. Quatman Foundation of Lima, Ohio (USA) has donated funds for the restoration of this church. The charming churchyard is private property, although the owners graciously allow interested visitors through.

The church of St Demetrios, which stands on a height near the village entrance, was built of wood and mortar in the local architectural style. Its interior is notable for a carved-wood iconostasis and the stucco decoration bearing traces of frescoes. This church has deteriorated badly in recent years and will collapse if no measures are taken to save it.

The ruins of about a dozen chapels and monastic buildings can be found in various spots around the village. The belief in buried treasures has caused much destruction, so there is not much left standing in architectural terms. Still, these ruins form an interesting goal for enjoyable nature walks in the environs of Sirince.