Kerek Is Filled With Guests Every Evening; For The Bedouins, Knowing
That They Are Here Sure Of A Good Supper
For themselves and their
horses, visit it as often as they can; they alight at one Medhafe,
[p.385] go
The next morning to another, and often visit the whole before
they depart. The following remarkable custom furnishes another example
of their hospitable manners: it is considered at Kerek an unpardonable
meanness to sell butter or to exchange it for any necessary or
convenience of life; so that, as the property of the people chiefly
consists in cattle, and every family possesses large flocks of goats and
sheep, which produce great quantities of butter, they supply this
article very liberally to their guests. Besides other modes of consuming
butter in their cookery, the most common dish at breakfast or dinner, is
Fetyte, a sort of pudding made with sour milk, and a large quantity of
butter. There are families who thus consume in the course of a year,
upwards of ten quintals of butter. If a man is known to have sold or
exchanged this article, his daughters or sisters remain unmarried, for
no one would dare to connect himself with the family of a Baya el Samin
(Arabic), or seller of butter, the most insulting epithet that can be
applied to a man of Kerek. This custom is peculiar to the place, and
unknown to the Bedouins.
The people of Kerek, intermarry with the Bedouins; and the Aeneze even
give the Kerekein their girls in marriage. The sum paid to the father of
the bride is generally between six and eighthundred piastres; young men
without property are obliged to serve the father five or six years, as
menial servants, in compensation for the price of the girl. The Kerekein
do not treat their wives so affectionately as the Bedouins; if one of
them falls sick, and her sickness is likely to prevent her for some time
from taking care of the family affairs, the husband sends her back to
her father’s house, with a message that “he must cure her;” for, as he
says, “I bought a healthy wife of you, and it is not just that I should
be at the trouble and expense of curing her.” This is a rule with both
Mohammedans and Christians. It is not the custom for the
[p.386] husband to buy clothes or articles of dress for his wife; she
is, in consequence, obliged to apply to her own family, in order to
appear decently in public, or to rob her husband of his wheal and
barley, and sell it clandestinely in small quantities; nor does she
inherit the smallest trifle of her husband’s property. The Kerekein
never sleep under the same blanket with their wives; and to be accused
of doing so, is considered as great an insult as to be called a coward.
The domestic manners of the Christians of Kerek are the same as those of
the Turks; their laws are also the same, excepting those relating to
marriage; and in cases of litigation, even amongst themselves, they
repair to the tribunal of the Kadhy, or judge of the town, instead of
submitting their differences to their own Sheikhs.
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