Indeed, it is essential in Sakaltutan to find money for winter supplies after the harvest since the road to town is usually blocked completely to wheeled traffic for up to three months. Trading in town is not entirely simple. Villagers are suspicious, perhaps rightly, of traders, and in spite of the arrangement of the market by which most of the streets are devoted to a single type of shop with full-scale competition, villagers normally have their known friends to whom they always go. These may allow them credit. One village or one set of kin and neighbours tends to concentrate on the same merchant so that he has a good deal to lose by failing one of them.
People use the town merchants mainly for large orders and major purchases.
Before a wedding, for example all the necessary cloth, clothes and extra food are bought on an expedition to town. When I gave a feast to the village to mark my departure, I was taken into town to buy rice and other necessaries. Migrant Labour One major village export is labour. Villages vary greatly in the numbers who migrate and in their degree of skill. One extreme is represented by a band of villages nearer Kayseri with an established tradition of building labour.