Mehmet Muhtar Amca
Mehmet Amca Demirtepe, the retired Muhtar of Çukurbağ Village, met with Ayşe Dağıstanlı recently and talked about what it was like growing up in the 40’s and 50’s. He also talked about his role as Muhtar of Çukurbağ Village which is located a few kilometers outside of Kaş.
Mehmet Amca with neighbors
After they finished the interview, Mehmet Amca, in true village style and in line with authentic Turkish hospitality, invited Ayşe to eat with him and his neighbors. The room was warm on a wet and cold day and the food was delicious. Mehmet Amca and his friends joked with Ayşe and amongst one another.
A "typical" village lunch
Amca is a term of respect for older persons in Turkish and literally translates to uncle. The Muhtar of a village is the “elected head of a village or a neighborhood within a town or city” and is the head of the village council of elders. The Muhtar is usually a position of respect by village residents.
Mehmet Amca was born in 1938 and was a bit more than a month old when Atatürk died. During his time as Muhtar in the 1980’s, the village went from using camels and horses as farm animals to the use of tractors and combines.
When Mehmet Amca started school at the age of seven, his family was very, very poor. At first he went to the school in Çukurbağ village but when the headmastr beat up a local student he did not want to go to such a school anymore and went to Ağullu instead. He walked barefoot daily from his home in Çukurbağ to school in Ağullu, a distance of over three km. His family rarely could afford bread and they had to make their own, he once traded an eraser for a loaf of bread because he was hungry at school.
After he finished elementary school at the age of 14, he did not return to school and worked with his family. They farmed the land both in the sahil or coastal village of Çukurbağ and in the yayla, the mountain version of Çukurbağ village, located near Gömbe and Elmalı 80 kilometers above Kaş. His family has always grown small plots of wheat and until just a few years ago they used oxen to plow the ground and plant their seed. Some villagers also used mules and some used camels. At harvest they would cut the wheat by hand and thrash the heads of the wheat stalks over canvas laid out in the fields to separate the wheat from the chaff. They also have almonds in the sahil and apples in the yayla. They grow all their own food and carry seedlings of small plants from one village up or down to the other to continue year round growth of food crops. Most villagers in Çukurbağ live a subsistence life, they grow almost all their food and rely on outside purchases very little.
In 1958 he went into the Navy for three years and was stationed at Iskenderum and later Istanbul. One of the ships he was on was a boat sent by the US Navy to Turkey. While on board ship, he was put in charge of several men over his rank because, as his captain told him, he could type and those men could not. He had taught himself to type after he joined the Navy and this put him into a position of extra responsibility.
Mehmet left the Navy and in 1964 got married. In 1965 their first of 10 children was born. They also have 17 grandchildren.
In 1973 Mehmet became the Muhtar of Çukurbağ village. He wanted the job and was elected for the first of four terms. He served over 20 years as the Muhtar. During that time many changes occurred. He believes he did a good job and also that he was an honest Muhtar because he was always poor while in his official status and now that he is retired his retirement income is more than he used to make as Muhtar.
We only have space for just a few of the notable commentaries about his time in office. For example, a new mosque was planned in Elmalı and because there were no roads to the building site they used horses and men to carry the building materials and the large iron gate for the mosque.
Çukurbağ village camel 2010
Every summer around June, most of the village moves from the sahil to the yayla. In the fall, usually October or early November, the process is reversed and everyone moves back. Until fairly recently, the village used camels and horses to move to and return from the yayla whereas now they use trucks. When they used camels the trip would take at least 48 hours of walking time, sometimes two and sometimes three days. They would usually stop for rest after 35 or 40 km at one of two places which were a sort of caravansary. If the weather was good they would tie or fence the animals and all sleep in the shelter, when the weather was very bad they would bring the animals with them also.
Electricity first came to the yayla in 1981 and the sahil a year later. The villagers had to use oxen to raise the electricity poles and the Muhtar collected the electricity payments for TEDAŞ. Running water to the homes came to the yayla in 1985 but not to the sahil until 1994! There was an earlier çeşme or fountain project and they had to build a water storage depot in 1970 and laid pipes from the depot to the fountains for the next two years. When they build the depot they had to transport a huge valve which weighed over 450 kilos severl kilometers over rough terrain and they tried to use a camel but the creature just refused to get up after they loaded it. The villagers had to disassemble the valve, carry it in pieces and reassemble it on location. Although camels can carry up to 600 kilos, this particular beast seemed reluctant to move. The 80 km of pipes for the fountain project had to all be dug by hand and they used camels to carry the pipes! In 1985 the village stopped using camels for transportation although a few were kept for camel wrestling which still happens today, for example in Demre.
Ayşe asked Mehmet Amca how long did he think the village has been in its current location and he guessed several hundred years. He said the village cemetary is over 28 thousand square meters of space and in his lifetime less than 2 square meters have filled. Local official records do not go back very far and he believes the really old records are in Ankara or maybe Istanbul but of course they are in the old Ottoman Turkish written in Arabic script.
Mehmet Amca said when he was a child there were approximately 125 persons in the village but now the sahil has around 400 and the yayla has almost 800. The yayla is so much larger because people come from other villages, towns and cities to spend their summers in the cooler mountains, a sort of summer “tourist” migration.
Mehmet Amca with newspaper headline
Mehmet Amca is especially proud of an incident in 1998 while he was Muhtar when he led opposition to a hydroelectric dam that was to be built in the yayla area. At first he was approached with the offer of a “payment to the village” if he did not oppose the project, he refused what he said was a thinly concealed bribe. “Doğuştan Çevreei Muhtar” or “native environmentalist.” He led the villagers to block the tractors, trucks and other equipment going to the project. Suleyman Demerel was President at the time and was pushing for many country wide modernisation projects including hydroelectric dams. The village believed it would be harmful to the ecology and to their way of life and fought it. They eventually won and the project went away. During the protest Mehmet Amca was grabbed by the Jandarma for his opposition.
Mehmet Muhtar Amca retired in 2003 although when he announced his retirement, no one believed it because he had become identified with the position in the village and people did not want to see him leave. Locals agree that his time was a time of transition and great change, a passing of the old into the new era and Mehmet Amca retired to turn over the next era to a younger generation.
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