Yörüks Erotic

The Yörüks are the Turks who kept walking. Their name comes from the Old Turkic verb for walking, and they earned it: while most of the Oghuz Turks who entered Anatolia after the eleventh century settled into towns and farming villages, the Yörüks stayed with their flocks, moving each year between winter camps on the Mediterranean plains and summer pastures high in the Taurus Mountains. That seasonal round, plain to mountain and back, is the spine of Yörük identity. It shaped their black goat-hair tents, their diet of yogurt, cheese and flatbread, their weaving, their marriage networks and their long, wary relationship with the state.

The heartland is the Taurus range of southern Turkey, from Adana and Mersin west through Antalya, Karaman, Isparta and Muğla, with older pockets across the Aegean interior. A second, separate Yörük world exists in the Balkans, where Ottoman rulers resettled Anatolian nomads from the fourteenth century onward to garrison newly taken land. Their descendants still live in villages around Radoviš and Štip in North Macedonia and in scattered communities in Bulgaria and Greek Thrace, where the name shifts to Yürük. Yörüks speak Turkish, an Oghuz language of the Turkic family, but their dialects are conservative enough to mark them off from town Turkish, and the Balkan dialects carry Kipchak features that Anatolian speech lacks.

Religiously the Yörüks are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, with the folk layer common to rural Anatolia: evil eye beads, vows at saints' tombs, a sacrifice when the flocks reach the summer pasture. Some groups counted as Yörük are Alevi, and the line between Yörük and Türkmen has never been fixed. In the west and south the nomads are called Yörük. Farther east the same kind of people are called Türkmen.

Internally the Yörüks are a federation of tribes and camping groups: Sarıkeçili, Karakeçili, Honamlı, Karakoyunlu, Bahşiş and dozens more, each with its own pastures and its own kilim patterns. The Ottoman state used them as auxiliaries and road guards, then spent the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries trying to pin them to the land. The forced settlement campaign in the Çukurova plain in the 1860s produced the line every Yörük knows, credited to the Turkmen poet Dadaloğlu: the decree is the sultan's, but the mountains are ours. Sedentarization mostly won. Most Yörüks now live in villages and towns and mark their heritage at annual Yörük festivals, but a few hundred Sarıkeçili families still migrate with camels between the Mersin coast and the Konya highlands, negotiating each spring with forestry officials for the right to pass.