A case occurred in Elbashï during our stay. A young man from a middle-range family, persuaded the daughter of a fairly poor man from the far end of the village to come home with him. She accepted largely because she could not abide her stepmother. Her father was very angry, and declared he would have no more to do with her, but no one talked of violence. After only a few days she found her mother-in-law, who was notorious for meanness and bad temper, to be a fire rather hotter than the frying pan of a stepmother she had left behind. She attempted, whether seriously or not I do not know, to drown herself in the village spring, but was rescued and dissuaded by a group of women and taken to the house of her mother's brother's son. She remained with him for a while, but eventually was reconciled to her father and married off to a distant village.
One of my best informants in Elbashï had eloped with the sister of a neighbour. In spite of three formal reconciliations, one of which I effected, they were not on speaking terms. No money passed in this case. Another young man in a household in which we were accepted had obtained his wife by the same means. He was said to have been asked a bride price before the elopement of T.L.I,000, and to have settled the matter after the elopement for T.L.200, with no trousseau. Many of the stories of elopement fitted this pattern - a highly variable period of intransigent indignation, followed by a settlement for cash, and reconciliation. But people insisted that elopement was a serious matter, and liable to cause violence, and this is not pure talk. A man from a neighbouring village belonged to a lineage which had been involved in reciprocal elopement with a rival lineage. He met a member of this rival lineage casually in Kayseri. Words led to blows, and he was knifed to death.