Marriage and Companionship Institution among Kazdağı Tahtacı Turkmens

In this study titled “Marriage and Companionship Institutions of Kazdağı Tahtacı Turkmens”, the marriage and companionship institutions of Kazdağı Tahtacı Turkmens in Çanakkale and its region were investigated and the relations of these institutions with each other were attempted to be revealed. Kazdağı Tahtacı Turkmen
culture, which has led a rather “closed” lifestyle from the past to the present and continues its traditional lifestyle especially in rural areas in forests and high places in terms of socio-cultural aspects, contains many cultural codes due to its syncretic structure. This study, which was carried out on these communities, which attracts attention as a social richness and lifestyle, was produced from the MA thesis titled “Marriage and Companionship Institutions of Kazdağı Tahtacı Turkmens” conducted in Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Philosophy and Religious Sciences.
As is known, Tahtacıs are a Turkmen community that used to work with wood in many places in Anatolia, especially in Southern and Western Anatolia, but have now settled down and used different sources of income. Çanakkale Region is one of the places where this Turkmen community lives. For the Çanakkale and Kazdağları area, which we considered as the study area, sources in the literature were used before the field data. Afterwards, we conducted interviews with resource persons in the Tahtacı Turkmen community with whom we established contact in the region.
Each community has characteristics that make them different. For Tahtacıs, the most important factor that makes them different in the society is that they lived in the mountains, in the forests and as nomads. Thus, they remained separate from the socio-cultural environment of the city or the region, and this situation caused the community to change less and to continue their lives as a closed community for centuries.