The care of their father's flock is committed to the charge of the daughters, whose beauty has often been extolled in many an amorous folklore song. Their duties are to milk the sheep and goats, churn the milk into butter, or convert it into cheese, bleach and spin the wool, and weave garments for the use of the family. A loom occupies the corner of every dwelling, and every spare moment is given to twisting thread with a spindle.
There is considerable dislike among the Greeks to let their daughters go out to service, but this feeling is not shared by the inhabitants of the Greek islands. On the contrary, they supply the main stock of domestic servants, and recognized agents sail to and from the islands to find them occupation and attend to their interests. These Greek servants are generally very ignorant, can seldom write, and depend on the agent or some kind friend both for reading and writing their letters. They do not draw their pay monthly or quarterly, but prefer to allow it to accumulate with their masters, and withdraw it in a lump sum. After having stayed for some years in service, the girls are greatly in demand with their countrymen, and return to their islands and marry, but only to go back to service when their lazy husbands have expended their savings. Many of them return in the capacity of wet-nurses, a vocation greatly in demand in the East, where children are seldom brought up on the bottle. They are highly paid, and, moreover, receive presents on such important occasions as the child's cutting its first tooth and the like.
Their social position is also different from that of other servants, for as foster-mothers they have a say in the child's upbringing, and their own children can claim kinship as foster-brothers or foster-sisters. Strange and incongruous connections are often the result, as, for instance, in the case of an acquaintance of mine in Smyrna, a British subject and manager of a bank. His foster-brother, a Greek, took to the mountains, and was known as the famous brigand, Caterdjee Yiani, and many a time the latter escaped detection and arrest by hiding in the house of his British milk-kinsman.
Wet-nurses in the Sultan's palace are, it is stated, invariably Circassians, and their own children become playmates with the Crown Princes, and are not forgotten in after life. The foster-mother enjoys a title of courtesy, and often her influence in the palace comes next to that of the reigning Sultan's mother. In the case of the wet-nurse of Sultan Abdul Aziz, her power was such that frequently the appointment or dismissal of Governors and other State officials depended on her good-will.
Greek servants are as a rule honest, but very slovenly, and at first very raw and unused to the ways of civilized life. They love to go about barefooted, or shuffle in slippers. Their hair is seldom combed, and their garments hang loosely about them. Their head-dress is a printed kerchief, called a fakiol, which they wear both indoors and out of doors, but the more advanced wear hats, and consider it such a distinction, that a man-servant of mine, who wanted to get married, could not describe his intended to me in more flattering terms than by saying that "she wears the capello" (hat).
On Sundays they put on their finery and are very keen to go to church, and gossip with their fellow-servants in the women's gallery. It was probably to similar tittle-tattling, so common in Eastern churches, that St. Paul referred when forbidding women to "speak in the churches."
Factories are so seldom to be seen in Turkey that women have few opportunities of employment as factory-girls, but in the silk-spinning factories in Brusa Greek, Armenian, and Turkish girls work side by side. Their great ambition is to be possessed of and wear gold coins about their persons, but specially a five-lira piece, representing about £4 10s. of our money. Too eager to wait until their savings enable them to buy that coin, they go to a money-changer and receive one immediately on credit, paying him weekly a stipulated instalment, and interest at 12 per cent. a year in addition. The result is that when they have paid off the debt they find that the coin has cost them at least £6 or £7; but in the meanwhile their feminine vanity has been gratified, and the coin displayed three or four years earlier than otherwise.
A curious class of people to be found in nearly every village in Turkey, and even in the interior of Arabia, Egypt, and Khartoum, is that of the bakals, or grocers, who are Greeks from Kaisarieh, in Karamania (Asia Minor). Fat, dumpy, and oily, with dirty, baggy trousers, greasy vests and shining countenances, they are as like one another as two peas. They have practically the monopoly of the retail grocery business, and their shops contain everything you can imagine in the way of Eastern articles of diet—bread, cheese, black olives, salted anchovies, sardines, curdled milk called yiaourt, oil, vinegar, salt, sugar, rice, sausages, and dried meats, honey, butter, dried fruits, tallow candles, matches, etc.
Their little boys—chips of the old block—go round every house, calling out "Bakalis" and catering for orders, or bringing them back in conical bags of brown paper. Nearly everybody buys on credit, and an account is run up (not always too honestly) which, after a short time, becomes formidable, and credit is stopped till an instalment is paid.