The Social Life of Remittance Houses: Scenes from Rural Kayseri
It has been three years that the local imam of Karakaya [Black Rock] was assigned to this highland village of Kayseri by the Diyanet, Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs. What brought him to Kayseri in the first place was his graduate studies in the faculty of theology at Erciyes University. Himself a native of Adana, a Mediterranean city that is only a few hours driving away, coming to Kayseri was not a game changer. In the past three decades, Kayseri, a city that was once the hub of out-migration, has become a city in-migration that attracted population from the neighboring Central Anatolian cities. What he did not digest easily was his appointment to Karakaya, a village with two mosques and a barely any congregation to fill one. As one of Kayseri’s main villages of outmigration, the village was empty for the majority of the year. In this village which was populated for the most part with the elderly and the retired, the imam argued that he would have a hard time gathering a congregation (cemaat) during the winter. Waking up at daybreak and battling his way through knee-high snow to recite the call to prayer in winter was not something he was used to back in his Mediterranean town. Moreover, serving to a non-existent congregation at this seemingly ghost town touched his nerves. The emptiness of the streets, and the presence of vacated houses was not something that he was familiar with.
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