536 REPORT—1 890. 
months of the year, dwelling in hovels erected out of ancient ruins, in the 
tombs of the ancient Greeks and in other ruins, but as soon as spring comes 
their abodes become uninhabitable from vermin, and they betake them- 
selves again to their tents. They are an exceedingly peaceful and law- 
abiding race, a great contrast to their neighbours the Afshars, Kourds, 
and Circassians, whose habitat is more to the east, and the Turks look 
upon them as the policemen of the mountains, for they are always ready 
to give information concerning the thefts and smuggling of the less peace- 
ful tribes, several instances of which came under our notice. 
The natural abode of the Yourouk is his black goat’s-hair tent, with 
the camel pack-saddles built round for a wall and the family mattresses 
spread in the midst; his life is occupied in looking after his flocks, and 
according to the season he moves from one pasture to another; there are 
also Yourouk tribes who occupy themselves in wood-cutting and char. 
coal-burning, and carry on their business with merchants on the coast by 
an elaborate system of tallies, but they are not so numerous as the purely 
pastoral tribes. 
Their year they divide into three seasons—namely, Yas, spring, five 
months; Gus, summer, four months; and winter, three months, which 
they again subdivide into three parts: (1) Kampsin, fifty days; (2) 
Karadés, black winter, ten days; and (3) one month, March, Zembrai, or 
the opening. 
They are a fine, active race, insensible to fatigue and hardship, tall 
and strong, with open countenances, usually dark hair, but lighter com- 
plexions than most other tribes in Asia Minor. They dress in loose cotton 
clothes, and their women do not veil their faces. Their infants they 
swaddle, first binding round the child’s body a rag containing earth 
heated with a stone; but infant mortality is enormous amongst them. 
Nearly every woman has a large family, of which only two or three 
survive. Hence the survival of the fittest and the healthy lives they 
lead contribute to the fineness of the race. .We found a considerable 
percentage of idiots amongst them, whom they treat with superstitious 
care ; and many instances of abortion in the shape of infants without 
arms, a wrong number of fingers, &c. One man, from the village of 
Tapan, north of Sis, had a horn like a goat’s horn growing on his head. 
He is, I hear, coming to Europe to exhibit himself. 
Diseases are uncommon amongst them except teletmeh, or throat 
' disease, to cure which they wrap the patient in the warm skins of newly 
slaughtered animals, and disease of the spleen, which they treat with 
poultices and decoctions of mountain herbs. 
Their intercourse with the outer world is very limited; often a well- 
to-do citizen of some town furnishes a body of Yourouks with flocks by 
contract ; the Yourouk to provide so many okes of milk, cheese, butter, 
&c., whilst the tribes get what milk is over, the hair, &c., and the con- 
tractor agrees also to keep up the flock, if by chance it diminishes. This 
is termed ‘an immortal contract.’ In this way the Yourouks often amass 
flocks of their own, and in time pay off the lender. 
These nomads are very destructive to the country they travel over: 
lighting their fires beneath trees, they ruthlessly destroy acres of timber—_ 
and the valleys of this part of the Taurus are rich in tall, straight fir-trees 
used for masts; then they lay bare whole tracts of country, that they 
may have fodder for their flocks, and nothing is so destructive to timber 
as the habit they have of tapping the fir-trees near the: root for the 
