538 REPORT—1890. 
In producing material from the mountain herbs the Youronks are 
very cunning. Before aniline dyes were invented they drove a good 
trade in colours, but now it does not pay them to continue making them, 
and European dyes are used by their women in making the Karamanian 
carpets. The milk of a spurge, called Galawidhi by the Greeks, is boiled 
with onion-leaves. When the wool is put in, the colour does not at first 
appear until it is plunged into cold water, when a brilliant red is the 
result. From the gall of the Quercus infectoria they make another dye— 
in fact, their mountains are covered with herbs useful for all kinds of 
purposes. 
The Yourouks will do anything for tobacco. When it is not forth- 
coming they make use of certain leaves known to them, and are even 
known at times to use smoke-dried fig-leaves. 
The Yourouks are an exceedingly polygamous race. Poor though he 
is, a man will often have seven wives, or, more properly speaking, seven 
slaves. Each wife generally occupies a different tent: one attends to a 
portion of the flock in one part, another in another direction, another 
wife looks after the camels, another stays at home to weave carpets, 
another collects wood and fetches water: and he must be a very poor man 
indeed who cannot boast of at least three wives. The natural result 
of this is that the female population, though in excess of the male, is not 
enough to meet the demand, so that much is done in the way of woman 
stealing, and if report speaks truly, a Yourouk who wants a wife is not 
particular in appropriating a married woman from another, tribe. 
On marriage the husband generally pays something to the father, and 
this has given rise to the idea that the nomads are in the habit of selling 
their wives for the harems of Constantinople, whereas they are only 
carrying out their legitimate idea of the marriage contract. The 
Yourouks are, strictly speaking, endogamists as far as they can manage 
it, only going outside when necessity obliges them. In this they are a 
marked contrast to their neighbours the Circassians, who generally seek 
a wife from a remote settlement. The Circassians also pay something 
down for a wife. The kalim, or price, is fixed in baitals, or mares, their 
ordinary scale of measurement: 1 camel = 5 mares, 20 sheep = 1 mare, 
&c. Ata betrothal the Yourouks kill a Jamb, play the tambourine, let 
off guns, &c., and exchange handkerchiefs—nothing else. The marriage 
is a little gayer—dancing and feasting for three or four days; but the 
ceremony so often repeated seems to lose its zest. 
The Turkish Government is anxious to get the Yourouks to settle in 
some of the more favourable localities on the southern slopes of the 
Taurus, where a few wretched hovels have been erected, but the 
Yourouks resent the idea, and doggedly refuse to have a mosque or @ 
Hodja. We saw several attempts to thus bind them ; but they resent the 
idea, and the mosque falls into ruins. Their religion is a truly pastoral 
one. Sacred trees by the side of the pathways are hung with rags to 
cure fever, wooden spoons, &c., and there is a little pile of stones hard 
by which passers-by add to; and when a Yourouk dies, they bring his 
body to one of these open-air temples, read a little over it from the Koran, 
and take a few of the small stones to put over his lonely grave. They 
prefer to bury near a path, so that the passer-by may say a prayer, and 
this has given rise to the erroneous belief that their cemeteries are those 
of villages which have disappeared. 
Their superstitions are few; they have their Piri, who inhabit streams 
