Our tale begins in the village of Korkut in the District of Gümüşhacıköy, which is in the Amasya Province of Turkey. Korkut has drinking water, a post office and a midwife, and apparently not much else.
Ali. O, like so many enterprising Korkunians, one afternoon during the Muslim commemoration of Ramadan, decided to make the deal of a lifetime with the stepson of his brother. The stepson would get his daughter and Ali would get a cow. The stepson delivered the cow and now it was time for the next part of the deal.
“I promised, I took the cow. Now you have to get married,” Ali O. told his daughter Guller O.
Like all romantic heroines, Guller did not want to be traded for a cow and fled to her aunt’s house in Ankara, where Ali began making threatening phone calls to her insisting that she go through with the wedding. The case came to court and Ali O. claims that he was slandered, that he did not sell his daughter for a cow, but that the cow just happened to be on his premises, and that he was doing his daughter a favor by marrying her off because she’s retarded.
Turkish Muslim Trades Daughter for a Cow
