İmece: the disappearing tradition Turkish villages still practice

The Turkish word imece describes a thing English doesn't have a single word for: collective, unpaid, neighbor-organised work, called for a specific purpose and dispersed when the purpose is done. The hazelnut harvest in a Black Sea village. The new house going up on a hillside in Erzincan. The hundred-and-twenty wedding guests cooked for by every aunt and second cousin in the family. İmece is older than the republic, older than Islam in Anatolia, traceable in Turkic societies for at least a thousand years. It is also — quietly, partly — disappearing. Where it survives, it's the most concentrated dose of Turkish village logic on offer.

The mechanics of a real imece

Say a family in Pokut yayla in the eastern Black Sea is rebuilding a wooden house. The patriarch (or, just as often, the grandmother) calls an imece for a Saturday. By Friday night, every household in the yayla knows. Saturday at 6am, twenty men show up with hammers, saws, and their own lunch tied in a cloth. The women of the host family — and most of the women of the village — start cooking at 5am. The work runs from 6 until early afternoon: foundation stones laid, walls raised, a roof beam hoisted into place to a small ceremonial round of maşallah ("what God has willed"). Lunch is eaten on a long cloth on the ground — sini — laid out in the half-built house. Tea, more tea, the men go home, the host family is in a new house by sunset. No money changes hands. The host owes the same labour back, on call, to anyone who shows up that day, for the rest of his life or theirs.

The Turkish anthropologist İsmail Beşikçi documented imece across eastern Anatolia in the 1960s, by which point it was already being eroded by cash-economy migration to Germany. By the 1990s it had retreated to upland villages and to the harvest of crops too time-sensitive for paid labour — hazelnuts, tea, certain grapes. By 2026 it survives as a working institution in maybe 200 villages, mostly in the Black Sea highlands, eastern Anatolia, and the southeast. In another generation it will likely be gone there too, except as nostalgia.

Where you can still see it

Yayla villages above Ayder, Rize

The summer hazelnut and tea harvests in the Pokut, Sal, and Hazindak yaylas still run on imece for the families that keep their summer houses there. If you stay at a guest house in Pokut or Sal in late August or early September, you'll see it — twenty cousins in a tea garden, a single radio playing, the whole crop in by lunch. Don't volunteer to help; you'll slow them down. Watching from the verandah with the host's elderly mother is the right role. See our Black Sea coverage for which yaylas are accessible.

Eastern Anatolia, post-earthquake

After the February 2023 earthquakes in Kahramanmaraş, Hatay, Adıyaman and surrounding provinces, neighborhood-level imece resurfaced for the first time in a generation as villages cleared rubble and rebuilt the homes of less-mobile neighbors. The state effort was enormous; the village effort was older, faster, and based entirely on the imece logic. If you visit the southeast in 2026, you'll still see the texture of it.

Wedding cooking in any small Anatolian town

A wedding in a small Konya, Sivas, or Şanlıurfa town is a three-day cook prepared by the bride and groom's families, plus every female relative within a fifty-kilometre radius. The cooking — usually pilaf, lamb, vegetables, bread baked in the ground oven — is the imece. If you're lucky enough to be invited to a small-town wedding (it happens; Turkish villages are unusually open to foreign guests), you're walking into a working imece.

The urban descendants

In Istanbul and the bigger cities, classical imece — show up Saturday with a hammer, build a house — has effectively died. What remains are its smaller cousins, recognisable to anyone who lived in a village before they moved to the city.

Kına gecesi — the henna night

The night before a Turkish wedding, the bride's female friends and family gather at the bride's family home for an evening of singing, dancing, and the application of henna to the bride's palms. The food is cooked collectively in the afternoon by everyone present. It is, structurally, an imece for emotional rather than physical labour — the village comes together to prepare a young woman for the next phase of her life. The custom survives in 2026 in Istanbul as enthusiastically as in any Anatolian village.

Taziye — the grief visit

When someone dies, the immediate family receives visitors at the home for three days. Every visitor brings food. Cooking-for-the-grieving is collective: the building's women, the deceased's colleagues, distant cousins, neighbors who weren't close to the family but live four floors up — all show up with a tray. The grieving family does not cook for forty days. This is imece in its purest psychological form: the work the bereaved cannot do is taken over by the people around them, without being asked. It is one of the most quietly devastating Turkish customs to observe.

The apartment-building scrub

Once a year, every apartment building's residents' association calls a Saturday morning temizlik günü — cleaning day. Everyone shows up. The kapıcı leads it. Stairs, communal corridors, garden, garage. Lunch afterwards is potluck, every flat contributing a dish. This is the residue of imece in 60-square-metre Cihangir flats. It still happens. You will be asked to participate if you rent long-term.

The harvest weekend in Bozcaada and Şirince

In the small wine-growing villages of the Aegean — Bozcaada island and Şirince above Selçuk — the September grape harvest still pulls in extended families and friends from Istanbul and İzmir for a weekend of picking. It's nominally a working holiday rather than imece in the strict sense, but the structure is the same: unpaid collective labour for a friend's harvest, fed and housed by the host, repaid in the social ledger.

The proverbs that explain it

• Bir elin nesi var, iki elin sesi var — "What does one hand have, two hands have a sound." The Turkish version of "many hands make light work," but the imagery is more precise: solo labour is silent, communal labour makes a noise that can be heard from the next valley.
• Komşu komşunun külüne muhtaçtır — "A neighbor needs his neighbor's ashes." Even the embers of a fire are worth borrowing rather than starting from scratch.
• İmece ile yapılan iş, bereket olur — "Work done by imece becomes abundance." The most direct articulation of the belief that collective effort produces more than the sum of its parts, and that the surplus is something close to grace.

Why it matters now

Imece is the Turkish concept that pushes back hardest against the global drift toward paid, atomised labour. It is the reason a Turkish wedding still costs less to throw than a London one despite a longer guest list and more food. It is the reason the kapıcı is still a working institution. It is the reason — see our hospitality piece — the host pays for everything: the host is, in imece logic, simply taking their turn. Every Turk you meet has been on both sides of an imece exchange enough times that the math works out over a lifetime.

If you want to see it in its real form, you have maybe ten more years of accessible field work before the upland villages thin further. The honest travel itinerary for a culturally-curious visitor in 2026 is: a week in Cappadocia for the postcard, a week in the Black Sea highlands for what's still operating. The latter is where you'll see what Turkey thinks of itself when no one outside is watching.

Bereket versin — may there be abundance.