Same family as the preceding photo, in the traditional house partly burried in the hill ; one façade gets more sunlight, the part with a succession of living/sleeping rooms.

Still some very large families in east Turkey, here the father desperate to have a second son but only one boy (the little blond one, 3rd on the right) in that family with 6 girls ; the mother specially was so happy to have someone taking photos of most of her children.

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The winters are very cold at that altitude, some 20km from Ardahan (more or less 2000m high, rather more IMO) so the houses in that area are often half buried in the ground for better isolation ; the total area of the house being covered with a deep layer of stones and mud which makes it amazingly cool in the summer compared with the outside.

They told me that the house had been inhabited by the same family for more than a century, and it was one type of habitations that interested me the most during that travel.