Ritual, the sacred way of doing things, transforms the mundane into the divine.  It also patterns life into tried, true, expected modes, and provides the psychological reassurance that comes from knowing one has done things right.

The rustic village homestead provides for a life of simple dignity and tradition in which the mundane can be transformed to the level of the sacred through ritual and lore.

Commonly, sets of rituals cluster around certain sacred objects or institutions.  The traditional Turkish home contains an object so sacred that we may refer to it as the “home altar” and to the woman associated with it as the “home priestess.”  This sacred object is the ocak (domestic hearth).  Much of what the famous cultural historian Fustel de Coulanges has written about the symbolic place of sacred fire in ancient Greek and Roman homes applies equally well to the traditional Turkish domestic hearth.  In the house of every Greek and Roman was an altar; on this altar there had always to be a small quantity of ashes, and a few lighted coals.  It was a sacred obligation for the master of every house to keep the fire up night and day.  Woe to the house where it was extinguished.  Every evening they covered the coals with ashes to prevent them from being entirely consumed.  In the morning the first care was to revive this fire with a few twigs.  The fire ceased to glow on the altar only when the entire family had perished; an extinguished hearth, an extinguished family, were synonymous expressions among the ancients. (1956, p. 25)

In Turkey, also, the domestic hearth symbolizes the family and lineage.  Some of the worst insults one can hurl at another involve the extinction of the hearth:

“May your hearth [family] die out!”

“May owls [symbols of death] perch on your hearth!”