Food, market and trade

Picture an old covered market. First comes the kasap, the butcher. Next door the helvacı sells halva that smells of sesame and syrup. On the corner the bakkal weighs out dry goods, and at the far end the attar sits among jars of spices and herbs. Each of these shops now lives on as a surname. The vocabulary of the bazaar moved almost unchanged into Türkiye's population registers.

Where the words come from

Kasap comes from Arabic qaṣṣāb and means a person who cuts and sells meat. Helva is also Arabic (ḥalwā, ‘sweet’), so a helvacı is someone who makes and sells halva. Bakkal goes back to Arabic baqqāl. In Arabic the word first meant a seller of vegetables; in Turkish it came to mean the grocer who sells dry provisions. Attar is Arabic as well. It is built on ʿiṭr, ‘scent’, and names the dealer in perfumes, spices and medicinal herbs.

The group also has Turkic members. Aşçı, ‘cook’, joins Old Turkic aş, ‘cooked food’, to the agent suffix -çı. Balcı is bal, ‘honey’, plus the same suffix. Dictionaries use it both for the honey seller and for the beekeeper, so the word sits between farming and trade. In Fırıncı, ‘baker’, the noun fırın reached Turkish through Greek fourni from Latin furnus. Tüccar, ‘merchant’, is a curiosity: in Arabic it is the plural of tājir, but Turkish uses it for a single trader.

Three shapes

These surnames come in three shapes. Some are the bare trade word: Kasap, Bakkal, Attar. Some add a suffix to the goods: Helvacı, Şekerci (‘confectioner’), Kahveci (‘coffee-maker’). Others use the patronymic pattern: Kasapoğlu, Helvacıoğlu. Article 6 of the Surname Regulation says a surname is used on its own or together with “(oğlu)”. Families known in the neighbourhood as ‘the butcher's sons’ could register exactly that.

The 1934 rules and the market

The Surname Law (Law No. 2525) was adopted on 21 June 1934. Its Article 3 banned names of military ranks and civil offices, tribal names, and names of foreign races and nations. Market trades were not on that list. A trade was not a state office, so a trade name was free to choose. Article 5 of the Regulation asked that new surnames come from the Turkish language. Words like kasap, bakkal and attar had been everyday Turkish for centuries, whatever their origin.

Why the group is worth a look

Read together, these names sketch an urban economy. Helvacı, Kahveci and Şekerci name the product; Bakkal and Tüccar name the act of trading. Still, a surname carries the history of a word, not of a household. Someone called Kasap today need not have a butcher in the family. The name was chosen in the 1930s, or it fixed an older family nickname.