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A family in northwestern Türkiye has run the same village grocery for four generations, keeping it open for about 120 years while the settlement around it empties.
Ibrahim Ertan, 60, a resident of Eskicaga village in Bolu’s Yenicaga district, runs a shop his great-grandfather, Hafiz Muharrem Efendi, opened during the Ottoman era. The business later passed to his grandfather, Seyit Ali and then to his father, Hikmet Ertan.
Ertan told Anadolu Agency (AA) that the shop dates to the reign of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed Resad. He said, “The shop is in the same place. It has not changed in 120 years.”
The building has mud-brick walls and wooden shutters. It sells food, glassware, hardware, clothing and local products. Ertan said clay, salt and olive oil were once sold loose before packaged goods became common, and that the shop also sold toys during his childhood.
“We keep sugar, flour, tea, oil, rice, bulgur and pulses, all of them,” Ertan said. He added that the shelves also hold needles and thread, socks, hats, belts and denatured alcohol, along with local products such as pine cone jam, linden tea, tarhana and honey.
Ertan said the village was crowded when he was a child but began to empty about 10 years ago. The number of households has fallen to 15. Villagers once made up most of his customers, he said, while passing travelers account for most of the trade today.
“Earlier the villagers did the shopping; now mostly strangers passing by on the road stop in,” he said.
Ertan said he opens the shop every morning and closes it every evening, with no weekends or holidays except when he is ill or someone dies. Shop income paid for the education of his three children. His father kept working until he died at 85.
Ertan said his son intends to continue the business as the fifth generation if he can retire.
He said visitors often tell him: “We remember the past. You keep the old village groceries alive.”
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