A boy and a girl would fall in love with one another and see one another. Beforehand, however, the father and mother would say, for example, ‘The daughters of so-and-so are good,’ for example ‘the daughters of Geoffrey are very good, Geoffrey is a very fine man. His wife is good.’ So we would bring their daughter for our son. The father and mother would tell this to their son and their son would see the girl, would go to see the girl. They would go and ask for her hand. The father and mother would go to make the marriage request. The boy would say to the girl ‘I shall send my father and mother to make a marriage request, to come and ask for your hand from your father and mother. If they (agree to) give you away, I shall marry you.’ They go to make the marriage request. They go and enter a house: ‘Hello! Greetings! How are you? Please sit down! Please sit down!’ They sit down. They bring tea. ‘What will you drink?’ They say ‘We shall not drink anything and we shall not eat anything until we tell you our request.’ ‘What is your request?’ ‘We have come (because) our son has entered your door and seen a flower. That flower is in your garden. We want to pick it and bring it to our garden.’ Then they eventually agree. They say ‘Good, we have relatives, whom we have to summon (to consult). They summon the father, mother, paternal aunt, maternal uncle, everybody, there to the house in order to consult them. They come and they ask the father. The father defers to the mother. He says ‘The mother has brought her up. I must ask her mother, because her mother has brought her up.’ Her mother says ‘I agree. I shall make her a bunch of flowers which I shall put on the chest of the boy.’ But they know who the boy is. They know whose son he is. They are pleased to give their daughter (to him). Then they ask the paternal aunt of the boy and she says ‘This is her aunt, she has a right to know also. Her paternal aunt gives the floor to her husband, to her aunt, to her brother, to her maternal uncle. The whole group is thus sitting down. When the betrothal takes place, they invite everybody. They give them the news, then they ask everybody and they all agree. They applaud since the betrothal has taken place. After a while the go to a betrothal party, betrothal party, the girl holds a betrothal party, the betrothal party is (the responsibility) of the girl. They hold a betrothal party, food, bread, tea, drink, they serve everything. The girl invites people to the betrothal party to her house. They eat, they drink, they dance, they jig. The betrothal party finishes and they fix the time of the wedding—the wedding is (the responsibility) of the boy. Sometimes they request him to make a big wedding. Sometimes they request him to make a small wedding. If they request a big one, a big wedding, a big wedding means that they invite many people. A small wedding means that the invite, for example, thirty or forty people or so. The time of the wedding arrives. In the villages they slaughter cattle. When they slaughter cattle early in the morning, they play drum and pipe music on the roofs so that people hear and get up. They call this (music) sar-⁺subay, sar-⁺subay, they play the drum on the roofs and the whole village gets up. They take cattle to slaughter. All the people gather. They slaughter the cattle and holding hands they begin to dance and jig. They cook those cattle. Then they invite people and they all come to the wedding from the villages nearby. If it is in a village, everybody knows each other and they come to the wedding from the villages nearby. They slaughter a large head of cattle, they cook rice, they lay pickles, wine, arak, everything and they eat, drink, dance, jig. They hold the wedding for seven days and seven nights, with drum and pipe, seven days and seven nights they would hold the wedding for their son. Then people come there and give wedding gifts. Their wedding gift was money, that is a hundred tomans—there were tomans—or two hundred tomans. There were not dinars. The dinar was used elsewhere, the tuman (was the currency) for Iran. They gave a wedding gift of two hundred tomans, one hundred tomans, three hundred tomans to the boy, to help him. Well, everybody then goes away. He also goes (to live) in the house of his father, the house of his mother, while beginning to go out to work in the vineyards and estates, but he lived with his father and mother. The bride had to obey his father and mother.