Forty as a customary round number
Forty is a number that keeps appearing in the folk life of Turkey and of neighbouring regions. Turkish kırk, Persian chehel and Arabic arbaʿīn all name it, and each language has expressions in which forty means something like “a great many” or “a full period” rather than an exact count. These are customs and idioms held by communities, not claims about the number itself, and they differ from family to family and region to region.
This article looks at the folk practice. The scriptural background of forty days and years in the Bible and the Qur’an is its own subject, and the broader history of number forty in scripture belongs there. Here the focus is on how ordinary households, proverbs and stories use the number.
The forty days after a birth
In Turkish tradition, the first forty days after a baby is born have often been treated as a special period. The mother is called lohusa during this time, and in many families she was expected to rest and to receive visitors who brought food and gifts. Visits to a new mother and baby in the first weeks are common in many societies; the Turkish custom is notable for tying the period to the specific number forty.
A number of practices have been recorded around this time. The newborn and mother might not be left alone, or not taken far from the house, until the forty days had passed. In some regions a ritual bath marked the end of the period, sometimes called the kırk çıkarma, “taking out the forty”. Sweet drinks such as lohusa şerbeti, a spiced red drink offered to visitors, are associated with the occasion. Older accounts also describe protective customs against spirits thought to threaten a new mother, including one called albastı in Turkic folklore. How widely any of these customs is still practised today is uncertain, and many families keep only part of them.
Similar ideas about a forty-day period after childbirth are recorded in other societies of the region, including Arabic-speaking communities, and in religious law the period of postnatal bleeding is sometimes discussed in terms of up to forty days. The rules in those legal traditions differ between schools and should not be confused with the folk observances, which have their own logic.
Forty days of mourning and remembrance
The second major use of forty in Turkish custom is after a death. The fortieth day is commonly observed with a gathering, in which family and friends meet to recite prayers or a mevlit, a devotional poem, and to share food. The same kind of marking occurs at the seventh day and sometimes at the fifty-second day or the first anniversary, depending on region. Such observances belong to the same family as the mourning periods that run from Jewish shiva to forty days in various communities, and they are common across much of the Muslim world, as well as in some Christian communities, where a fortieth-day memorial is also kept.
A related observance is the Shia commemoration of Arbaʿīn, held forty days after the day of Ashura, which is a large religious event in its own right. It is a good example of forty being used as a mourning interval, but it is tied to a particular historical memory and should be kept distinct from household custom.
Explanations for why forty is used differ. Some people link it to the belief that the soul stays near the home for a period before departing. Others point to the religious importance of forty in earlier traditions. A third approach is that forty is simply a large round number that is easy to remember. Which explanation is right for a given custom is often unclear, and the reasons people give today may be later than the practice.
Forty in proverbs, stories and sayings
The folk use of forty in speech is large. The Turkish saying “bir fincan kahvenin kırk yıl hatırı vardır”, often translated as “a cup of coffee carries forty years of goodwill”, expresses how hospitality creates a lasting bond. The expression kırk yılda bir, “once in forty years”, means “very rarely”. A lazy or difficult task might take “forty days”, and many fairy tales feature forty days and nights of feasting at a wedding.
Stories use the number too. The tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is among the best known, though it is a later addition to the Arabian Nights tradition and was not part of the oldest surviving manuscripts. The Persian name of the Isfahan palace Chehel Sotoun, “forty columns”, is another example, since the building has twenty columns, and a popular explanation is that the reflection in the pool doubles them. In Turkic folk religion, the Kırklar, “the Forty”, are a group of saintly figures in some Alevi and Bektashi traditions. In Sufi practice the retreat called the chilla is traditionally forty days long.
Why forty?
Scholars and commentators have offered several suggestions for the popularity of forty. One is practical: forty days is a little under six weeks, long enough to feel substantial. Another is that forty works as a round number in languages that count in tens, much as “a hundred” or “a thousand” is used. A third is religious borrowing, since forty days and nights occur in older Near Eastern stories. The word quarantine, which goes back to an Italian word for forty days, belongs among the number-derived words. None of these explanations has been proven, and several may apply at once.
The safest summary is that forty works as a conventional measure of a complete period of time. In Turkish and neighbouring traditions it frames the early weeks of a life and the first weeks of grief, and in speech it signals “a long time” or “a great deal”. It is a number whose strength comes from custom and repeated use, not from any property it holds.