B7 Village Life
Yulia Davudi of ⁺Hassar ⁺Baba-čanga in Sydney, Australia
Let’s start with the churn. The churn was in the village. We put in it yoghurt and tied its mouth with the stomach of cattle. We had made it attractive. We used to call it a ⁺k̭ramta (‘stopper’). We put the stopper on the mouth of the churn. We put yoghurt in it and tied it. At the top there was a hole so that air could come out. We put in yoghurt, we put water in it, and we began to churn. We brought it (forward). We pushed it away and we brought it forward to and fro. Under it there was a stand, made of wood, low at the bottom and high at the top, so the churn would go down and up. A woman or a man would sit in order to churn it. He would put a cloth under it and kept churning the churn. Perhaps it took half an hour until the butter was produced. When we opened it we saw whether it needed water, or did not need water. Perhaps it was necessary to put water into it. So, then we opened its mouth and we emptied it into big vessels, a saucepan. A saucepan (⁺k̭azanča) is made of metal (and is) black. They put it on the oven and they heated water in it. They emptied the contents of the churn into the saucepan. They took off all of its butter from the surface. The buttermilk remained. We made the buttermilk into jajəc. We put the jajəc into the saucepan. We put it in the saucepan. We put a little salt in it. We put it on the oven, as I said, the oven, and we lit it, its length, its depth was one metre twenty centimetres, and perhaps its width was also a metre, or more. We would light it and put it on this. It would boil. We put it in a bag and it became jajəc. This jajəc, when its water has evaporated, we make like … it becomes cheese. We had herbs for it. We put in basil. We had onions, butter, which we put in them, in the jajəc, for breakfast. Butter, jajəc, cheese, cream (gita), we took the cream (gita) from the top of the milk. Early in the morning, before we warmed the milk, we took the cream from the top if it. When we heated the milk and it cooled, the top of it became a skin, we called it ⁺k̭urrušta (skin). The milk would become slightly warm, not very warm. We put in a spoon and stirred it, so that the milk would become yoghurt, in pots. We had pots (k̭adalə), we called them enamel pots, like the saucepan I showed you, enamel, which did not absorb water. There were pots. We put the milk in these and it would become yoghurt. So our breakfast consisted of these. We had chickens. They laid eggs. A rooster. A rooster. We had a rooster for the chickens. Here, the chickens here produce eggs without a rooster. We had a rooster for them. It used to crow and looked after the chickens. We had a lot of eggs. We did not have a refrigerator in the village, we put them in salt. Churning pot, we had churning pots, we put salt also in those. We put many things in them, like pots, such as wine, which we put in them. So, we put the eggs in salt, because so long as they remain in salt the eggs would not go off. You could perhaps keep it in salt for one year, in sea salt, we had a sea by us in Urmi. We had a sea, it had salt, white, big like this. So we kept it in that. As for meat, when people came, meat would be slaughtered. We did not have shops. When meat was slaughtered, we took a lot and we fried the meat. We fried it, we boiled it and it cooked, we put clarified butter on it, salt on it, and put it in pots. When we wanted to cook anything, we dug out some of the cooked meat fat, its name was k̭alya, we took it out, we put it in a saucepan and we cooked. We cooked stew, they call it yaxni (stew), soup. They call it yaxni, which is made of meat, potatoes, chickpeas, which we used to put in it, eggplants. All these came from our own crops, from the village, only meat came from outside. From time to time we slaughtered one of our cattle, from time to time we slaughtered our chickens. So meat (was cooked in) a saucepan with meat fat. The meat fat was produced thus. We preserved everything. In winter we put everything outside in the snow. My father used to slaughter pigs and hang them outside. He used to hang them and go every morning and cut from them and bring back pig fat, he made ⁺xvisa (bread fried in fat), ⁺xvisa, with bread. Then we had what we call a ⁺k̭ulina (storage box). A ⁺k̭ulina (storage box) was this type, long, but it (extended) upwards, it was two metres high. One of its sides, one of its compartments, of the storage box, was for flour. You would pull it from below and flour would come out, but you would put it in from the top. One side was for wheat. (There is a) pantry (⁺dalapča), as they call it. A pantry is the door that you open where we used to put bread. We used to bake our own bread, very fine flat breads (⁺lavašə). We had dough, we used to knead ourselves. They were made with water, flour, and perhaps we made some with milk, which we would call them ⁺paṱirə. But (when made) without milk we called it bread, flat bread (⁺lavaša). We put in it water, flour, salt, ⁺bulč̭u (leavening dough). ⁺bulč̭u is (like) yeast, but we fermented it ourselves, from the flour, from one dough to another dough. We buried a ball of dough, a ball of dough in flour and until the next time it would be there hissing and ready. So when we wanted to use flour, again to make dough, we put the flour on the side. But we had a very big vat, a vat. The leaven was in water, we made it into dough, we mixed it, we made it into dough. It took perhaps two hours before the dough matured, before the dough rose, before it matured. After that we lay out balls of dough. We would light the oven. How was our oven kindled? We had a vineyard, a vine, grapes. They would cut them all down, we would gather them, tie them into bundles, and bring them back to the storeroom for winter. The cattle—excuse me—when they made their filth, we would clean away the filth in the stables and put it in a basket. We took it on our back and threw it down outside. We stamped it down, it was hard as the ground. Then men would cut it with a spade. Men would cut it very big, from here to there, as big as that. Dung cakes (camrə) as big as that. We call these camrə (dung cakes). These—men would cut the dung heap (sulta), its name is sulta. They dug it like this, cut it and made it like this, so that the sun would enter under them, so that they would dry. When they had dried, we brought them inside for the winter, for the oven. Excuse me again—we took out the filth of cattle to another place and put water in it. We made something like mud, we processed it with our legs into mud and kneaded it with our hands, long like this. The name of these, is dung cakes, ⁺p̂aṱuxə. These were large dung cakes, but the others were a little thinner. I say to my brother, we used to gather wood, bark strips (⁺ṱalašyatə). ⁺ṱalašyatə are (from) a tree, you take its bark, we called them ⁺ṱalašyatə. We put these in the dung cakes, and with the wood of the vine, with the long dung cake (⁺p̂aṱuxta), long dung cakes, we lit the oven. The oven had a long airhole. They put the airhole in the oven under the ground. They make an airhole. They place a thick piece of wood and they build (the oven). Then, after it (the structure of the oven) dries, they take out the wood. Here is the oven and here is the airhole, which you close for the fire to remain good. But when you are newly kindling it, you have to adjust it, so the air enters the oven and so the fire burns. They call this an airhole, the airhole of the oven. We had a cloth which we had prepared for us to stuff into the hole so that the oven did not take in (air). But when we were newly kindling it, we had to take it away. We had a tandurta, a small oven, for us to cook in every day.
We had a house, we said ‘room (for) guests,’ winter house. The winter house had the oven in it. In the guest room we had a stove. We put wood in the stove. We put long dung cakes in it. We put small dung cakes in it. We cooked on it. We had a hot plate. This (word) hot plate (p̂liṱa) is Russian, I am sure, because my father’s family brought them. They laid a hot plate and cooked on that. I say to my brother, we had vegetable garden plots (cardiyyə). Plots, that is for the cultivation of herbs, basil, eggplants, peppers, spinach, many things, beetroot, cabbage. We cultivated all of these in our own vegetable garden. They were needed for winter, when we needed to cook with them. Many things, herbs. Our herbs were parsley, we call it jafari, (the word) jafari is Persian, coriander, leek. We had all of these. We used to make dolma. We chopped it finely, we put rice in it, meat and we made dolma. We made dolma with cabbage and other things. So life was very good. We preserved as pickles the basil, peppers, eggplants. We filled jars with pickles. As for the grapes that we had in the vineyard, we brought back the grapes and crushed them. From their juice we made grape molasses. We cooked grape molasses, very well. Its colour was white like butter. We added soil, we had a (special type) of soil, which they brought from J̵avilan. We would dig the soil from the ground and put it in the grape juice, for that you would get up in the morning and add the soil. People would climb up the grape-press. Its name was čaraz. They made it like this. It had a hole. When they did like this, the grape juice flowed down from the grape-press into a cauldron. You would take this in buckets and put it in the pot, with the soil. Then you stirred it and they mixed the grape juice together with the soil. Scum would come out (of the juice). In the morning you would get up, you had to take it off early in the morning. All the mud and dirt had come out onto the surface. You would see, however, that the grape juice was juice fit for drinking, pure. You had to strain it. We would put the mud in a sack. Its juice would flow down again. We cooked this, but its juice flowed by itself. That grape juice was very pure and fine. We used to make grape molasses (like that). From that grape juice we used to make wine. From that grape juice we used to make vinegar, vinegar, which we put on the pickles. The pickles were very tasty.
I say to my brother, soap, I have said to you now, we used to make our own soap. We would put soda on bones. When you put soda on bones, on something, it melts it all and makes it like water. You put it on the oven and cook it. You put it on the surface of water and it comes out like fat, fat, oil, which you put on the surface of water and it stays. Then we would cut it into big blocks, as we called them, blocks of soap. We laid it up so that it would all dry. But we would take blocks from it. We had soap for perhaps ten years. We used to wash clothes with it. We brought water from a stream. We did not have water from pipes. We had to go and bring it from the stream. The stream was perhaps five-hundred metres away. It came from a group of villages, from our villages, it came from Xanišan, also from K̭arajalu, ⁺Babajan, it entered our village, then it went down to ⁺Spurǧan, Xanišan, Yanjija. It was all the same stream. You know what a stream is? A river, but this is a part (flowing) from a river. It comes to villages so that people can irrigate their crops with it. For example, if you wanted to irrigate your field, or irrigate your vineyard, or your kitchen garden—we used to cultivate a kitchen garden—you would irrigate them from that stream. You would take (water), take it (for your land), I would take it and bring it (to my land). Other people would all take from this stream and irrigate (their land). It is called the stream of ⁺Spurǧan, because this stream goes to ⁺Spurǧan. There were fish in it. We used to cultivate a kitchen garden, as I have just said, we cultivated a kitchen garden. There were watermelons in it, very fine round watermelons. We had a seed, the ⁺šaddu seed. It was a white and black seed, which was called ⁺šaddu. It was round. We had long ones, which were what were called xonə. One type of long watermelon we called xonə. We had musk melons (bašilə), first these were a small green musk melon (cəndura). We used to put them under the ground in the soil, we put soil over it. You would see that they all came out and they have become musk melons (bašilə). They call these bašilə. You put the green musk melon (cəndura) under the soil and it comes out from under the soil. You pick it and it is a musk melon (bašila). Also large musk melons (šallak̭ə), green in colour, long like this, very sweet, called šallak̭. Cucumbers, green musk melons, these came from the kitchen gardens.