When the fields are being reaped, the farmer has to move fast, carting the stacked sheaves of cut wheat to the threshing ground as he goes. The work gets much easier if the cart roads have been leveled and put in order ahead of time, because everyone knows that every spring, from the heavy rains and the places where the water runs over, gullies open across the roads and hold the carts up badly. Notice and see, Tornik, how careless the village people are. Only when those natural roads are ruined do they think of laying out some new road, and the old natural road is left to go to waste. And if the new road is longer and full of bends, that does not trouble them at all, because a villager does not know how to add up the lost time, let alone the hardship. So the farmer's work grows much harder, unless the ruined main roads at least are repaired year by year. Before the harvest is even brought to the threshing ground, preparing the threshing ground is a very important matter, and so are the tools the threshing needs, the threshing sledge, the jarjar, and the rest. In the provinces east and north of Van there are many villages that never need to prepare a threshing ground at all, because close by the villages lie thick, low-growing meadows that cover the face of the earth like a green carpet. The threshing grounds of our own village of Archak are like that, natural, and need no preparing. Do you see, Tornik, how clean and unmixed our wheat heaps are once the strewn sheaves have been threshed, with no soil or stone in them? But where the ground is bare, lifeless earth, the farmer has to build his floor and make it ready every year at threshing time. He digs over the face of the floor and lets water onto it, levels the uneven places with a spade and trues up the surface, and when the water has dried, they spread straw over it and beat it smooth with the back of the spade. Even so, floors made this way come out rough and pitted, and the wheat does not stay free of the sandy soil. The best threshing floor is one paved with stone once and for all, with a rim around it at least half a cubit high, so the cart bringing the sheaves stops at its edge and does not come onto the floor. The cart's wheels would ruin the floor's bed.
The way our villages of Van thresh the strewn sheaves, and the tools they use, are good enough. Working the threshing sledge and the jarjar together, they get a great deal done. The jarjar is the better tool for threshing and for shredding. It is a wooden roller two cubits long, set with sharp iron adze blades in spiraling rows, and as it turns like a wheel it breaks up the strewn sheaves on the floor. Above all, when horses are yoked to the jarjar, it turns fast and does far more work than the threshing sledge.
Ask, Tornik, how the poor villagers manage their threshing when they have none of these tools. Eh, Tornik, there is no point in the question. The poor man holds no land in the first place, so how is he supposed to plow and sow? But look at the threshing floor of poor Ghazar of our village, who in his day was the foremost rich hamban, the great householder, of the place, and now has barely a few cartloads of wheat to thresh. He has one ox and one cow, yoked to a worn, toothless threshing sledge, and with that he threshes his poor little floor. I have known poor Ghazar a long time. He was a village headman once, and his door stood open to everyone, and now he has come to this. The creditor seized his fields and orchards alike, whether justly or unjustly I do not know. This much I do know. Before the law of the world and before his own conscience, the creditor held himself blameless, and he recited these lines of the poet.
I have told you this in passing, Tornik, so you will keep clear of debt. Otherwise you too will end up a poor Ghazar.
You have not seen it, Tornik, but I have seen it in Bolis,1 and I will tell you about it. The ingenious craftsmen of Europe have now invented a machine for the threshing, and it is a formidable thing. It rides on four wheels like a great wagon, and inside it is fitted with iron wires of every gauge, fine and coarse, and with other threshing and shredding blades, more than the wits of peasants like us can follow. The machine is driven by fire. Two men stand on top of it, unbinding the sheaves without a pause and feeding them in through the mouth of the hopper, and the sheaves are broken up small and driven out through the machine's two openings, the wheat from one and the straw from the other. The machine is always set up close beside the stacks, since it can be pulled along like a cart and taken wherever you like.
Do you see, Tornik, how far science has lightened people's labor? What we labor at for months (and our floors are often caught under the snows, and besides we have to wait for the soft winds, so we can winnow the wheat and lift it clear of the straw, and pass it twice through the horsehair sieves, and all the rest of it), all that month of work the machine finishes in a few days, with none of the drudgery. And it cleans the wheat so thoroughly that a man is amazed to see how completely the stones, the soil and the stray grains are carried off to one side. There is no need to clean the wheat again with sieves before it goes to the water mill to be ground.
Do you know, Tornik, how the villagers hurry at the autumn threshing, to gather the floors in before the rainy season starts? Because at threshing time the farmer wants no rain at all, only sun and a favoring wind. But the great advantage of this machine is that it can work in any season.
That is why the great farm owners of Europe keep their wheat unthreshed in the stacks for a long time, and when they need it, they bring the machine up to the stack and thresh. Experience has proved that wheat keeps better over a long stretch in the stacks, in its own ears and husks, than in the granary, where it often heats and gets weevils if you do not turn it over and mix it now and then. Our poor threshing floors have no need of a machine. Our machine is the arms of hardworking men. Could we really bring that costly machine into our country, when a single one is worth a thousand liras? As I have said many times, farm labor in Europe has been made very easy for the village people. The villager has no need to buy a machine of his own, because there are companies whose whole business is working machines of that kind, and the villager pays only the hire and has the whole of his wheat stacks threshed. And do you know how easily that unwieldy machine is carried from village to village, with only two horses yoked to it, thanks to the leveled, well-made roads? Who knows? A time is surely coming, a day will come, when that machine comes walking into our country. I will die, and you will see it, and you will remember your Papik's prophecy.
That ends the lesson of the threshing and the threshing ground. Now I have to talk about preparing the granary, which is an important matter for the farmer.
Notes
- Bolis, Constantinople. ↩