It came into my head all of a sudden, Tornik, what a happy meeting of days this is. Tomorrow is the feast of the Cross of Varag.1 It has been the custom since our forefathers' time, and tomorrow the whole Vaspurakan country will put the harisa2 on to cook. For the village people it is a day of rejoicing above all others. We call this day kali korkot, the threshing-floor korkot, because the threshing floors are coming to an end, and out of the floor's first fruits the village housewives make korkot for the harisa, choosing the white-grained wheat for it, and every house in the village sets its harisa on, each by its own measure. There was a time when the greatest hambans of the village, the rich householders, would each slaughter an ox for the harisa. They remembered their dead and prepared the soul-bread, and all the village people, the poor among them, ate their fill and blessed the master of the house. That time of plenty is gone, Tornik. Never mind an ox. These days it is enough if they can kill a kid. There are many old songs for the harisa, but let me sing you one of them again.
Now let me tell you, Tornik, the tradition of the harisa, and how it has been remembered and handed down to us from the day of our Illuminator.
I heard it from my own Papik, who used to tell it this way. When Saint Gregory the Illuminator came up out of the deep pit and arrived at Vagharshapat, he preached to the heathen Armenian people for sixty days straight, and people listened to him by the tens of thousands.3 There were surely many poor among them, and the Illuminator wanted to prepare a meal for the poor. But he did not make this meal by a miracle, the way Jesus did. He gave the word to the villagers in their thousands, and they brought plenty of oxen and sheep. He had them slaughtered, great cauldrons were set on the fire, and the meat was filled in with the korkot on top of it. Then he gave the order to the strong-armed young men and said, Beat this (harek zsa), and that is how the dish kept the name harisa.4 It is a noble Armenian dish. Hayrik5 loved harisa, and he always had it cooked at the monastery of Varag. Once, in his exile, when he was hungry for harisa, he wrote a letter to the brotherhood of Varag, and I have kept the words of that letter in my memory.
Happy brotherhood of Varag, you who live under the wing of the great Holy Sign!6 Do you ever remember the pandukht Hayrik, Hayrik in exile? Ah, I remember you. I remember the feast of the Cross of Varag, which is near. I remember the monastery's noble harisa, and you will eat the dish our fathers left us without Hayrik. Eat it, and may it be sweet to you. Eat your fill, and drink the cold, cold water of the springs that break out of the breast of the mountain of Varag. And Hayrik, in his exile, can only sigh for the harisa. What would it cost you to remember Hayrik and hand one ladleful of harisa to Habakkuk's angel, so he can bring it to Babylon,7 and I can eat and bless you? Keep well.
Eh, Tornik, that is enough. Enough of the harisa and its tradition. Now back to the order of our lesson.
In the village economy, making a granary is a very plain and primitive business. The villagers usually pit their wheat, their barley and their other grain in the ground, digging a hole deeper than a man's height. They line the sides of the pit with grass or straw, but even so the grain very often comes to harm. It draws damp, and the bread comes out musty. And since these wheat pits sit out in the open, with no roof over them, time and again they take in water from the rains and the snows, and the wheat rots. It looks, Tornik, as if in the old, old days the villagers kept their wheat underground to keep it safe, as they kept many other things too. The strange part is that in our own secure times they have held on to the same custom. But that is the fruit of carelessness and laziness. A villager builds a house for himself, a stable for his cattle and a fold for his sheep. Is it really so hard for every house to build granaries to match the grain it has? Some make great hive-shaped bins of clay, which hold grain in large quantities. The bins keep the grain very well. Only the roof over them has to be well made, so that no drips come down inside.
But the granary must always be counted the best of all, because we can build it as roomy as we like, with separate bays inside for every kind of grain. The wheat has to be stirred and turned over at the right times, so it gets air and does not heat and breed weevils.
Ah, Tornik, my heart sighs. What does a village farmer in debt need with a granary at all? Look, there is the threshing floor of our friend Brother Kirakos, and they are measuring it. Look at it, a wheat heap of some twenty kilas.8 The usurers from the town have come, all ready and waiting. They measured the heap, and it came to twenty kilas. First the state's tithe was paid. Then the usurers measured out and took, each by the reckoning of his own interest. What was left? Only the sweepings of the floor, and even on those the poor came pouring down, took the share of the floor that is the poor's due, and swept the floor clean. Now look at the sorry state of Kirakos. He hung his sad face, picked up the floor broom, the shovel, the carrying-pole and the rest, and went home. The housewife asked him, man alive, is there no share left for us out of that huge threshing floor? What are our brood of little ones going to eat? The master of the house answered, rye, rye (hachar), and the barley will hardly be enough for the guests who come and go. The housewife wrung her hands and wept. Ah, God, you saw it all. The whole year long I baked the bread in front of that blazing tonir, I cooked the food, I looked after the laborers. What judgment is this, Lord? Must my children and I go without wheaten bread? Eh, housewife, do you not know? The wheat is for the townsfolk, and the fat, fat slaughter beasts are for the townsfolk again. The villager's portion is rye, millet and tanapur. Even that is enough. Give glory to God, wife. There are people worse wronged than we are, because the villager of Mush lives on his coarse gruel alone, which is far poorer stuff than the rye and the millet.
Ask it, Tornik. When will our village people be delivered from the hands of these conscienceless, unjust usurers, who are not content with the wheat on the threshing floor but are seizing our fields as well, which are our life and our refuge? Already very nearly a good part of the freehold land of the villagers of our own Archak is seized. This is a matter of life and death for the farming people. And there is one remedy and cure for it, only one. The just law of the state, and the hand of authority, can cut short the usurers' hand, which lies heavy on the indebted farming people.
Some years back the state did turn its attention to this. It founded lending-chests in the head towns of the provinces, at very moderate interest, so that the farming people could leave the usurers and turn to the lending center instead.9 But will those chests be enough against the enormous, uncounted, piled-up sums that the whole people of the state's land is carrying on its back today? The threshing floor and the granary gave me the opening, Tornik. I have said only this much, in passing, and it is enough. We can leave the question to the great economists. Let them write great volume upon volume on the economy of the land, which is the life of the land's prosperity, because the state lives by bread, and so does every people under the state.
Notes
- The feast of the Holy Cross of Varag (Varaga Khach), kept in late September. The monastery of Varag near Van treasured a famed relic of the True Cross. ↩
- Harisa is hulled wheat (korkot) and meat boiled slowly together and beaten smooth, the Armenian festival dish. The tonir of the song is the sunken clay hearth-oven. ↩
- Saint Gregory the Illuminator, brought up from the pit of Khor Virap, preached at Vagharshapat before the conversion of Armenia (c. 301). Tradition gives the preaching sixty days and more. ↩
- Harel means "to beat," and harek zsa "beat this!" That is the folk etymology of harisa. ↩
- Hayrik, "Little Father," is the author Khrimian himself, sometime abbot of Varag. The exile is his enforced residence far from Van. ↩
- The Surb Nshan ("Holy Sign"), Varag's relic of the Cross. ↩
- Bel and the Dragon (Daniel 14) 33-39, where the angel carries Habakkuk, dinner in hand, to Daniel in the lions' den at Babylon. ↩
- Kila (Ottoman kile), a dry measure for grain. ↩
- The Ottoman agricultural lending-chests (menafi sandıkları), reorganized in 1888 as the Agricultural Bank, lending to farmers at fixed interest. ↩