On the Mountain,
They Grew
Chutney

ISS. 3 (SEP. 2023)

i.

“Jebel is Arabic for mountain. And Aqra,” my grandfather said, patting the top of his head and smiling, “means bald.” My grandmother and I laughed. We were chatting over tea in the dining room—an evening ritual since the cold Canadian winter pushed us inside. Something had reminded him of his home in the valley beneath that bald mountain. It may have been the freshly shelled walnuts or the dried dates, or maybe the smell of errob—a homemade grape molasses—wafting upward from our cheap ceramic mugs. Either way, he was in the mood to reminisce. He turned to me and continued: “My village is Kaladouran, in Kessab.”

But how could a village be in a town? I thought to myself. Their homeland had always been a blurry image. Each time I heard the name Kessab it seemed to imply something different. Sometimes it was a town, built on the slopes of Jebel Aqra, on the border between Syria and Turkey. Other times it was a village—used instead of specifying Kaladouran, for instance—where grapes, apples, and figs grew on the remote, rocky coast of the Mediterranean. It would also, at times, describe an entire region in northern Syria, which included the eponymous town and all ten of its surrounding, predominantly Armenian, villages. And, in certain cases, it implied a significantly larger territory of pastures, farmland, and homes that were ceded to Turkey by the League of Nations in anticipation of the Second World War.

(I have since come to accept that the name Kessab necessarily belongs to an accordion of distinctions. It is through its opaqueness that the homeland of a diaspora remains intact—a constantly shifting otherness against the nation states, ethnicities, and religions that grow around them.)

I looked back at my grandfather. I was still confused but I wasn’t about to interrupt his story to interrogate the point. In an attempt to clarify he held out his arm, palm down and slightly bent. “Jebel Aqra is here,” he said, using his right hand to caress the conical shape of Jebel Aqra in the space his left arm bent around. “Kessab is my shoulder. And my hand is the Mediterranean.” He spoke slowly, pausing on each joint to make sure I was following. “This is Kaladouran,” he said, tracing the length of his arm between Kessab and the sea. “And my house is here,” he said with a smile, pointing to the inside of his elbow. “My home is the highest in the valley. You can see Jebel Aqra, the sea, and Kessab all at once.”

ii.

Dinner was interrupted by the sound of raindrops in the grapevine leaves above us. The humid sky had been clear until now. My grandmother was the first to jump up, stacking plastic containers of olives, halloumi, and makdous onto her plate before running inside. I did the same, grabbing the pot of mujadara in one arm and a platter of fresh garden vegetables in the other. My grandfather remained for a moment. He was listening, eyes closed, to the fitful sounds above. He eventually followed us inside, holding a salty glass of tahn, mostly unbothered.

There was a sudden clap of thunder and a heavy downpour fell through the vegetal ceiling. I rushed the remaining dishes to my grandmother, who was already busy resetting the table in the sunroom. Once everything was inside, I looked back to see hailstones collecting on the deck; they mixed with young grape clusters that had been knocked off their stem. By the time I sat down to continue eating, my grandparents were in the midst of a conversation. They were using words I didn’t recognize, so I had trouble following.

Like many elderly migrants, my grandparents have gotten by with minimal English and I, like many new generations born to mixed parents who spoke English at home, avoided learning their dialect—a unique creole of Armenian, Arabic, and Turkish called ‘Kessaberen’. I have lived with my grandparents for a little over a year now and while we have gotten much better at communicating during my time here, small misunderstandings remain a staple of our broken conversations. When I get lost in unfamiliar words I will look to my grandmother (her English is better than my grandfather’s, thanks to two decades of factory work here in Canada) and she will do her best to translate.

“Back home, in Kessab, there were grapes everywhere, wild and farmed. But we weren’t allowed to eat them before they were blessed,” my grandmother said to me when their conversation ended, “our grandparents would say it was bad luck!” They had been recalling memories of Asdvadzadzin, an annual event in Kessab and an ancient Armenian tradition revolving around grapes. “On the Sunday closest to August 15th everyone in the town, the villages, and even people from Aleppo would gather in Kessab,” she continued, “there would be one or two thousand Armenian people there: Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants!”

The celebration lasts three days, my grandmother explained. On the first day, everyone gathers outside the town’s Apostolic church while the priest performs a special blessing. Large platters of newly-ripened grapes are then brought out and shared amongst the community. The next day starts in Eskouran, a nearby village. Here, sheep are slaughtered on the chapel steps and cooked in a dozen communal cauldrons. Harrissa—a traditional hulled wheat dish—is cooked in the mutton’s broth and made into patties that are distributed to everyone in attendance. The third and final day is in Kaladouran. It is spent singing and dancing to traditional music and goes on late into the night.

(I would later discover in my own research, that historically this final day took place near the summit of Jebel Aqra, within the ruins of a 6th century Georgian monastery. But it was moved to Kaladouran when the mountain’s upper slopes were transformed into a Turkish militarized zone in 1938.)

The storm had subsided by the time we finished our dinner and my grandmother’s translated retelling of their conversation ended with hesitation: she was unsure if the celebration would happen this year because a new variant of Covid had now reached their remote town. She dwelled silently on the thought before getting up to make coffee. I followed my grandfather outside to see if the hail had damaged the young fruit trees. “Our grapevine is thirty years old this year,” he said to me, sweeping the fallen grapes into a pile. “It was the first thing we planted when we moved here to Canada, to our new home.”

iii.

My grandmother waved good morning to me as I stepped onto the back deck. She was sitting on a low stool, sorting the last clusters of grapes under the vine’s speckled shade. Yellowjackets were buzzing around the sweet smell. “We are starting masarra today,” she said with a smile.

A large plywood basin had been pushed up against the deck railing on top of a blue plastic tarp. The basin, which my grandfather called a takna, was propped up on one side with two bricks and a spout had been inserted at the low end. My grandmother emptied the sorted grapes into the takna and sprinkled a handful of white powder over them. The powder was dolomite lime, an American substitute for a mineral they called havura which was traditionally gathered from the foot of Jebel Aqra. She then helped my grandfather into the takna; he had changed into a pair of tall black rubber boots. She crouched down at the lower end, holding a bowl and sieve under the spout and my grandfather started to march in place.

My grandmother handed the bowls to me as they filled up with grape must, throwing the errant pomace back in under my grandfather’s feet. I emptied the bowls into a large steel pot in the grass and after about an hour it was mostly full. My grandfather and I then carried the pot across the yard to the shed and lifted it onto an old propane burner. We boarded up the open half of the shed to stop drafts. “The hard part for today is finished,” he said to me, kneeling down and turning the burner to a low heat. The juice was left to simmer for six hours. As it heated, a grey-green foam collected at the surface that my grandfather intermittently removed with a steel skimmer. By evening, the foaming had stopped and the liquid’s colour had turned to a dark brown. We transferred the liquid to two wide, shallow trays to cool overnight.

iv.

The next morning we carefully poured the reduced liquid into a smaller pot, stopping short to avoid any lime sediment that settled at the bottom of the trays. Over the next few hours, it would be boiled vigorously into a thick grape molasses known as errob.

My grandfather stepped into the shed and returned after a couple minutes holding two tools: one was the wide perforated spoon and the other was a hollowed-out dipper gourd with a window cut into it. The gourd, which he called a kernieb, was grown by a friend in Armenia and brought to him a number of years ago as he was unable to grow them here in Canada. As the liquid boiled, it rose suddenly in an agitated foam. My grandfather plunged the kernieb into the pot, lifting the liquid up and letting it cool it before slowly pouring it back. The foam would recede quietly before quickly rising again. This ritual movement would need to be done two or three times a minute for the next three hours, a careful balancing act to keep the liquid from boiling over as it reduced into molasses.

By the second hour, the colour had changed to a dark, golden amber and the rising became more aggressive. Every few minutes my grandfather displaced a scoop of the liquid into one of the aluminum trays next to him. He would call my name after it had cooled and I would pour the liquid back into the pot, sometimes through the perforated skimmer. Around the third hour, after I set the tray back down, my grandmother passed her finger through the residual liquid, holding the tray slightly upright. “It’s ready now,” she said, judging the consistency of the molasses based on how slowly it filled into the lines her finger made.

We poured the finished errob once more into one of the trays on the ground. “It’s time for perpor now!” my grandfather exclaimed. He stood over the tray with the kernieb, raising a large scoop of errob up above his waist, and then pouring it back into the tray. As the errob fell, the splashing molasses coalesced into a golden foam. My grandmother walked into the house, returning shortly with three small leaves in her hand. These leaves, she told me, were picked from a wild gasli (laurel) tree in Kessab and brought to her years ago by her sister. She handed us each a leaf—the traditional utensil used for eating the foamed treat. We crouched around the tray, scooping up the perpor and puckering at its sweetness. And when none of us could eat anymore, the remaining errob was collected into twelve and a half canning jars to last through the winter. It would be mixed into our tea, with a tablespoon of lemon juice, each evening over stories of home—that place I have become so intimate with, but have never been.