Karkaz of Keurkune

Vahe H. Apelian

Symmes Park is one the many public parks that graces greater Cincinnati and is situated a walking distance from our house. Some years ago the park experienced an unusual happening. An owl nested on the decapitated trunk of what once must have been a large tree. The Park Rangers placed signs in the vicinity of the tree trunk alerting the attendants to respect the privacy of the nested owl. Respect they did. Pretty soon the news of the nesting owl spread all over the city. The curiosity it generated would have stirred in the envy of any celebrity. In the evening a multitude of onlookers armed with expensive looking binoculars, telescopes mounted on tripods, movie and picture cameras with huge lenses, attentively watched the nest from a safe distance. Their curiosity mounted as the hatchling with a voracious appetite started to grow and flip its wings in preparation for the day when it too will flee its nest. The growing chick rewarded the few diehard vigils when one day in plain view took its wings and flew from the nest.  

The summer-long vigil of the nestling owl reminded me of the lone pair of the big black birds that nestled on the rocky hilltop overlooking the spring that sustained Keurkune, our ancestral village. The villagers called the birds Karkaz. We were not as respectful of their privacy as the Cincinnatians were of the owl. Fortunately for the nesting pair, we could not access their nest secured at the far edge over a steep precipitation.

We had gotten a bit older when we managed to visit the nest over that dangerous rocky edge. It was at the end of our summer-long stay in Keurkune and nestling pair had already left the nest along with the chick they raised. We took turn. One of us lay on his belly over the rock, held the arms of the other who slid on his belly over the rock and descended onto the nest. It was a very dangerous and a very foolish thing to do. There was barely room for standing in the nest at the bottom of the rock over the deep precipitation right below. Other than feathers I do not recall seeing anything else, not even bones of the preys they caught. We ascended the cliff in the same manner. The next summer or the following, the lone Karkaz pair stopped nesting in Keurkune and never returned. To this day I remember their graceful flight hovering over the village and its surroundings high against the blue sky in search of prey and wonder if they were among the few pairs, left much like the California Candors.

We were over half a dozen village urchins. Some of us came to Keurkune during the summers, while the others lived there all year around. We were, what the western sociologists would call, the heralds of the post World War II baby boom generation. But, I doubt that the World War II and its aftermath had anything to do with us. Greater Kessab and the Kessabtsis in Lebanon and Syria pretty much continued their daily routine as the European powers blew each other apart. The War for them was a distant happening.

We were related to each other in some manner in that exclusively Armenian village, Keurkune. We had our own rite of passage from childhood into our pre-teens and then beyond. Each one of us boys started wearing brick red colored leather shoes we called Yemeni. This type of shoe essentially consisted of two types of leather. The sole was made of hard leather on which brick red colored softer leather was shaped with a single knob on an ankle strap for buckling. The first thing my uncle Joseph did, when I went there for my summer-long stays, was to take me to Kessab, the main village, and have my foot sized for the yemeni I was to wear for that summer.

I do not remember how old I was when I made the transition from wearing the Yemeni shoes into the shoe that essentially all men wore. We called this type of shoes sandal. The shoe consisted of a rubber sole made by shaping rubber tire on which a black colored leather was shaped with a silver buckle on one or two ankle straps. Adults also wore the boot variety of the same fabric and called it Jezme. Some men had one additional pair of shoes for formal occasions such as Sunday church service or at weddings. These formal shoes were called Kondra, which is a Turkish word for shoe. We were in our sandals when we were entrusted with muzzle gun to do our own hunting of birds.

Loading the muzzle gun in preparation to hunt down a bird was a ceremony in itself. It consisted of placing gunpowder into the barrel followed by a piece of cloth. The cloth was then firmly packed with a barrel long rod that was placed along the barrel. Following the gunpowder, the barrel was loaded with ball bearings that were also similarly packed. We carried the gunpowder and the ball bearings in bottles in a shoulder bag each one of us carried I realize now that loading the gun in this manner served a good purpose as well. It limited the number of birds one could hunt in a day.

Much like the Karkaz chicks that grew in the nest and flew the coop, we also left Keurkune in time. The seemingly vast expanse of Keurkune of our childhood became confining. The allure of worlds far beyond got the better hold of our teenage imagination and one by one, all of us in our immediate generation moved away. We left the village behind, but the village never left us. We had made a pact, come what may, we will meet again in the year 2000 in Keurkune but we never did. The world and we had moved on far differently than our imagination could envision during our youthful carefree days in Keurkune.