Under the Same Roof

(Lest it will be forgotten)

Vahe H. Apelian

I spent my teenage summers in Keurkune, Kessab in our paternal grandparents’ house with them and with my Uncle Joseph and his family as one extended family. In fact, my brother Garo spent a year or two in his early childhood in Keurkune year around.

My paternal grandfather Stepan had become the natural inheritor of the family’s ancestral house, as he was the only survivor.  The house is built with double layered stones. On the outside, the walls remained uncovered and each stone block remained visible. The inner surfaces of the outer walls and as well as the inner walls partitioning the rooms were covered with a special mix the villagers made to plaster the walls. It was a mix of minced wheat stalk and clay that put a heavy white to off-white plaster coat on the walls. In hindsight, I realize that the coat acted as an excellent insulator against cold and moisture. On one of the inner walls, there was a cavity that probably was made by design by not placing a stone there. The cavity served as the treasury of the Keurkune’s church where my grandfather kept the meager Sunday offerings of nickels and dimes in a tin can. 

A typical house in Kessab then

The width of the outside walls is such that, as a kid, I used to sit on the window sill and gaze at the mountains. The windows had wooden panels for cover but no glass. The floor and the ceiling were made of wood. Wooden logs extended from wall to wall. On these wooden logs, wood panels were fastened. Some, if not most, of the ceiling logs were blackened over time. It was said that the blackening was also due to the attempted torching of the house. Turks, who had taken over the house after forcing the local Armenians out had attempted to torch the house when they vacated the region and fled as The World War I was ending with the defeat of Turkey that would lead to the dismemberment of the once powerful Ottoman Empire. Among the blackened wooden logs across the ceiling, a few silkworm cocoons had remained lodged. They were yellowed a bit but remained very visible against blackened logs. My grandparents had raised silkworms at one time.

 The roof of the house was covered with special blue dirt the villagers called "kuyrock". There were a few quarries in the vicinity of the village that yielded this bluish stone. These blue stones are light and easily crushed. They were overlaid on the roof and rolled over with a big round stone that used to be found on the roof of each house. During rain, the roof would leak at times. The next day I would see my grandfather laying more blue dirt at the spots and go over them with the roller.

The interior of a typical house in Kessab then.

The house, much like the other houses of the village, had a special place for clay water jars. My grandfather filled the earthen jars with water he fetched from the spring. It was my treat to have him seated me on the saddle of our donkey on the way to spring. He fetched the water in four tin containers. Two tin cans were placed on each side of the saddle. After he filled the tin cans with water, he capped them with small gasli - laurel – tree branches with leaves on them. On our return, I would trail the donkey with him. At home, he poured water from a tin can into the two earthen jars we had at home. As I grew older I could tilt the jars myself and fill the brass cup we kept next to the jars. We all drank from the same brass cup. Water from the jar remained refreshingly cool to drink. I later learned that it is due to evaporation as the clay jars were porous and they would ‘sweat’ and evaporation kept the water surprisingly fresh and cool to drink, in a natural cooling process, during the hottest days of the summer.

Almost every room of the house had a fireplace. My grandmother and Aunt Asdghig prepared food on the fireplace in the room we used as the kitchen and the dining room. The fireplace in the other rooms was used for warmth during the cold days of the winter. At times my grandmother would cook in these rooms as well. Smoke coming from the chimney of a house meant life. Woo (վայ) to the house that had no smoke coming from its chimney. Hence comes the common Armenian expression we use to this day: Moukh Marel, մուխը Մարել (extinquish one’s smoke).

 The house is two stories high and each floor was an almost exact replicate of the other with a center hall with a door opening into each of the four rooms on the second floor. Two rooms of the first floor did not have a door that opened to the central hall and could only be accessed through its adjoining front room, each of which had a door that opened to the central hall. For a while, we used the lower right-hand side room as the kitchen and the dining room. We sat on the floor around a round floor table. A kerosene lamp illuminated the table during dinner. Its adjoining inner room was used to store hay for the animals. We called the room hartanots.

For many years the lower left-hand side room, which also had a door that opened to the courtyard, served as the stable along with its adjoining inner room and housed our chicken, donkey, and cows. The ceiling of this front room that served as the stable i.e. the floor of the upper room had collapsed during the baptism of my father and had remained unfinished up to my early teens. Therefore I would view, by looking down the door on the second floor, the stable below on the first floor. I have seen our cow give birth to a calf there and our chicken nest and end up with colorful chicks that immerged from the eggs to my utter impatience and periodic checking with my grandmother. These naturally raised chicks were colorful and beautiful indeed, unlike the dull off-white colored chicks grown commercially nowadays. The animals and we lived under the same roof.

The courtyard was walled. The oven – toneer – was located on the right-hand side of the entrance. Further to its right was the outhouse. My grandmother baked bread in the oven.  Every week she would prepare the dough a day before and make a cross sign on the dough and cover it to ferment. The next day she would bake the bread by plastering the handful pieces of wetted dough on the inner side of the upright oven heated by burning sticks.  It was customary for us kids to visit the ovens of the village after the baking was over to fish charred bread pieces remaining on the inner wall of the oven. We called these charred and blackened pieces of bread kurmush. Charred as they were, but they tasted great! Later on, my Uncle Joseph had a bakery erected on the same spot and operated it for many years. He ran the bakery once a week and more often during Christmas and Easter. The villagers would bring their dough there to bake bread or the different pastries they made on special occasions.

Our grandfather returning from the market on a Saturday and being met by the younger grandchildren and grandmother

There was a mulberry tree in the courtyard, a remnant of those days when they raised silkworms. The tree also supported the grapevine that gave succulent red-colored grapes we called ouzoumlek. These types of grapes are not used to make grape molasses and are only for consumption as fruit for dessert.

The courtyard would become busy in the evening as our grandfather returned from the fields. The cows would be milked and then driven to the staple. The chickens would naturally head there in the evening and get their sleep above ground on logs. My grandmother would collect the eggs the hen laid. She could tell that a hen had laid an egg by the hen’s vocalization during the day. I later learned that hens lay eggs only during the day. That is why the lights remain on day and night over the commercial coops for hens to continue laying eggs day and night.

The house had a wooden balcony on the second floor. Spectacular view came into view from the balcony and the far ends of historical Antioch where Apostle Paul reached proclaiming the Good News. An invisible border separated Syria from Turkey.  Parts of the serpentine road that connected the region to the world beyond also came into view. We used to call the road zivti Jampa, which means the paved road. It was then the only road in the region that was paved and connected Kessab to the outside world. I believe the road was laid and paved by the French during their colonial rule over Syria after the First World War.

Our grandfather Stpean was born in 1897 and was driven out in 1915. He never alluded to the house as having built after he was born. In all probability, the house was built in the later part of the 19^th century. The house is well over 100 years old and bridges three centuries, 19^th to 21st. The house had remained as it was up to my early teens. Additions and renovations have changed the house. However, the main structure of the house is the same as a testament to its solid stone foundation. Rarely has a house remained with an Armenian family for over 100 years. I am not sure if our paternal grandfather was born and raised there, but three generations of his descendants were born in there: my father Hovhannes and uncle Joseph, my cousins, both of whom studied in the American Universit of Beirut. Stepan, studied agriculture  and Ara studied medicine; and Stepan’s children Tsolag, an engineer with a Ph.D. degree, Shoghag and Hovag, being the last.