A Sunday Unlike Any Other

Vahe H. Apelian

For an onlooker, Sunday in Keurkune, our ancestral village, was no different than any other day of the week. There were no cars and hence no traffic to experience less of it on a Sunday. There were no shops in the village to see them closed on Sundays. There were no people working in any commercial enterprise in the village to see them not working on Sundays. The villagers toiled in the fields. Yet Sundays were all too different from the other six days of the week, especially in our house because of our grandfather.

I will come to that later.

It was the sound of the church bells that broke the stillness of the day in the village heralding that the seventh day of the week is meant to be unlike the other six days. There were two kinds of bells. There was a resonating piece of metal that was hung with a wire from one of the three olive trees in the church courtyard. It was rung signaling the start of Sunday school for the children. It was a small metal piece but it made a surprisingly clear sound that was heard all over the village.

The other was the sound of the church's bell that alerted the start of the Sunday service for the grown-ups. The bell was rung not long before the pastor was ready for the service, for he served the only churches, the Armenian Evangelical Church in each of the two sister villages: the one in Ekizoloukh, and the one in our village Keurkune. In a spirit of fairness the Sunday church service was held early in one village and later in the other on a given Sunday and the order was reversed the following Sunday. There were no cars then, so the pastor had to hurry from one church to the other on foot. It took some 30 minutes of brisk walking for the paster to cross from one village to the other. Most, to my recollection, preferred to walk the distance on the short path that traversed through the fields and orchards instead of riding a donkey on the regular route that might have made crossing the distance a bit more comfortable but surely not faster.

Honestly, Sundays were a dread for us boys. First and foremost there was the issue of the attire. Even though dressing for Sunday meant only tucking a white shirt in shorts and continue wearing our sandals without socks, it nevertheless became all too confining and all too formal for us. Hunting was forbidden on Sundays. We were thus not allowed to use rifles or debkh, the sticky sticks we used to catch birds. Even the animals were not grazed on Sundays, confining Papken and me in the village. Our inclination would have been to have the animals grazed in Keurkune's gorge, we called khandag where some of the Apelian families had owned and operated a water mill at one time. The mill had been idle and abandoned when we came of age. The khandag was considered to be too remote for a youngster to be entrusted with the animals for grazing there, but two youngsters teaming made the venture permissible.

There was also the chore of attending the Sunday service. Irrespective of marital status, the men entered the sanctuary from the left-hand side door and the women from the right-hand side door. The front two pews, on the left-hand side of the three rows of pews in the church, were reserved for the boys.

The fields were wide open then and spread all around us. There were no buildings to obstruct the idyllic pastoral scene that came into full view from the left-hand side windows, extending all the way to Chakaljekh, the village nearest to Keurkune. It took a lot of discipline on our part not to appear overly bored during the service and gaze outside lest we invoke the stern looks on the faces of our elders and be reprimanded after the service.

Sunday in our house was marked with our grandfather's ceremonial shaving in the morning. I do not think he shaved every day of the week and I do not mean to imply that he shaved only on Sundays. But his shaving on Sundays in preparation to attend the church service was the more ceremonial and it created that special Sunday mood in our household.  He had a bar of soap in a small kettle. He foamed the soap with a brush, applied it to his face and shaved with a long razor that he sharpened beforehand, all the while at looking at a small mirror he used for that purpose. His shaving was important for his Sunday grooming. There was an honored role he was entrusted with and attended to it diligently until to the very end. He was the life-long treasurer and a trustee of the church.

We had become accustomed to that Sunday ritual as kids came to our house bringing with them larger coins and asked him to have the larger coins changed for smaller. Our grandfather kept the church's meager treasury in a tin can in one of the cavities high on one of the inner walls in the house. He would bring the tin can down on Sundays to have an ample supply of smaller coins ready. He would see the kids returned to their homes with smaller change for their Sunday church offering. We called it khatchamboor. It is a word perhaps unique to the local Kessab dialect. It may have meant money reserved for the cross.

For lack of a better description, nickels and dimes may best describe the coins cast on the offering plate, which was made of brass. The drop of the coins on the metal plate made a distinctive sound during the collection. From the sound, we could tell what denomination it was.

Our grandfather would be late coming home after service. We would wait for his return home to have Sunday lunch. After service, he and the pastor would count the Sunday's offering and I presume recorded in a ledger. He would then bring the Sunday's treasury home to pile it in the tin can. At times, before he placed the coins in the tin can, he could have them on his bed creating a lot of excitement in the house should there be a "paper money" in the collection We would speculate as to who may have offered the "paper money". The speculating usually would center on the villagers who lived elsewhere, such as in Beirut, and were visiting the village for the summer or happened to be there. In hindsight, I realize that faith, more than finances, perpetuated the Armenian Evangelical Church of Keurkune that now bridges three centuries.

The rest of the Sunday would drag on for us boys.

As I look back to those bygone days, I realize that Sundays in Keurkune were truly a day for rest for the villagers. Having toiled in the fields for the preceding six days, Sundays gave them the rest they needed to resume their work the following day to make a living by the sweat of their physical labor made possible for them by nature's gifts, soil, water, and sunshine.