It’s the Masara Season

Vahe H. Apelian

Once again, it’s the masara season for the Kessabtsis as it was on October 20, 1906.

In a letter dated Oct. 20, 1906, Kessab missionary Miss Effie Chambers alluded to masara to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) on whose behalf she was doing mission work among the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The letter pertained to the schools in Kessab.

Miss Chambers said that there were six schools in Kessab. The Kessabtsis supported four schools. The Kessabtsis and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (ABCFM) jointly supported another to prepare students to further their education in Aintab Central College. Many students became beneficiaries of this joint venture and charted their courses in life. Among them, Dr. Avedis Injejikian, as his son Gabriel attests. Dr. Soghomon Apelian and his brother Rev. Bedros were also beneficiaries of this college-level preparatory school.

The other school was for girls. It was entirely supported by the ABCFM. The school's existence is telling as to how open Kessabtsis were in matters of gender and education and that over a century ago they let a foreign mission run a school to educate their daughters. Not every community in the Ottoman Empire, whether Armenian or not, would have been so open as to trust their daughters to be educated by foreigners.

Miss Chambers also noted in her letter that Kessabtsis have been supportive to her. However, she also voiced a complaint that getting the students to attend school in the fall was difficult. She wrote: “The first part of the term is greatly interrupted by gathering in the vineyard products and the making of molasses, which is a sort of general good time for everybody, makes it difficult.”

Not being a Kessabtsi, Miss Chambers did not know that Kessabtsis call “making of (grape) molasses” masara. Then and to this day it's “sort of general good time for everybody”.

What is a masara?

It seems impossible to find a Kessabtsi who does not know what masara is, although the origin of the word seems to have been lost in obscurity. And yet many among the new generation born to expatriated Kessabtsi parents may not have heard the word, let alone attended its preparation. Masara remains one of the major social events that binds Kessabtsis together.

Masara is “making (grape) molasses”, but it is not a chore, however tedious the preparation is. It is a time for merrymaking. The process obviously starts with the harvesting of the grapes. I would not be surprised if parents looked for the help of their agile children who would climb and reach the grapes on vines wrapped on tree branches high above. There were no vineyards in Kessab the way we envision vineyards these days. It would not surprise me that the kids, in turn, surely made ample use of their parents’ masara disposition and skipped school. I would have been tempted to do the same.

The grapes are then piled and sprinkled with a clay-like material, covered and left standing for a few days until the grapes are ripened for the juicing process to start. Juicing consists of stepping over them bare-footed. Young men wash their feet and get into the troughs and start tramping on the grapes until the grapes are juiced. The juice flowing from the trough is collected while the remaining pulp would become a source of nutrition for the animals.

Masara in Kessab on October 19, 2018, Courtesy Stepan J. Apelian 

The grape juice that contains the clay-like dirt is placed in a deep container and the dirt is allowed to settle down taking with it all the insoluble components in the grape juice and leaving a clear supernatant solution above. The latter is collected and placed in a large shallow pot and heated on ovens specially constructed for the process. The supernatant is heated until it attains a syrupy consistency. The process, which takes hours, provides the people with time to sit by the fire, relax, converse while periodically replenishing the wood to keep the fire going and making sure that the juice is heated no longer than needed.

Once it is determined that the molasses, which Kessabtsis call eroup, is formed it is transferred to a holding container. That transfer is the climax of the process and all would be waiting to savor its exquisite tasting foam, prpor. The person who transfers the warm syrup to start its foaming breaks the stillness of the evening or the night by shouting loudly "prpor, prpor", inviting everyone to savor the exquisite foam. To maximize the foaming of the warm syrup it is scooped with ladle made of gourd and poured from a distance through a perforated metal plate attached to a wooden handle back into the container thus creating a yellowish thick foam over the warm syrup.

The best way to taste the prpoor – the foam -- is by scooping it with laurel (gasli) tree leaves. Some would simply snatch a leaf from a gasli branch and fold it to taste the prpor. Others, especially the kids, would be more inventive and shape different kinds of wooden spoons with the gasli leaves.

Oct. 20, 1906, the day Miss Chambers dated her letter, turns out to be a Saturday, much like this year, in the fall in Kessab--a time when masara would have already commenced or would be commencing soon, depending on the ripening of the grapes. The world has changed much since, especially for the Armenians who would experience the Genocide nine years later. Two-thirds of the Kessabtsis would vanish in the Genocide. Amidst all these changes, masara has remained the way it was.

To this very day, in spite of the March 21, 2014 sacking of Kessab by extremists who assaulted the villages from Syria, the Kessabtsis held masara after their return in early autumn.

Nowadays Kessabtsis hold masara not so much as to prepare a rich source of nutrition for the long winter ahead (as it was done once), nor for commercial reasons, as it was also done once with the surplus. Masara nowadays is done to keep the tradition and the social bonds alive among the Kessabtsis in and outside Kessab.