REMEMBERING THE APPLES OF KEURKUNE

Vahe H. Apelian

THE GARDENER

Whenever I see apples, I am reminded of Keurkune and my late paternal uncle Joseph, affectionately-emmin (uncle in Kessab dialect). He was a true gentleman. He had the misfortune of losing one of his eyes as a kid when a stone thrown at him hit squarely his eye, blinding him in one eye. He wore an artificial eye set that gave him a pensive look that complemented his gentle nature. 

He was an expert for tending apple trees. He was also an expert pruner and grafter of trees. I took those skills for granted in my youth. It was in my college years that I read with astonishment that in agriculture schools, pruning and tree grafting are up to doctoral level specializations. He had earned his expertise in the University of Hard Knocks in greater Kessab and mastered it by trial and error over the years. The last time I saw him was when he visited America. I showed him the few fruit bearing trees I had in my backyard at our home in N.J. and sought his comments just to reconnect. This may be sentimental but it is true. To this day I plant a few fruit bearing trees in my backyard and grow every season a small vegetable garden. It reminds me of my father and him.

With my uncle in the orchard with my hunting rifle dangling from  my shoulder

Many Kinds of Apples

Sometimes back I embarked on a grocery-shopping spree. But this time around I was armed with a pen and pencil and had no intention of buying anything. Instead, I recorded the types of apples I came across on the grocery shelves and their prices. Here is the list. The following types apples were sold for $1.69 per pound: Gala, Braeburn, Granny Smith, Fuji, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Cameo, Pink Lady, Jonagold. McIntosh Apples were being sold in bags of 3 pounds for $3.99. That is to say, they were $1.33 per pound. They were the least expensive. Another type of apples called Ambrosio was being sold for $9.99 in 5.5 Lb bags. The store had made sure that the customers did not miss its price per pound, so it had listed it to the fourth decimal, that is to say, $1.8163 per pound! 

The most expensive apples were Honeycrisp Apples. They were being sold for $2.99 per pound. Let us face it, a pound is less than half a kilo. With the size of apples, these Honeycrisp apples were, two of them would weigh way more than a pound. I was not going to spend that kind of money no matter how crispy they were and even if they tasted as sweet as honey. Thank you guys for the offer, but I have tasted the tastiest apples around. I savored them in Keukune, our ancestral village. I picked them right from the trees and ate them as fresh as an apple can be. I admit though, hygiene was not my main concern. I would wipe the freshly picked apple against my pants or shirt or rub them with the palms of my hands and eat them crisp, tasty and fresh. 

There was another kind of apple sold in bags called Grapple. From the looks, they looked like ordinary apples. Why would they call them grapple, I wondered? As soon as I came home I went to the gadget that outsmarts me all the time with the vast information it has amassed, my Apple Computer. It said that grapples are Fuji apples that have been soaked in grape juice so they have a grape taste. It said Fuji apples were the best type of apples to absorb the grape flavor when soaked into it. Why on earth one would seek grape taste in an apple? 

Having innumerateede all these types of apples, the following caught my attention. Only two of these apples were termed delicious: Golden Delicious, a look alike of the famed Golden apple in Keurku e and Red Delicious, a look alike of the famed ‘Starken’ of Keurkune. 

The famed Golden Apple of Kessab

APPLE AS A TRADEMARK

Some time ago, my cousin, Steve Apelian made a comment that had his namesake Steve Jobs not registered Apple as a trademark, apple would have been the trademark for Kessab. Keurkunetsis, much like the rest of the Kessabtsis, owe a lot to apples. Apples changed their way of life for better. It helped parents assist their children to continue their higher education elsewhere. Apples are indeed the “apple in the eyes” of Keurkunetsis. For a few decades, apple remained their main cash crop for livelihood. 

THE GOLDEN AND STARKEN APPLES OF KESSAB.

Two persons are intimately associated with growing apples in Kessab, A person whose name sounded Chouboukhjian. The second is Joseph Apelian, endearingly called Pasha

No one I know has been able to identify for me the type of apple Mr. Chouboukhjian introduced. They were large size, green-colored apples and were known by the person’s name. Keurkunetsis did not take fancy of the Chebekhchian type of apples for commercialization. I was told because of their size and tendency to fall.

My late father-in-law told that Mr. Chouboukhjian. lived in Lattakia for a while. Recently, I learned from Hilda Tchobanian that he was a Frenchman, lived in France and was instrumental in purchasing, on behalf of the community, the Armenian Blue Cross Relief Society’s Belfontaine Camp in France.

Joseph Apelian is credited to have introduced the two types of the apples Kessab remains associated with, Golden and Starken apples. How and why was it that they chose those two types of apples remains a mystery to me given the fact they had no prior experience growing apple? One thing is obvious, they were prophetic in the choice they made for these two types of apples proved to be the right types for commercialization. Both proved to be delicious especially when grown in Keurkune’s open and unpolluted air. Both types proved to be very marketable. They also complimented each other in sight. One was yellowish, the other reddish. When both matured on the trees, they cast an awesome and captivating sight to behold. 

The yellow color apple was the Kessab famous Golden apples but I do not know why Kessabtsis adopted the word “starken” for the red colored apples. My uncle Joseph told me that the appearance of the red skin resembles star-studded sky. Indeed, the red-colored skin of the apple is intricately dotted when examined carefully. However, I have not come across the word “starken” in the dictionaries I checked, meaning star-studded.  But “starken” remained the word for the Red Delicious type apples in Kessab. However, they were much, much more succulent and tastier than the Red Delicious apples I have tasted in the U.S.

I asked my mother once why is Joseph Apelian nicknamed Pasha. She told me that Joseph was a very handsome child. His mother would call him Pashas – my prince. It was a relatively common endearing expression, more so then, than nowadays to call a young son, my prince - Pashas. Most Kessabtsis had an endearing nickname. His became Pasha and did justice to his demeanor as an adult as well. He was calm, composed and had a commanding presence in a social setting. Next, to his family, the loves of his life were Keurkune and catching bird with debkh-the famous sticky sticks Kessabtsis use to catch birds

EARLY YEARS

The introduction of apple in Keurkune came about when I was not yet in my teens but I was very conscious of my surroundings and remained impressionable. I remember distinctly the conversation that took place among the villagers in my paternal grandparent’s house. Seated cross-legged on the floor, under the dim kerosene lantern, their conversation would go along this way:  if each had so many trees, and if each tree produced so many apples and if the apples were sold even at such a price, the total would come to an astonishing amount for Keurlunetsis. However, the following never came into their conversation because they did not know then that insects ravaged apples, that they had to buy disinfectants on large scale, that they needed wooden boxes and trucks for transporting, and that over time others would start cultivating apples competing with them on the market. Keurkune was then, a world onto its own, cut from the rest of the world without electricity and hence without radio. But over time they came to know and understand the cultivating, tending, marketing apples on their own and they did a superb job to their credit. The other thing that never came into the conversation was their round the clock labor. They worked hard anyways, so their labour hard was a non-issue. The seeds for growing apples thus were thus planted onto the soil of Keurkune.

Once it became understood that growing apples was the way to go, the families in and out Keurkune teamed up to prepare for the planting. The fields that grew wheat and tobacco were turned into young orchards. I recall the changes that took place in the field behind our grandparent’s house that became the apple orchard depicted in the pictures attached here. 

The fields needed to be open when wheat was planted because the soil needed to be tilled every season. The soil in keurkune is not forgiving. It is full of pebbles and rocks and is crusty that needed to be loosened up for seeding. Tilling was done with oxen. The tiller and I have my late grandfather in mind, would hold, steady and push the plow as the oxen pulled it. The furrows needed to cast next to each other in straight lines. It was a very tedious and difficult job. The process required the fields to be open. 

The same open fields were partitioned in order to prepare the orchards, by erecting retaining walls, Kessabtsis call them errafs.. I remember my uncle, our grandfather working to erect these retaining walls  stone by stone.

In the apple orchard LtoR: Stepan, Garo, Zvart and Ara Apelian

GROWING APPLES IN KEURKUNE

Once orchards were prepared, the apple trees were planted. It took a few years for them to grow to start bearing fruit, necessitating families supporting each other in the interim. With the growth of apple trees, two words came into the Kessab vocabulary that were not there before – acarose and demol. Acarose is the infestation that causes havoc to the orchard. To this day I do not know how the Keurkunetis came to know that those nasty bugs were called acarose. That is what the Keurkunetsis called them. The Internet search engines have not been of any help for me to understand as what bugs they referred to. The other word was demol, the insecticide they applied on the apple trees. 

Maintaining the apple trees was a tedious job. Muscles were in force. My uncle Joseph and his brother-in-law Assadour teamed to spray the insecticide solution they prepared at home. My uncle carried the container on his back and held the hose, while Assadour continuously and rapidly manually operated the piston to pressurize the tank. The insecticide solution did not spare them either. I remember my father had a trench coat and goggles sent to Keurkune for his brother to wear during spraying. But they proved to be of no use. The trench coat was too cumbersome and confining to do the job and the view from goggles would be blocked from the the droplets of spray coating the goggles. 

The other menace that threatened the apple trees was a worm that bore into the tree. My uncle would constantly check the trees one at a time and look for droppings the worm left at the base of the tree turnk as it bore into the tree. He would then locate the entry hall and insert a metal wire through the hole to kill the worm. They looked like grub worms. 

With such determination and care, apple trees were cultivated in Keukune starting mid 1950’s. Apples were then harvested, placed in wooden boxes, hauled on the trucks by the young and upcoming who were kids when the apple trees were planted. Hauling of the boxes on the truck became a communal event. Most of the times the young men who hauled the boxes would go with the truck to Aleppo to safeguard to boxes in the open market waiting for the merchants, the famed “toujars” in the Kessab dialect. Soon after the Kessabtsis erected a refrigerated warehouse in Kessab to store apples instead of flooding the market at one time. A new economy was thus born in keurkune and greater Kessab as well and the Kessabtsis became astute traders in apple. 

Apple trees have a relatively long life but I doubt that any of the trees planted then have survived to this day. Over time apple ceased to be the commodity it was once and Kessabtsis adroitly succesfully adapted to the new realities making Kessab a famed touristic attraction only to face the harsh reality of the ongoing Syrian civil war that changed the course of the lives of the ever-resilient kessabtisis.