Blowin' in the wind

April 19, 2014

Higher than the Meryemana, round a narrow road that winds way up to where the frost lies white on the ground through mid-morning, is Şirince. Şirince means ‘pretty village’. But it wasn’t always so.

This village was once called Çirkince, which means a fairly ‘ugly place’, or something suchlike. It was so high, so remote, and so isolated that shepherds were the only folk likely to come calling in days long past. Its way of life was traditional, and, as result, it was dying. There were no jobs to be had, and no money to be made.

When the Christian Greeks were moved out, and the Thessaloniki Muslims moved back in after the war, things had to change. Money needed to come in to town. No doubt, as Turkish folk do, the elders likely gathered around the table at the local kahve shop and set about solving the village’s biggest problem. They chose to do a simple thing. They changed the name of the town to Şirince, and Turkish visitors started to find their way up the mountain to this pretty place, in droves. Now, some tour buses even brave the winding route.

The locals did what they had always done: relied on the skills they knew from their groves of olives and fruit to get themselves through. For now they had to please and placate tourists. They made soaps and oils from the olives in their fields as they had always done, but they packaged them prettily and set up little market stalls outside their wee stone homes, and sold tons of olive oil products. They made wine from their grapes; then from any fruit they had growing in the fields: blackberries; blueberries, mulberries, strawberries, sour cherries — in truth, any ripe fruit they could get their hands on they turned into fruit wine. They bottled it, and became famous in the doing.

Şirince fruit wine is second to none. Tourists cannot get enough of it. They preserved leftover fruit, setting it out in sturdy jars, much as they had always done. Tourists snaffled them up in passing.

They squeezed juice from their pomegranates, reduced them in pots on blackened stoves until they were as thick as molasses: bottling them plainly, and shoving them in a basket outside in their market stall, only to find it empty the next time they looked, which had them running back to the stove to reduce some more.

Our çay was poured from a blackened pot on a blackened stove that has clearly been around for generations. Lamb Sis were charred on skewers over a low wood fire in the dining room, as was the bread. Salad added. All so fresh and simple and delicious.

In times past the bread might have been cooked communally in the baker’s oven that still looks perfectly functional in one of the retaining walls that hold the old village up, high on the hill.

Ways are still traditional. Old ladies still wander the cobbled streets doing as they have always done. Folk art adorns many a doorway. But change is in the wind: when the old stone cottages finally crumble away, their replacements are of smart stucco and shiny painted shutters. Which they can likely well afford these days. Şirince is really a photographer’s paradise. It is to be hoped they don't change too much, too quickly.

oooOOOooo