2

Working the Earth

Tillage and Sowing

“What does ‘farmer’ mean?” Alexis answered his own question: “two oxen ahead and one ox behind”; in Greek, vódhi (ox) symbolizes stupidity rather than strength. At 81, Alexis was lame and his sight failing. He no longer had draft animals and his tools gathered cobwebs in the barn, but he enjoyed reenacting his craft. He yoked virtual oxen to a wooden ard that “scratched” a furrow, rather than turning the soil like a modern plow, in the dirt road outside the barber’s shop in north Greek Assiros. He paced out a 10 m-wide strip for broadcast sowing, marked the edges by plowing a single furrow, and then walked up one edge and back down the other, pulling imaginary seed from a double bag on his shoulder and casting it 5 m towards the middle of the strip. From time to time, he reversed the bag on his shoulder to keep the weight of unsown grain balanced. Then, he walked up and down the middle of the strip, casting seed towards the edge. He maintained a steady rhythm by synchronizing hand movements with paces. “That’s how we ‘locals’ sowed.” Thracian refugees from European Turkey, who arrived in the 1920s, sowed by casting alternately left and right and, he reckoned, achieved less even coverage; he could identify “locals” and Thracians from afar by their sowing rhythm.

After stopping for a real cigarette, he plowed the strip to cover the seed before birds could rob it; migratory flocks of geese were a particular worry. He placed the iron share tip of the ard at the start of the first furrow. Then, with one hand steering the ard from behind and the other brandishing a goad that doubled as a spatula for scraping mud off the share, he trudged up and down the sown strip. As he walked, he called instructions to the oxen to keep straight and then turn at the end of the field, where he lifted the ard and positioned it to start the next furrow. He reckoned the oxen pulled the ard back and forth 15–25 times to cover over the 10 m-wide “sowing,” with furrows overlapping to avoid leaving untilled strips in which weeds would grow and compete with the crop. If the ground was heavy, he kept stopping to scrape mud off the share. “Next, if possible, you harrowed the field, but the animals were slow and the weather was a problem. We started plowing in October, as soon as the first rains softened the ground, but we could not work when the ground was wet and, by early December, frost often made the ground too hard.”

As dusk fell, Alexis pulled up a chair. “Then, from late January, when the weather allowed, we plowed the fallow fields.” Each year, half of the fields were sown with wheat and half left fallow. “We plowed the fallow in one direction and then a second time, after it had rained, crosswise. Before April or May, we plowed a third time, in the same direction as the first. If you had good animals, you plowed four or five times.” In March to May, some fallow fields were planted in summer crops (e.g., maize, sesame), and once these were harvested, the fields should be plowed again. The number of plowings grew as Alexis warmed to his theme. Other elderly villagers claimed that earlier generations had plowed nine times, citing a false folk etymology for niáma, the word used in many parts of Greece to denote tilled fallow or the first plowing of the fallow period. However exaggerated, these accounts underline the value placed on repeated plowing of fallow – echoed by the Cretan and Cypriot term for tilled fallow (kalourgiá, kalourká), which literally means “good working.”

Alexis’ reenactments were somewhat idealized – he had not been the most thorough farmer. Much of his performance is echoed, however, for sound practical reasons, in descriptions of ard plowing elsewhere in Greece (e.g., Loukopoulos, 1983, 182–183) and the wider Mediterranean (e.g., Palmer, 1998). The characteristic back–forth movement is necessary for effective tillage with an ard (Forbes, 1982, 215). A sowing strip about 10 m wide is widespread, as is the explanation that 5 m is a practicable distance over which to scatter seed and that throwing seed from both edges and perhaps also the middle achieves even broadcasting. The length of sowing strip is more variable but limited by size of field, strength of draft animals, and the need to cover seedcorn promptly; farmers feared not only robbing by birds but also interruption by rain or snow. At Anogia in highland Crete, a man had just sown a terrace far above the village and was plowing in the seed, with his pregnant wife behind breaking clods with a pick when she announced that her waters had broken. He helped her onto the donkey and told her, “hold tight [to the unborn baby!] and hurry”; he followed down the mountain as soon as he had covered the seed. Fear of interruption before the job was complete, coupled with the slowness of plow animals, strongly favored sowing small strips, enabling cropping decisions to be taken on a much smaller scale than with mechanized agriculture (Section 6.5).

Despite many common features in the tillage and sowing of fields for Old World cereals and pulses, there are also important variations in several interrelated aspects: the type of tool used for tillage and what (or who) provides the labor to operate it, how often and when the ground is tilled, and the method and timing of sowing. Some of this variability is found in Alexis’ Assiros and some further afield.

2.1 Two-Oxen Households in Paliambela

The lowland hamlet of Paliambela lies 45 km southwest of Assiros, below the town of Kolindros. The workforce of a Turkish agricultural estate occupied Lotzano, as it was then called, until the early twentieth century, when the area was incorporated within the Greek state and a syndicate from Kolindros bought the land. A few estate workers remained in Paliambela and were joined in 1922 by Thracian refugees from European Turkey. The Thracians had fled their homes temporarily a few years previously, but in 1922, knew they were leaving for good. “My father loaded my mother and us girls on the oxcart with the chickens, hand-mill, loom, cooking utensils, sickles, and two sacks of grain. Then, he emptied the remaining sacks, drained the wine barrels, and turned loose the rest of the animals. As we pulled away, one sack of grain fell off the cart.”

In Thrace, most of the refugees had been farmers with their own plow oxen. For the first few years in Paliambela, they were landless and several families shared the abandoned two-room houses of the estate workers. They survived by plowing and harvesting for “local” landowners and, once they accumulated some cash, by renting a few fields to cultivate on their own account. In the late 1920s, each family was allocated 3–4 ha of land, depending on the number of children. The more industrious households rented, and eventually bought, additional fields so that they cultivated up to 5–6 ha of autumn- or winter-sown cereals and pulses and perhaps 1–1.5 ha of summer crops (e.g., maize). Nikos, born in 1929, orders two glasses of tsípouro (the north Greek equivalent of Italian grappa) before filling in some details. “Our fathers all had a pair of oxen. With one good pair, you could not sow more than 50–60 strémmata (5–6 ha) of winter crops, because every field had to be plowed twice: after the first rains, to break the stubble, and then crosswise after sowing, to cover the seed. After that, to break clods and make the field level, we harrowed with a bundle of wild pear branches – it has very tough wood.” The Paliambela Thracians had too little land to sow only half of their fields every winter (as Alexis had done in Assiros). Fallowing was limited to the small area of summer crops, and most stubble fields were plowed only once, at the end of summer, before being sown again.

The Thracians used oxen for plowing and carting the harvest, whereas “locals” in Paliambela and many in Kolindros, perched on a hill, favored horses and mules for plowing as these served as pack animals on steep paths, carrying produce from distant fields and transporting merchandise over the hills to the town of Veria. Thracians and “locals” agreed that oxen plowed more thoroughly than horses or mules. Some “locals” also used oxen, but the refugees regarded a pair of oxen as a source of pride and, in their first years in Paliambela, these animals must have been the only material sign of their status as farmers. The first generation of Thracians maintained and, when necessary, replaced these costly assets, although initially they cannot have used them fully.

As Nikos’ generation entered their teens, surpluses produced with oxen enabled some purchases of additional fields. By the 1950s, however, those born in Paliambela were marrying and setting up separate households, leading to subdivision of landholdings. Nikos stayed with his father, to accumulate property for his sisters’ dowries, and continued plowing with oxen. Many of his contemporaries, starting independent households with only 1–2 ha of fields and lacking the cash to rent more, could not maintain oxen and started plowing with cows. Like horses and mules in Kolindros, draft cows had uses other than plowing – in this case, producing calves for sale to urban butchers. Mitsos, the oldest man in Paliambela, takes up the story over morning coffee. “My father plowed with oxen, big...