Wilco Van Herpen
BIRGI – Hürriyet Daily News
I never realized collecting chestnuts was such a difficult job. Sometimes you have to see something to believe it. Young men armed with flexible branches climb the chestnut trees and hit the trees’ branches. It is very risky, but for young men, it is a very exciting job.
It is that season again. The weather is getting colder, the leaves are falling and people are wearing warm clothes. Yes, it is autumn, time for chestnuts. On Istanbul’s İstiklal Avenue, people with little pushcarts are roasting chestnuts, the first sign that summer is over. I have seen them so many times but never thought about where those chestnuts came from or what people can do with them.
If you ask someone on the streets where chestnuts come from, their answer most probably will be Bursa, a northwestern Turkish province. But unfortunately they are wrong. Once upon a time Bursa was the center of chestnuts, but you can no longer find chestnuts in Bursa because of the disease called chestnut tree cancer. To fight the disease, most chestnut trees in Bursa were cut and burned. The place to be, if you want to see a chestnut forest, is in the Aegean province of Aydın or in Birgi near Ödemiş in the nearby province of İzmir. Most of the chestnuts used for industrial purposes come from that region.
I went to Birgi and looked around to see if there really were so many chestnut trees. Thirty percent of the chestnuts in Turkey come from that region and, according to the people there, they produce the best quality chestnuts. On the hilltops farmers made new terraces to plant chestnut trees, so the area should be producing even more chestnuts soon. It must be a lucrative job; a chestnut tree does not ask much from the farmer and gives a lot in return.
Hitting chestnut trees
I never realized collecting chestnuts was such a difficult job. Sometimes you have to see something to believe it. Young men armed with long, flexible branches climb the chestnut trees and hit the trees’ branches. It is very risky, but for young men, it is a very exciting job. They jump from one branch to another like monkeys. It is an amazing show (when you are safe with both feet on the ground). They hit the tree so hard that I felt sorry for the tree because for me a tree is something that is alive and has feelings in one way or another. They hit and hit and chestnuts by the dozen fall on the ground. Not only do I feel sorry for the tree, I also think that this system is not very healthy for the tree. In the United States, huge chestnut forests have disappeared because of chestnut tree cancer and the same happened and is happening in Turkey. Why? A chestnut tree is a very fragile tree. Once it is damaged and the tree has an open wound, it is very easy for the tree to become infected with cancer. Since all the men who are getting the chestnuts out of the tree do it by hitting the tree, they also damage the tree. So more and more trees are getting sick, and the only cure so far is to cut the infected branches or the whole tree and burn the wood.
On the ground women collect the chestnuts. They all wear gloves because the needles of the chestnut are so sharp. I tried but was immediately poked underneath a nail with one of those needles. I can tell you, this was not a very pleasant experience. They make a big pile of the collected chestnuts, sprinkle them with water and cover them with leaves. Now the chestnuts are ready for transport to… Bursa.
(Source: www.hurriyetdailynews.com )