[This interview was taken by Aigine Research Center during the research on famine. It is being published for the first time]
Esenbaeva Nuripa, 57 years old, Talas region
My sister would say that in 1941 people did not have clothes to wear, food to eat, they worked in the field from morning till late evening and they gathered in the harvest manually. People were short of wheat. They collected wheat in ditches, fields, said my sister. One goat was enough for the whole village. They poured goat milk in a bowl, added water and boiled that milk. They added some wheat and boiled it for a long time, until it dissolved and the mass became thicker. If there were ten families, all of them drank that mass equally and friendly. My sister was later remembering that people lived very friendly. My father was not taken to the war because of a health condition. He used to hunt mountain goats, brought meat and distributed it among the whole village households equally and also managed to give an amount to the government as a tax. Also he sent the meat of mountain goats to the war. My sister was saying that there were no clothes to wear. They used the skin of mountain goats that our father brought. They soaked the skin in sour milk in order to make it softer and then wore that skin even when it was very hot. She said that the weather was so hot that she had to take off the animal skin as it was painful and when the weather got cooler she wore it again. Clothes made from the goat skin was called kuur ton. My sister was remembering that she grew up wearing those kinds of clothes, which hurt her body in hot sunny days.
My father was a hunter- he hunted mountain goats. He was from Jumgal, died at the age of 98. If he left house early morning, he brought back 5-6 goats in the evening. People prepared a special food called olovo, which is made of lungs boiled in milk. My father killed 7-8 mountain goats a day and hid them in the mountain. In those days there were no cars to transport all the goats. So he brought to the village as many as he could carry. The rest he left in the mountain covered by rocks, so that birds and other animals would not eat them and he brought the rest back the following day. At that time people did not have soap to wash. They made soap from the plant called shakor. I did not see that plant. The soap was made in the following way: one spread animal fat all over a big bowl, brought shakor plant and put in that bowl without drying it and like that they made soap. I was not interested in knowing how that was made. People used to eat soktalkan. People planted millet, gathered it by hand, then attached a stone on a horse and ground the grain. That was taken to a special place where the ground grain was cleaned. At the end one got a fine product. In order to prepare food from that product one had to put it in a big bowl, add water and ferment it for one day. In order to make it dry one poured it in a small sack and let water drip down. When it became dry it was fried. Then it was put in a wooden bucket, which is called sokku and it was beaten until the shell of millet came off and it became white. One can see white millets in shops, so they become like that. Then it is sieved and ground on a grinding stone. The final product that one got was very fine, which was eaten with clarified butter. That was called sok talkan. If you put that ground mixture of groats with clarified butter for one day it becomes hard and one can eat it in small pieces with spoon or knife. Millet can also be used just by being beaten in a wooden bucket and without being ground. One keeps that mass in a separate dry bag and added in milk and water. The proportion is, for example – one cup of millet is enough for 3 liters of milk and 1 liter of water. The mass is boiled for one hour and it is fermented. That is called saksai. This was usually eaten by farmers, rich people. Of course, those who did not plant millet did not do it. One could also make bozo (Kyrgyz national drink) from millet. Now people use ground corn to make bozo. That is not good because it causes stomach bloating. As for millet, it does not cause stomach bloating, on the contrary, it is good for blood and the organism in the whole.
These were made even before the war. After the war up until 1951 people had difficult times. They ate bread from barley. During famine there was such an illness called smallpox. Even when it heals there are wholes left after that. That time only few people could recover; most of them died. My mother would say that three of her siblings out of six died of this illness. When a person had a stomach pain, s/he was treated with hot ash from the hearth. That hot ash make the intestines of a sick person hot and soft that causes stomach bursts [meaning got lost in translation]. When one had to travel for a long time s/he smoked and dried meat. It became very hard, which was ground. For example, now we are using Rolton; dried and ground meat also became like a flour. It was kept in a bag and people used it when they were traveling for a long distance or during famine. When people were hungry they boiled one big bowl of water and put a handful of ground meat and drank that bouillon. That is called kulazyk. People used kylazyk while traveling. I think people overcame famine with their labor. They worked, hunted mountain goat, cultivated land, and in this way they overcame famine. My sister would say that they had to gather in the harvest manually and those who worked got products in a small amount, which was measured according to the amount of harvest they gathered and the number of family members. Those times we used pood as a system of measurement, one pood was 16 kilograms. People got products in pood. Of course that was not enough for children, so that is why they had to gather leftovers from wheat crop harvest. Those times people went to Osh to buy a material called boez. Now this material is used to wash floors. Since then people use the proverb: “A young lady gets married thanks to her father’s fame, a material called “boez” (white rough cloth) is sold because of its being a material” [I can’t get the meaning/ significance of the phrase]