Armenian Apricots: The National Fruit That Gave the Flag Its Color
Most European languages named the color orange after the orange. Armenian has a word like that too, but it isn't the one on the flag: the bottom stripe is officially called tsiranaguyn, apricot. A third of the national flag carries the name of a fruit that in June sits on every market stall in the country.
Armenian apricots (Armenian ծիրան, tsiran) are ordinary stone fruit that Armenians eat fresh, dry for winter, stuff with nuts and distill into spirit - and that Armenia has written into its language, its music and its state symbols more thoroughly than any other crop.
Why the Apricot Is Named After Armenia in Latin When It Isn't From There
In Latin the apricot is Prunus armeniaca, the Armenian plum, and Armenians like to offer that name as proof of where it came from. But the name was given to it by the ancient Greeks and Romans, who knew the fruit from Armenian orchards and filled in the rest themselves. Genetics now puts the apricot's home in Central Asia and China; Armenia was a stop on the way to Europe, where the fruit settled in so thoroughly that it ended up carrying the country's name. Today the apricot belongs to the whole region: Turkish Malatya alone harvests over 400,000 tons a year and supplies half the world with the dried ones, Iranian cooks scatter dried apricots even through savory rice, and it grows just as well across the Caucasus, in Georgia as in Azerbaijan. Armenia exports around 23,000 tons, almost all of it to Russia. By volume it's a bit player. As a symbol it's a superpower.
The Duduk, the Flag and Two Songs: What Armenians Made of the Apricot
Armenia's national instrument, the duduk, is called tsiranapogh in Armenian, the apricot pipe, and it means that literally. The duduk is made from apricot wood and nothing else: the wood is dense, it takes the moisture of a player's breath, and it has to dry for a year before anyone is allowed to cut into it; the music that comes out of it was added by UNESCO in 2005 to its list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. I heard it live over dinner at Tavern Yerevan, where folk songs were sung to it - and one of the best known is called Tsirani Tsar, the apricot tree. A century later Armenia sent Eva Rivas to Eurovision 2010 with the song Apricot Stone and finished seventh. The film festival in Yerevan is called the Golden Apricot. If someone had to sum Armenia up in one word and it couldn't be Ararat, the candidate would be obvious.
How Apricots Are Eaten in Armenia and What's Left of Them for Winter
The season is short, June and July, and in those two months the apricot is eaten mostly the way it came off the tree. The rest of the year depends on drying. Dried apricots, tsirani chir, are sold in two colors, and the color gives away the method: the bright orange ones went through sulfur, the dark shriveled ones dried in nothing but sun. Unripe white apricots, and more often peaches, are turned into alani, dried pitted fruit stuffed with walnuts, cinnamon and cloves, and the surplus of the harvest goes into tsirani oghi, apricot spirit, which plenty of Armenians make at home and a few companies bottle for sale. Back home in Czechia an apricot usually ends up inside a sweet dumpling or in jam; in Armenia nobody shuts it inside dough, because dried it keeps until spring with no help at all. Dried apricots are, to my mind, the most sensible thing to bring back from Armenia. Turn up outside the season and you won't find them fresh, but every market will sell you the dried ones by weight.
Apricots With Leaves Between the Layers
I never ate apricots in a restaurant in Armenia; I bought them at the supermarket, a whole plateful at a time while the season lasted. In the shop they stack them into crates in layers and put leaves from the tree between the layers; if you want to know when they were picked, look at whether the leaves have wilted yet. They were sweet and juicy and the flesh let go of the stone on its own, no knife, no tugging - softer and more fragrant than the ones I know from a Czech garden. What they cost I never wrote down. That the leaves between them still hadn't wilted, I did.
