The long awaited sheep slaughtering finally happened…
May 9th, Victory Day, my family headed to the mountains for a day of celebrations. A fairly forgotten holiday in America, Victory Day remains vivid in the minds of the hundreds of millions scattered across the Soviet Union who remember and honor the thirty million Russian lives lost in World War II. To welcome the holiday that honors the sacrifice of so many others we sacrificed an animal (and proceeded to boil its carcass in hot water.)
Arriving to the beautiful mountains I was anticipating a day of frolicking, playing, and enjoying nature. That is how it started after all…a nice hike my little brother took me on while the family prepared for the day’s festivities. Upon returning I see my host dad carrying a tied up sheep. Together with his brothers my host dad was hoisting the sheep to a far off place where it would meet its destiny. It looked oddly calm – exhibiting little struggle or resistance. After a quick blessing a swift flick of the knife sent blood rushing from its neck onto the warm green grass which lay underneath it.
It was over before it started. It died with its eye open staring at us while we cut it from neck to tail. While they were cutting the sheep up my family pointed out the different parts of the body in an attempt to emphasize how close they were to their animals and to show me that what we see on our supermarket shelves did not start like that. It really drove the message of ‘conscious eating’ home – killing one’s own meat that is.
After finishing the basic preparations my host dad really surprised me. He took me aside with one hand, while holding a ten pound sack of something in his other. He brandished a knife, gave me the sack, and with a swooshing sound cut the neck of the sack of which a gooey, greenish paste leaked out of. It was a ten pound sack of shit.
He told me to go to the tree nearby and squeeze the warm poop out of the bag. I tried not to throw up. A cousin came over to help me and after sufficiently squeezing the sack clean my cousin asked me to fetch water to clean it out. They were planning on eating this organ of which I just squeezed ten pounds of the smelliest doo-doo in my life out of…
After rinsing it out through-and-through, my most powerful ‘wow im in kyrgyzstan’ I proceeded back to where my host father was dividing the organs – inner intestines and the head were in one pot while what the Western world would consider to be edible meat in the other. The festivities proceeded with a stretch-a-thon in which the two meter long five inches wide intestinal tract was elongated to an over ten meter long string-thin wide piece of floss. The head was then tossed in a pot of boiling water. The colon was also chopped up into teeny-tiny pieces resembling tiny calamari. After all was chopped and ready it was thrown in with the head to sit boiling for four hours.
When it was thoroughly boiled we were taken to the tuz to enjoy the long awaited delicacy. Every organ was slowly brought piece by piece out of the dripping water. The last to go was the face. At the tuz they proceeded to chop the meat into even tinier pieces. The last piece of meat to be chopped up was the face. It started with the cheeks and ended with the eyeballs. Every part of that sheep was consumed. To wash down the taste we were all given a bowl of shorpo, the water of the ass of a sheep.
My peevishness and hesitation did not by any means win approval from the crowd, after all this dish, besh-barmak, is the national dish of the country but I could not participate to a level that would have been approvable. Most likely I never will either. My first sheep-slaughter is full and complete, one thing more checked off of the list…And all I wanted was a day in the mountains.
From the Center of the World
Andrew
Woori Kyrgyz 