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When the first rains began in autumn, lilac-blue flowers thrust up through my lawn on bare stems, crocuses I had forgotten planting there two summers ago. They were not disoriented, mistaking autumn for spring. They were autumn-flowering crocuses untroubled by a covering of mown grass. They are Crocus speciosus, one of the easiest and most beautiful crocuses for gardens.
With crocuses in mind, I set off earlier this month for Macedon in northern Greece, homeland of my life-long subject of study, Alexander the Great. It is a fine time to explore the north-west of his kingdom, one which his father King Philip II amalgamated as far as lakes Prespa and Ohrid. The local forests of beech trees were colouring magnificently, but neither by the lakes nor beneath the trees were crocuses to be seen. With intrepid Charikleia Koromila, a frequent excavator for the Greek Archaeological Service, I descended from the mountains to a broad arable plain around Kastoria. Road signs warned that wild bears might cross the road, but none did. One sign struck another chord: “To Kozani”.
In autumn 1970 I visited Kozani and noted, but did not visit, a sign to a village called Krokos. Surely it must teem with crocuses, so we consulted safran.gr and struck an item as precious as gold dust. Krokos is a heartland of Crocus sativus, the saffron crocus whose lilac-blue flowers in autumn have orange-red filaments; the ones, when dried, that cooks use in risotto or fine lamb tagine. True saffron is highly expensive: I was soon to learn why.
In northern Greece the saffron crocus does not only have an eponymous village. It is managed by a crocus co-operative, whose commercial director, Konstantinos Katsikaronis, answered his phone and was happy to explain its work at his headquarters near Krokos. So we went, intrigued.
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The last week in October and the first week in November are the season for saffron crocus flowers but none was visible in the farmland along our road. The co-operative’s modern HQ emerged instead, on whose upper floor Katsikaronis gave us an urbane account of the crop, its history and the co-op’s role.
Alexander never saw saffron crocus in Macedon. It was never native to the plain round Krokos village. It arrived about 300 years ago during Ottoman rule in the Balkans, when merchants and house painters brought bulbs back from what is now Austria. They flourished in their new home, around 700 metres above sea level, but their crop is not easy to harvest. Three long red filaments spread out from the centre of each flower and have to be picked by hand because the flower is too fragile for the task to be mechanised. Huge quantities are needed for a small residue: the filaments of 150,000 flowers have to be dried to make a kilogramme of pure saffron. I look with new wonder on the heaps of saffron used in antiquity to dye statues and robes, scent funerals and brighten arenas. Huge work teams were needed, way beyond modern scholars’ imagination.
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By the 1960s, crocus growing around Kozani had contracted into ever fewer farms. In 1971 the crocus co-operative was formed to reverse the decline. Member farms deliver their crops to it and after studying other countries’ market prices, the co-operative sets a single selling price for all the stock. It pays members on delivery and then takes a 10 per cent fee off the eventual revenue. Seventy per cent of the crop goes abroad and 30 per cent stays in Greece. All year, meanwhile, local knowledge is pooled and progress compared. It is a wonderful social riposte to hyper-Thatcherite free market rhetoric. About 1,000 workers are now employed by Kozani’s crocus industry, reinforcing the rural villages and preventing a price war to the bottom in which big farms drive little ones out.
Katsikaronis explained crucial points, some of which linked to my historical interests. In Greek Macedon the saffron crop is unadulterated, whereas many other suppliers cut off the filaments’ yellow stigmata, add them to the mix and enhance them with red dye. Already, in classical antiquity, authors remarked that saffron is easily adulterated. In the bazaar in Istanbul you can buy saffron mixed with tasteless safflower, a different plant. In Spain saffron is also grown in bulk. The stock is supplemented by saffron imported from Asia and elsewhere: Turkey, Morocco and Iran still have hotspots of indigenous saffron. In beautiful Kashmir, in the 1620s, the Mughal emperor Jahangir was entranced by the local saffron just when faraway Kozani was beginning crocus farms of its own. In 1978 I saw terraced plantings of saffron running down Kashmiri hillsides, and also in Afghanistan, both then peaceful. Wars have diminished these sources since.
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The yearly yields at Kozani fluctuate with the weather. A recent high point was 40 tonnes, but yields of 10 tonnes or less are more common in the changing climate. Saffron crocuses do not need rich soil and are not troubled by ever hotter summers. What they relish is a snow blanket in winter, but it is unpredictable in modern Greek winters. Saffron, Katsikaronis added, can only be grown for six years on the same ground if it is to flower well. The bulbs are then lifted mechanically, cleaned by hand and replanted in a new area. Their former home must remain without crocuses for 15 to 20 years.
A scholarly ace flashed into my mind. Pliny’s Natural History tells us that Mucianus observed that saffron crocus has to be dug up and planted elsewhere every sixth or seventh year. This Mucianus, we know, was a respected soldier and governor in the Roman empire who governed Lycia, now south-west Turkey, in the early AD60s. As saffron crocuses grew famously well in parts of Lycia, Mucianus had local knowledge. The ancients’ transplanting matches modern growers’ practice, a thrilling continuity.
Would we like to visit crocuses in flower? Of course, so we bumped in a van down rough tracks to a wondrous sight: acres of lilac-blue crocuses and teams of pickers, almost all women, nicking off the flowers and separating the filaments while leaving the flowers to be dumped by the roadside. Again I marvelled. In amazing c 1750BC wall paintings found on the Greek island of Santorini, girls in crocus-patterned robes, wearing crocus-shaped jewellery, are picking crocus flowers and filling baskets, puzzling scholars because some baskets hold flowers, others red filaments. Here, before me, some 3,780 years later, female pickers were segregating them in the same way, though this time into baskets of white plastic.
The male farmers stand on the path, smoke and watch. The pickers’ day runs from 9am to 5pm with free lunch, two short breaks and a wage of €60. They do not sing, but they gossip, and so I went to join in. Theophrastus, Aristotle’s pupil, believed that saffron crocus grows best if it is trampled on, but I took care to keep off it. Kneeling and picking with Team Crocus, I half filled my bucket, but ached to be back on the pathway. Twice a week, the men there told me, they go in too and set traps for mice and moles. I tried to remember the Greek for “badger”: no, they reassured me, we have none. What a co-operative heaven it is.
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