A Life of Simplicity

At the age of 84 Zemroot remembers the simpler ways of life in a small town by the name of Sirak, Iran. Unwilling to return to Sirak for times have changed, she still remains passionate about her childhood within her beloved town. Now, as a widow in her apartment living solemnly without her once beloved husband in Glendale she is trying to make the most out of her life with what’s left of her family. For Zemroot, spending time in the mountainous regions of Sirak while having a picnic was just what she lived for, now she makes the food she had received in her picnics for her grandchildren to enjoy. She has experienced times of no electrical power and times where water was only to be found in a well, and moved to such a place where we take these necessities for granted. Now I am granted with the story of Zemroot’s life in a small town which she prospered in.

My name is Zemroot and I was born in December 1924. I lived in central Iran in the village of Sirak, a mountainous region.

Daily life in the village of Sirak predominantly involved men in agriculture and women mostly home with their own works. All day women were mostly involved in weaving carpets and taking care of household chores, and men were predominantly outside in farms taking care of cows. The backgrounds of the people of Sirak were predominantly Christian Armenian. I knew most of the people in Sirak saying it was such a small town.

In 1946 the majority of the population of Sirak left and migrated to Armenia but my own village is what remained, and I do have some friends that I never see, but I still have very close, good friends around. News in my village got around by board of communication, the city was divided into segments and populations that would get together and exchange information.

In Chaharmahal I did not see any wildlife outside of a herd of sheep, although annually we would go for a celebration towards the top of the mountain where there were ravines and we went on horseback on donkeys and then just had a good time and returned back around the evening. The houses of Chaharmahal were all two story houses, there were two bases upstairs that were mostly consisted of two rooms. All the livestock and all the feed for the livestock were kept on the first floor, upstairs was basically the living quarters. All the houses were built by man made bricks and mounted up and made into a big frame.

All roads in Chaharmahal were dirt roads and we were all on donkeys and mules, which was the basic mode of transportation. I don’t remember how the donkeys were domesticated but they used to load a lot of items for them to carry and then they somehow domesticated.

There was no hospital in my village, if someone got hurt or sick we used to transport them to the nearest city called Shaharcourt, which had a hospital, they used to treat the ill in that particular hospital. We did not have a mayor per say but we did have an individual like the eldest and the most prominent, an esquire, village people would go to the esquire for their grievances or troubles or anything that needed to be settled they used to go to him to settle the issues. One of the esquires’ names was Minas and the others Tatevos based on my memory.

I do not remember a person that everybody knew in Sirak but I remember my own parents that they were from New Julfa in Iran but there wasn’t anyone in particular that I remember that was popular and well known in the area.

Our houses weren’t equipped with power and water, the water was supplied through natural water springs for drinking and we would get form the water springs nearby but for daily routine type water we had water wells in the individual homes that we used to extract water for feeding the animals and for cleaning and so forth. As far as sewer we would basically throw away waste into septic tanks and the fields but the human waste and trash in the sewer and in septic tanks and waste just put into the fields some place dug into holes, basically, as far as the animal waste was concerned they were kept in a separate area, some were used for heating during winter times and some was used for fertilizer for planting our crops

As far as culture goes there was a school where plays were organized at the school, we would go and watch plays, there wasn’t much music per say as far as concerts and so forth, but during weddings we would go and listen to a specialized instrument that was called zorna, a wind instrument.

We were surrounded by two different villages one they were Farse and on they were Kurds both Muslims but we never experienced any discrimination. It was not like a Shiite Sunni kind of thing. Majority of Sirak’s villagers left to bigger towns and the villages inhabited by nobody now, I mean, no one from the old. It’s not that towns became bigger but they just left to different towns, they went to bigger towns to find work.

A favorite place I used to go to in Sirak was the mountains or, or at the beginning or close to the village there were water wells, water sources where we would go and picnic and have a good time. We had mostly all the food products that was common and my father was the only one that had a vineyard he grew grapes and another uncle had a farming land that produced food.

One of my brothers was going to university in Isfahan, my entire family lived in Sirak and my parents died in Sirak but my brothers and I got married and mostly left and lived in a city called Abadan in South East Iran. Obviously I liked staying in Sirak and I had friends, relatives, everyone around me that had close relationships. Since the village was basically emptied by all friends or people of my background there is no one that I could go back with, nothing could be the same, but we’ve had churches, we’ve had schools everything was normal back then.

It was much simpler to live in Sirak, don’t forget we’re talking about sixty years ago, and life there was a village type life and life in America is not comparable. The life was simple, and everyone was satisfied with basics… Majority of the villages left to and migrated to Armenia.

Since my kids were all living in the United States my husband and I decided to come to join them so that we could be united again. This migration of us coming to United States was primarily because of the revolution in Iran my children had left for education and for better life. If it wasn’t for the revolution I would have never come to America, if the regime had remained the same.