We were still laughing when he indicated we had arrived. And there, glowing in the early sunshine, was my first field of Crocus sativus . The field was small and enclosed by fencing—reinforcing the sense that this was a valuable crop—and to my joy it was packed with the purple flowers I was looking for. We opened the gate and went in. I bent down and picked the crocus nearest to me, with Jesús pointing out the thin crimson stigmas that were the pure saffron.
The petals were an intoxicating color, fluttering on the edge of blue and purple. In the morning dew they glistened and shone, but what struck me most was their fragility. None of the books had mentioned this, and I had imagined something more robust. After a few seconds in my hand the bits I had touched were bruised—after being pressed in my Spanish pocket dictionary for more than a year the whole flower is now almost diaphanous. “It’s like the wedding gown of a prostitute,” a Spaniard once said, and I don’t disagree. There is something not quite innocent about this bright flower that flaunts its genitals—three red female stigmas and three yellow male stamens, exploding from the center—with such showy pride. But it wears its vulnerability on its sleeve as well: the stigmas have their own sad secret, although I wasn’t to learn that until later. But also, saffron is so delicate. If it doesn’t get the right tender loving care from both humans and the elements then it fades like those sixteenth-century flowers in Saffron Walden when the farmers stopped looking after them. I put one stigma in my mouth. It tasted bitter and was wetly crunchy like a single stem of fresh cress. From that point on, not only was I smitten by this extraordinary spice but also my tongue (I didn’t realize until later) was totally yellow.
The field belonged to Vicente Morago Carrero and his wife, Teleforo. Their forebears on both sides had been growing crocuses for generations, and they had insisted on continuing the practice even though it had gradually become less lucrative. For harvest week they had enlisted their engineer sons José and Manuel, who were twenty-five and thirty, to help out at home. When we arrived, Vicente and the boys were bent double, nimbly filling straw baskets with flowers. They looked as if they had been doing this all their lives, and they probably had—it’s normal to start helping out the family at around the age of eight. The straw baskets were pretty, but they were also necessary: saffron is a fussy flower. It doesn’t like nylon or plastic.
The field was 80 meters long and 30 wide. Which is not impressive in terms of purple cloaks on the Spanish landscape, even though it is pretty when you are in it and very hard work when you are picking it. Jesús commented, making the sons and me blush, that they were both looking for a nice wife. I soon showed myself to be an unsuitable girl, however—just ten minutes of crocus plucking and my back was protesting.21 Teleforo joined us, and I asked her whether she was going to the Saffron Festival at Consuegra, 40 kilometers away. “No time,” she said, “we have so much to do here.” The paradox of saffron farming is that everything has to be done in a hurry (if you don’t pick the flowers by noon you have missed their potency, and they bloom only once), and yet it is such a painstaking process that nothing can be rushed.
I gave Jesús a lift back to the village. He gallantly kissed me on both cheeks, as if this were a reward for his assistance. Then he wished me luck on my return journey. “Be careful. In Madrid they’ll slit your throat for a few pesetas,” he warned, with a shiver-inducing mime of banditry. “I’m worried about those boys,” he continued in the same breath. Bandits? I asked, incredulously. “No, they are so old and not married yet,” he said. “Actually the whole pueblo is worried.”
That night I stayed in Consuegra. When I had asked at the Spanish consulate in Hong Kong about Consuegra the reply was “Where?,” and when I got there I understood why. The town has only two claims to fame: a picturesque regiment of white windmills on the hills behind and the Rosa del Azafrán Festival every October. Consuegra is not a wealthy place, nor is it a pretentious one. In fact, as I looked around the door of a promising-looking bar in the main plaza and instead found Formica and video violence, I longed for just a little pretension. Half of the town is flat and full of garages and cheap furniture shops. The other half winds medievally up the hill toward the thirteen windmills, each of which has been given a name from Miguel Cervantes’s seventeenth-century novel Don Quixote. In the book, the Don is a man who lives in the Renaissance but desperately wants to be a romantic medieval knight. Everyone, especially Cervantes, laughs at him for his desire to maintain the old ways of chivalry when times have so patently changed. The famous windmills incident, in which the Don attacks the mills thinking (or hoping) they are giants, is about holding onto old ideas, even when the evidence says you are wrong. And there are many people in Consuegra who fear that although saffron is a wonderfully historical thing which looks pretty on the landscape and nice on rice, keeping the harvest going in these days of modernization is simply a kind of tilting at windmills. “Saffron is dead,” said one man bitterly, while I was standing at my hotel bar. “I don’t know why we have this festival.”
By historical rights, the first Saffron Festival should have taken place more than a millennium ago, or perhaps even two. There are two theories about saffron’s presence in La Mancha. One is that it was introduced by the Arabs in the eighth century. But then there is another story, which I like better, which suggests saffron has been in Consuegra since the time of the Romans. In the town’s tiny museum there is a terracotta incense burner from Roman times. It is etched with full-moon fertility symbols, and apparently women used to burn saffron in it and then breathe it in to make them conceive boys. Saffron mythology is as fragile as the plant itself: there are other stories to the effect that drinking a big dose of saffron would lead to an abortion and that an even larger dose could kill.
The Saffron Festival is easier to date than the saffron. It was an invention by a tourist delegation from nearby Toledo in 1962, when they decided their hinterland needed more visitors. Nowadays several thousand people arrive in town for the last weekend in October to watch the competitions and processions and to fill the restaurants with smoke and laughter. This new festival gives families the excuse to get together once a year in the same way that the saffron harvest used to do in the old days. It also probably ensures that some families at least keep a field of crocuses going.
The next morning I met José Angel Ramón, an engineer in his early thirties. He was the first in his family not to grow crocuses. When he was a child his home would be full of visitors helping his mother pick out the red stigmas, and drying them on wood fires until the room was full of an earthy scent. “I remember lots of young women talking, and all the music. There would be parties until midnight.” But that stopped about ten years ago. “It didn’t make sense anymore.” What had happened? “Economics,” he said. Consuegra is a poor town, but it isn’t poor enough. He introduced me to a group of international saffron exporters and we were driven two kilometers outside town to a field owned by the Lozano family, Consuegra’s biggest producers, with seven fields. Apart from the ugly financial sums, what is the biggest problem for saffron growers today? I asked Señor Lozano. “Mice,” he said. They adore the sweet corms. And the cats can’t catch them because the mice of Consuegra are faster than the felines. Which seemed comic until I learned that they have a far from funny death: farmers kill the mice by smoking them out with red chillies, the “natural way.” It sounded like an unnatural way to go.
“The thing is,” said one buyer from Switzerland, “La Mancha might be one of the centers of European production but Europe isn’t where saffron is at right now.” And where is it at? “It’s all happening in Iran,” he said, and then paused for effect. “In Iran the fields are as big as Holland.” The rest of us were silent as we absorbed the concept. I looked over at the range of low-lying mountains to the west of Consuegra, shimmering mauve in the distance, and imagined the whole area, from my feet to those peaks, covered in a Persian carpet of flowers. It was a turning point. I had to get to Iran, I thought.
But for the moment I was in Consuegra, tilting at windmills, and down in the plaza an hour later the competitors were getting ready for the regional finals of the saffron stripping competition. How many pigments can a petal-plucker pluck if a petal plucker plucks in a competition? I went all the way from Hong Kong to central Spain to find out . . . and I still don’t know. There were thirteen women and one man, all sitting along one side of a white table. In front of each of them was a bag with a hundred flower heads, and a plastic plate on which stones were laid out. I thought there was something significant about the arrangement, but someone pointed out gently that the wind was gusty and nobody wanted to chase the plates around the plaza. A little quiet was called for, and then at a signal they all started to pluck. They had to pick out only the red stigmas. Any stamens in the final bunch scored negative points.
I should have liked to have reported the tension, the cheering, the different villages rooting for their own neighbors in raucous Spanish style, the excited megaphone commentary about how the man from Tembleque was pulling himself up from last position (which, to be fair, he was never in). Or about how the Consuegra champion had been training for months by plucking burrs out of cotton wool or pine needles out of honey. But I can’t. This is not an event with great potential for TV rights. Everything happened in near-total silence except for the racking cough of a grandmother to my right and the screams of a bored infant to my left. It was all very calm and, for a competition, almost disturbingly laid-back. The fingers were not exactly flying, more like scurrying or fumbling. But what the exercise made clear was why saffron is so expensive. Every thread you use has required somebody’s concentrated attention. Each has been touched by a person, not by a machine. There have been attempts to mechanize this bit of the saffron process but it doesn’t work: crocuses are too fragile and the tug at the center of each flower is just a little too hard to calibrate.
On one side of the table were the unwanted flowers: beautiful but rubbish. People have tried to find uses for them through the centuries, but crocus petals don’t seem to contain enough of anything useful, and they are simply thrown away. In Saffron Walden they were at one time a real liability. In 1575 a royal decree prohibited crokers—saffron farmers—from “throwing of saffron flowers and other rubbish into the river in time of flood.” The punishment was two days and nights in the stocks.
The fingers of the Consuegra competitors picked until there was nothing more to pick. The winner was Gabina García from Los Yebenes, closely followed by María Carmen Romero from Madridejos. They looked pleased, but not triumphant. It wasn’t that kind of competition. I have a silly watch—it has a blue digital dial and can only be read if you press a big button. Children love it. But at critical unforeseeable moments, like open-air saffron plucking competitions, it is a liability, as its numbers do not show up in bright sunlight. So I approached the organizers, asking for official times. But the man just shrugged. He said, simply, “The first is first,” and explained how nobody bothered with stopwatches. So for the record, the Spanish October 2000 best time is one hundred sets of stigmas in about eight minutes. Or maybe ten minutes. Approximately.
PERSIAN YELLOW
In the twelve months following my visit to Consuegra I travelled the world looking for color stories, and by October I should have finished my research. But I could not stop thinking about fields of purple stretching to a Persian horizon, and ignoring my looming deadline I applied for an Iranian visa again. However, it was the same week as the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and Tehran turned down an entire batch of applications from Britain. Mine was in it. I tried again two weeks later, and got my visa. Then the Americans and British started bombing Afghanistan, and the northwest of Iran was suddenly off the list of recommended holiday destinations.
I began to hear wildly conflicting rumors. Some people said that Iran’s saffron center of Mashhad was safe; others that it was closed to foreigners because it was so close to the Afghan border. The British Foreign Office had issued a travel warning and even the United Nations had stopped its staff going into some parts of the province. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I contacted a saffron exporter in Mashhad. There’s a problem, he replied immediately. Briefly I imagined refugee tents covering the fields of flowers, or armed Iranian militia keeping out saffron searchers, especially those with cameras and questions. Can’t you come a week later? he continued. The harvest is late this year. I could not delay, and sent a reply saying I hoped there might be at least a couple of crocuses poking their noses out of the sandy soil. “The fields are full of flowers,” he confirmed quickly. “But in a fortnight they will be even more wonderful.”
Three days later I had not only arrived in Iran, but was on an overnight train travelling the thousand kilometers from Tehran to Mashhad. The set dinner was a promise of saffron things to come: boneless chicken kebabs nesting in a bowl of deeply yellow buttery rice. Of course it was saffron, one of my travel companions confirmed. “When an Iranian goes on a journey it is traditional to give them saffron rice. It’s like saying: ‘We give you our best; go with our blessing.’ ”
Before we went to sleep I walked the length of the train, looking for signs that my fellow travellers were on pilgrimage. Mashhad is the holiest city in Iran. It is where Emam Reza, whom the Shiite Muslims believe to have been the eighth leader of the Islamic faith, was murdered with poisoned pomegranate juice. Just as Muslims can call themselves “haji” after visiting Mecca, so they can call themselves “mashti” after praying at the Holy Shrine in Mashhad. I didn’t necessarily find pilgrims, though certainly most women were wearing the full chador, next to which my own little black scarf and coat combination looked positively decadent. But what I did find was Persian classical music in the dining carriage. “Are you Mussulman?” whispered the man next to me. “On ziyarah?” I knew that meant pilgrimage, so grinned and whispered that I wasn’t. “And you? On ziyarah?” I asked him politely in return. But my Persian accent must have been bad, because he promptly offered me a cigarette. Other people in the carriage tut-ted and told us crossly that we couldn’t smoke in there. My protests that I had meant to say “pilgrimage” were in vain.
THE LAUGHING SPICE
Before I ever saw a saffron field in Iran, or got close to finding the answer to my questions—about whether they were purple mantles and whether they were as big as Holland—I was given two contrasting images to play with. The first was from a film director, and was—in the metaphor of Don Quixote—the medieval image. The second was from a businessman, and it was the full, modern story. I am still not sure which was more intriguing.
In 1992 Ebrahim Mukhtari made a documentary called Saffron, about a month in the life of the villagers of Bajestan, 500 kilometers south of Mashhad. What had touched him most about saffron, he said—when I met him in Tehran—was the fragility of the process: the delicacy of placing the corms into that rugged land, the way they open for one day only, and the brittleness of the little dried threads. Ebrahim had not realized it then, but when he filmed in Bajestan he was capturing one of the last old-style harvests. “That is the village I was in,” he said suddenly, pointing to a framed picture on the wall behind me. I had thought, without looking carefully, that it was a Victorian orientalist painting in the style of someone like Lawrence Alma-Tadema: a romantic scene of women weaving in a courtyard, framed by the laden branches of a pomegranate tree. It was actually a framed photograph. That idyllic scene was a real one, and the villagers in the picture were still alive and probably weaving.
My second foretaste of Iranian saffron came from a man who could be called the Sultan of Saffron. Ali Shariati is the general manager of Novin Saffron, the biggest saffron company in the world. It sells 25 tons a year, more than five times the total production of Spain. To get to his office we walked past a truck full of white sacks. A man stood on top of the pile, throwing down the bales to his companions, who would pass them through a doorway. There was a wonderful bounce to the process: those sack
s were light. The truck carried about 50 kilos: the dried stigmas of eight million crocuses, each of which had been picked by hand that morning. And this was a small haul: we were still early in the harvest.
It was about seven times that amount which caused a short war in Switzerland six centuries ago. The nobles were trying to assert ancient claims to take land and power from the commoners, and one day in 1374 the businesspeople of Basle decided they were having none of it. They sent saboteurs to the hunts, and put a guerrilla force in the woods to attack the nobles. The aristocrats retaliated by hijacking the merchants’ most valuable trade item: 800 pounds of saffron, freshly arrived from Greece.22 The Saffron War lasted for more than three months, with the spice held hostage in a castle; I like to imagine the mythical Chipping Walden pilgrim walking past the rumpus one day on his way home and casually doffing his hat.
As I waited, the assistant manager, Ana Alimardani, played “Mellow Yellow” on her computer, with the singer Donovan crooning that he was “just mad about saffron.” It was hard to stop humming it. What had I expected? I had read the legends of Darius’s men wearing saffron uniforms to fight Alexander the Great, and I had also known about how once a year Zoroastrian priests in Persia used to write special prayers with saffron ink on papyrus, and then nail them onto houses and near farms to ward off pests, and bad spirits. 23 So after finding both the picturesque and the rural in Spain I had expected the same in Iran, but more so. But that is the extraordinary thing: in Spain the saffron harvest has died out because it is traditional. In Iran it has revived because it is modern. In the past ten years Iran’s production has soared from 30 tons a year to 170. Spain’s has gone from 40 to 5.