Purslane: Nutritious, Delicious, Salvation From Starvation

Photo taken in Newton, Massachusetts by MarashGirl©2021 Above is a contemporary photo of purslane (perper in Armenian, ermerouk in Turkish). According to Marash Girl's interviews with survivors of the Ottomans'attempted genocide of the Armenian people early in the 20th century, purslane was often the only source of nutrition, nutrition that if those Armenians were "lucky", they would gather along the roadside, their only source of nutrition as they were marched out of their homes by the gendarmes of the Ottoman Empire, marched into the desert during the "death march"(see internet explanation below) . . . Today purslane (ermerouk in Turkish) is often used by Marash Girl as a vegetable to be used in salads and soups . . . both the leaves and the stems of the the plant are highly nutritious and delicious. Gardeners will welcome your gathering the purslane from among their plants, as purslane will suddently appear unbidden, particularly among the tomato plants in vegetable gardens throughout the northeast! Just be sure to remove the roots and wash the purslane plants in cool water, rinsing numerous times in order to rid the plants of any soil before chopping the purslane for soups or salads. N.B. Below taken from the internet: "Perhaps the most "classical" example of the death march was the one that occurred as part of the Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey (part of the fading Ottoman Empire) in 1915. The events leading up to that death march were paradigmatic of the experience of genocide victims in other places." "The death march of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire took place against the backdrop of the hostilities of World War I. In the spring of 1915 Ottoman rulers ordered that all Armenians be expelled from their homes in areas outside of war zones. The Armenians—men, women, and children—were then lined up and made to walk in convoys of tens of thousands toward the Syrian desert. Although the expulsions resembled deportations, the treatment of the people making the march by Turkish "guards" made it clear that a more sinister agenda was driving the march: a planned elimination of the Armenian population through a process of starvation and exhaustion. The death march was a culmination of decades of Turkish discrimination against Armenians, which had long consisted of the barring of Armenians from serving in the Turkish army, repeated executions of small groups of Armenians, and mass killings by special forces known as Teshkilâti Mahsusa—gangs of violent ex-convicts ordered by the Ottoman/Turkish government to commit murders of Armenians." N.B. Lest we forget . . . From the Internet: "June 1, Wilbraham, Massachusetts Two tornadoes hit Wilbraham on June 1, 2011, Town Administrator Robert A. Weitz says. The first was the F-3 tornado which also devastated Springfield and Monson and cut a swath through Wilbraham from Tinkham Road, south of the center of town, to Monson." And to relate this note to the above blogpost, before the tornado, Marash Girl's garden in Wilbraham was replete with wild purslane growing unbidden among the carefully planted tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and zucchini.