Tag #125306 - Interview #97653 (Rebeka Evgin)

Adana was a really wealthy city.  Wheat and cotton was planted.  Depending on the season, Adana would either be covered in yellow with wheat or white with cotton.  Citrus groves, vineyards and vineyard houses are like Adana’s symbols.  All of the houses had gardens.  My mother would gather the eggs from the chickens in the coop and have us drink them raw.  There was a statue of Ataturk [6] in the plaza.  The street going all the way to the station was surrounded by citrus groves.  Stores were in this area.  In the area which was called the Old Station, there was a neighborhood called Dipdil.  Darker skinned people who talked mostly Arabic lived in this area.  We called them “fellah” [peasant/ negro].  They wore baggy trousers, the tough guys among them gathered sugar canes.  Later on they would gather the sugarcanes together, tie them up and play games among themselves to break them in two.  The Jews did not have much to do with them.  Jews dealt in commerce mostly.  Our street was wide or it seemed that way to me from a child’s perspective.  The side streets were narrow.  The floors were cobblestone or dirt.  There were very, very few cars.  Transportation was mostly done by horse carriages.  Horses would poop in the streets.  We would gather the horse dung and dry it under the sun.  This was called dried horse dung.  This dried horse dung was burned in stoves afterwards.