Life-Giving Stories, Fermented Memories
AYLİN VARTANYAN
I mostly imagined my grandmother Koharig’s childhood and youth through the fragments of a life she spent mostly on Kınalıada—a life whose details I barely knew. Born and raised on the island, and married off from there as a “local” island woman, her presence added value to my own family’s more seasonal, summer-only connection to the island. It was a story I enjoyed telling in my youth. As I grew older, and as the unspoken stories at home grew richer in texture, perhaps a few additions were made to the family history of my grandmother from Kayseri—but the gaps were never really filled.
My grandmother was a talkative, extroverted woman. In fact, she often crossed boundaries, meddled in others' affairs, and stirred up trouble. She had a story about everyone she knew—except when it came to her own family history. Then, she said nothing. And we didn’t ask.
What I remember most vividly about my grandma Koharig is her restlessness and her extraordinary talent for preparing food. She could bring together whatever was available at home and make a delicious meal. She gave meaning to her life by constantly cooking and feeding her loved ones (sometimes forcefully). Maybe that was her way of telling the family stories she couldn't put into words. One of her greatest skills was making pickles and jam. I’m sure many of us remember the colorful jars of various shapes and sizes lined up in our grandparents’ cupboards, waiting for their turn. The labor and devotion behind those jars only became clear to me years later—belatedly—when I decided to try my hand at making pickles and compote during the pandemic. With my grandmother’s voice in my ears and her plump, skillful hands before my eyes, I made my first jar of pickles. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to understand your elders. What I was preparing wasn’t just food. Through the act of pickling, I was bringing to life stories buried in a silence, in a memory, in an entire era. I suddenly realized: our grandmothers preserved many of the things they didn’t say in those jars. They left us recipes instead of words. They served unwritten histories at the table. They transformed absence into jam, anxiety into salt.
In 1986, Ursula K. Le Guin, in her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, opened a critical window onto the notion of the hero in literature. Instead of heroic narratives that often devolve into destructive power over time, she proposed carrier narratives. She reminded us that the first cultural tool wasn’t a weapon for killing, but a bag used to carry and preserve. This view, supported by anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher, places survival, nourishment, and transformation at the center of narrative.
In place of what Le Guin called “killer stories”—linear narratives that resolve a crisis through the destruction of someone—she proposed stories that carry life, offer care instead of conflict, and transformation instead of an end. These stories aren’t told; they’re carried. They’re passed silently in jars, in bags. Shaped by the hands of elders, they appear in jam jars, in pickle crocks. The jar, like Le Guin’s carrier bag, becomes a vessel for story.
Fermentation is not just a method of preservation—it’s a practice of resistance, healing, and transformation. Making pickles or jam has been a survival strategy for women who’ve endured war, exile, and poverty. It’s not only about recipes: intuition, patience, rhythm, and care are passed on through these acts. As Sandor Elix Katz notes, the Latin root fervere refers to boiling, overflowing, rising. It is a quiet transformation beneath the surface—an invisible labor of bacteria and fungi, but also of memory. In this way, jars become a kind of time capsule. Everything placed inside them changes identity. It sours, sweetens, and gains texture. But it always transforms. Just like human stories shaped by sorrow—never reducible to a single identity. That’s why pickling is a way of survival. Not only physical survival, but emotional, cultural, even ethical survival.
I will never fully know what pain my grandmother Koharig witnessed. What she lived through, what she silenced, what she buried inside herself, what she chose not to tell—most of it remained unspoken. And yet the weight of those unknown stories one day surfaced in my own body, in a moment I didn’t expect. It was as if the wisdom she developed in hard times—to feed her family, to hold things together, to fit life into a pot of food—rose up from within me, from a place with no name. As Talin Suciyan once wrote in this column , many of our grandmothers lived like “angels of history”—silent witnesses to catastrophe, unable to speak, unable to tell. Maybe their recipes and handwork took the place of the stories they couldn’t convey. Like a quiet response to pain: by fermenting, by transforming, by trying to make it into healing. That’s why—even if I don’t know her story—I still meet my grandmother. In every difficult moment, she appears, not in form, but as a resonance inside me. A part of her response to pain still lives on in me. Healing is sometimes not something spoken, but something repeated. Even what we’ve kept silent can one day emerge from within. Just like trauma can be passed down, so can resilience.
