Lesnik

The most commonly used Serbian word for forest is "šuma". I love this word. Serbian word "šum" means rustling, which is the sound of deciduous forests. This makes forest "the shushing place". 

But this is not the only Serbian word for forest... 

Another word used for forest, but more specifically for mountain forest, and mountain in general is "gora". Like this one on Mt Tara:

I talked about this word a lot when I talked about words for sun, fire and warmth in Serbian and Irish languages

Yet another word used for forest is "dubrava". This word which means "oak forest" comes from Proto-Slavic root "*dǫbъ" (oak). This is a very common toponym found all over Central Europe wherever Slavs live or have once lived...

Oak was the holy tree of the Slavs. It is still considered a holy tree in Serbia, where people in villages still hold masses under ancient oaks called "zapis", like this one from South Eastern Serbia, also marked with a "Celtic" :) cross...

The holy status of oaks can be seen from the fact that when a young oak is cut in Serbia to be used for Yule log, it is addressed and treated as living god...

I talked about Serbian Yule log rituals in my post "Badnjak".

To Serbs, and other Slavs, oak was an extremely important tree. Its hard, durable, water resistant wood was used for building houses, boats, kitchen utensils, tools, furniture, carts...You could say that in the past, Slavic culture was built around oak...

I talked about this in my post "Oaks".

Balkans Slavs also ate acorns until the mid 20th c. Most lowland people only during "hungry years", but some mountain populations regularly. Forests of sweet acorn oaks called "sladun" (sweat oak) "medun" (honey oak) were planted and maintained on village boundaries...

These "sacred" oak forests, cultivated as a source of acorns, for people and pigs, were called "gaj" (cultivated forest), "zabran" (forbidden forest), "lug" (light forest, as oak forests are very airy and bright) and "zabel, zabela"... 

I talked about these cultivated forests in my post "Pelasgos".

Knowing the importance oak held in Serbian culture, I was surprised to discover that one other tree was maybe venerated even more: hazel. 

When village holy oak suddenly died, people planted hazel in its place and prayed to it for protection. Why? 

More about Serbian hazel lore can be found in my post "Hazel".

Well, the last word for forest used in Serbia is: "les" or "lijes". This is a Slavic wide word, found in all Slavic languages. Now interestingly, the word for hazel in Slavic languages is "leska". Now this can mean that "leska" literally just means "tree", or that "les" literally just means "hazels"...You will see why this confusion is very important...

And this handsome guy is Lesnik, Leshy, Leśniczy, Lasowik...a tutelary deity of the forests in Slavic mythology. 

His name basically means "Of the forest"...Except this depiction of Lesnik from 1906 is wrong...It depicts him in a wrong forest...Fir, Pine forest...Not hazel forest...

In Slavic languages "bor" means pine but also a conifer forest...So the forest spirit on the picture above should better be called by his other name: Boruta, Borowy, Боровой (of conifer forest) or even Svyatobor (Holy pine, holy forest) also known as Svyatibog (Holy god)...Interestingly "Bor" is in Serbian also used with the meaning "god", instead of "bog", like in phrases "Bora mi" (instead of Boga mi, meaning May god be my witness)...

Now here is the interesting bit :) 

Few years ago I wrote a post about post ice age floral repopulation of Europe. 

In it I talked about how different tree species migrated back into Europe at different times. 

At the end of the Ice Age, the only trees left in Europe were conifers...

At that time, fir, conifer meant tree, as there were no other trees, and it meant forest, as the only forest left were fir, conifer forests...By the way did you know that "forest" comes from Proto-Germanic *furhiþą (forest, wooded country), from Proto-Germanic *furhō (fir, pine).

Now add to Germanic "fir" (fir, conifer, forest) Slavic "bor" (pine, conifer forest, forest spirit, god)...

How old is this linguistic and cultural root? Could it be that this comes to us from the time when the only trees left around were fir, pine, conifers? From about 12000 years ago? 

Interestingly, after the weather got warmer, the first trees that really moved in, in a big way, and took over were birches...That must have been some site...Dark fir forests and white birch forests...It still is...

But then in the yet warmer early Boreal period (7000 - 5500 BC) hazel and pine expanded into the birch woodlands to such a degree that palynologists refer to the resulting ecology as the hazel-pine forest. Now this is interesting...

We still have fir forests and now pine forests are joining them. 

But hazel forest are taking over, to the point when hazel became dominant tree species in Europe...

Is this when "bor" (pine, tree, conifer forest, forest,  Borovoi-forest spirit) became "les" (hazel, tree, deciduous forest, forest, Lesnik-forest spirit)?

Is this the time when the confusion between les (hazel, tree) and les (forest) was created in Slavic languages? About 7000 years ago?

This was all happening before first Oak (dub) even bothered looking up north...But when they did finally decide to move up north, they truly took over...The age of oaks began...

Now if we look at the chronology, we have Fir (Jela), Birch (Breza), Pine (Bor), Hazel (Les-ka) then Oak (Dub)...All Slavic holy trees...All very difficult trees to spread by themselves because of big heavy nuts, acorns, cones... All edible...

Now in my post about post ice age floral repopulation of Europe I asked whether people helped oaks to move up north after the last Ice age? They just spread too quickly...And we know that people used acorns as food...They are very nutritious and very easy to store. I talked about human consumption of acorns in the posts linked from this page. But did they help fir, birch, pine, hazel too? 

Was this Garden of Eden, the endless forest of edible trees and berries full of wild animals, birds, fish...planted by men or god? Or both? I talked about this in my post "Christmas trees from Garden of Eden"

To be devil's advocate, I tried to think if the links fir-tree-forest-forest god, oak-tree-forest, hazel-tree-forest-forest god could have been forged in recent time too. And the two out of three of these links could:

1. fir-tree-forest-forest god could have been forged in Scandinavia and Northern Russia where fir is still the predominant tree species. Considering that only Slavs have the forest spirit, the link was probably forged by them and then transmitted to their Germanic neighbours

2. oak-tree-forest could have been forged in vast oak forests of Central Europe by Central European Slavs

But the link hazel-tree-forest-forest god, could only have been forged at the time when hazel forests covered most of Europe...And the last time that was the case was during early Boreal period (7000 - 5500 BC)...

Not all salts were made equal

Which salt should you use for salting meat? This seems like a strange question, but as you will see, when it comes to curing meat and fish, not all salts were made equal. 

In my post "Fulacht fiadh - salt extraction facility" I mentioned an article "Extracting Salt from Distichlis spicata (seashore saltgrass): Continued Investigations into Methods of. Salt Extraction and Salt Utilization in Prehistoric California". In it you can read that:

Many California tribes extracted salt from plants.

Various plants such as Distichlis spicata (seashore saltgrass), Petasites frigidus (sweet coltsfoot), Umbelliferae (Celery) were burned to create salty ashes which were then used as salt.
In some regions salt grass was burned on a grating of hardwood sticks which was laid over a pit full of hot coals. The salty sap oozed out of the plants and dropped on the coals, forming lumps which were extracted from ashes after the pit was cooled.
 Another way of extracting salt from salt grass was by drying it on flat rocks and pounding it in mortar holes. The crushed bits were then winnowed using a circular tray which separated the salt from the grass. The resulting salt was then dampened and pressed into balls. The balls were broken as needed for use.
In some cases, the salty plants were were eaten raw.

Sometimes non saline grass was soaked in brackish water and then burned.

But this article contains another passage that is very very interesting indeed:

"Native groups in California extracted salt from salt springs, saline soil, rock salt, and saline and nonsaline plants. Salt was so valued by Native Californians that it was the number one trade item. All native American tribes from California either supplied or received salt from other groups, and 11 of the groups both supplied and received salt from different sources. For example, the Western Mono supplied rock salt and the TuleKaweah Yokuts supplied salt from salt grass to the Eastern Mono... "

This is very strange. Why would people exchange rock salt for grass salt and the the other way round? Salt is salt right? Wrong. Native Americans extracted "salt" from various green leaf plants. One of them belongs to the Umbelliferae family, commonly known as the celery, family. Plants belonging to celery family are super rich in sodium nitrates. And sodium nitrates in the meat get converted in sodium nitrites which kill one of the nastiest bacteria that can spoil the meat "C. botulinum" which causes botulism, potentially fatal illness.

The dehydrating and oxygen-depriving effect of salt (sodium chloride) in the wet or dry cure is effective against most of bacteria including Salmonella and E. coli. But salt can't kill C. botulinum. As a matter of fact, C. botulinum (or botulism) thrives in the absence of oxygen, so as the moisture (and dissolved oxygen) are drawn out of the meat by the salt, the dehydrated meat becomes an attractive environment to anaerobic bacteria like botulism.


Nitrates are converted in the food to nitrites. The nitrites are what controls the growth of botulism, by inhibiting certain metabolic processes of the bacteria.

All fruits and vegetables contain nitrates, and some contain significant amounts:

celery (all parts including the juice and the seeds)
beets (especially the beetroot)
carrots
leafy greens like spinach, chard and beet leaves

Ash produced from these plants will contain high level of nitrates. If plants were first soaked in salty water and then burned, the resulting salty ashes will contain both sodium chloride (salt) and sodium nitrate. This type of "salt grass" salt would have much better preservative effects if used as part of the smoking process than pure sea or rock salt, which is almost pure sodium chloride. 

However even just using the above nitrate rich plants in a wet brine will protect from botulism on top of providing flavor to the meat. This is the equivalent of using Prague Powder #1 curing salt, the most commonly used curing salt which contains 6.25% sodium nitrite and 93.75% table salt. 


Indeed, the addition of celery to the cure is what allows some ‘healthy’ commercially-cured meets to declare they are nitrate/nitrite-free, since what they add is celery. It’s not their problem that the celery provides nitrates.

Interesting don't you think? Is this why Native Americans extracted salt from "salt grasses" even though they were also able to extract it from brine and sea water and rock salt? And why they traded rock and sea salt for salt extracted from plants? Did they, although probably not knowing why, realize that salt extracted from plants was much better meat and fish preservative than rock, brine or sea salt?

I believe so. 

But what about the ancient Irish? Is it possible that they also, unwittingly, used nitrate rich salt extracted from "salt grass" to cure their meat and fish? I believe so. 

Celery (Apium graveolens), which we have seen is super rich in nitrates, has been cultivated as a vegetable since antiquity. But originally it was a wild plant which originally grew in salty marshlands. The original Wild Celery (Apium graveolens) is a plant of mainly coastal ground growing in salt-marshes or brackish ditches, by sea walls or streams – but it is rarely found inland.

It is quite possible that the ancient Irish, like the native Americans extracted salt from this plant. They definitely knew that the plant tasted salty. They could have burned the plant, and then added the ashes to the brine made in fulacht fiadh either during the salt extraction or during the meat and fish brining process. They could have also boiled chopped fresh leaves and stalks in a pot, using either charcoal piled next to the pot or fire heated stones dropped into it. Boiling extracts nitrates from the plant into the water. Cooled down nitrate rich celery soup could then be added to the brine. Brine enriched in such way would be would have proven to be much better meat and fish preservative to ordinary brine, made with sea salt.

Fulacht fiadh - acorn leaching pit?

I finished my post in which I presented all the pros (none) and cons (many) on the subject "Fulacht fiadh - a cooking pit?" with this paragraph:

"So I think that we can safely say that fulachta fiadh were not used in the way the mainstream archaeology suggest they were used:  for cooking large amounts of meat in troughs full of water heated by hot stones. The Bronze Age people who built fulachta fiadh had much more efficient ways of cooking large quantities of meat at their disposal." 

But what about the troughs? Every fulachta fiadh had a trough, so they must have been used for something. But if not for cooking, what were they used for?

In my next few posts I will like to propose what the troughs could have been used for. 

In this post I would like to propose that one of the possible efficient (very important) uses of the Fulacht fiadh's troughs could have been acorn leaching. 


In my two posts about Irish bullaun stones: "bullaun stones" and "new material about bullaun stones" I presented my theory that Bullaun stones from Ireland and the similar stones with large deep cup marks, were made to be used as mortars for grinding probably originally acorns, and then wild grain, grain, tubers and even ore...

These articles are part of the series of articles about the human use of acorns as food through history, in which I presented the evidence that acorns were a staple human starch food since Paleolithic times. 

You can find these articles here:

"Oaks", "Acorns in archaeology", "How did oaks repopulate Europe", "Eating acorns", "Christmas trees from garden of Eden", "Acorns in ancient texts". 

But in order to eat acorns, they first have to be leached. 

So what is acorn leaching?

There were two distinct types of oaks and acorns:

The white oaks whose acorns mature in 6 months and taste sweet or slightly bitter; The inside of the acorn shell is hairless. The bark is light in colour, gray to light gray. The leaves mostly lack a bristle on their lobe tips, which are usually rounded.

The red and black oaks whose acorns mature in 18 months and taste bitter to very bitter. The inside of the acorn's shell can be hairless but is in most cases woolly. The bark darker in colour. Its leaves typically have sharp lobe tips, with bristles at the lobe tip.

The acorn bitterness is caused by tannin or tanic acid. The concentration of tannin varies from species to species. This is why acorns from some oaks can be eaten raw and some are so bitter that they are inedible unless the tannins are removed. This process of removing tannins from acorns is called leaching. The tannins leached out of the acorns "tan", color the water.  

These are the same tannins used in tanning leather...

Now there are many different ways in which you can leach acorns.  In my post about eating acorns I wrote about the discovery and development of the acorn processing techniques and tools. 

Most acorn leaching techniques involved soaking acorns in water as water dissolves tannin.

There are basically two main types of water leaching: active and passive. 

Passive techniques involve storing whole shelled or unshelled acorns in baskets which are either submerged in running water or in waterlogged pits. Water slowly leaches tannin and eventually after several days, weeks (running water) or months, years (waterlogged pits) the acorns become edible. This technique requires very little work but takes time and ties the people to the location of the leaching baskets or pits. 
Active leaching involves basically shelling and crushing acorns  and then washing them in cold or hot water. This technique requires a lot of human work but is much quicker. Acorns leached like this become edible after several days to several hours depending on the temperature of the water used for leaching. So you could store your acorns dry into baskets, which is good if you want to carry them around from place to place, and then leach them when you need them. 

It is this second type of water leaching, the active leaching, that I believe the fulacht fiadh's troughs could have been used for. 

So to do this type of quick leaching you need to first shell the acorns. You can then crush them, because the smaller the pieces, the larger the contact surface area between the acorns and water, and the faster extraction of tannins, but you don't have to. Sometimes is more practical to leach acorns whole, as it is easier to store whole leached acorns than acorn mush....

Anyway, once the acorns are shelled (and optionally crushed) they can be leached by getting them into contact with water. This is done by submerging the acorns into a container containing fresh water in proportion 1 part acorn 3 parts water or more water. The acorns will sink to the bottom and start leaching straight away turning the water dark. You wait for a while for tannin to dissolve in water and then you pour out or scoop out the tanned water. You then pour in new fresh water and repeat the procedure until the water stops turning dark or until acorns stop tasting biter. Simple. If you can get large enough watertight containers near running water... Like large pots, pits, sand beds, or wood or stone lined troughs. 

The cold water leaching process takes from from 8 hours to several days depending on the tannin content in acorns. You can speed up the leaching process by using hot water. Acorns submerged in hot water leach a lot faster, taking only two to three hours to lose their bitterness. What is interesting is that from the ethnographic data collected among the Native American tribes, we know that they used heated stones for heating water for acorn leaching. The stones used for water heating were carefully chosen so that they don't fracture during the continuous heating and cooling. The best stones for this purpose are basalt stones as the don't shatter under thermal pressure. 

There are couple of things that need to know when using water for acorn leaching:

You have to use either only cold water or only hot water for leaching. If you mix cold and hot water or if you put acorns into cold water and then heat the water, the tannin in the acorns will be bound to the acorn meat permanently and you will not be able to remove it. The temperature of water with which you leach the acorns is very important. Heating water over 73 degrees Celsius precooks the starch in the acorn. Cold processing and low temperatures under 65 degrees Celsius  does not cook the starch. Acorn meal that was leached in cold water thickens when cooked, hot-water leached acorn meal does not thicken when cooked.  Also, when you leach the acorns in very hot water you also boil off the oil with the tannins, reducing  acorn meal nutrition. So ideally you would want to leach acorns in water which is hot but not very hot. 

This brings me back to what I said about why I believed that pit meat boiling was extremely unlikely usage for fulacht fiadh. Fulacht fiadh have much larger surface area compared to their dept and "the heat loss due to evaporation of water from a surface of an open tank is totally dominant at higher water temperatures". What this means is that at boiling temperature, it becomes extremely difficult to keep the water in the shallow trough with the large surface boiling using heated stones for long enough to actually cook meat. But the heat loss trough the surface is much smaller on lower temperatures and these temperatures can be maintained relatively easily using heated stones. Which means that fulacht fiadh could be efficiently used for hot water acorn leaching. 

So how would the hot water acorn leaching be done in fulacht fiadh? First you would fill the trough with clean water. You would then heat the water using heated stones until it is hot but not boiling. You would then pour in whole or crashed acorns. You would occasionally add new heated stones to keep the water temperature high. You would also steer the water with a stick to help the leaching process. You would also from time to time scoop out some of the tanned hot water and replace it with some clean cold, followed by adding heated stones to keep the water hot. 

This leaching procedure is very efficient not just because we are using hot water, but also because we are using stones heated in ashes for heating the water. Every time we drop a heated stone into the trough, hot wood ash which was stuck to the surface of the stone gets washed off the stone and dissolved in water. And believe or not we know that in addition to using hot water to speed up the process of dissolving the tannin, some cultures also used wood ash to induce chemical reactions which transform tannic acid into harmless chemicals. Early ethnobotanist Huron Smith (1923, pg 66) documented the Menominee method of processing various oak acorn species: "The hulls were flailed off after parching, and the acorn was boiled till almost cooked. The water was then thrown away. Then to fresh water, two cups of wood ash were added. The acorns were put into a net and were pulled out of the water after boiling in this. The third time, they were simmered to clear them of lye water. Then they are ground into meal with mortar and pestle, then sifted in a birch-bark sifter."

So it seems that acorn leaching is one of the possible uses for fulchta fiadh. Well at least for those fulacha fiadh which were cut into bedrock or into a clay rich soil next to a clean streams. However, as I already said in my post "Fulacht fiadh - a cooking pit?", one of the key feature of the most fulacht fiadh sites is elevated soil acidity. Basically most fulacht fiadh were located in marshy boggy areas where a hole dug into the ground would quickly fill with water. Acidic marshy water. A very very bad water for cooking food. And a very very bad water for leaching (extracting acid from) acorns. So even though fulachta fiadh could functionally have been efficiently used for acorn leaching, only the ones not located in marshy pit bogs could in reality have been used for this purpose. 

I will continue exploring the possible uses of fulachta fiadh in my next few posts.