“Americans don’t know about this,” the older woman whose family owns the liquor store near us, who I think is Turkish, told my wife. She pointed to a low, kind of scrubby looking plant that was coming up through a crack in the sidewalk in front of the store. “See that? That plant is delicious, but to an American, it’s just a weed.”
Indeed, we had the same plant in our own garden, and had been pulling it as a weed the whole time. Because our neighbor called our attention to it, we went looking online for information. The woman had called it purslane. We found recipes and botanical information. It is, indeed, a commonly-eaten plant in many parts of the world. Its habitat ranges throughout the middle east, and from India all through the Balkans and other parts of eastern Europe. It also grows through much of North America, though it’s not a native plant.
Purslane plants grow to be about a foot or so in diameter as they lay close to the ground, with juicy, red-tinged vines and succulent green leaves smaller than a dime and teardrop-shaped. It blooms in the morning – little quarter-inch yellow flowers pop up in the elbows of the vines – and then the blooms close by the afternoon.
Morning is also the best time to pick it; you take the whole plant right out of the ground, root and all. Purslane produces oxalic and malic acids overnight, with its pores closed to keep in moisture, then converts those acids to sugar and metabolizes that sugar through the day. Pick it first thing in the morning, and the acid gives the plants a lemony tang. Cut them up, stems and all, and either toss them into a salad raw or cook them for stews and other uses. On the streets of Istanbul, it’s sold wrapped in puff pastry as a street food.
Purslane is first known to have been in North America in the thirteenth century in Canada, which suggests that it may have been brought here by the Vikings, perhaps when Erik the Red first came to the shores of Labrador, perhaps brought either intentionally as a dependable food source – the plants are hardy and low-maintenance — or accidentally as seeds stuck in somebody’s boots or clothes or baggage.
But if the Vikings brought it to North America, how did they come to have it? It’s a desert-adapted plant growing in the opposite corner of Europe from them.
I found that the Byzantine Empire had employed Norsemen as elite mercenaries, some even working their way into the hierarchy of the Empire. I imagine Viking soldiers spending years campaigning in the southern Balkans, then going home carrying the seeds of purslane in their belongings, in the seams of their clothing, boots, or bedding. Perhaps those same warriors then made their way across the Atlantic to Labrador, where the tiny black seeds, barely discernable from grains of dark sand, finally came to rest and began sprouting on the low hillsides of eastern Canada.
Now purslane grows through cracks in the sidewalks, in gardens and fields all over this continent. In it I see a connection to lost Byzantium, which disappeared from the Earth in the first week of June in 1453, destroyed after standing for 1123 years by the Ottoman Turks. I’ve walked past clumps of purslane, or pulled it as a weed from my garden, oblivious to its history, every warm, bright day of my life.
It’s a consequence of having a name for a thing. That naming seems almost to change the physical shape of the thing, as well as what surrounds it. What was a “weed” as I tossed it into a lawn and leaf bag now connects to a world of knowledge I’d never considered. Learning about Byzantium itself has been the same sort of revelatory experience. The hook for that story also comes from learning a better name for the thing.
The people who lived within its borders didn’t call themselves “Byzantines.” That was applied to them only centuries after the Empire’s demise by historians trying to make a distinction the people themselves never made. If you had asked those people to identify themselves, they would have told you that they were Romans, right up until the day the Ottoman Emperor Muhammad II broke into the Sanctuary of Hagia Sophia on June the 4th, 1453 and destroyed the altar, the symbolic act ending the Empire.
In trying to better understand the nature of that society, those who study it have made it unrecognizable to the people who lived in it. By learning that one fact, I have become fascinated with the Byzantines and how their civilization has shaped the world we live in, from the seemingly insignificant things like purslane, through the answers to some long-standing questions I’ve had.
For instance, how is it that the Muslims seemed unstoppable and carried their holy war throughout the middle east and northern Africa to the Iberian Peninsula, where they ruled for centuries, yet they didn’t storm across Europe from east to west at the same time? The answer is plain to those who know the history of Byzantium. The Empire was the bulwark that saved western Europe so that it could become the cradle of modern western society.
It sparked the Renaissance as a center of learning throughout medieval times, and when it finally collapsed, scholars and artisans fled to Italy and fostered some of the great thinkers of succeeding generations. We owe much to these people, whom most of us never knew to be Romans, whose civilization fell a mere forty years, well within the living memory of the last of them, before Columbus (who some believe may have been a Byzantine himself) crossed the Atlantic to find a land that had already been touched indirectly by those latter-day Romans, it would seem, in the form of viny, succulent, tangy, little-known purslane.
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