Ovens, Hearths and Firins

Still working hard to get through the 2004 material – should be done tomorrow. Things are slower as I take segments of the day to work on my oven/hearth project and the community archaeology project. Burcu and I continue to visit local villages interviewing people about their ideas about archaeology and their uses of clay. We have learned a great deal about making and using ovens and hearths – and about cooking in general.

We’ve seen about 10 different ovens, hearths, and tandirs (breadoven). Everyone seems to have their own way of making it. One thing I noticed is that our friend Saliha, who lives in Kücükköy has an oven and hearth similar to her mother’s, who lives in Abdatolu. This made me wonder if the variation we see in ovens and hearths is due to the knowledge women pass from one generation to the next, learning from their mother. That may account for the variation we have seen in the local villages and it may have something to do with the production practices at Çatalhöyük.

We talked to one women (Azize) who brought the clay from her oven all the way from Antalya. Other women – most of them – get the clay and plaster material locally. We went to visit some of the locations where they get their clay and Burcu collected samples. I’ve been asking a lot questions about which foods are cooked in the hearth and which in the oven. I’m trying to understand the difference between the bread oven (tandir), the hearth (ocak) and an upright oven (firin). Some women have all of these and use a different fire installation to cook different foods or use one of them in the winter and the other(s) in the warmer months.

It’s been fantastic to learn about how the ovens are made, who makes them (mostly women, (but in one village the men make the ovens), and how they are destroyed, repaired, replastered, and rebuilt. This is incredibly helpful for our work at Çatalhöyük since it can help us to understand the ovens and hearths we find on site. This, in turn, helps us understand the cooking practices. There are no clay ball used in contemporary local villages, but there are clay ovens!
Here’s a photo of one of the oven-hearth combos we saw. This is Hacer’s oven – in Kücükköy. The tandir (bread oven) is the large circular part of the fire installation and the open air hearth (toward the front of the photo) is used for making most other food.


One of the best parts of all of this is meeting these fantastic women and hearing about their lives and the pride they take in feeding their family. The wonderful food they give us from these ovens during our visits is a special treat. It’s absolutely true what they say ….there is nothing like Turkish hospitality.