Vavilov’s fascination with the history of the apple is still alive today as academics, enthusiasts and conservationists all try to understand the apple’s convoluted story and its relevance in the modern world.

BBC news kicked off with a slideshow dedicated to Kazakhstan’s wild apples last Monday.

This picture shows some of the surviving wild apple forests in the Tien Shan mountains of southern Kazakhstan, but you’ll have to visit the BBC’s web site to see the rest and find out why they are in the news again.

Then yesterday Nick Saltmarsh published an article on the history of the apple on his blog The Tracing Paper, specifically making the connections between the far-off forests of Kyrgyzstan and his local apple varieties. Most of those local varieties will not be familiar even to local people, because suppliers such as supermarkets disdain to deal in them, but Saltmarsh gives some good tips about how to go about tasting the full range of apple diversity.

1916
Autumn

In essence, the Pamirs are, so to say, a natural laboratory, but this area is, of course, not a primary centre. It was only extreme need that had forced the population to escape into such a natural confinement. There the cultivated flora itself had in respect of its morphological properties a clearly secondary character. Over centuries and millennia peculiar forms developed in this truly natural laboratory, which indicates the enormous plasticity of the species. The most recent research has demonstrated that agriculture in the Pamirs can reach altitudes of up to 3900 m, where vegetables, potatoes and barley can be successfully grown. It is known that in Tibet, agriculture reaches its highest altitude, all the way up to 4600 metres.

The expeditions to the Pamirs had to a considerable extent determined the direction of future expeditions. The role of the mountainous area of southwestern Asia had become completely clear. The presence in the mountain areas of wild relatives in the form of wild barley, wild Aegilops, wild rye and wild lentils had demonstrated before our own eyes that there it was possible to solve the most fascinating and the most complicated problems of evolution.

The crops of wheat were mixed with spring rye, peas, chickling vetch and so-called bitter vetch. The crops were exclusively irrigated. The lack of rain caused an exceptional whiteness of the ripening bread grains. There is neither rust nor any mildew here. Indeed, much of the covered smut is washed off in the mountain brooks, where the grains are placed in a sieve under jets of water.

The discoveries of cultivated plants in the Pamirs exceeded all our expectations. Full understanding of these finds became feasible only as a result of much subsequent work — comparative studies of crops harvested, investigations in other countries and comparisons with the development of all the cultivated crops in the world. The essence of the genesis of this cultivated flora is, in brief, the following: mankind in its difficult struggle for existence within the densely populated areas of southwestern Asia, including Inner Asia, had long since been forced to settle at almost inaccessible altitudes. Saving themselves from oppression, the poor had fled to the mountains. The mountainous areas of southwestern Asia had, just like the mountains of Africa, the Cordilleras, the Central Asiatic highlands and alpine Caucasus, been settled thousands of years ago by agricultural populations. The conditions for existence were difficult. It was necessary to fight for every parcel of land. The fields in the Pamirs often measure only a few square metres; they have to be isolated behind stonewalls and then irrigated. All this requires a lot of work. However, fortunately, there is enough heat, light and water. Under the conditions of high altitude and isolation, remarkable and highly productive forms of plants were developed, which differed by early ripening, rapid growth and tolerance of low temperatures during the night, even during summertime.

The isolation promoted selection of forms not known on the lowlands, so-called recessives, typical representatives of which are, for instance, non-ligulate wheat and rye with simplified leaves. The mountains are the realm of barley, peculiar, high-altitude Asiatic peas and blue chickling vetch with small, dark seeds. Side by side with profoundly primitive forms, linking the cultivated varieties and the initial, wild forms, it is possible to see original results of inbreeding there in the form of the non-ligulate, recessive bread grains. All bears witness to a production here of entirely new and little known forms under conditions of a strange environment. The originality of this flora corroborated more and more the understanding of this territory as one of the centres for the formation of cultivated plants. For me, as a scientist, it became increasingly clear that it was necessary to penetrate deeper into southwestern Asia into Afghanistan, Chitral, Nuristan (formerly Kafiristan) and northwestern India.

1916
Autumn

About 100 km from Khorog, the agriculture in the valley of the Gunt river comes to a halt. The altitude there is about 3600 metres. There cattle are replaced by yaks. The yak endures the rarefied atmosphere very well and is indispensable for travelling through snowdrifts during winter. When it is necessary to proceed through obstacles of snow, the yaks push forward and make paths for the horses. It is also possible to ride yaks, and they serve as milk producers.

We found the highest crops grown along the upper course of the Gunt. At the mouth of the Dusukhdara river, the barley can barely ripen and is used as a green fodder for cattle. This is the limit of agricultural crops. Beyond begins the Pamirs themselves, an area of sparse, cattle-herding Kirghizian populations.

It could be said that a plant breeder and botanist have no business looking for new plants to cultivate among the mountains and deserts of Middle Asia, a region where the plateau of the Pamirs is one of the most characteristic natural areas.

In contrast to the classical geographical scheme of the European mountains, including the Caucasus, the mountains of Inner Asia are characterized by a totally different pattern as far as the distribution of precipitation is concerned. In the mountains of the Caucasus the amount of precipitation usually increases in relation to altitude. Precipitation in Inner Asia and also in Central Asia decreases the higher up one ascends. To his amazement a traveller finds himself there in an alpine desert or, at best, a semi-desert. The mean annual amount of precipitation according to data from the military posts in the Pamirs is 60 mm a year. So, what should an agronomist do in the Pamirs?

1916
Autumn

The agriculture is of a primitive nature. Besides simple wooden plows harnessed to a pair of oxen or cows, the Tajiks of the Pamirs know of no other implements. Often the plots to be sown are so small that there is no space for plowing. Then the soil is worked by hoes. To put the soil in a condition satisfactory for seeding, it is often necessary to start by collecting heaps of stones from the plot. The hay is, as a rule, stored on the roofs of the houses.

The villages are usually situated in small valleys on narrow riverine terraces and it is, in part, difficult to see where there is any space for crops. Only a few dozens of square metres are left for seeding. The villages are ordinarily very small and consist of only four to seven houses. Precipitation is extremely low and the crops are usually irrigated with water from mountain brooks. The irrigation ditches are very narrow and furrows conduct water to the entire surface of the fields. Not only level plots are cultivated, but also steep slopes. To reach such fields, winding paths have been made by the people. Rain and cloudbursts are very rare here and therefore erosion of the soil is minimal. In Darvaz the harvest is, in part, brought down from the fields on sleds. Oxen prevent the sleds from sliding down too fast. When the sleds can be released, the oxen walk down to the villages over the pebbly soil.

Larger villages lead a communal life. The threshing and winnowing of the grain is done by common labour. The threshing is done by the hoofs of oxen; thereafter the threshed grain is shovelled together and winnowed by the wind. It is stored in special small granaries built of stones, but also in pits in the ground. Such pits are lined with stones; large flat stones are placed on top of the grain and all is buried under soil.

Water is conducted from the ditches via wooden pipes to the water-driven mills typical of the Pamirs. The water sets small, flat millstones in motion. The agriculture is very poor and at the upper altitudinal limit it does not provide the essentials for the existence of the people. Towards spring all the bread is consumed and the search for roots and spring greens begins. However, in places the modest agriculture does yield enough for making a surplus of bread. The Kirghizes of the Pamirs, who mainly raise cattle, have none and in the autumn one can see caravans of Kirghizes in the valley of the Gunt going to the Tajiks for bread. In exchange for the bread the Kirghizes offer wool and skins of animals.

1916
Autumn

With respect to dialect, the inhabitants of Shugnan and Rushan differ from the people in Darvaz, who speak a purely Tajik language. This circumstance attracted my attention since in addition to the difference in language there were also some things concerning the appearance of the composition of the cultivated flora, used by the Pamiri Tajiks, which were different from what is common to the inhabitants of Darvaz and Kulyab. Rye is only grown by the Pamiri Tajiks and the epithets of rye are there completely different. It is called ‘loshak and the straw of the rye is named ‘kal’k', while in all of Persia, Afghanistan, India and Turkestan, rye is called ‘dzhoudar’ or `choudar’. According to information from [?Aginson], rye is also called `gandum dora’ in Afghanistan, which literally denotes ‘a plant that infests barley or wheat.‘

…

As far as nourishment in the form of grain is concerned, the Tajiks are at a ‘low level.’ According to a scheme set up by Mauritio and compiled on the basis of information from many countries, these are the following stages in the development of alimentation: [1] a kind of soup, prepared from boiled raw or roasted grain; [2] the stage of gruel, a concentrated type of soup; [3] the stage of baking flat cakes [without leavening]; [4] preparation of leavened bread from a mixture of grains; [5] the stage of black rye bread; and [6] the stage of white, wheaten bread. This is only an outline. Some of the initial stages of alimentation are, of course, common in Europe as well, but in general this outline of the progress of food preparation is probably correct.

The Tajiks are ‘little advanced’ according to this scale. The main food of the Pamiri is a soup made of peas, barley, wheat and millet. They make mainly flat cakes. The preparation of bread with yeast is entirely unknown. As already stated, the flat cakes are made from practically everything: millet, foxtail millet, peas, vetchling, barley, rye and wheat. A mash of a mixture of grains is also used, to which seeds of flax or safflower are often added. Meat is consumed only at feasts. The preferred meat is mutton. In this part of the agricultural Pamirs, cattle raising is little developed. Horned cattle increase towards the East. In the zone of mulberry trees, the bread called ‘tut-pikhe is used not only as a sweetmeat but also as a serious source of nourishment. Walnuts, almonds, or apricot pits and dried apricots are also included as important component of the diet.

I made the acquaintance of the Pamiri plant breeder, Abdul Nazarov, from Porshnev. This is a very intelligent man. Under suspicion because of illegal dealings with the Afghani, he was exiled by the Russians to the province of Saratov. The suspicion turned out to be groundless, but he profited from the journey to Russia and now he is the most educated chief in all of Shugnan. Through his Afghan wife from the left bank of the Pyandzh river he learned that near Kabul an unusually early-ripening wheat was grown, which ripened up to 20 days before the ordinary Pamiri wheat. With great difficulty, seeds of this wheat were obtained, which turned out, indeed, to be very early. Now it is grown all over the Pamirs under the name ‘dzhindam-dzhal’-dak,’ i.e. literally, ‘early-ripening wheat.’

Several kinds of wheat could be seen on the fields of Abdul Nazarov. He was able to characterize every kind. One furnished a good flour, another yielded many grains. In addition to wheat he had also obtained peas from Afghanistan, among which he noticed both black and white seeds. He planted them separately and now he had crops of pure white and pure black peas. I also discovered attempts at plant selection among other Tajik farmers. Once I watched the careful sorting of a sheaf with a mixture of rye and wheat. The wheat was carefully picked out for sowing the following year.

[S]uddenly a Kirghizian uprising occurred in Semirech’e and consequently the route to Mongolia via Turkestan was closed.

Only later did [Vavilov] tell his family and friends that his Krghizian guides had deserted him; that he had been attacked by a mob but somehow escaped from them on foot, only to be arrested by local officials. Once the local police released him, he was forced to shift his plans, journeying southeastward until he came to an ancient spur of the Silk Road. It was on that spur that he entered into the high, dry and lonesome land known as the Pamirs of Gorno-Badakshan late in the month of August of 1916. …

Somewhere before leaving the Kirghizians for the Tajiks, Vavilov befriended a man of enormous linguistic talent and girth, Khan Kil’dy Mirza-Bashi. Mirza-Bashi, a local Pasha, served not only as Nikolay’s interpreter, but as his mentor in learning the tricks of the trade with regard to back country travel, a venture that Nikolay frequently engaged in until the last three years of his life. The Pasha acquired six horses and two guides to accompany them in their journey across snow-covered mountain passes and wind-swept glaciers, but even these companions did not necessarily ensure him a safe passage.

…

It was my good fortune to follow Vavilov to where his early misfortune had led him, into the Pamiri highlands of Gorno-Badakshan where both crop diversity and linguistic diversity are startlingly apparent. This autonomous region is presently part of Tajikistan, and lies just north of Afghanistan on the edge of the towering Hindu Kush. It is a cold desert where highland farmers have long worked seeming miracles in getting water to trickle in canals along miles of ridges before it moistens the earth in their fields of mixed grains and legumes. Vavilov quickly recognized the Pamirs as a “a natural laboratory” for crop evolution, and returned there for extended stays on two additional expeditions, spending more time there than in any other region of peasant agriculture encountered in all of his travels.

A treasure of lasting value

It was there — in the verdant fields nestled within the Pamiri desert — that Vavilov began to take the meticulous field notes that have continued to inform other scientists to this day. In three of the steep valleys of the Pamirs, his recorded observations of local patterns of crop diversity are so precise in place and time that we can still use them as benchmarks for assessing changes in climate, crop diversity, farming practices, and food security.

While many have regarded Vavilov’s enduring achievement in the Pamirs to be the founding of the World Collection of Cultivated Plants later housed at VIR in St. Petersburg, we now recognize that his field notes are also a treasure of lasting value. That is not to dismiss the significance of his two hundred-some seed collections from the Pamirs, for they included several samples that were later used to successfully breed early-maturing wheats, chickpeas, lentils and mung beans, cultivars which are still feeding people to this day. Genes from his Tadzhisky 10 chickpea collection still feed Tajiks (“Tadzhiks” in Vavilov’s spelling) through a widely-used cultivar called Zimistrony. Several of his field collections of lentils were hybridized to create Tadzhik 95, another cultivar that has garnered praise from many farmers.

Yes, the physical, biological legacy left by Vavilov continues to buffer poor peasant families against food insecurity; and yet, his intellectual legacy is no less tangible. Vavilov’s carefully crafted field notes paint one of the few historic pictures detailed enough to allow a precise assessment of relative loss or persistence of crop diversity through time, in the very centers where these crops originated.

Extracted from Where our Food Comes From by Gary Paul Nabhan
and used with permission.

A. I. Ipat’ev, was a cousin of Nikolay and the Vavilov family historian. He remembered his cousin’s departure:

One clear summer day in 1916 an automobile, a great rarity then, pulled up to the house. Nikolai Ivanovich came up to me while I was sitting in the garden and greeted me. He was, as always, radiant and happy, only his appearance was unusual and strange. He was wearing a cream-colored summer suit, across his shoulders was a full pack, and on his head was the strangest thing of all, a white hat with a double brim, which he called a “hello-good-bye’’ hat. He got into the auto and drove off.

1916
Autumn

Let us return to the peoples of the Pamirs and the expedition itself. On the one hand it turned out to be much harder, but on the other hand to be much easier than expected. When back from Persia in the autumn of 1916, I intended as a matter of fact to go to Mongolia to collect plants; but suddenly a Kirghizian uprising occurred in Semirech’e and consequently the route to Mongolia via Turkestan was closed. For 2 months and perhaps even more, not even mail arrived in Semirech’e. When Cossacks were sent to suppress the revolt, the Kirghizes started to escape to Bukhara and Afghanistan and into the mountains, so that the ordinary and comparatively comfortable route to the Pamirs via Daraut-Kurgan from Skobelev into the Alai valley was occupied by them.

I had to choose between returning to Moscow or using a little known route through high passes, not situated near any villages. Such passes are difficult because of the possibilities for obstruction by snow in September and October. The governor of Fergana and the district commander in Kokand seriously urged us to return to Moscow. However, after consulting with Dmitry D. Bukinich, with whom I had travelled in Turkestan, I decided not to follow the advice of the governor. The first route along the Isfara river, along which Bukinich and I had advanced, turned out to be impractical. After walking almost to the pass, I became convinced that it was already filled with snow. The guides refused to conduct me through it. It was necessary to return and try another route. The local Kirghizes and Tajiks suggested a route over a glacier and along the Tutak river to the Karagushkhana. This route turned out to be completely impassable. The ice bridge, the usual kind of bridge at this locality, over which it was possible to cross the Ak-Su river, had collapsed. However, somehow I succeeded in making my way into the district of Karategin with the help of Kirghizian guides, alas losing part of the luggage. It was necessary to use horses and to walk on foot when travelling. One horse was adequate for the luggage at the start of the journey but at its end we needed three of them.

The route over the Demri-Shaurg glacier was difficult. Where possible we had to make our way along its edges since the centre was full of fissures; these made it hard for the horses to proceed and they had to be led around them. Three to four hours were required to advance 3-4 km. The glacier itself stretches 25-30 km; below the 15-km milestone, it is covered by a moraine of shale so that you know you are walking on a glacier only where there are large fissures or cracks. This was a difficult and peculiar landscape such as I had never seen before. The glacier of Demri-Shaurg is the source of the Tutak river and another small stream, originating from the melting glacier. The sources of these rivers were easy to see. Snow was already falling and closing some of the fissures in the glacier, making it difficult to follow this path. The passage over the pass was made on 18 September. This route is absolutely unsatisfactorily marked on the 10:1 verst military map, the only one existing for this area. Leveled roads or trails are not marked on the map. A road across the glacier would also be difficult to make. It is not more than 4 km from the village of Raut to the outskirts of the village of Zardalu, but this distance took us exactly 5 hours on very good horses.

During this journey the Bukharan official, attached to me by the Russian political agent in Bukhara as an aide and escort on all roads within the Bukharan domain, proved to be a great asset. Such assistance is customary in Buhkara for all travellers sent by government agencies. Although my mission had nothing to do with any government agencies, I had letters from the Moscow Agricultural Institute and from the Moscow Society of Investigators of Nature, which in particular proved to be impressive.

1916
Autumn

The third zone contains even more crops. Among the field crops there is much cotton although it is encountered to a minor extent within the second zone as well. … These annuals give a pitiful impression: 20-30 cm, with a pair of leaves and few capsules. It is hard to tell directly whether there is a special kind of cotton here. The Pamiri botanical kind of cotton is referred to Gossypium herbaceum L. and it reminds one very much of a Turkestan or Persian strain, a cotton with closed capsules and short fibres. The harvest of this cotton is insignificant but the Pamiri are forced to be satisfied with it. The Pamiri dress in homemade woollens but are in great need of cotton fibres [for thread]. In the Pamirs flax is not grown for the fibres, although there is no reason not to do so. There is also extremely little hemp. In some villages there are stands of hemp among the fields of cotton and along the fences. At first I thought that this hemp was used for twine. Later it became evident that the hemp was sown to obtain hashish, thus replacing here the cultivation of poppies, forbidden by the Russian border guard.

Sesame for oil is cultivated on a small scale within the third zone together with castor beans, usually among crops of cotton of a pure Persian type.

The third zone is also rich in trees. There are many mulberry trees. There are trees even in villages where there is no arable soil. The mulberries, together with some apricot trees here and there, appear to be the main sources of food. The paper mulberry plays an enormous role within the second zone and the upper portion of the third one. It replaces wheat and barley for which there is not space enough. The fruits of the mulberry tree are dried and ground and in that form they are used for consumption not only as sweets but also instead of bread. I brought samples of such mulberry bread, so-called ‘tut-pikht’, from the Pamirs. It is a little sweet but has great nutritional qualities, keeps for several months and does not require baking. ‘Uryuk,’ dried apricots, is also a food but is used more as a sweetmeat.

At 2000 metres altitude one begins to meet grapevines, the fruits of which usually do not ripen fully. This completes the composition of the cultivated flora in the Pamirs. There are no vegetable gardens.