More caviar, please
And other afterthoughts

June 24, 2005
iranian.com

Just as I thought I was done with ruminations of a tokhmi kind, up pops one Fathali Khan with some pertinent observations about the etymology of khaviar [Kneading a meaning]. He -- like many who think everything whose origin cannot be nailed to Shah Abdolazim or Sabzi Miydan necessarily must have emanated from abroad -- asked if the term “khaviar” began by the Greeks. I can tease Fathali Khan because he is a first class tease.

Greek? Possible but unlikely. The word in Greek -- at least modern Greek, for roe is tarama and what we call khaviar is haviari in Greek (which is of the same origin as the Turkish haviyar). Besides there is no compelling reason why Persian would take a “k” sound of an alien caviar and turn it into “kh.” As for the Greeks, I also understand that there is a lake in Greece where the Greeks are developing caviar and apparently doing pretty well.

While I was researching the Greek angle, it dawned on me that -- hey -- the Russian ikra and the Turkish kuru, on which I reported earlier, are cousins, a few vowels removed: ikuru into ikra. That likelihood then opens the door to the thought that the word kuru/ikra must have originated in an area where Turkish and Russian were present: My bet is on the Tatar region of southern Russia.

You cannot really talk about southern Russia and not be impressed by the huge presence that Astrakhan has had on the development of sturgeon fisheries and khaviar production. In addition, the great number of branches of the mighty Volga River that empty into the Caspian below Astrakhan have been home to the spawning sturgeon since the beginning. The readers who have been with me for these recent forays into etymology of place-names can already smell something fishy about the origins of the name Astrakhan and how close it sounds to sturgeon [Anglo-French, Old French, Original Teutonic roots], the fish that produces caviar. Hmm?

We all know that unlike the Persians -- who invented everything -- the Russians copied a lot from others in particular the French and Germans, why not call a city after the sturgeon. The Encyclopaedia Iranica says that Tatar and Persian for this place-name is Hajji Tarkhan, Ajdarkhan, Hashtarkhan and Ashtarakhan.

I have weightier things to deal with than the origin of Astrakhan. I am still trying to see if I could have gone wrong on my assessment that khaviar comes from the fabric called khavjiz that I claimed was used to massage the roe. Now I start with accepting that kha part of khaviar could be a contraction of khayeh, which in dictionary Persian means egg, seed and testes. I now attach the “v” sound to the rest of the word and have to consider the meaning for “viar.”

Other than the salivating notion experienced by any pregnant woman, I submit the word must have been of the stem “var” like in “bar” that means to be laden with, pregnant, to have -- such as in barvar, kharvar and so on. Then the mahi khaviar is literally then “the fish that is loaded with roe.” Mystery solved, in a different way: We have two explanations for khaviar -- from the Encylopaedia Iranica, as corrected here in the form of (khay-var) and not khay-dar (!) and from khavjiz (khav-yar). I still like the second one as the tastier of the two.

I close with another discovery today. This one is truly a slap at the inept stewards of Iran’s policy and their “researchers” who have failed year after year to turn up any probative evidence of the claim that Iran and USSR had joint sovereignty over the Caspian Sea. This passage is from “The Pageant of Persia” by Henry Filmer (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co. 1936 (page 324):

The importance of the Caspian Fisheries to Russia arises from the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the life-history of the sturgeon, the most important fish inhabiting those [Caspian] waters. Source of the rich caviar, the sturgeon, although common to the Caspian generally, are accustomed, so far as concerns its southern waters, to seek a retreat in the Persian rivers emptying into the Sea, for the purpose of laying their eggs at periodic intervals.

The newly born sturgeon subsequently proceed out to Sea and, upon reaching maturity after some eleven years, return to the Persian rivers to deposit their eggs in the endless cycle of sturgeon history. Although born in Persian waters, the sturgeon, under such rules of international law as govern the lives of fishes, possess a mixed Soviet-Persian nationality by virtue of the permanent residence established in waters over which the two countries jointly exercise sovereignty.

About
Guive Mirfendereski is VP and GC at Virtual Telemetry Corporation since 2004 and is the artisan doing business as Guy vanDeresk (trapworks.com). Born in Tehran in 1952, he is a graduate of Georgetown University's College of Arts and Sciences (BA), Tufts University's Fletcher School (PhD, MALD, MA) and Boston College Law School (JD). He is the author of  A Diplomatic History of the Caspian Sea (2001) >>> Features in iranian.com