Lecture Summaries: 14 December, 2005

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Lucjan Turkowski's Account of Traditional Rural Life in 1940s Palestine
a lecture by
Carol Palmer

Between 1943 and 1947, Lucjan Turkowski (1905-1976), an exile serving in General Anders’ Second Polish Corps, found himself stationed in Jerusalem. Originally trained as an ethnographer, he devoted his free time to recording the lives and material culture of Palestinian villagers, the fellaheen, in words and through sketches of artefacts. His aim was to compile a comprehensive book on Peasant Material Culture in the Judaean Hills. In this endeavour he was greatly assisted by Heleny Roumman, a Russian-speaking teacher from Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, and her family. Turkowski was completely new to the Mediterranean environment, Arabic language and culture, and everything fascinated him. He recorded the men ploughing their fields, women’s gardens, olive orchards, shepherds and their flocks, and the constant cycle of work required to keep a store of food, among other things. Very little escaped comment: from weaving horse hair to making flour sieves to the long-term impact of changes in Ottoman land tenure and new crops that were entering the market due to the influence of European-Jewish settlers.

Turkowski never completed his book. Neither could he return to his native Lithuania (part of Poland at the outbreak of war in 1939) and, in common with many Polish exiles who served in General Anders’ army during WWII, he came to the UK. From 1949 onwards, he earned his living in London doing office work and lecturing on a part-time basis for the Polish University Abroad (PUNO), where he was re-united with his former mentor, Professor Cezaria Jadrzejowicz (formerly Ehrenkreutz), from Stefan Batory University in Vilnius.

During the 1960s, the Palestine Exploration Fund was contacted to see if they could offer advice on publishing a manuscript that Turkowski had already then been working on for many years. The first chapter on ‘Peasant agriculture in the Judaean Hills’ was translated and published in two parts in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly in 1969. In 1976, after Turkowski’s death, several more chapters were passed on to the PEF, together with a mass of photocopied notes, references and illustrations. Building on the labours of previous scholars, both around Turkowski’s circle and at the PEF, his work is finally being brought to publication with the help of Ivona Lloyd-Jones from the PEF, assisting with additional Polish translations; Nigel Hepper, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who is contributing numerous plant drawings to illustrate the text; and Felicity Cobbing, assisting with further illustrations from the PEF archive.

Carol Palmer, who acts as general editor for the manuscript, is currently a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Sheffield University and previously held the Council for British Research in the Levant Postdoctoral Fellowship at Leicester University (1999-2002) Her research interests are in rural communities of the southern Levant in their environmental and social context, modern plant ecology, and archaeobotany.

Last modified 24 November, 2005