A 10-year-old boy calls for the dawn Muslim prayer in a village in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. The people who hear the call know what’s coming next: a day of hard work harvesting the most expensive spice in the world.
Older women make their way out of Askaoun village and its mud-brick homes before the Sun rises. They’re headed to fields of purple saffron flowers. One by one, they’ll pull out the flowers’ thread-like crimson stigmas.
“Isn’t the flower just calling to be picked? Look at it, it gives itself to your hand,” says villager Biya Tamir. The women’s bent backs ache. Their hands are blistered by the morning cold. But they sing and chat as they work.
The saffron flower thrives in only a few places on Earth. Most saffron comes from Iran. But Morocco is among the world’s top five saffron producers. The saffron plants bloom for only two weeks a year. The flowers each contain three crimson threads called stigmas. They become useless if they blossom. So the women must work quickly and steadily.
Every step of saffron harvesting is done by hand. The intense labor gives saffron its nickname: “red gold.” People have valued saffron for a long time. Persians used it to make paint for cave art and wove the threads into royal rugs. Romans used the spice to make eyeshadow and to dye fabric and leather.
Few crops can thrive in the dry soil of the lower Atlas mountain range. The village depends on saffron to survive. But the harvesters don’t make big money on the precious spice. The people who sell it around the world get the wealth.
Bad weather can mean serious trouble for the harvesters. This year, rain was irregular, snow was scarce, and the cold season didn’t last long enough. Saffron harvesters are gathering just half of what they harvested last year.
After picking, the women sit at tables pulling the stigmas from flowers. They talk about how the hard work makes their bodies hurt. But then their talk is interrupted by singing heard in a nearby house.
“The saffron season is hard, but it is still a time for us to forget our sorrows,” says Khadija Safieddine. “We come together and have a good time, and for that alone we love the saffron.”
Everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man. — Ecclesiastes 3:13
