From prehistory until the mechanical cultivation of the land, the agricultural economy went through various stages at a very slow pace.
Under Ottoman rule, the land was exploited according to a system which was in force throughout the Ottoman Empire. Serfs (doulopariki), living in rudimentary accommodation provided by the landowner, worked the large estates (γiftliks) under the watchful eye of overseers known as dragoumani. Other γiftliks followed the system of sharecropping, where tenant farmers rented the land and gave the owner a portion of their produce.
When Thrace was incorporated into the free Greek state, the Ottomans’ large estates were bought by wealthy Greeks. The Greek smallholders grew pulses, maize, sugarcane, sesame, flax, sorgo, tobacco, and, especially, cereals for their own needs. Although wheat and barley were the staple crops for centuries, the farmers were often unable to grow enough to meet the needs of their families, and so they exchanged other products for extra supplies.
In Evros prefecture, the distribution of land to the landless began in 1933. Much later on, there was a certain amount of reparcelling, accompanied by flood control, drainage, and irrigation work, which yielded new arable land for more profitable crops, such as beet, maize, and cotton.
Cultivation of the land - Cultivation of cereals
The first rains in October signal the start of sowing. The fields are dug over 2 or 3 times with a wooden plough (aletri) or an iron plough (papara). Reaping was done in July with sickles, and the reapers wore a kind of wooden glove (palamaria) on their left hand or long wooden thimbles (daktylithres) to protect their hand and to enable them to carry a larger number of cornstalks. The cut stalks were tied together to make sheaves (dematia), which were gathered together in stacks. The threshing was done with the adokana or doukana, a timber beam dragged around the threshing floor by animals. The constant movement of the beam would break up the corn. The workers used a wooden implement known as a sklavoura to collect the coarse straw and take it to the barn for storage. The rest ― grain and chaff ― was piled up and tossed into the air with a wooden pitchfork (lihnitiri). The wind carried off the chaff, and the grain fell to the ground. The grain was then sifted with a riddle (starodermono), transferred to sacks, and carried home. The unit of measurement for corn was the sniki (or the pnak on Samothraki).
Four snikia were equivalent to a kilo of grain, or enough to sow a field of 2,000 m2 (two stremmas or approximately half an acre). People would talk about a ‘one-kilo field’, rather than a ‘two-stremma field’, which was the official unit of measurement. On Samothraki, because most of the islanders raised livestock, the expression ‘a one-head fold’ was used as a unit for measuring a variable land area. The better the soil, the smaller the ‘fold’.
