This painting story is about the animals which helps us to carry their herbs in the hot summer day July. They call "Sam" to the blonde one and "Donna" to the brunet one.
This painting tells the story of two animals forced to work in the sweltering heat of summer. In the image, two oxen are visible. These oxen were used to pull a sledge — a vehicle with its front end hitched to the oxen and its back end resting on two wheels, used by villagers to haul hay, goods, and all manner of loads. One of the oxen in the painting is named "Sam," and the other takes its name from Donna, the dark-haired character from the same series.(Dallas 80's)
From a young age, my father, my mother, and I began spending summers in our village in Ordu. As a family, we would help my grandfather with his seasonal work — cutting, drying, and collecting hay. While my father worked in the fields, my mother spent the entire day cooking and tending to the house. At certain hours, when my grandfather and father came in exhausted and thirsty, she would bring their meals out to them so they could keep going. I, on the other hand, watched all of this from the outside, like a spectator — and sometimes, out of sheer boredom, I would follow my father out to the fields.
Through this whole effort, we collected the hay that would feed the animals through winter — cut, dried, and gathered from our own plots scattered across different parts of the village. Livestock farming normally involves buying feed from outside, but in the Black Sea region, this is rare. The land there is green everywhere; grass seems to grow out of the very rocks, ready for animals to graze on. And once you start spending money on feed, the whole enterprise stops being profitable.
So the hay-gathering work of the Black Sea villager is, in its own way, a remarkably shrewd calculation — keeping livestock viable without the burden of feed costs.
But doing all of this in the summer heat is anything but easy. Starting at four-thirty in the morning to avoid the worst of the sun, the whole operation is grueling — for the people and for the oxen alike.
Things never go according to plan, and somehow the heat always catches up with you. Because making multiple trips in the heat is so difficult, the oxen are forced to carry far more than they can comfortably bear. On top of that, their sweaty, never-cleaned bodies would attract an unimaginable number of flies. So there they were — physically strained to their limits and in pain as their blood was drawn — carrying, in every sense of the phrase, the weight of the world.
The only moments these animals got a break were when they stopped to drink water. Whenever the path led past a water source, they were allowed to drink. To keep the oxen from wandering off while hitched to the sledge, they were bound at the head with a wooden piece called a "zerve," carved from wood to fit their necks. Forced to drink in this deeply uncomfortable position — zerves still on — they would sometimes snap them clean in two.
At moments like that, someone had to stand in front of them to make sure they neither broke the zerve nor damaged the sledge. Sometimes that someone was me. Those moments stayed with me. I would stand there in front of an ox, my small body dwarfed by its size, watching its struggle to drink — half afraid, half overwhelmed with pity.
This painting brings back exactly that moment for me. The moment an ox lunges forward, its eyes bulging as if they might burst from their sockets. The suffering of those animals must have never truly left me, because here I am, years later, finding that memory again.
I couldn't fully understand it back then, but those moments left something in me. And now, looking at this painting, they seem to say something different. These animals — grand enough to carry the names of glamorous Dallas characters — lived lives marked by a quiet, relentless hardship. And somehow, that doesn't feel so far from our own modern lives: existing in spaces we call comfortable, even luxurious, while still waking up every morning to work we never chose, and still finding ways to feel like we're someone.
Village or city — the rules of the game don't change.