Saturday morning at 5:30 I waited outside my apartment building, and was gradually joined by a few of my fellow American teachers, until the school van (on loan) pulled up and a man we had never met before gestured for the four of us to get in. We were on our way to a neighboring village to purchase and pick up a pig for a zabijacka.
Zabit means to kill in Slovak, and the zabijacka is essentially a pig slaughter. The tradition used to be ubiquitous in Slovakia, families would work together to take apart the pig they had jointly raised and would make sausage, smoked meat, etc to live off of during the winter. In recent times zabijacka is becoming rarer and mostly only happens in small towns and villages. The first time I encountered this procedure was in 2007 in Brehy, my grandpa’s village. By the time I arrived on the scene the process was well underway, the pig had already been cleaned and cleaved, and was hanging from a pulley system while internal organs simmered in a large vat nearby. I went, I saw, and I left about ten minutes later, not really sure what was going on or how much work the process entailed.
Our headmistress is very good about making sure we partake in any and all “Slovak” festivities, whether it be bike rides to gulas or pressing cabbage into sauerkraut. When she told us about this zabijacka (the pig is for her family, though friends were leading and mostly performing the operation) she suggested we bypass most of the gore, swing by sometime in the afternoon to see a sausage or two made, then join her for yet another special cabbage soup feast.
This time though I wanted to see the process from the very beginning. First of all, anything that involves an “alpine start” (though 5:30 is hardly “alpine”) or getting up before the sun to accomplish something just FEELS like an adventure. More importantly, I wanted to see the pig when it was still alive, and watch the transformation from the walking, animated creature I am familiar with to the inanimate, cellophane-wrapped slabs of meat I am also familiar with. I wanted to fill in those gray areas of the production process about which I am mostly clueless, and of course I wanted to participate in an inherently Slovak tradition that would probably be placed on an “endangered traditions list,” if such a list existed.
The three men—our driver Jano, his companion Camil, and the farmer—handled catching and killing the pig. In the predawn hours the panicked animal let out its final death-squeal, and immediately after being shot in the head (there wasn’t a gun—I thought it was a giant bolt but there was some kind of charge…) fell to the ground and begun to convulse and thrash around while the three men kneeled on it to gash its throat (allowing blood to drain out) and attempt to keep it down. A postmortem weighing marked the pig at around 150 kilos- which is a lot of pounds. The pig was then heaved into the trunk of the school van, and we made our way to the headmistress’s yard for the first stage of dismantling.
As I said before, in the few minutes between when the pigs mortal wound was inflicted and the time it was in fact lifeless and motionless, it did plenty of thrashing around in the muck and mud mixed with blood, water, and even its own excrement. When we arrived at processing plant number one (Helena’s yard) in the still gray light of dawn Vlado, Helena’s husband, had already prepared an outdoor fire to heat water for cleaning, some pallets which served as the OR table, an array of tools, and a token bottle of slivovica with a shot glass—it might be early, but such celebratory work requires at lest a shot or two. With large tin cups of warm water we rinsed as much dirt and debris off as possible, then the two Slovak men (Jano and Camil) begun shaving off the hair with metal horn-like tools. Heidi (another American) and I became like dental hygienists, or probably more appropriately assistants in the OR—following our respective “boss” around with a steady, but slow stream of hot water. After removing the hair and rinsing it as much as possible we blowtorched the pig to burn off any remaining hair, and also sterilize the body. I got to wield a torch myself, and I must admit I felt pretty accomplished.
After the outside of the pig was effectively cleaned we had to handle the inside. With freshly sharpened knives Jano made expert incisions with the ease and familiarity of someone who’s done the job a thousand times. Now, even though I was an English major in college I took an anatomy class in high school, and I retained much of the information. The body—human or otherwise—is in an incredible mechanism, and, for lack of better words, blows my mind! Heidi is pre-med and currently teaching biology, therefore she also had body parts on the brain; so as Jano sliced, grabbed, and moved innards around we oohed and aahed and did our best to identify anatomy—that was the heart (notice the increase flow in blood…), those are the lungs, and is that the pancreas, or stomach? We even brushed up on the functions each organ performed. The liver was absolutely beautiful—its rich red-brown color glistened as Jano pulled it out and tossed it into a bowl, lobes splayed out like the fins of a stingray. The morning was cold but heat radiated out of the recently deceased body, where core temperature had not yet had time to plummet. As I held an ax for Jano and Camil to pound on with a hammer and split bone in the skull and spine that clearly did not want to be split, I just couldn’t stop thinking about how well-built the body is, how much trauma is really necessary to inflict serious damage on it.
In Helena and Vlado’s yard the pig was completely dismantled. It was fully decapitated, the unwanted eyeballs, eardrums, and toenails were flicked into the grass and the intestines were buried in a hole Vlado dug in the far corner of the yard. The more precious liver, heart, kidneys, and other internal organs (even parts of the face) were separated into bowls. The rest of the carcass was cut into sections: shoulders, haunches, and two massive ribcages. After just a few hours and the first stop of the morning the original state of the pig had been completely altered, and a good portion of it did not continue on to the next stage. While it took four or even five people to lift the whole animal into the van and transport it to the pallets (talk about “dead weight!”), one man was capable of carrying the pared-down sections back to the van in which we traveled to our processing plant number two.
With the prep work out of the way it was time to get down to business. We arrived at Jano’s house where Camil’s wife, Katka, already had a wood burning stove ready to start making kapustnica (cabage soup), and a pot full of onions clarifying in lard for the liver stew we ate at lunch. A large wooden table had already been cleared off with knives and various tools set out and ready for action. She even had drinks poured (tonic water, fernet, and a slice of lemon). Freezing, yet reluctant to admit it to our Slovak supervisors for fear of looking weak, this warm basement workroom came as a pleasant surprise, only enhanced by Katka’s offer of “Kava? (Coffee?).” “Prosim! (Please!)” we excitedly replied. We worked hard all day, but every once and a while we would pause to have a drink and cheers each other, or eat a stew prepared from the delicacy of the fresh liver, mere hours after it had been removed from a live body. I’m not the most partial to liver, but knowing what a delicacy it is forced Heidi and I to stomach some, along with copious amounts of bread. Our fellow American Mark was gracious enough to take one for the team and handle a few pieces we just weren’t capable of ingesting.
This team (Jano, Katka, and Camil) has been performing Zabiackas together for years, and they are a well oiled machine. Each person knows his or her job and knows it well. Nobody missed a beat, though Jano seemed to be the boss and sort of got on everyone’s case a little from time to time. Katka could do the whole thing blindfolded, and like a true Slovak woman she managed to perform her duties as well as entertain by preparing drinks and our lunch of liver stew and bread. It was almost impossible to distinguish her tasks between pertaining to the pig and zabijacka, or making sure her fellow workers were well fed, hydrated, and comfortable.
As the day progressed I too found some kind of rhythm. I did my best to make myself sparse when it was clear I was not needed, and the white butcher shirt I was wearing once again made me feel like an assistant in an OR—except instead of “scalpel” one of my leaders might say “Vit-any, noz (“knife”). Also, the leading ‘surgeons’ did not seem overwhelmingly concerned with the contamination possibilities of handling raw meat—Jano would reach for his cell phone after simply wiping his hands on his shirt, and there was way more licking of fingers or even eating bits of raw lard going on than this well-trained American with a raw meat phobia was comfortable with. At one point Camil was digging around in the vat of 40 kilos of ground meat, rooting for garlic cloves and popping them into his mouth. I just had to remind myself that this wasn’t their first rodeo, and they were probably far more aware of the repercussions of their actions than I was. I got plenty of practice speaking Slovak, and expanded my vocabulary a little. Once again Heidi and I ogled the specimens of striated muscle, veins and arteries, fascia, and all other marvels of the body. We also both happened to develop a strong urge to go running over the hour or so we spent separating the subcutaneous layers of fat from the skin and cubing it so it could be melted down into lard.
As I mentioned before, the process took all day and other than brief breaks to eat, drink, or sit (“union breaks!” as my mother calls such time-outs while working in the yard) we continually partitioned the pig into smaller and more differentiated pieces or categories— meat to be made into klobasa (sausage), fat to be boiled down into lard, or prized tenderloins to be left unprocessed and simply cooked. Many of the bones and some pieces of meat were chucked into the giant pot that sat simmering on the stove all day which I decided to call “bone soup” instead of “stone soup” like children’s book—I felt like the same general philosophy of throwing anything and everything in applied, except we were working with animal parts, not a panoply of vegetables. Almost every part of the pig was used somehow—even if it was just given to the cats and dogs as an extra treat, like the spinal cord or miscellaneous pieces of tissue.
At no point did I feel mortified or grossed out by what we were doing (well, other than sanitation wise), and now whenever I see a nicely portioned filet of meat I will know just how much back-work was necessary to get to that one little morsel (comparatively speaking). That evening we congregated with the other four Americans at Helena’s house to eat some of the “Bone soup,” and enjoy the fruits—or rather meats—of our labor.
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