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In the highland village of Corvasel, a centuries-old harvest ceremony known locally as the Turning has survived largely unchanged since the early 1800s, according to municipal archives, even as the surrounding region industrialized and its population shrank by more than half over the past sixty years. The ceremony, held each autumn after the last grain is brought in from the terraced fields, involves a communal procession in which villagers carry woven wheat figures to a hilltop shrine, followed by a shared meal prepared from that year's harvest regardless of whether the yield was abundant or poor. Anthropologists who have studied the practice note that its persistence is unusual, since most comparable harvest rites in neighboring valleys were abandoned by the mid-twentieth century as mechanized farming reduced the ceremonial significance of manual harvest labor. Corvasel's version survived, researchers argue, partly because the terraced terrain never suited large machinery, keeping harvest work communal well into the 1980s, and partly because emigrant villagers began returning specifically for the autumn ceremony even after settling permanently in cities. In recent decades, the Turning has taken on a second function alongside its original agricultural meaning: it now serves as an informal reunion for descendants of Corvasel families scattered across the country, some of whom no longer speak the regional dialect but still return each year to walk the procession route. Local officials have debated whether to promote the ceremony to outside tourists as a way of generating income for the aging village, but a majority of remaining residents voted in 2018 to keep the event closed to non-descendants, arguing that outside attention would turn a meaningful communal practice into a staged performance. The debate remains unresolved, as younger residents increasingly favor limited, controlled tourism to fund the shrine's upkeep.