[This article has endnotes with author name only. Full bibliographical data
can be found in the bibliography of Clifford A. Wright, A Mediterranean Feast]
As any of the latest naval stand offs between Turks and Greeks in the
Aegean shows, the Greeks are not much amenable to the idea that their food might
be indebted to Turkish cooking. It is commonplace for Greek food writers to
introduce Greek cuisine as one “shaped through over 3,000 years of
history.”1 The sumptuous feasts described by Homer
or Plato and menus from Athenaeus--all this will be described as part of the
Greek culinary heritage. Sometimes it can get rather silly, such as the comment
of one writer that “When you start your day with rolls and coffee, you are
following an ancient Greek custom.”2 One Greek
writer went so far as to state that Greek cuisine is twenty-five centuries old
and is the ur-cuisine that the Turks, Italians, and other Europeans borrowed
from, not the other way around.3 Nicolas Tselementes
was a noted Greek food authority who claimed the Greeks influenced western
European foods via Rome; he traced the ancestry of such dishes as
keftedes, dolmades, moussaka, and yuvarelakia to ancient
Greek preparations that subsequently became masked behind Turkish and European
names. He also said that bouillabaisse was an offspring of the Greek
kakavia.4
The Greek food writers are right about one thing: Greece is the source
for an original European cuisine, just as it is the source of Western
philosophy. The Hellenist influence on the Mediterranean is no doubt a powerful
and important one and should not be underestimated. But whether it is the only
font to Mediterranean cuisine is another matter. Greek culinary nationalism has
hindered any reasoned debate and research on this question of the degree to
which the Greek people preserved and maintained the classical heritage through
2,500 years, including Roman occupation, barbarian invasions, and 500 years of
occupation by the Turks, not to mention interference and occupation by
Venetians, Genoese, and Catalans. They ignore the fact that the majority
population of peninsular Greece in the Middle Ages was Slav.5 They also underemphasize the importance of the Byzantine
Empire, the Greek successor state to the Roman Empire in the East.
The Byzantine Empire saw its most glorious period in the sixth century. A
new period of splendor also occurred in the ninth and tenth centuries, but after
the Turkish victory at Manzikert (Malazgirt) in 1071 the fortunes of Byzantium
declined. The empire broke up when the Crusaders captured Constantinople in 1204
during the Fourth Crusade, and continued as a truncated state, ever-shrinking in
the face of the Ottoman Turks and vainly begging for aid from the West. Finally,
Constantinople fell to Mohammed II in 1453 and the Byzantine Empire was
extinguished forever. But this Greek civilization certainly left important
culinary artifacts, and these culinary influences from Byzantium are a more
likely Greek contribution than that from classical Greece as claimed by so many
writers. We know that there were Byzantine mechanical devices such as one for
preparing dough using animal power, apparently invented at the end of the tenth
century. We can surmise that there was other important culinary transfers as
well. Unfortunately, there are no comparative historical studies of Greek and
Turkish food by disinterested third-party scholars, although at least one Greek
scholar believes his countrymen claim too much ownership.6 In any case, all claims regarding the heritage of Greek
food must be taken with a grain of salt for Greek culinary history still awaits
its Maxime Rodinson. As the scholar of medieval Hellenism Speros Vryonis Jr.
warned: “In matters of cuisine the conquerors undoubtedly absorbed some items
from the conquered, but the problem is again obscured by a similarity in
Byzantine and Islamic cuisine which probably existed before the appearance of
the Turks.”7 Turkmen cuisine was very simple,
usually produced from their flocks, with products such as milk, yogurt, butter,
and cheese, with grains such as millet, fruit, honey, eggs, and a type of
pancake cooked on a hot iron griddle. Vyronis states that the elaborate Turkish
cuisine that came later was foreign to the Turkmen nomads and belonged to the
native cuisine of the eastern Mediterranean. There is a similarity between the
sweets of the Turks and those of the Byzantines, he argues, where one finds
dough, sesame, nuts, honey, and fruits, as the Byzantine pastilla shows.
The Turkish baklava was known as kopton and Athenaeus gives a recipe.
(Athenaeus, XIV, 647-48). Cheese, borëk, and pastirma were all
known to the Byzantines, as was the roasting of meat on a spit. The above
argument by Vyronis has been convincingly challenged by Charles Perry, who says
that Vyronis misread the Greek text of Athenaeus and that the simple food of
Turkic nomads may actually have been the mother of invention for more complex
preparations, like layered doughs for bread, see Perry 1994: 87-91. For my part,
I am convinced of the possibility that contemporary Greek food, when it is not
directly taken from the Turks or Italians, has its roots more properly in the
Greek Byzantium than it does in the classical era.
The history of Greek food is as complicated as Greek history. Listening
today, one would think that the boundary between Greek and Turkish is true and
clear--but it isn’t, for although Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire for a
long time, the Greeks themselves sometimes benefited from a pax turcica.
In the Middle Ages the Greek peasants of Anatolia rose up against the towns
where their Greek landlords lived, converted to Islam, and welcomed the Turkish
nomads arriving from the East. Remember, too, that the Greeks helped the Turkish
expedition against Crete in the seventeenth century because they hated the
Venetians. Before the Turks, Greece was under the scourge of the Catalans who
took Athens in 1311 and set up their own dynasty, not to mention the Florentines
in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. By the mid-fourteenth
century, parts of Greece were falling to the Turks and the great Greek capital
of Constantinople fell in 1453, a momentous event. Some of the most famous
admirals in the Turkish service were Greeks, such as the corsair Khayr al-Din
(Barbarossa) and possibly Kemal Re’is, whose fleet defeated the Venetians off
Modon in 1500. When the Turks overran Greece, they populated the fertile plains
of Thessaly and western Macedonia but were never really able to conquer the
mountains. These mountain Greeks, the famous Klephts, often raided the plains,
attacking both Greeks and Turks. The Turks sometimes used the institution of the
Greek armatoloi (men at arms) to track down the Klephts. There were also
Greek tribal communities left completely untouched by the Ottoman forces, such
as the Suli of Epirus (Ipiros), the Máni in the Peloponnesus and the Sphakia on
Crete. These tribes were semi-autonomous communities left unmolested by the
Ottomans in their impregnable mountain confederations. They rarely interacted
with the Turks, except occasionally when the Ottomans compelled them to pay
tribute if they had sufficient troops in a local area to do so.8 (Photo: Cook slicing gyro sandwich at Mpairaktaris taverna in Athens, Clifford A. Wright) The rivalry between the Houses of Anjou and Aragon over the island of
Sicily affected Greek history of the late thirteenth century more than any other
cause. Once peace came to Sicily, the Catalan auxiliaries of Aragon sought their
mercenary adventure in Greece, wrecking havoc on the Greeks and the Frankish
rulers of the Levant. The Catalans ruled Attica and Boetia for seventy-five
years until Athens was taken by Nerio Acciaiuoli, a member of a famous
Florentine banking and arms manufacturing family in 1388 and the Greeks
subjugated. The position of the Greeks during this time is reflected in Catalan,
Sicilian, and Florentine documents where, when concerned with Greece, the Greeks
remain nameless.9 For a hundred years Greece was
dominated by this conflict, only to fall to the Ottoman Turks in short
order.10 By the late fourteenth and early fifteenth
centuries there was an upsurge in Greek ethnic awareness that sustained the
Greeks as a people through four centuries of Turkish rule. This spirit was
fostered and guided by the Greek Orthodox Church. Whatever exists in the way of
a unique Greek cuisine more than likely derives from the efforts of the orthodox
church in sustaining Greek Byzantine culture, rather than from the classical
period, and was influenced by mountain Greeks who were not so easily subjugated
by occupying powers.
Unfortunately, we don’t have any information about what culinary
traditions or recipes may have been preserved in Greek Orthodox monasteries
outside of folkloric apocrypha. The number of fasting days in the Greek Orthodox
calender are numerous, and the Greeks are a devout people, so many preparations
were created for special religious occasions or for the particular needs of
fasting. The most important holiday for the Greeks is Easter, celebrated by
Christians as the anniversary of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The following
recipes are some examples of foods that might find their way onto a menu for a
variety of religious holidays.
1. Mallos 1979: 23. 2. Yianilos
1970: 39. 3. Paradissis 1976: 7. 4. Chantiles
1975: xiii. 5. Dalby 1996: 34. 6. Professor
Nikos Stavroulakis, conversation with the author, Khania, Crete, October 14,
1994. 7. Vyronis 1986: 481, 482-83. Although there are no
studies of the vestigial culinary culture, Vyronis’s study indicates the fertile
ground to be explored for the notion of a Byzantine residue in Turkish Anatolia
and who speaks of an “invisible” physical Byzantine residue (p. 463). Certainly
the evidence is strong in the agricultural field, where he concludes that the
“Byzantine agrarian practices and techniques determined Turkish agricultural
life in Anatolia” (p. 477). As we have seen in other situations, agricultural
evidence is the usual foundation for, at least, rural culinary cultural. Another
important work for researchers to examine in detail is the food and bread
entries in A. Tietze’s “Griechishe Lehnwo[um]rter im anatolischen
Tu[um]rkischen,” Oriens, vol. 8 (1955), pp. 204-257. 8.
Skiotis 1975: 310-11. 9. Setton 1975. 10.
Miller 1908: 211. |