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[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. |
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