SLOW FOOD TURKEY: WHEAT RITES
Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso
July 26 2012
Italy
Francesco Martino
A few kilometres off the coast of Istanbul, in the Sea of Marmara,
the Princes’ Islands are the tourist destination for those who want
to leave behind, at least for a few hours, the frenzy of the immense
metropolis on the Bosporus. These islands have been for millennia
a laboratory of cultural contamination, as testified by recipes,
smells, tastes, and words – suspended between memory and oblivion
Kinaliada, Burgazada, Heybeliada, and finally Buyukada, the largest
of Princes’ Islands – the foaming wake of the ferry departed from
KabataÅ~_, on the European shore of the Bosporus, slips them one by
one, like beads on a long necklace surrounded by the sparkling blue
of the Marmara Sea. Here the ship, rocked by the wind, docks at the
unadorned pier and hundreds of tourists descend along the battered,
yet still elegant “Iskele”, the maritime station, decorated with
turquoise tiles.
The Princes’ Islands, or simply “the islands” (Adalar), are a small
archipelago located an hour of boat from Istanbul, across its Asian
shore. Their long history is intimately linked to that of the city
of Constantine, who later became the capital of the sultans. Over
time, as in the rest of the Ottoman Empire, the islands have become a
melting pot of different ethnicities, cultures, and religions: Greek,
Turkish, Armenian, Alevi, Jewish. Over the centuries, that meeting
stemmed a unique synthesis, as varied as the colourful bazaars (Carsi)
that still stun and fascinate millions of visitors. A mix of beliefs
and traditions, but also languages, flavours, and fragrances.
With the collapse of the Sublime Porte, that multicoloured world,
made of contamination and eclecticism, largely disappeared, except
for a few small pockets. The most vital one, that miraculously
survived up to the present day, is precisely that of the Princes’
Islands, where sounds and flavours of a fragile and precious past
now face a new challenge, that of globalised modernity. In recent
decades Istanbul has literally exploded, rising from two million
inhabitants in 1970 to over 13 million in 2010. A real earthquake,
capable of shaking balances and erasing centuries-old heritages.
“Starting with food. And language. The idea is simple and true. Food
and language are the deep connections that bind people to the earth,
to their identity. To preserve the unique heritage of the Princes’
Islands, this is the key. Also because the language-food pairing
is the thread that binds all the islanders, regardless of religion
and ethnicity”.
Aylin Oney Tan, a long-time architect specialising in historic
monuments, is now one of the best-known experts in culinary culture
of Turkey and lives in Ankara, where she chairs the local Convivium,
and the Princes’ Islands. She is the soul of a community of educators
and promoters of multicultural food traditions of the Islands, created
to protect flavours and words that are likely to disappear forever.
“When the municipality built a museum on Buyukada, we took the plunge
and worked to create a section on food and language. We reconstructed
the cycle of religious holidays – Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish,
and Alevi – and the dishes that characterise them. What has emerged
is an extraordinary picture of ties and syncretism”.
The most striking example involves the most simple and basic element
you can find on your plate: wheat. Dishes based on wheat mark rites
of passage and seasonal rites in all cultures of the islands. The
dis bugdayı, sweet corn boiled and sweetened with sugar or honey or
grape molasses, sprinkled with cinnamon and chopped nuts, is used in
the Turkish-Muslim tradition to celebrate a child’s first tooth.
A very similar pie, koliva, is prepared by the Greeks to mark
another, sadder passage – it is cooked for Ton Psihon, the Day of the
Dead. The Armenian community has its own sweet corn, the ‘anus abur,
decorated with pomegranate seeds and scented with essence of roses,
that accompanies any celebration of Christmas or the New Year. The
Jewish Sephardic version, called t Koco line, is served for the feast
of the trees of Tu Bishvat along with dried fruits, nuts, dried figs,
dates, and olives.
The very Sephardic community, arrived to Istanbul with the expulsion
of Jews from Spain in 1492, gave birth to some of the most amazing
and delicious fusions. “My people brought with them only two things,
the language of the fathers and the recipes of the mothers, that
mingled here with local ones”, says Selin Rozanes, Slow Food member
and founder of the Turkish Flavours. From the recipes that Selin
shows me, peep unique creations like dulse de kayesi (sweet kayısı
– Turkish for “apricot”) or burekos de igo, a delicacy made of figs
stuffed with walnut, where the Turkish word borek (used to indicate
savoury fillings) meets with the Hebrew-Spanish igo (fig).
Even the plots between Armenian and Turkish traditions run deep,
with unexpected twists. “The most important community cookbook,
the “AÅ~_cının Kitabı” (1914), was written in Turkish, but using
Armenian characters”, says Takuhi Tovmasyan in her office crammed
with books.
Takuhi is the author of a book in which family memories are interwoven
with Armenian recipes in Istanbul and its surroundings. “Meat,
eggplant, green peppers, onions, garlic, lentils, beans, tomatoes,
spices. In the memories of my childhood all the ingredients and smells
in my grandmother’s kitchen speak both Armenian and Turkish. I still
feel on my tongue the taste of food and all the words”.
On the islands, the crossing of the lines that usually divide religions
and ethnicities was and continues to be a constant. The sweet bread
originally prepared by the Greeks to celebrate the Passover, for
example, has over time become a staple food for all the population,
and under the name of paskalya föregi is consumed throughout the
year without reference to the religious celebration.
The spring festival of St. George (Ayios Yorgi, with a church dedicated
to him on Buyukada) corresponds to the Turkish Hıdrellez – both
communities celebrate with a picnic where the main dish is roast lamb.
“My family was mixed with Greek and Turkish blood, but also Hebrew
and Hungarian – a true Ottoman family”, recalls with a smile Sema
Temizkan, passionate researcher of the Greek-Byzantine cultural
heritage. “The kitchen was the kingdom of my grandmother Theopoula,
who was capable to meet and enhance all the colourful festivities
that marked the life of our house, for example with fanuropita,
a cake mixed with orange juice and grape juice, consumed on August
27th in honour of Ayos Fanurios, the patron saint of lost things”.
It only takes a few hundred metres along the steep sides of Buyukada,
where rows of cypress trees leave little by little room for dark
forests of pine, to find yourself alone. Cars are banned on the
islands, where bikes or horse-drawn carriages are the only transport.
>From here, Istanbul, with its miles of concrete buildings and
skyscrapers, is a fascinating, but equally terrible vision. The
immense megalopolis represents the danger facing the islands’
microcosm. Hundreds of thousands of people every week leave the chaos
of the city behind for a few hours on the quiet Princes’ Islands – a
peaceful invasion, but one that may succeed where the violent ones of
the past have not, and delete words and fragrances of an unrepeatable
history of coexistence and mutual enrichment.
A real danger, to fight with words and flavours. The stakes are too
high in case of defeat – not even the intercession of Ayos Fanurios,
I fear, could help Istanbul to find the lost treasure of pearls on
the Sea of Marmara.