By two cooking aficionados who refuse to pick sides*
There are two of us: one from Greece, with family roots in Turkey — Istanbul, Kayseri, and Trabzon; the other from Turkey — Finike, Antalya, Bozcaada, and Istanbul, all places with deep traces of Greek culture and memory. We’re both passionate cooks, both deeply invested in the rituals of the kitchen: selecting ingredients, layering textures, tasting flavours. And yes, we cook many dishes with the same name, though never quite the same way. Baklava is just one of them.
Our baklava debate is simple: walnuts, as in Greece, or Antep fıstığı, the pistachio from southeastern Turkey? Each time we come together, whether to eat or to cook, our words explore time and place, tracing the paths of flavor where Greek and Turkish kitchens echo each other; sometimes in harmony, sometimes in contrast. We always find ourselves comparing dishes and memories: ingredients, methods, seasons, rituals… And sometimes tease each other gently across the counter, spatula in hand.
When we — Greek and Turkish — share a plate of baklava, we’re not drawing battle lines. We’re drawing a map of entangled histories.
We’ve heard it countless times, usually over dessert, often with a wink: So, is baklava Greek or Turkish? It’s the kind of question that pretends to be casual but carries centuries of pride and rivalry in its flaky layers. But behind it lies something deeper: a hunger not just for food, but for identity, for roots, for belonging.
Still, we resist the binary choice: we believe food is one of the most powerful reminders that culture transcends borders. Food unites. Food travels. Food transforms. Food is shared civilisation.
We’re tasting inheritance and improvisation, memory and friendship.
Of course, food has origins, but they’re rarely simple. The origins of baklava lie neither in Greece nor in Turkey. This is something culinary historians have long emphasised.
Charles Perry (2001), for instance, has documented the medieval Islamic roots of many sweets across the Middle East, including early baklava-like pastries that evolved in Arab and Persian kitchens.
Mary Isin’s Sherbet and Spice (2013) traces how Ottoman cuisine absorbed and reinterpreted these traditions, creating new ones along the way. She shows that dishes like baklava were not inventions of one people, but creations shaped by empire, trade, and multicultural contact.
Rachel Laudan (2013) puts it succinctly: we must treat food not as a symbol of pure national identity, but as a historical process — shaped by movement, class, conquest, and exchange. To insist that baklava belongs to only one nation is to miss the point. It would be like claiming ownership of the wind.
Ilay Örs goes even further: she claims that an understanding of food as shared culture may “exemplify a case of gastrodiplomacy” and open dialogue between conflicting parties (Örs 2024, 242).
Like our shared history, our baklava is always better when made together — not quite the same way, but with care, one layer at a time.
So yes, food can be imposed, rebranded, appropriated or even erased — our histories are full of these moments. But food also survives, adapts, and resists. Recipes are carried in exile, remembered in diaspora, revived in the kitchens of grandchildren. They are not fences that divide — they are bridges that connect.
When we — Greek and Turkish — share a plate of baklava, we’re not drawing battle lines. We’re drawing a map of entangled histories. We’re tasting inheritance and improvisation, memory and friendship. We’re eating something that belongs to us both, and to many others, too.
Like our shared history, our baklava is always better when made together—not quite the same way, but with care, one layer at a time.
*Burcu Serdar Köknar, an architect and landscape designer, teaches the course “Food, Culture and Globalisation” at NYU Berlin.
Ares Kalandides, a geographer and urban scholar, teaches the course “Transnational Migration, Identity and Citizenship” at NYU Berlin.
References
Isin, M. (2013). Sherbet and spice: The complete story of Turkish sweets and desserts. I.B. Tauris.
Laudan, R. (2013). Cuisine and empire: Cooking in world history. University of California Press.
Örs, İ. R. (2024). Culinary complexities in Turkey and Greece: On food, nation, and identity in the Aegean. Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 42(2), 225–256. https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2024.a937517
Perry, C. (2001). The taste for layered breads among the nomadic Turks and the Central Asian origins of baklava. In S. Zubaida & R. Tapper (Eds.), A taste of thyme: Culinary cultures of the Middle East (pp. 87–91). I.B. Tauris.