I have never been on a cruise and have only once stayed at an all-inclusive resort. That kind of package deal isn’t something I’m used to. However, the one time it happened almost – exactly 16 years ago – was the first stop in the year-long, around-the-world honeymoon that began the first version of this blog. Emily and I had decided our first week or so should be true relaxation – the real honeymoon break once takes after a wedding just to have fun without the complications and challenges of adventure. So we booked ourselves a stay at Timo Resort – one of the many all-inclusive options along the Turkish Mediterranean. We had no idea we would be the only non-Russian guests – but it didn’t stop us from enjoying.
That stay at Timo in Alanya was full of learning opportunities, but among them – and perhaps the most enjoyable – was a crash course in Turkish cuisine. To Timo’s credit, while it kept a small section of its massive buffet for Russian-oriented foods – the vast majority was Turkish. In fact, it was just about every kind of Turkish food one could hope to encounter. The dessert station alone had a broader selection of baklavas and related semolina desserts than most Turkish sweet shops. No restaurant we later visited – or that I have encountered to this day – ever had such a complete Turkish menu.
Looking back, I don’t think I fully appreciated the culinary glory we were sitting on – though I wasn’t ignorant either. The blog was very new at that time and I was still finding my voice and approach. Timo was my first food post – and one that became the strong beginnings of a template that has been used for many years since.
Thanks to an early landing on a completely smooth, comfortable and uneventful Turkish Airlines flight, I have a six-hour layover in Istanbul. To my pleasant surprise, the Turkish Airlines lounge is the closest thing to Timo I have since encountered. Food stations amount with freshly made foods in each Turkish genre from mezzes (small plate appetizers such as dolmas and cecik, the Turkish counterpart to tzatziki) to freshly made pide (flatbreads) to a simit station to hot entrees in clay pots to a splendiferous dessert station. I haven’t tried it yet, but I am praying the dessert station has the same kind of halvah-laced baklava Timo did. It’s extremely rare and my absolute favorite.
In fact, let me take this opportunity of being on Turkish soil to say something I could never say in Greece: Turkish baklava and related desserts are better. To go the next circle into hell – a lot of Turkish mezzes are better than their Greek counterparts. I know, I’m feeling shame writing this – but in a world of almost parallel cuisines, there are many areas where the Turkish version is slightly elevated.
There, it’s said. We will never speak of it again – or at least not this summer.
Of course, the similarities between Greek and Turkish mezzes and desserts (the two parts of the cuisines I care most about) are emblematic of Turkey which itself is not the homogenous culture onlookers might thing, but actually a diverse melange of peoples sort of slapped into a modern nation-state and given an common identity. Being at a crossroads of regions and cultures, Turkey itself is more of a spectrum than anything else.
Go far enough back and much of what is Turkey today was part of the Hellenic world – essentially Greece. Troy was on the Turkish coastline. But The Iliad and The Odyssey were Greek stories involving a war between Greek kingdoms. Ephesus – the preserved ruins of a Greek city – sits just outside Kusadasi, Turkey. Ephesians were Greek and prayed to the Hellenic Pantheon of gods.
Fast forward in time and even as Greeks became Christians who eventually separated from the Roman Empire and Catholic Church to run their own Byzantine Empire – they were still Greek and their seat of government was Constantinople – now called Istanbul. It was all going very Greek-ish until the Ottomans came out of the Steppes and began invading about 700 years ago, ultimately taking not only modern Turkey but most of what is now Greece, some of the Balkans and most of the Middle East.
Unlike many conquerors, the Ottomans were not interested in ideological supremacy or conversion. Greeks were allowed to remain Christian. Sure, Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was turned into a mosque – which was a real slap – but the empire did not try to convert all its subjects. In towns like Salonica (modern Thessaloniki) Jewish populations thrived and in its later years, the Ottoman Empire had no problems with European Jews resettling in modern Israel, creating the first kibbutzim and draining swamps to create Tel Aviv.
By and large, if people paid their taxes, they could exist in relative peace. In fact, most subjects of the Ottoman Empire didn’t even speak Ottoman Turkish. Arabs usually spoke their respective ethnic languages including Arabic, Greek, Armenian, Bulgarian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Serbian, Albanian and “the people’s Turkish”, a common dialect closer to Anatolian roots than the Arabic and Persian-influenced dialect of royalty and the empire’s elite.
The Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1922 – essentially unable to continue after being on the wrong side of a disastrous world war and stripped of most of its territory beyond Anatolia. When the modern Turkish state was declared in 1923, the country’s first leader Mustafa Kemal – known colloquially as Ataturk (“Father Turk”) – had a problem not dissimilar to what Lee Kuan Yew would later face in Singapore in 1965 – he had a country without a clear cultural or national identity. People in far east Anatolia did not see themselves as being like Istanbullus. Then what exactly was as Istanbullu? The former imperial capital was a conglomeration of people from throughout the empire living in a cosmopolitan world. They were far from homogenous.
But a nation-state can’t stand if it houses a collection of disparate people who have no common identity or sense of nationhood – and Mustafa Kemal keenly understood this. Reforming Turkish into its modern form – divested of many of the Ottoman loan-words and more rooted in Anatolian dialects – was one of his top priorities, along with forcing families to adopt last-names.
A Turkish flag, a strong man leader and a “true” Turkish language were the pillars of creating the Turkish nationalism that created the definition of the Turkish state and culture, even if it came at the costs of some of its formerly tolerated minorities – especially Istanbul’s Greek-ethnic population and of course Armenians.
Still, whatever trimming of loan words there was from Turkish, it retains a tremendous amount of them still. In October 2010, my limited knowledge of Farsi and more extensive knowledge of French made it so I could pick up on a fair amount of Turkish vocabulary. At least when written, Turkish is one of the languages I don’t know that I can best follow.
This makes sense. Whatever reforms anyone makes, you can’t move Turkey – which is one of the world’s great crossroads. With Europe to its left, the Middle East just below, Eastern Europe and Russia just above and Iran to its lower-right, Turkey straddles some diverse neighborhoods.
Not surprisingly, much of its foreign policy is balancing one power off the other. It’s a NATO member who also does a brisk business with Russia despite a deep and centuries-long distrust involving numerous wars. Half of Istanbul is in Europe, but Turkey’s attempts to lean towards Europe have not been so welcomed – its EU application being regularly kept on hold. Turkey holds interests in the Middle East that often – but not always – parallel the US and Europe’s. It was happy to see Assad defeated, but took the opportunity of the Syrian Civil War to take aim at Kurdish groups. Turkey was helpfully anti-ISIS and willing to act in concert with Western Allies. However, it went from a friend of Israel to sort of an unfriendly, but benign neighbor. It had a lot of tension with Greece for roughly sixty or seventy years peaked by both the 1923 mutual expulsion of Greek and Turkish ethnics and the 1974 Cyprus War, but has now settled into a non-competitive, largely cooperative relationship.
Turkish people remain a melange of Central Asian from Anatolia to the multicultural groupings that inhabited the Mediterranean coast and Istanbul during the Ottoman Empire including those of Arabic, Greek and Balkan descent. As a gentleman I once talked with in an Istanbul cafe in 2010 told me, “Turks, Greeks and Bulgarians – we’re all the same people. Only Turks actually work.”
Because of Turkey’s geography and political alignments, or lack thereof, you get all kinds of people on a Turkish Airlines flight including those going to countries you can’t reach from an American airport or on an American carrier. Iran, for example. Or Georgia. Or Lebanon if you’re brave enough. In this way, Turkish Airlines is itself as cosmopolitan was Istanbul was during the Ottoman Empire, making boarding an interesting experience – always. I saw Turks, Americans, Russians, Persians, Korean tour groups – and that was only what I could easily identify. Many languages, habits, sensibilities – all of which the cabin crew deftly manages and keeps very comfortable.
All of this said, it’s time to enjoy some Turkish delights – including possibly Turkish Delight. In a few hours, I’ll take my hour-plus flight to Athens and make my way to the ferry – and outside the world of flights, lounges, complicated histories and cultural struggles.
I’ll keep the mezzes and baklava, though.
