Turkish Delight: A Guide to The Historic Cuisine of Hatay
Modern-day Antakya, in Turkey’s border province of Hatay, is a melting pot of religions and cultures, with one of the most delicious cuisines in the world.
Photographs by Rena Effendi
Lettering by Fatih Hardal
Spot illustrations by Alex Citrin
It was the olives — snappy green bitterish things no bigger than peanuts but with jumbo personality — that initially made me aware of a province called Hatay, in Turkey’s south. A few years ago, these olives, halhali by name, began turning up at better markets in Istanbul, where I own an apartment. Next came fragrant olive oils from the region, followed by a boomlet in “Hatay-style” Istanbul restaurants serving endlessly intriguing permutations of tahini, walnuts, and aromatic red peppers; sexy wild-thyme salads dribbled with pomegranate molasses; herbaceous kebabs and blistery flatbreads slathered with sharp, crumbly çökelek cheese. And for dessert, candied pumpkin, whose miraculously crunchy shells gave way to soft, perfumed centers.
With every bite I was more and more smitten — okay, dazzled. In my ten-plus years by the Bosporus, I’d never encountered such foods. These were crossroads Ottoman flavors, a million times more vivid than mild Istanbul meze, fresher and more Mediterranean-Levantine than the rugged lamb-centric cuisine of Turkey’s other southeastern regions, where even baklava reeks of sheep butter. I began having thoughts: Could this strange exotic Hatay, a fertile finger of land between Syria and the Mediterranean, be some Next Greatest Food Frontier? Apparently the folks at UNESCO were on a similar wavelength; in 2017, Hatay was awarded its prestigious Creative City of Gastronomy commendation.
Gripped by the sudden urge to finally visit this place I was still mostly clueless about — other than that it was fairly close to Aleppo, Syria, but safe — last fall I booked a flight and reached out to Lale Kuseyrioğlu, friend of a friend and a cheesemaker who lives there and was described to me as a passionate ambassador of its traditions and culture.
Only the night before departure, frantically hitting the internet, did I realize where my boyfriend, Barry, and I were headed. I’m not a cultural ignoramus; I try to be a diligent traveler. So how hadn’t I caught on that our destination city, officially Antakya — a.k.a. Hatay, and confusingly, capital of the province with the same name, one dreamed up in the 1930s by modern Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk — was also the biblical Antioch? Yes, the Roman Empire’s third largest city, the magnificent “Queen of the East,” worldly and accomplished, one of the centers of early Christianity, a prize grasped by Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, and Ottomans, a melting pot of religions, of cultures, of histories.
“Wow, Anthony and Cleopatra got married there!” I yelped to Barry during a tizzy of wee-hours Googling.
“Peter and Paul preached there!” Barry yelped back in his own tizzy.
“Alexander the Great defeated Darius of Persia around there!”
“Silk and spice trade routes went through there under the Ottomans!”
“Then France ran the region as part of post-Ottoman Syria, until Turkey got it back in 1939!”
“Yeah, and Indiana Jones went there chasing the Holy Grail!”
After switching off the light, I lay sleeplessly hatching a plan: For the next four packed days we would eat, pray ecumenically, talk to newly resettled Syrian refugees making a go there, visit Turkey’s last Armenian village — all the while trying to decode the interplay of foods, identities, and histories in this singular borderland. From my book research, on food and nationalism, I was already familiar with Istanbul’s post-imperial Balkan-Greek-Armenian melting pot. But what happens at the Eastern Mediterranean intersection of Turkish, Arab, and Levantine cultures?
“If your aim in traveling is to get acquainted with different cultures and lifestyles,” announced the philosopher Libanius in the fourth century A.D., “it is enough to visit Antioch.”
By takeoff from Istanbul the following morning, we’re feeling Libanius’s hype. Because besides its food and rich history, the Hatay region, I’ve learned, holds a remarkable position of diversity in Turkey — a result of joining the Turkish Republic late, in 1939, thereby avoiding the feverish early years of Atatürk’s monolithic “Turkification.” The province counts Turkey’s largest percentage of Arabs (nearly a third, even before the recent influx of Syrian refugees), who speak Levantine Arabic as well as Turkish. And the religious mix reflects Syria’s: Sunni and Alawite Muslims, Arab and Armenian Orthodox Christians.
We land in Antakya, ravenous for a breakfast encounter with the local flatbread, baked under an oily aromatic sheen of mild chilies and spices. Instead, Lale, a real Libanius 2.0, is waiting to rush us straight onto the religious trail. Antakya, she declares, has its priorities.
A former globe-trotting Istanbullu with a London degree, Lale moved here in 2013 to follow her husband, Mithat, scion of venerable local landowners. Eventually she found a new calling as cheesemaker-slash-local-evangelist, determined to save artisanal traditions.
“In Antakya, you come for the food,” she says now, on our way to a church — or should I say the church — “but stay for the culture, the mosaic of faiths.”
One of the most hallowed places of Christianity, the Cave Church of St. Peter — the second-oldest church, supposedly, in all of history, after Jerusalem — sits carved into the slope of Mount Staurin. We enter through a stone screen facade added by the reverential and incredibly bloodthirsty First Crusaders around 1100 A.D. and find ourselves in a blotched rock hollow the size of a tall two-family garage. A slab altar, a pint-size statue of the saint (from 1932), and a small stone throne are the sole furnishings. Here, about ten years after the Crucifixion, it’s said, the Apostle who, according to the Roman Catholic Church, would become the first pope of Rome preached to a furtive group of early believers, believers called “Christians” right here in Roman Empire Antioch. We peer at the small tunnel through which these “Christians” might flee if the authorities raided. We try to find, with no luck, a scrap of mosaic supposedly somewhere. We gaze around, two starving atheists overcome by emotion, by the aura, the history. Almost in tears, we exit slowly, past the uniformed guard sitting dozing over his cellphone.
The bombshell comes a little while later, over tea at weathered Café Affan on Kurtuluş Caddesi, the city’s chaotic main thoroughfare, built over a grandly colonnaded Roman road still there some 20 feet underfoot.
“You know, there’s no real evidence St. Peter’s cave was used by early Christians,” Jørgen Christensen-Ernst informs us very gently, as if delivering some awful news.
I’d reached out to Jørgen after learning of his excellent book, Antioch on the Orontes. He and his artist wife, Bente, are dapper 70ish Danes who’ve invited us to taste Affan’s celebrated iced treat called haytali, almost violently pink with rosewater syrup. After living for years in Ankara and Istanbul, this worldly bohemian couple came to Antakya to scope it out — and have stayed for ten years, attracted by the fact that it has “its own easygoing, tolerant spirit,” says Jørgen, dreamily.
“But — but why the cave’s escape tunnel, then, in St. Peter’s church?” I bleat, pink spoon aloft, alarmed at having wasted my tourist tears.
“The cave was probably used for pagan rites,” says Jørgen. He grins. “Who knows what they got up to?”
The Danes lead us on a walking tour of the hivelike maze of narrow, painted alleys off Kurtuluş that remind me of Moroccan medinas. In pocket-size bakeries, matrons gossip in a mixture of Turkish and Arabic while delivery boys hustle in with kebabs from the butchers and clay-pot casseroles from neighborhood residents, all to be baked in the hearths. Farther into this labyrinth, in the Zenginler Mahallesi quarter toward the river, laughter and shisha smoke drift through courtyard cafés shaded by vine trellises. The quarter’s beautiful courtyarded houses, “mostly belonging to wealthy Christians,” notes Jørgen, were abandoned and crumbling but are now being reborn as boutique hotels, bars, and meze spots. We wander on: past the city’s diminutive Catholic church with an Italian priest, past a one-room Apostolic church, past a tiny white-domed ziyaret, an Alawite shrine, and on toward the small ancient synagogue known for its five-century-old Torah scrolls.
“Not for nothing,” says Bente, “do they call Antakya mini-Jerusalem.”
“If a faith exists, people here practice it,” says Jørgen with a chuckle. There is, of course, a Korean Protestant church in the old French consulate building. But also countless Protestant home churches, adds Jørgen.
“And Baha’is,” adds Bente.
“Even Christadelphians,” says Jørgen, “though they’re sort of fizzling out.”
Christa-excuse me?
In Antakya, how quickly you plunge from spiritual heights into gluttonous depths. After a morning of religious touring, Lale whisks us to lunch at a butcher shop-slash-kebab restaurant, the iconic meaty setup for which the region is celebrated, where I plan to do my first real gastronomic decoding. Tugay Kasabi, our lunch grail, stands off the busy main road amid dusty half-urban debris framed by fertile farmland and rolling foothills. Inside, the ceiling is hung with beef carcasses, and the entire butcher brigade is furiously mincing — um, red onions, garlic, peppers, and parsley? Vegetables?
“Elsewhere in Turkey,” Lale elucidates, “kebab is all meat, lamb mostly, sooo fatty.” She wrinkles her regal nose. “But in Antakya,” continues the burly owner Nuri Şabanoğlu, his massive zirh knife a blur, “we mix roughly half hand-chopped beef and half vegetables.”
“Light, healthy, Mediterranean,” coos Lale, and I recall the words of a famed Armenian food writer from Istanbul: “Cuisines don’t have ethnicities, only geographies.” Lale orders two specialties, each shaped into Frisbee-size patties, one set into a round metal tray like a meat cake. We then carry the patties a few yards to another crucial Hatay institution: the firin, a stone baker’s oven like the ones we saw on our walk with the Danes. The butcher’s assistant thrusts them into the glowing, wood-fired maw.
Upstairs a few minutes later, in a rudimentary dining room, we finally attack our herbaceous-smoky-salty “almost veggie-burgers,” as Barry calls them, slathering them with oven-blistered tomatoes and peppers. This is why I’d have walked the 688 miles from Istanbul: for this almost primordial situation, where a family raises the beef and even grows wheat for the flatbread, butchers the meat, and cooks it along with the bread in a kind of oven that probably existed since … when, biblical times?
Like many butchers in this multifaith city, the Şabanoğlus are ethnic Arab Alawites, members of a syncretic Shia offshoot (religiously distinct from Turkish Alevis) who make up about a third of Hatay’s population. “Alawites offer great meat,” Nuri Şabanoğlu explains after I bombard him with questions, “because in our religion we only cut male animals, which are tastier.” I also discover that Alawites observe not just Muslim Ramadan and Kurban Bayrami but some Christian holidays, too (“because Christians have always protected us”), and that they embrace alcohol, which explains the happy clinking of glasses of raki, Turkey’s signature anise-like tipple, around us. Alawite rituals used to be famously esoteric and secretive, “but nowadays,” says Şabanoğlu, “everyone grows up together and knows everything and eats the same food.” The melting pot in action, no easy decoding available.
I run into the same problem the next night at Konak, Lale’s favorite restaurant, surveying the meze mosaic. There’s cevizli biber, a fiery paste of roasted peppers and walnuts — an iteration of Levantine muhammara. There’s zeytin-kekik, the mouth-tingling combo of wild thyme and halhali olives which does seem truly local, and kisir, a bulgur salad that practically throbs with pomegranate molasses and hot pepper paste, this one common to other southern Anatolian regions. And what of the tarator dip, possibly of Byzantine origins and made with variations throughout the former Ottoman Empire, from Beirut to Bulgaria, but here featuring thick yogurt, tahini, and walnuts?
Here, in this crossroads region ruled for four centuries by the polyglot, religiously pluralist Ottoman Empire as part of its Syrian domains, then by the French during their Mandate of Syria, before joining the Turkish Republic — in a referendum Syria still doesn’t recognize — it appears my own original mandate is fruitless. How can I possibly disentangle all these flavors?
Then again, isn’t the dinner table where identities are revealed and articulated — chewed over? One of Konak’s owners, we learn, is a local Orthodox Christian, part of Antakya’s largest Christian group (they number some 1,200); his wife, formerly Druze, is now a practicing Christian, from Lebanon. “Konak’s cuisine is Orthodox Antakyan,” declares their partner, Razik Buyukgazel. “Similar to Orthodox Lebanese cooking … but less green, maybe a little less sour?”
Half a dozen iterations of the ubiquitous local oruk, a patty of cracked wheat and meat known as kibbeh in Arabic, arrive. A further opportunity — or a challenge — to parse religious and sectarian recipe subtleties.
“Christians make oruk casings much thinner,” says Lale, pointing to the flat crunchy-bottomed one filled with oniony meat, “and Alawites often add basil to the filling.”
“And Christians make this raw-style oruk more like a steak tartare,” offers Buyukgazel, “while Muslims use less meat, more bulgur.” Konak’s rendition is unlike any raw kibbeh I’ve encountered before. We lapse into awed silence, shaping the ruby-red mallet-pounded beef into patties and filling these DYI with crumbly spicy cooked meat. The textural contrast is genius.
Lale’s gregarious Sunni husband, Mithat, pours some inky wine, made by Konak’s owners from the local Barburi grape. “People at the dinner table make jokes about other religions, and the next day they are best friends again,” he says, laughing.
If only things were that easy, I almost reply. Instead I nod, and turn to dessert.
Back in a more optimistic geopolitical moment, when Turkey’s EU ascension seemed possible, Hatay’s regional authorities worked hard to promote its image as a chorus of faiths, a “garden” of tolerance. That image is being severely tested these days by sectarian spillover from Syria’s conflict, now grinding into its eighth agonizing year. The next morning, we meet two NGO officials at the Antakya Chamber of Commerce, where a mural of Jesus, a mosque, and Orthodox Jews nests among multiple portraits of sternly dandified Atatürk, the arch-secularist founder of the Turkish Republic.
More than 400,000 refugees have flooded the province, 100,000 into Antakya itself, swelling its population of 250,000. Ratcheting up the enormous strain, as Samet Firat Soydemir, one of the NGO guys, tells us, “Many refugees are Sunnis opposed to Assad, who is Alawite and is generally supported here by his Hatay coreligionists.” Another complication: Antakya’s legacy of Atatürkian secularism clashes with migrants’ conservative Islamic values.
“These asylum seekers aren’t trying to integrate,” Soydemir exclaims, bluntly conveying local frustrations. “They are coming to Arabize us.” I stare at the floor, jarred by his bleak candor. “It all depends on your humanity,” Soydemir’s older, Kurdish colleague, Bülent Yüce, counters quietly. “The refugees are a traumatized community.” Yüce’s NGO coordinates a gastronomy training project for asylum seekers, mentoring cook trainees, who then apprentice at local businesses, 200 so far. “What we’re trying to do,” he says, weary but hopeful, “is to build sustainable livelihoods.”
Perhaps food does indeed offer a hope. The Syrian restaurant Şehbender, where Soydemir brings us for lunch, is a recently opened hit in a new part of town, featuring a cheery, colorful juice bar and kids hopping in delight around a foam-billowing fountain. Behind the counter, smiley guys assemble plates for women in stylish white head scarves and young men in black leather jackets — Syrians homesick for the tastes left behind.
“There are enough slapdash falafel places in town,” says the young, bearded Syrian proprietor, Ibrahim Mahiroglu, a trained pharmacist. “We wanted to serve delicious quality food Syrians miss.”
I’m primed for grandmotherly dolmas and stews. Instead, Mahiroglu orders a juicy rotisserie chicken and “pizza döner,” a pressed döner sandwich oozy with cheese, red peppers, and olives that Mahiroglu proclaims “a huge modern hit of Aleppo.”
A portion of delicious chicken, it seems, and a foamy fountain for kids modeled on a famous fast food place in Aleppo, can bring moments of cheer and normalcy. “To humanize the inhuman journey that people have endured,” Mahiroglu concludes with a sigh.
From visiting Hatay’s most recent arrivals, we head out the next morning to visit some of the region’s oldest: the Armenians. The mountain air is like a bracing tonic up on Musa Dagh in sweet, tiny Vakifli, the Armenian village 17 switchback miles southwest of Antakya. We’ve come to pay our respects to a culture and people that flourished in this region for at least a millennium — until the dark events of the 20th century reduced them to this patch of mountainside.
We pull in for tulip-shaped glasses of Turkish tea at a sunny teahouse on the side of the road.
“There was a lot of tourism here before the Syrian war,” says Garbis Kuş, the teahouse owner and former chairman of Vakifli’s small Armenian church. “We’re famous,” he notes, “as the last and only Armenian village in Turkey.” As if any visitor would be unaware of this — though perhaps not aware of the savage weeks in 1915 when the villagers retreated to the top of the mountain and from there desperately fought off the Ottoman Empire’s onslaught against its Armenian citizens. Vakifli’s heroic resistance and miraculous evacuation inspired the 1933 epic novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, by Austrian writer Franz Werfel.
“But now tourists are slowly coming back,” Kuş, goes on, gesturing at the vanload of gleeful Istanbullus arriving to pick mandarins, the region’s cash crop, which blaze on trees overlooking the Mediterranean.
Vakifli these days has shrunk to 130 residents supporting themselves on farming and tourism. “Back pre-1915, there were 500 here,” says Kuş.
“What happened that year?” I ask, wondering how he might handle the volatile subject — still officially taboo in Turkey. “Nothing happened,” he replies blandly. “But a lot of local Armenians went to Syria then.” That’s it; subject avoided.
I switch to food. Any regional Armenian dishes? “All mixed up,” he answers more volubly. “Armenian, other Orthodox, Alawite. We used to be famous for walnut jam; now everyone makes it. But because of Lent,” he continues, “our oruk has potatoes and vegetables instead of meat.”
A small shop-cum-tasting room next door showcases the handiwork of an association Kuş created to help local Armenian ladies sell their homemade wares. There are 60 kinds of jams, and liqueurs in a mind boggle of flavors — bergamot, daffodil, orange flower, all picked right outside. Sweet tourist tokens of a nearly vanished culture, I reflect sadly, as we gird for a late-morning tasting under the resolute gaze of nationalist icon Atatürk on the wall.
At our farewell meal — lunch at Ali Mürdüm, a cult bastion of traditional flavors — Lale promises “the closest to grandmotherly Antakyan cooking you can find at a restaurant.” The eponymous chef, an Anatolian Soup Nazi known to send guests packing, covers our table with dishes. We tuck into chard dolmas thinner than cigarettes; greens-filled pastries in homemade phyllo dough, baked in a neighborhood firin; and cauliflower roasted in the same wood-fired oven to a deep, nutty tan.
“I’m still searching for tastes of my grandmother’s recipes, of my childhood — organic, pure, authentic,” says Mürdüm with a sigh. He’s 58 and a model for Antakya’s religious tolerance: a Sunni Muslim who relishes his homemade raki.
I never had a grandma who cooked ekşi aşi (a genre of sweet-sour-fruity Antakyan soups), but Mürdüm’s version induces a Proustian flare of dopamine. Ditto ąsür, his earthy wheat-berry porridge with walnuts and cumin, its intriguing chewiness derived, Mürdüm explains, from “pounding for an hour with a pestle.” I take a slow, ruminative spoonful, reflecting on the past four days’ journey and my futile quest to disentangle cultural strands and assign ur-identities to particular dishes. Yes, there’ll always be nationalists in the world, and religious sectarians, who’ll insist on my hummus, my dolma, my baklava. There’ll also be liberal universalists of the “melting pot school,” who insist all dishes belong to all people. Both arguments, in a way, are cultural constructs that depend on one’s politics; the eternal (maybe ultimately pointless) question — whose foods are these? — will never be answered, certainly not in this complicated part of the world.
And yet, I reflect, lingering over the last spoonful of the wheat-berry porridge: ethnic, cultural, political, and religious divides can dissolve, at least for a few impossibly delicious moments, in this existentially comforting dish that Turks call keşkek, Armenians harissa, and some Arabs harees. A dish that has been providing basic nourishment — and yes, comfort — here in this melting-pot bulgur-belt region since long before nation-states or modern borders, since long before arguments about religions as we know them even existed. I lick my spoon, and leave it at that.
The Food of Hatay
Where to try the multiculti city’s best dishes
Meze
Vibrant with spices, tahini, and grassy olive oil, Hatay’s meze mosaic includes mütebbel (charred eggplant-yogurt dip), cevizli biber (a tangy red pepper–walnut spread), and salads with the region’s signature çökelek curd cheese. Try them in the enchanted courtyard of Avlu Restaurant (39 Kahraman Sk., +90–326–216–13–12).
Flatbreads
The blistery pizzalike masterpieces of local firin (wood-oven bakeries) include biberli ekmek (topped with a spicy red pepper paste) and katikli ekmek (slathered with that pungent çökelek cheese). Customers can send home-made flatbread toppings to bakeries, or try them ready-made inside the Long Bazaar.
Meat
Hatay’s kebabs are shaped into giant patties and roasted in wood-burning ovens. Kağit kebab bakes on sheets of butcher paper, to be served atop flatbread (think Anatolian burgers), while tepsi kebab sits in a baking tray doused with spicy sun-dried- tomato liquid. Try them at Tugay Kasabi (Atatürk Cd. No:63, +90 326 221 25 48).
Grain
Bulgur dishes flourish here as an edible life force. Labor-intensive oruk — filled bulgur and meat patties called kibbeh in Arabic — can be found either pielike and baked or crispy and deep-fried. Try at the Konak or Ali Mürdüm (Hastane Cd. No:49, +90 326 213 90 95).
Sweet
The iconic local sweet, künefe, has crunchy layers of artisanal shredded wheat cradling an oozy white cheese filling, often bathed in aromatic sweet syrup. Try it at Çinaralti Künefe Yusuf Usta (2 Pazar Sok.Ahmediye Cami, +90 506 723 08 03) inside the Long Bazaar, where trays of the sweet cook over coals stoked with hair dryers.
Fun Facts from Hatay’s Ancient History
Hatay was controlled successively, from the third millennium B.C. onward, by Akkadians, Hittites, Assyrians, Persians, Seleucids, Romans, Arabs, Byzantines, Seljuks, Crusaders, Egyptian Mamluks, Ottomans, the French, and finally, in 1939, Turkey.
Food caused a famous contretemps here in Antioch in the mid-first century A.D., between apostles Peter and Paul. Should Jesus’s followers, almost all Jews then, share meals with uncircumcised people? (Paul insisted yes.)
Herod the Great, infamous king of Judea, had an Antioch connection — just like Cleopatra, his frenemy. Shortly before Christ’s birth, he paved the city’s main road with marble, right under present-day Kurtuluş Caddesi.
Apollo supposedly chased the nymph Daphne in woods outside Antakya (still a popular picnic spot). She escaped by turning into a laurel tree. The laurel wreath Apollo wore in her memory is the origin of wreaths for victorious athletes. Defne (Turkish for laurel) soap is a prized Hatay specialty.
Saint Simeon Stylites the Younger, native son and devout hermit in the sixth century A.D., spent 68 years working his way up columns on a mountainside near Antakya. One column’s stump is still there, in the haunting ruins of the monastery where it rose.
The Silk Road extended west to late-medieval Europe, and “Cloth of Antioch” (usually woven with gold thread) became so highly prized that Henry III, the 13th-century English king, had special “Antioch Chambers” in his royal residences.
How to Hatay
Tips for traveling to and around the city
Overview
Although the region is currently enjoying a resurgence in domestic tourism, the ongoing Syrian conflict means travelers should exercise caution. Book your trip through a trusted Turkey specialist, such as Turkey at Its Best.
Getting there
Turkish Airlines flies to Istanbul from several U.S. hubs, with a short flight daily from Istanbul to Hatay. Get your Turkish e-visa beforehand.
Historical sites
Must-sees include the Cave Church of St. Peter, the ancient Habib-i Neccar Mosque, and the stunning Archaeology Museum, which houses one of the world’s richest collections of Roman and Byzantine mosaics.
Local culture
Soak up local life and the café scene in the atmospheric narrow alleys off Kurtuluş Caddesi, and haggle for spices, local silks, and Hatay’s famed herbal soaps at the two-mile Long Bazaar, formerly a major Silk Route trading hub.
Day trips
Vakifli Village; the haunting sixth-century A.D. remains of the Monastery of St. Simeon; and Vespasianus Titus Tunnel, an idyllic marvel of Roman engineering. In summer, hit Samandağ, the second-longest beach in the world.
About the author: Moscow-born food writer Anya von Bremzen is the winner of three James Beard Awards for her books and journalism. She is the author of six acclaimed cookbooks including PALADARES, her latest book about Cuba, as well as a memoir, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, which has been translated into fifteen languages. Anya has written for Food & Wine, Travel+Leisure, Saveur, the New Yorker, and Foreign Policy magazines among other publications. She divides her time between Queens, NY, and Istanbul.
