Living in a Limen: Moving Recipes, Traveling Scentscapes
Every time I go through passport control at an airport in Turkey, I feel an unexplained mixture of fear and happiness. All the stories of my mother’s family (who come from the small town of Balya in Balıkesir, Anatolia), and the silence of my grandfather refusing to recollect anything about Anatolia, conjure up traces of a pogrom in my mind. A pogrom that neither I nor my mother experienced, but that we inherited: through two or three photographs of smiling faces, a religious icon, the key to our ancestral house, stories that were narrated by faces full of tears, and my grandfather’s sealed lips. Every time I arrive in Turkey, though, I also feel like I am arriving at my topos; I feel a warmth of familiarity and belonging. Memories of a homeland are unconsciously recollected in the post-traumatic experience of a third-generation refugee.
Figure 1. The author’s grandmother Panagiota Papazoglou Kourbasssi after her arrival in Mytilene, Greece, from Balya, Turkey. Courtesy of Christos Antonios Kakalis.
Memory is at the heart of our everyday life; it triggers geographies of imagination, preserves nostalgies, activates the geopolitical unconsciousness of a territory, and allows for dead geographies to live again through their vibrating manifestations in material practices and cultures. I live in a limen and this limen has its own materiality expressed through objects that can be easily transported, such as the icon of Saint Dimitrios or a photo of my uncle, a recipe or a ritual. These objects are mobile sanctuaries that have the power to slip through borders, boundaries, and edges. As liminal objects, they have the power to stich wounds and create healing geographies of human relationships.
Figure 2. A hand-written recipe for tsoureki, no date, by Mrs. Kalliopi from Kordelio of Smyrna. Courtesy of Dimitra Massalis, 2021.
I first met my Turkish colleague and now good friend Dr. Neşe Yıldız during a conference in 2015. She showed a warm enthusiasm because I was ethnically Greek, and she vividly described how her mother’s best friend, who was married to a Greek architect, would give them Paschalia tsourek during the Greek Orthodox Easter—a usual gift to friends this time of year. The bread was Neşe’s favourite treat. After moving to Spain, in the 1970s, ten-year-old Neşe missed the taste of tsourek. Her mother communicated with her friend, living in Greece following the 1964 expulsion of the Greek Orthodox population from Istanbul. The friend sent them the recipe for the sweet pastry in a parcel with the required spices: masticha and mahleb. Masticha is the resin from the trunk of a tree found in the island of Chios in Greece and mahleb is made from the seeds of a species of cherry. Both of them are extremely aromatic and give the bread a unique smell and taste.
A religious bread that was made in the Ottoman Empire by Greeks and Armenians, tsourek is part of the Easter practices that were displaced with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century. Since then it has traversed the world and survived in the diasporic practices of a displaced minority. (Paschalia tsourek can be still found in Turkey but there are very few pastry shops that make the “proper” one used for Christian celebrations.)
While in Boston in the 1990s, Neşe told me, she was hosting a good friend of hers and they decided to go to nearby Watertown to browse the Armenian shops, hoping to find memories from their homeland. They entered one named Sevan, owned by an Istanbul Armenian family, the Chavushians. The smell of mahleb and masticha filled the space. Neşe instantly recalled tsourek. She struck up a conversation with Nuran, the son of the owner, describing how important this sweet bread was for her and how many memories it carried for her family as a material manifestation of her mother’s friendship. Nuran grabbed a warm tsourek from the shelf and gave it to her as a present. A new friendship was created. Thereafter, Neşe regularly visited Sevan to buy goodies and meet her new Armenian friends. The relationship was so well-formed that days before leaving Boston she went to the shop to say goodbye.
Figure 3. Sevan’s bakery, Watertown, Mass. Photograph courtesy Street View by Google Maps, 2021.
My first gift to Neşe, shortly after we met, was to arrange for my mother, originally from Anatolia (Turkey), to send Neşe a tsourek during the Greek Orthodox Easter. A piece of tsourek was also the first thing I ate when I first arrived in Istanbul in April of 2018 to conduct fieldwork, given to me by a member of the staff of the Rum Vakıfları Derneği (RVMV, Association for the Support of the Rum Community Institutions), with whom I was working, as a welcoming treat. The same person (a member of the Greek minority of Turkey) also sent a tsourek to Neşe, re-enacting the series of stories of displaced friendships.
Unpacking these stories of human relationships illuminates the possibilities of making and sharing food as an organic communicative tissue that tangibly and intangibly holds together parts of geopolitical landscapes in a way that is fluid enough to adjust to changes, and remain open to future possibilities.
“The tsourek is part of a family of liminal objects that have the power to generate topographies of human relationships in geographies that are suffering from open geopolitical wounds.”
Even after the tragic events of ethnic unmixing and its associated cruelties, across historical periods, tsourek continues to travel, and to materialize a fusion of multicultural horizons. Re-enacting the multicultural landscapes of Ottoman Empire, today this travelling bread recipe is adjusting to new transborder geographies of minorities, refugees, and diaspora populations. In her seminal work Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus, Renee Hirschon describes the way that displaced practices, including cooking and formal and informal religious events, have the power to move and settle in new places, transforming cultural topographies by adding layers of memory and cultural identity. In an experiential understanding of spatiality, the body of the individual transposes activities from a former condition into a new one in order to familiarize itself and generate a sense of belonging and comfort.
Seen in this light, the tsourek is part of a family of liminal objects that have the power to generate topographies of human relationships in geographies that are suffering from open geopolitical wounds. Tsourek not only maintains existing interactions but allows for the emergence of new ones. It is an object of possibility.
Figure 4. Making tsoureki at Üstün Palmie Pastanesi in Istanbul. Photographs by Üstün Palmie Pastanesi, 2021.
In these emergent geographies of human relationships, memory and liminality play key roles. Tsourek is part of a mnemonic scentscape that moves through the world due to specific historical conditions. It is part of personal and communal geographies that retain bonds between the places we used to live and new lands. The making and sharing of Easter bread are liminal practices at the boundary between formal and informal rituals. These practices are really important because, on the one hand, they secure memories and elements of the formalities and liturgical qualities of religion for minority groups. On the other hand, since they do not form part of the institutional aspects of the Orthodox Christian religion, they do not threaten the status of majority groups who might otherwise totally ban them.
Tsourek passes from hand to hand. It moves between people within the same community as a religious object and ritual (Easter bread), between inhabitants of the same region as a seasonal object shared with different ethno-religious groups, and across long distances through migration, settling in new lands where it is shared by different regional groups. The object itself, the instructions of the making, the making-together, the sharing and eating whether individually or together, carry knowledge of foodscapes lived as dynamic eventful topographies. Tsourek fills the atmosphere with an intense aroma, but also has a characteristic texture that adds to the bodily experience and mnemonic recollection of people and events. It stands in-between, penetrating boundaries created by ethnic purification processes. But is also a peace offering with the power to heal trauma. Sharing food as a sacrificial gift becomes a practice of mending broken tissues.
