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By the time the Ottomans dissolved the Roman Empire in 1453 and took down Constantinople, the city had conceived the name Istanbul. It is now known as a city that embraces cultural diversity in the most enlightening ways despite, in Nektaria Anastasiadou’s words, “a monstrous confusion of civilization and barbarism” it has dealt with over the past millennia. Indeed, beyond the boundaries of literature remains history that deserves a telling or at least a re-telling, especially if it’s prone to go silent. Istanbul comes alive through the nostalgic experiences of the people in Anastasiadou’s debut, A Recipe For Daphne, where she presents a thriving minority community that has endured unique trauma and repression.
Her storytelling is redemptive, powerful, and a thrill to behold. With a language both feisty and clear-cut, Anastasiadou puts us in touch with descendants of the ancient Byzantium known in Turkish dialect as ‘Rum’ — short for Roman, who fell under the Ottoman persecution of Greek Orthodox Christians in the region since its emergence.
As the book’s pages take shape from such a memory, the vivid quality of the prose explores the intricate sojourn of a young Daphne in Turkey — a homeland connected by her immigrant parents of Turkish and Rum origins. As soon as she arrives for a brief holiday as an American, her charming beauty she inherited with a “tinge of Istanbul and Athens” snags the attention of two older bachelors in the Rum neighborhood — Fanis and Kosmas, skillful pursuants of both women and cooking. What then follows is a zesty love triangle tackling who wins whom, whilst family secrets bound to a political turmoil unfold.
How each character goes on about their lives despite their agony is deeply impactful. I spoke to Anastasiadou who graciously opened up about her willingness to breathe back a history that still hangs in the dark. Yet, past the salty wounds are richer culinary explosions discovered on the tongue of a tourist wandering Turkey.
Rushda Rafeek
Your main character hooked me from the start. I’ve rarely come across characters as amusing as he. You criss-cross between his carnal nature in the midst of envious attitudes towards suitors like Kosmas, which adds to the riveting plot. What was the genesis of Fanis?
Nektaria Anastasiadou
Years ago, I was living in an apartment in Faik Paşa in the historically rich Çukurcuma neighborhood of Istanbul. One evening I was sitting in my cumba—a traditional Turkish bay window — and imagining how the street’s iconic stone buildings would have looked sixty or seventy years before. From there, I began jotting them down in my notebook from the perspective of an old man who had lived all his life in that street, having seen it transform over time. He would have been born in the 1930s, when the street was largely Rum. He would have been a young man during the pogrom of 1955, when organized mobs stormed into shops and destroyed their contents. He would have been an antique shop owner by 1964, when Rums with Greek passports were deported, taking with them family members who held Turkish passports. Later, he would have seen the degeneration of the neighborhood, and then, by 2011, when the story starts, he would have seen the regentrification of the area. This old man became Fanis, a septuagenarian ladies’ man.
In the first chapter of the book, Fanis is diagnosed with cerebral arteriosclerosis and vascular dementia, yet he remains determined to fall in love, marry, and have children. One could say he is delusional. After all, he approves Greek gods and has an exaggerated view of his own prowess. However, Fanis is also a metaphor for the Rum community. Although he is given a death sentence, he refuses to accept it. Steering forward, he challenges societal expectations restricting him to curl up and die instead. He is fuelled by the possibilities of love and marriage regardless of age, and strongly believes in the renewal of the Rum community. This is what makes him my favorite character.
Rushda Rafeek
So, it isn’t just me who’s drawn to Fanis! Which brings me to ask if you’ve seen the Greek film, “A Touch of Spice” (Politiki Kouzina) released in 2003. A boy grows up mastering his knack for cooking thanks to his grandfather, a spice store owner who taught him the solar system using spices until deportation. Years later as an astronomy professor he returns to the city he calls home. Why I ask is because as soon as the credits started to roll, it made me think of how people value cities and what they keep close. Language, borders, scents, sensibilities, tastes, emotions, urban psychology, all of it. Do you agree that cities teach us things we know but overlook? That being said, the film captures a multicultural Istanbul as you do in a novel of many wanderings.
Nektaria Anastasiadou
I love what you just said: “a novel of many wanderings.” Certainly, that is what the book is, so thanks for noticing. I’ve seen ‘Politiki Kouzina’ many times. It’s one of my favorites. As you mentioned, A Recipe for Daphne and ‘Politiki Kouzina’ (PK) have many important things in common: a love of Istanbul, food, coming to terms with traumatic events. But the two works deal with different aspects of the community and its history. PK is a lovely depiction of an Istanbul Rum family in the 1950s and 1960s, the deportations of Greek citizens in 1964, the immigrant experience in Greece, as well as an early 2000s love story, whereas A Recipe for Daphne is primarily concerned with the Istanbul Rum community in 2011-12. We all have different things to say about the same City, which is wonderful.
Rushda Rafeek
What is the awareness among Muslim Turks of the Rum community? Do people like Dr. Aydemir, who doesn’t quite understand what a Rum is, exist?
Nektaria Anastasiadou
Seventy years ago, almost all Istanbullus were mindful of the Rum community (although, they sometimes confused Rums with Greeks, thinking Greece was the “real” homeland of all Rums). Today, much of the population of Istanbul has only been in the City for a few generations. With the exception of a few intellectual and deeply rooted Istanbullus many newcomers and young people are not. So, yes, people like Dr. Aydemir do exist.
Rushda Rafeek
It’s interesting how you’ve combined pastry with politics and travel. Food and conversation enrich both the novel and your Twitter feed. Are there times where you eat or take walks while writing? What dishes do Rums consider special, if any?
Nektaria Anastasiadou
I almost always drink Turkish coffee while writing (sometimes accompanied by baton salés, a salty, mahlab-flavored cookie stick). I like to walk before and after writing. However, due to lockdowns this year not much was done.
Plethora of dishes in Rum cuisine are considered special. A signature treat of the Rum home are spoon sweets, consisting of fruit preserves that differ from jams in that they are made with whole or large pieces of fruit: unripe figs, orange cubes with the peel, sour cherries, and apricots. A non-fruit classic is rose jam. The name “spoon sweets” comes from the ritual with which they are served. A bowl filled with the sweet is placed in the middle of a silver tray. Spoons and glasses of water are placed around the bowl, according to the number of guests. The guest dips his spoon into the bowl once, eats his sweet, drinks the water, puts the spoon into the empty glass, and replaces the glass on the tray. These spoon sweets play an important role in the novel I’m finishing now.
Rushda Rafeek
Elsewhere you have said the balkanık pastry prompted your decision to turn a lived experience into fiction. Can you talk a little about crafting the title for it?
Nektaria Anastasiadou
The balkanık was a real pastry so I didn’t have to craft a title. Upon meeting an elderly Rum gentleman, I was told it resembled a large éclair, but with different flavored crèmes
inside. Each crème harmonized the coexistence of the Balkan people. This resplendent unification of religions, cultures and languages fascinates me. I knew I wanted to write about a pastry chef who would resurrect an old recipe.
Eventually, it’s a forgotten recipe, or at least the form described to me is largely forgotten. Kosmas’s effort to resurrect it and all that it holds — the Ottoman symbiosis of multi cultures — is a personal effort to continue the traditions of the Rum.
Rushda Rafeek
What would be your response to food and sex and how it interpenetrates in the Turkish vernacular?
Nektaria Anastasiadou
Food is very important in Turkish and Rum culture, and most of it is shared between the two. Talk of food — as well as food expressions and proverbs — is common in Turkey. Regarding sex, Turkish and Greek have some colorful expressions and curses, which are used by the more daring speakers in my novel, including the Levantine music teacher Julien Chevalier and the taxi driver.
Rushda Rafeek
Often, some characters indulge in superstitions, ‘evil hour’ and tasseography (coffee-reading). Is this a common practice? Also, did it help shape your ideas of fate, destiny or even death for the novel?
Nektaria Anastasiadou
Coffee reading is quite common in Turkey, especially among people who feel the need for some direction in life. It has been a long time since any friends looked at my fal (coffee grinds), but I do find it amusing. In Turkish we have a saying: “Fala inanma, falsız da kalma.” This means: “Neither believe in fal nor be without it.” Tasseography can be fun, but of course it shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Rushda Rafeek
Considering the atrocities of the Istanbul Pogrom which took place in September 1955, was it painful to confront this in your writing?
Nektaria Anastasiadou
It wasn’t necessarily painful both because the pogrom isn’t a large part of the book and because I did not live through it personally. However, I do find it distressing to listen to people’s memories of the pogrom. Many people still weep while sharing their stories.
Rushda Rafeek
Kosmas is tied to an overbearing mother. And it aches to see him being prodded by the push and pull of her expectations. Does this indicate the societal aspect of mother-son relationships in Turkey? We also have Sultana warning Daphne about ‘Istanbul mother-in-laws’.
Nektaria Anastasiadou
Mothers are powerful in Mediterranean culture. Some mothers — but of course not all — see their sons as the most important men in their lives, almost like their husbands. And this can of course lead to problems not only in men’s relationship with their mothers, but also with their girlfriends or spouses. How to separate emotionally from one’s mother while still caring for her and without deserting her is another dilemma I tackle in the novel.
Rushda Rafeek
At most, stories infused with romanticist pursuits have some predictability framed into them and as readers we pick it up fast. But what you offer here is full with twists hence a pleasure for the senses.
Nektaria Anastasiadou
Thank you! I appreciate it.
Rushda Rafeek
Now that the book is out, readers are demanding a sequel as seen in some reviews. Did you have anything of the same in mind when you set off to write? What’s the recipe for a future, can we expect more of the Turkish delight?
Nektaria Anastasiadou
I’m not thinking of writing a sequel to A Recipe for Daphne at this time, although I won’t rule it out entirely. At the moment, I’m finishing a novel written in the Istanbul Greek idiom, based on the short story that won the Zografeios Agon literary award in 2019. The themes are female friendship, lifelong bachelorhood, and anti-Semitism, but the novel is also an entertaining look into the shared past of Istanbul and the book’s fictional narrator.
FICTION
A Recipe for Daphne
by Nektaria Anastasiadou
American University in Cairo Press
Published February 1, 2021
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