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 the tensions 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 Nektaria 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
Fanis, your main character, hooked me from the start. I’ve rarely seen characters as amusing as he is. You crisscross between his carnal nature in the midst of his 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 the street of 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 nineteenth-century stone buildings would have looked sixty or seventy years before. I began writing about them in my notebook from the perspective of an old man who had lived all his life on that street, who had seen all its changes over time. He would have been born in the 1930s, when the street was mostly Rum. He would have been a young man during the pogrom of 1955, when organized mobs broke 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, get married and have children. One could say that he is delusional. After all, he believes in ancient Greek gods and has an exaggerated view of his own prowess. However, Fanis is also a metaphor for the Rum community. Although he has been given a death sentence, he refuses to accept it. He decides to keep moving forward without limiting himself to societal expectations that he should curl up and die. He believes that love and marriage are possible at any age, and he also 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). 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. Years later as an astronomy professor he returns to the city he calls home. The reason I ask is because it reminded me of how people value cities and what they hold onto. Language, history, 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 that. I’ve seen Politiki Kouzina many times. It’s one of my favorites. Like you mentioned, A Recipe for Daphne and Politiki Kouzina have many important things in common . . . a love of Istanbul, food, a 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, 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
Elsewhere you said the balkanık pastry prompted your decision to turn a lived experience into fiction. Can you talk a little on the process of crafting the title for it?
Nektaria Anastasiadou
The balkanik was a real pastry, so I didn’t have to craft a title. An elderly Rum gentleman told me about it. He said that it was something like a big éclair, but with differently flavored crèmes inside. Each crème symbolized a different Balkan people and their harmonious coexistence. Because the peaceful coexistence of people with different religions, cultures and languages is something that fascinates me, I knew that I wanted to write about a pastry chef who would resurrect that old recipe.
Eventually, the resurrection of the balkanik became a metaphor for the renewal of the community. It is a forgotten recipe, or at least the form that was described to me is largely forgotten. Kosmas’s effort to resurrect it and all that it symbolizes—the harmonious Ottoman symbiosis of different peoples and cultures—is a personal effort to continue Rum traditions and renew the community.
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 had an awareness of the Rum Community (although, even then, they sometimes confused Rums with Greeks, thinking that Greece was the “real” homeland of all Rums). Today, much of the population of Istanbul has only been in the City for one or two generations. Well educated people and deeply rooted Istanbullus have an awareness of the Rum Community, but many newcomers and young people do not. So, yes, in this sense, people like Dr. Aydemir do exist.
Rushda Rafeek
I like that you’ve combined pastry with politics and travel. Food and conversation enrich both the novel and your Twitter feed. Do you eat or take walks while writing? Are there any dishes that Rums consider special?
Nektaria Anastasiadou
I almost always drink Turkish coffee while writing (sometimes accompanied by batons salés, a salty, mahlab-flavored cookie stick). I normally like to walk before and after writing, although that hasn’t always been possible this year due to lockdowns, etc.
There are many dishes considered special in Rum cuisine. The signature treats of the Rum home are spoon sweets, which are fruit preserves that differ from jams in that they are made with whole or large pieces of fruit, such as 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 that I am finishing now.
Rushda Rafeek
Your characters often indulge in superstitions and tasseography (coffee-reading) which I’m curious about. Is this a common practice? Also, did it help shape your ideas of fate, destiny 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 it shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Rushda Rafeek
Was it painful to write about the Istanbul Pogrom of 1955?
Nektaria Anastasiadou
I wouldn’t use the word painful to describe the writing process because the pogrom isn’t a large part of the book and also because I didn’t live through it personally. However, I do find it very distressing to listen to people’s memories of the pogrom. Many still weep while speaking of it. And often what they don’t say is more upsetting than what they do say, because you know that those holes in the conversation are not empty . . . they are the place markers for the unspeakable. For example, an elderly woman who told us that “terrible things” happened after the pogromists knocked her father unconscious. This woman survived, but her nine-year-old sister “didn’t make it.” The woman didn’t say what the “terrible things” were, nor did we ask. Of course, it was understood that the “terrible things” were gang rape.
Rushda Rafeek
I must compliment you for keeping us readers engaged till the end without giving way to obvious predictions. It was just the right kind of play and suspense.
Nektaria Anastasiadou
Thank you! I appreciate that.
Rushda Rafeek
What would be your response to food and sex and how it interpenetrates in the Turkish vernacular explicitly?
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
Kosmas is tied to an overprotective mother. 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 in the novel.
Rushda Rafeek
Now that the book is out readers are demanding a sequel as seen in some reviews. Was that what you wanted when you set off to write this novel? 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. It is 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.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
FICTION
A Recipe for Daphne
by Nektaria Anastasiadou
American University in Cairo Press
Published February 1, 2021
