Food Rituals at the Tables of Birth, Marriage, and Death

Three Thresholds, One Answer

In 2011, UNESCO added a dish pounded for hours in giant copper cauldrons to its list of humanity's intangible cultural heritage: keşkek, a wheat-and-meat dish tied to weddings, circumcisions, and religious holidays. The same logic quietly runs through birth and mourning tables across the same region.

Turkish folklore scholarship groups birth, marriage, and death as "transition periods" — the three thresholds where a person's social status shifts, and where communal support matters most. The table is where that support becomes visible and edible.

Birth: The New Mother's Table

A new mother is called lohusa in Turkish, a word of Greek origin. Around her, visitors are traditionally offered lohusa şerbeti, a red sugared drink — a hospitality custom, not a claimed health remedy. When a baby's first tooth comes in, some regions mark it with diş buğdayı: boiled wheat topped with sugar and crushed walnuts, distributed to neighbors. A related but distinct term, hedik, covers boiled grain treats more broadly and is not interchangeable with it everywhere.

Marriage: Feeding the Crowd

Before the wedding, kına gecesi (henna night) gathers women for one last night with the bride, with sweets and sherbet passed around. The wedding meal itself solves a different problem: feeding dozens or hundreds of guests. Keşkek — pounded wheat cooked slowly with meat — answers that scale. Wedding cooks prepare it communally, and the exhausting final stage of pounding it in giant cauldrons is done together, often by the village's young men. In 2011, UNESCO inscribed the "Ceremonial Keşkek tradition" on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, at its 6th session in Bali.

Death: When Food Speaks Instead of Words

Neighbors traditionally bring food to a house of mourning rather than the grieving family cooking for guests — a custom Islamic scholarship traces to a report about the household of Ja'far ibn Abi Talib, whose family the Prophet asked others to feed. Halva carries an older layer: pre-Islamic Turkic belief held that roasting oil until it smelled through the chimney was an offering that fed the spirits of the dead, while the halva itself fed the living. The custom outlived its original belief and is still practiced today among Bektashi and Alevi communities. Commemorations on the third, seventh, fortieth, and fifty-second day after death often include halva as well.