How Ottoman Cuisine Shaped the Balkan Table

A Procession of Trays: Framing a Shared Culinary History

Every year on the fifteenth day of Ramadan, trays leaving the kitchens of Topkapı Palace were carried in a ceremonial procession, the Baklava Alayı, to the barracks of the Janissaries. It was one of many signs of how far a palace kitchen's output could travel across an empire.

Centuries of Ottoman administration in the Balkans left a similar kind of movement — not a one-way import, but an exchange that local ingredients, techniques and languages reshaped into their own forms. This piece traces that exchange through shared dish families, borrowed words, and a few cases where the flow ran the other way.

One Pastry, Many Names: Börek, Burek, Byrek

The Turkish word börek is first recorded in the 12th-century epic Danişmendnâme, and a related pastry called päräk appears in the 14th-century Chinese cookbook Yinshan Zhengyao. The round burek associated with former Yugoslavia was reportedly introduced to the Serbian city of Niš in 1498 by an Istanbul baker, Mehmed Oğlu; the city still holds an annual burek festival, Buregdžijada.

From there the pastry took on local identities: pita in Bosnia and Herzegovina, byrek in Albania and Kosovo, byurek — treated as a variety of banitsa — in Bulgaria, and in Greece a family of its own: boureki, bougatsa, tiropita, spanakopita. Romania calls its version plăcintă. Each name marks a different kitchen's take on the same idea, not a copy of a single original.

Wrapped, Stuffed and Reinvented: Sarma, Dolma and Moussaka

Sarma (wrapped leaves) and dolma (stuffed vegetables) both trace back to Ottoman cuisine and remained common well beyond it, from Greek dolmades to Romania's sarmale, considered one of its national dishes. Moussaka makes the case for transformation even more clearly: the word passed from Arabic through Ottoman Turkish into Greek and other Balkan languages, first recorded in English in 1862 — but the layered, béchamel-topped version most people now think of as classic Greek moussaka was created only in the 1920s, by the French-trained chef Nikolaos Tselementes.

From Kebap to Ćevapi: One Word, Different Timelines

The Serbian word ćevap comes directly from Ottoman Turkish kebap, and a fast-food grill culture once ran from Istanbul across Ottoman Rumelia through cities such as Edirne, Thessaloniki, Skopje and Niš. Yet ćevapi as it's known today is first recorded in former Yugoslavia only from the 1850s, and sources describe it as absent from Bosnia and Herzegovina before the 1900s — the first Bosnian ćevapi restaurants opened only in the 1960s. Even dishes filed under one 'Ottoman legacy' label can carry very different national timelines.

Sweets, Coffee, and a Two-Way Exchange

Baklava's origins remain disputed among three separate theories. The Turkish patent office registered a geographical indication for Antep Baklava in 2008, followed by an EU Protected Geographical Indication in 2013 — the first such recognition given to a Turkish product. Turkish coffee culture and tradition was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List in 2013; in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the same method is known locally as Bosnian coffee.

The exchange wasn't only outward. Kashkaval cheese, whose name is linked to the Italian caciocavallo or the Romanian caş, was served at Ottoman court feasts; the 17th-century traveller Evliya Çelebi recorded some 400 cheesemakers working in Istanbul, kashkaval producers among them. And when chili peppers reached Hungary by 1569, Ottoman-controlled territory served as part of the route — a reminder that this table was fed from more than one direction.