How Borders Changed What People Ate and What They Forgot: Soutzoukakia, Hellim, and the Jaffa Orange

A border cuts twice. Once through the land, once through the memory of what that land grew and cooked. The second cut doesn’t show up on any map. It shows up in the kitchen. I write this column, Deaditerranean, because the recipes on our shelves are paperwork from expulsions. Soutzoukakia carries the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange in its cumin. Hellim carries the 1974 partition of Cyprus in its brine. And the word Jaffa, printed on a crate of oranges, carries 1948 in its peel. The official terms are population exchange, transfer, nakba — the catastrophe. The kitchen term is culinary forgetting: what a border does to a recipe book. Which names get kept. Which get translated. Which fall out somewhere between the stove and the suitcase. If you cook Mediterranean food, you handle these documents every day. Here’s how I read them.

Soutzoukakia Smyrneika: The Meatball With a Border Inside It

Start with the dish, because the dish is the document. Soutzoukakia smyrneika: long meatballs — beef, or beef with pork, depends on the household — worked with garlic, soaked bread, and a heavy hand of cumin. You brown them in olive oil, then simmer them in tomato sauce with a splash of red wine until the sauce goes dark and a little sweet. The name is the biography. Sucuk, the Turkish dried sausage, wearing a Greek diminutive ending. A Turkish noun living inside Greek grammar. That was Smyrna — a port where the languages shared one pot.

I learned the dish in Athens, in Nea Smyrni, from a neighbor whose grandmother came over on one of the last boats. She would grab my wrist to fix my shaping. She told me the cumin has to smell like the pan has been somewhere. And in all the evenings I spent in her kitchen, I never once heard her say dinner without smyrneika attached to it. The word was doing memorial work. So was the suburb.

On 30 January 1923, at Lausanne, Greece and Turkey signed the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations. Roughly 1.2 million Orthodox Christians left Anatolia and Eastern Thrace for Greece. Around 400,000 Muslims left Greece for Turkey. Two exemptions: the Greeks of Constantinople, and the Muslims of Western Thrace — hold onto those, they matter later. The exchange grew Greece’s population by about a fifth in under two years, and many of the Orthodox had already fled by then, after the fire of September 1922 gutted the Greek and Armenian quarters of Smyrna. The convention just turned an exodus into a treaty obligation. The refugees settled around Athens and Piraeus and named the new streets after the old cities. Nea Smyrni, founded by Smyrniots in 1926. Nea Ionia. Kesariani, for the people from Kayseri. Nea Chalcedon, for Kadıköy. Nea Philadelphia, for Alaşehir. The map of Athens is a memorial with bus routes. Cooking soutzoukakia in Nea Smyrni means cooking inside a street sign that is grieving.

The dish crossed with the women who carried it — refugee tavernas first, then home kitchens — and by the 1960s it was Greek comfort food, mashed potato or hilopites on the side. The name kept saying Smyrna in Greek mouths for a hundred years after the Greek street of Smyrna burned. That is this whole column in one sentence, if you want it.

What the Border Made People Forget

Forgetting has a mechanism. It isn’t carelessness. It’s paperwork.

Take the Karamanlides — Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians from Cappadocia. They arrived in Greece writing their Turkish in Greek letters. Their recipe books were bilingual documents: Turkish ingredient names, Greek script, one kitchen. Within a generation the language had been pushed out of the schoolroom and off the page, and the little bilingual glossaries went with it. The dishes survived. The dictionary didn’t.

Cumin was next. In interwar mainland Greece, cumin read as foreign. Anatolian. Working-class. Turkish, if you want the whole word. Polite cookbooks trimmed it out; refugee kitchens kept it in. Then by the 1980s the same cumin was being printed as authentically Greek. A border doesn’t just move people. It edits recipes — line by line, one embarrassed spice at a time.

Then there’s the question of who got written down at all. Smyrna’s Jews — mostly gone by the 1950s — had their own tomato-and-cumin meatballs. So did Smyrna’s Armenians, or they did until the genocide of 1915 emptied Anatolia’s Armenian towns and the exchange finished the job. The Greek version entered a national canon for a blunt reason: the Greek state had a million people to integrate, and women’s leagues published cookbooks to help do it. The others never got the printing press. What survives isn’t what was eaten. It’s what was printed.

The Other Side of the Aegean: Ä°zmir Without Its Greeks

Turkish kitchens got edited too. Ä°zmir köfte — meatballs and potatoes in tomato sauce — belongs to the same family as soutzoukakia, and some Turkish food writers trace it to the departed Greeks. I can’t prove that, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What’s documented is smaller and sadder: a shared late-Ottoman Ä°zmir kitchen that the exchange split into two national claim systems, each one now certain it invented itself.

And the border pushed food both ways. The Giritli — Muslims from Crete — settled around Ä°zmir, Aydın, and Bodrum, bringing an olive-oil kitchen of braised greens, artichokes, and beans that still runs through the region. When an Istanbul restaurant advertises Cretan cooking today, that is precisely what it means: the Muslim exchangees’ Crete. The asymmetry is the lesson. Greece folded its refugees’ food into “Greek cuisine” within a generation and printed it. Turkey’s exchangee food stayed regional. Same border. Different archives.

Istanbul’s Long Goodbye: 1923, 1942, 1955, 1964

Remember those exemptions? Lausanne let Constantinople’s Greeks stay, on the theory that a protected minority could actually remain protected. The border disagreed with its own fine print. November 1942: the Varlık Vergisi, the wealth tax, ruined thousands of non-Muslim families, and the men who couldn’t pay were shipped to a labor camp at Aşkale. 6–7 September 1955: organized rioting wrecked Greek, Armenian, and Jewish shops across Istanbul — the pretext was a bomb thrown at Atatürk’s birthplace in Thessaloniki, later shown in court to have been planted by a Turkish agent who supplied the occasion. March 1964: Ankara cancelled the residence permits of Greek citizens. Some twelve thousand people, many of them born in the city, out within months.

Politiki kouzina went with them — the city’s olive-oil-and-fish kitchen, its egg-and-lemon soup that Greek cooks from Istanbul still call by the Turkish word terbiye, because that’s what it is. It emigrated to Athens tavernas, and to Melbourne, which became one of the largest Greek-speaking cities on earth. Istanbul’s Greek community fell from well over a hundred thousand to a few thousand today. The soup kept its Turkish word. The city lost its Greeks. That’s the exchange rate.

Halloumi, Hellim, and the Line Through the Dairy

Cyprus, 1974. A coup on 15 July, backed by the junta then ruling in Athens. A Turkish invasion on 20 July. Partition. Roughly 180,000 Greek Cypriots fled south; about 50,000 Turkish Cypriots fled north; and a buffer zone — patrolled by UNFICYP — still cuts Nicosia in two. The mixed villages ended that summer. The places where the two communities actually shared fences, wells, and cheese pots. They have not come back.

Both communities had been making the same cheese for centuries. Folded, minted, sheep-and-goat milk, kept in brine. Halloumi in Greek. Hellim in Turkish. In 2021 the European Union registered “Halloumi” as a protected designation of origin, on the application of the Republic of Cyprus — the government of the south. As first drafted, certification ran through Republic authorities. Which meant Turkish Cypriot dairies in the north, some of them exporting hellim for decades, faced losing the name in the EU market altogether. In 2022 Brussels amended the rules so production in the north could qualify. Some Turkish Cypriot producers got certified. Both sides kept objecting — Greek Cypriot cheesemakers about enforcement gaps, Turkish Cypriot producers about the conditions, and about routing everything through a government they don’t recognize.

Let me be plain, because this column doesn’t do false balance. The cheese was never one community’s invention. The paperwork was written by one side. And the 2022 fix was a trade compromise, not a reconciliation — halloumi is the island’s biggest agricultural export, hundreds of millions of euros a year, with Britain the hungriest market, and money moved that amendment faster than any peace process has moved a fence post. And still. I have grilled hellim bought in north Nicosia and halloumi bought in Larnaca — dry the cheese, pan hot, black blisters before you turn it, lemon at the end — and honestly, I can’t tell you which was which. The border is real. The cheese refuses to know about it.

Jaffa: The Orange That Kept Its Name and Lost Its Farmers

Before 1948, Jaffa was the citrus capital of Palestine. The Shamouti orange — thin-skinned, nearly seedless, shipped from Jaffa’s harbor to London and beyond — had turned the city’s name into a brand decades before the state that now uses that name existed. McVitie’s launched the Jaffa Cake in 1927. At that point Jaffa was a Palestinian city under a British mandate. The biscuit is older than the border.

Between April and May 1948 the city fell. The great majority of Jaffa’s Palestinian residents — tens of thousands of people — left by boat and by road, under mortar fire and fear, into what became permanent exile. Their descendants are among the Palestine refugees the UN has now registered for three generations. The groves didn’t vanish. Ownership did. The new state’s citrus board kept shipping under the Jaffa name, and the word went generic — Jaffa cakes, Jaffa labels — while the farmers kept their keys. My grandmother in Beirut still bought burtuqal Yafa from a grocer who was himself from Jaffa. The fruit kept the city in the market. The grocer kept the city in his pocket.

Ghassan Kanafani, born in Acre and raised in exile, wrote The Land of Sad Oranges in 1962. A family flees. The oranges dry on their trees. A father breaks. In July 1972 a car bomb killed Kanafani in Beirut, and his seventeen-year-old niece with him. The story ends in loss. The author ends in loss. I’m not going to fix either of those for you. In 2019 the EU’s top court ruled that produce from Israeli settlements can’t simply be labeled “Made in Israel.” The label has been the battlefield since 1948. It still is.

How to Read a Recipe Like a Border Document

Here’s the method this column will keep using. It works in any kitchen:

1. Date the spice. Cumin in mainland Greek home cooking before 1923 is rare. After 1923, it’s a fingerprint. Spices travel with displaced people faster than recipes do.
2. Check the name’s grammar. A Turkish noun inside Greek endings — soutzoukakia. A Turkish word, terbiye, still living inside a Greek soup. Bilingual names mark borders that moved.
3. Ask who paid for the printing. Refugee women’s leagues. Tourism boards. Dairies. Citrus export boards. Whoever funded the cookbook decided what would count as authentic.
4. Read for who’s missing. A recipe from Ä°zmir with no Greeks, Jews, or Armenians left in it isn’t a recipe. It’s a census of who’s gone.

One tradeoff I keep having to admit: memory is a bad archive, and archives are bad at food. Cookbooks standardize — they save a dish by killing off its variants. Protected designations defend small producers and freeze a story into one legal version at the exact same time. I hold both facts in my head and keep cooking anyway.

Where This Column Goes Next

This piece opens a running series I’m calling The Border Pantry. The rules are simple: one named dish, one dated event, one recipe I’ve actually cooked, every single time. Next up: Marseille, 1962 — the year the pieds-noirs sailed out of Algeria while Algerian workers kept arriving in France. Same couscous. Two memories. One city’s markets. I’m also building a small glossary of bilingual kitchen words — sucuk/soutzoukakia, hellim/halloumi, terbiye/avgolemono, bastırma/pastourmas — the vocabulary borders tried to sort and kitchens flatly refused to. If your grandmother used a word the cookbook doesn’t have, send it to me. That’s the archive we can still save.

FAQ: Borders, Recipes, and Who Gets to Remember

What is soutzoukakia, and why is it tied to 1923?

Soutzoukakia are oblong cumin-and-garlic meatballs simmered in tomato-and-wine sauce, brought to Greece by Orthodox refugees expelled from Anatolia under the Greek-Turkish population exchange signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923. The name pairs a Turkish word — sucuk — with Greek grammar. The dish’s whole biography, in one noun and one suffix.

Is İzmir köfte the same dish as soutzoukakia?

Close relatives from the same late-Ottoman İzmir kitchen — and no surviving document proves direct descent in either direction. The honest answer: the 1923 exchange split a shared repertoire into two national canons, and these are what that repertoire became on either side of the Aegean.

Who does halloumi belong to?

Both Cypriot communities made the folded, minted cheese for centuries — halloumi in Greek, hellim in Turkish. The 2021 EU protected designation was registered by the Republic of Cyprus, and a 2022 amendment opened the same protection to Turkish Cypriot producers in the north. “Belongs” is the wrong verb. Provenance is shared, the paperwork is political, and the export money is very real.

How can you trace a dish to a political event?

Date the ingredients, the name, and the first printed recipe. Compare versions on both sides of the border. Then read for what’s missing. Spices travel with displaced people faster than recipes do, bilingual names mark moving borders, and whoever paid for the printing decided what counted as authentic.

What is culinary forgetting?

The process by which borders edit recipes: names translated, spices trimmed as foreign, whole communities left out of print — while the dish keeps selling under the old name. Soutzoukakia kept Smyrna in Greek mouths. “Jaffa” kept selling oranges after Jaffa’s farmers were gone. The dish survives. The memory is managed.

One Last Thing Before You Cook

Make the soutzoukakia. Bloom the cumin. Shape them long, and say the whole name — smyrneika — out loud while the sauce darkens. A border wins when the names go quiet. Cook loud.