Come, sit. I’ve just pulled a tray of sfiha from the oven—the dough blistered and golden, the lamb spiked with cinnamon and a whisper of allspice. My grandmother in Beirut made them the same way, but she called them lahm bi ajeen. Across the mountains in Damascus, her cousin used pomegranate molasses instead of lemon. Same dish, different name, different tartness. The border between them was barely a line on a map when they were girls. Then it became a wall. And the food remembered what the maps tried to erase.
I’m Yasmin Khoury, and I’ve spent years tracing how political borders—drawn by men in distant rooms—reshaped what people ate, what they named their food, and what they quietly forgot. This isn’t just history. It’s the taste of loss, and the stubborn survival of flavor.
The Ottoman Kitchen: A Shared Language Before the Lines
Before the Great War carved up the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean ate from a common pot. The Ottoman Empire, for all its flaws, created a culinary continuum stretching from the Balkans to the Arabian Peninsula. A cook in Aleppo and a cook in Sarajevo both understood the logic of stuffing vegetables with rice and pine nuts, of simmering lamb with dried fruits, of finishing a dish with a dollop of yogurt. The names varied—dolma, yaprak, mahshi—but the grammar of the kitchen was shared.
My great-grandmother, born in 1890s Tripoli, kept a handwritten cookbook. The pages are brittle now, stained with olive oil and rosewater. She wrote in Arabic script but used Turkish words for certain techniques: kavurma for browning meat, salça for tomato paste. The book doesn’t mention Lebanon or Syria. It mentions cities—Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem—as stops on a continuum, not capitals of separate nations. The recipes assume you can get the same bulgur, the same sheep’s milk yogurt, the same orange blossom water whether you’re in a mountain village or a coastal port. Borders hadn’t yet interrupted the flow of ingredients.
The Sykes-Picot Carve-Up: When Maps Became Menus
In 1916, while my great-grandmother was still kneading dough for kibbeh, two diplomats—one British, one French—drew lines across a map of the Middle East. The Sykes-Picot Agreement didn’t just create new nations; it created new national cuisines. Overnight, a family could find itself in a different country than the market where they’d always bought their spices. A village’s traditional wheat field might now be across a guarded checkpoint. The ingredients that had always been local became foreign.
Take freekeh, the smoky green wheat that farmers across the Levant had made for centuries. Before the borders hardened, it traveled from the Hauran plain to kitchens in Haifa, Nazareth, and Beirut without anyone thinking twice. After 1948, the Hauran’s freekeh still made it to Damascus and Amman, but the route to Haifa was severed. Palestinian cooks who’d fled to Lebanon recreated it with local wheat, but the smokiness was different—the wood wasn’t the same, the soil wasn’t the same. The dish survived, but it carried a new kind of longing.
The Ingredient That Became a Refugee
Consider za’atar. Not the spice blend—that’s a whole other story—but the wild herb, Origanum syriacum, that grows in the hills of Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Before 1948, Palestinian villagers gathered it freely. After the Nakba, many of those hills became military zones or were bulldozed. The herb itself became a refugee, transplanted to kitchen gardens in diaspora communities. Today, Palestinian cooks in Jordan or Chicago grow it in pots, preserving not just a flavor but a connection to a specific patch of land that their grandmothers walked. The za’atar plant doesn’t recognize borders, but people must.
When Names Became Political
Borders don’t just change where ingredients come from. They change what dishes are called, and who gets to claim them. The humble chickpea fritter is the most famous casualty. In Lebanon, it’s falafel. In Egypt, it’s ta’amiya, made with fava beans instead of chickpeas—a distinction that goes back centuries. But in Israel, falafel was adopted and rebranded as national street food. The culinary appropriation became so complete that many outside the region now associate falafel with Israel, unaware of its deep Arab roots. The dish itself is neutral. The naming of it is anything but.
Similarly, hummus became a battleground. Lebanon and Israel competed for the world’s largest hummus plate—a Guinness record that felt less like celebration and more like a culinary land grab. Behind the spectacle, smaller stories unfolded. A Palestinian family in the West Bank, whose olive grove was cut off by the separation wall, began buying Turkish olives to make their hummus. The taste changed. The memory of their own trees, their own oil, became a story told at the table, not an ingredient in the bowl.
The Disappearing Dishes: What Borders Made Us Forget
Some foods didn’t adapt. They simply vanished from one side of a line. In the Hatay province, annexed by Turkey from French-mandate Syria in 1939, the Arabic-speaking community once made a delicate cheese called sürk, spiked with Aleppo pepper and nigella seeds. After annexation, Turkish dairy regulations discouraged raw-milk cheeses. Sürk faded. On the Syrian side, war and displacement scattered the cheesemakers. Now, you might find it only in a few villages, made by old women who remember the taste of a borderless time.
In Cyprus, the 1974 division split the island’s food culture. Greek Cypriots in the south and Turkish Cypriots in the north both made halloumi—or hellim—from sheep and goat milk, flavored with wild mint. After partition, the cheese became a symbol of Greek Cypriot identity, aggressively marketed internationally as a uniquely Cypriot product. Turkish Cypriot hellim production dwindled, cut off from export markets. The same cheese, made on the same island, now tells two different stories of belonging.
The Sweet That Crossed the Line—and Changed Its Name
Not all border stories are about loss. Some are about transformation so complete that the original is forgotten. Baklava is the most famous example. Its origins are disputed—Assyrian, Byzantine, Ottoman—but by the 19th century, it was a specialty of Aleppo and Damascus, made with local pistachios and clarified butter. When Armenian and Arab immigrants brought it to Europe and the Americas, it became “Greek baklava” or “Turkish baklava,” depending on who was selling it. The Syrian version, with its distinctive rosewater syrup and paper-thin pastry, was subsumed into broader categories. In Greece, it’s made with walnuts and honey. In Turkey, it’s drenched in sugar syrup. Both are delicious. Neither is quite what my great-grandmother made.
This renaming happens quietly. A dish crosses a border, finds a new audience, and gradually sheds its old identity. Kunafa—that glorious cheese pastry soaked in syrup—is Palestinian, specifically from Nablus, where the unsalted Nabulsi cheese gives it a distinctive stretch and salt-sweet balance. But in Egypt, it became a national dessert, adapted with different cheeses and sometimes topped with mango. In Turkey, it’s künefe, served in small copper pans. Each version is wonderful. But the Nablus origin is often lost in the telling, a quiet erasure that happens when borders turn local specialties into generic “Middle Eastern” dishes.
The Spice Routes That Borders Severed
Before nation-states, spice merchants moved freely along routes that had existed for millennia. Aleppo pepper—pul biber—was once the defining spice of the Levant, a flaked chili with a fruity, almost raisiny depth. It grew around Aleppo and was traded throughout the Ottoman Empire. Then came the Syrian civil war. Aleppo’s spice souks were bombed. Farmers fled. The pepper nearly vanished from global markets. Turkish Maras pepper and other substitutes filled the gap, but they’re not the same. Cooks who’d used Aleppo pepper for generations had to adapt their recipes, losing a layer of flavor that had defined their regional cuisine.
The same happened with sumac from the hills of southern Turkey and northern Syria. When conflict disrupted harvests, the supply chain broke. Cooks in Beirut, who’d always used Syrian sumac for its deep burgundy color and lemony tang, turned to Iranian or Turkish sources. The new sumac was fine, but the color was paler, the acidity sharper. A subtle shift in flavor that only a grandmother might notice—and mourn.
What the Diaspora Rebuilt
But here’s where the story turns. Borders may sever supply chains and erase names, but they can’t erase memory. In diaspora kitchens—from Dearborn to Berlin to São Paulo—cooks have become culinary archivists. They recreate dishes with whatever ingredients they can find, adapting and preserving simultaneously. A Syrian refugee in Germany might use quark instead of labneh, but she still strains it overnight, still drizzles it with olive oil and za’atar, still serves it with the same pride. The technique survives even when the ingredient changes.
In Paterson, New Jersey, a Palestinian baker makes ka’ak al-quds—Jerusalem sesame bread—using American flour and sesame seeds from Mexico. The shape is the same: a round, purse-like loaf with a dimple in the center, designed to hold a boiled egg. The bread is sold to a community that remembers buying it from street vendors near the Damascus Gate. Eating it is an act of return, a temporary undoing of the border that keeps them from home.
The Shared Table That Borders Couldn’t Break
Sometimes, food becomes the only place where enemies still share something. In divided Nicosia, the last capital of a partitioned country, Greek and Turkish Cypriots both make koupes—bulgur shells stuffed with minced meat and spices, deep-fried until golden. The recipe is identical on both sides of the Green Line. In the buffer zone, where UN soldiers patrol, there’s a small café that serves both communities. The koupes taste the same. For a moment, over a shared plate, the border dissolves.
In Jerusalem, the ka’ak seller in the Old City sells to everyone—Israeli Jews, Palestinian Muslims, Armenian Christians, tourists. The bread doesn’t ask for a passport. It’s one of the few things in that fractured city that still belongs to no one and everyone. The vendor, a Palestinian whose family has held the spot for four generations, says the recipe hasn’t changed since Ottoman times. The border around him has shifted a dozen times. The bread hasn’t moved.
What We Lost, What We Keep
I think about my great-grandmother’s cookbook often. The pages are a map of a world that no longer exists—a world where food moved freely, where names were local but not national, where a dish belonged to a city or a family rather than a flag. Borders didn’t just change what people ate. They changed what people were allowed to remember. Claiming a dish as “Lebanese” or “Syrian” or “Israeli” is a political act, a way of drawing a line through a shared history and saying, “This side is mine.”
But the food itself resists. A bowl of hummus doesn’t carry a passport. A tray of baklava doesn’t salute a flag. When I make my great-grandmother’s sfiha, I’m not making Lebanese food. I’m making her food—the food of a woman who lived in a world before these borders, who would have found our culinary nationalism baffling. She cooked what her mother cooked, what her neighbors cooked, what the land provided. The land didn’t have a nationality then. It still doesn’t, not really. Only we do.
So the next time you eat something “Mediterranean,” pause. Ask where it came from—not which country, but which city, which village, which pair of hands. Ask what border it crossed, what name it lost along the way, what ingredient it had to replace. The answer is usually a story of loss. But it’s also a story of survival. And that, I think, is worth tasting.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did the Sykes-Picot Agreement affect Mediterranean food culture?
The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement divided the Ottoman Empire’s Arab territories into British and French spheres of influence, creating modern borders that disrupted centuries-old trade routes and ingredient supply chains. Families found themselves separated from traditional markets, and dishes that had been regional became nationalized, often losing their original names and variations in the process.
Why do some Mediterranean dishes have different names in different countries?
Many dishes predate modern nation-states and were originally known by local or city-specific names. After borders were drawn, countries often claimed these dishes as part of their national cuisine, renaming them or adapting them to local tastes. Political conflicts and cultural nationalism further encouraged the rebranding of shared foods to assert distinct national identities.
What role does the diaspora play in preserving traditional foods?
Diaspora communities act as culinary archivists, recreating traditional dishes with available ingredients while preserving core techniques and flavors. This adaptation keeps food memories alive across generations and geographies, often transforming dishes into symbols of identity and resistance against the cultural erasure caused by displacement and border changes.
Are there any foods that have completely disappeared due to border changes?
Yes, some regional specialties have nearly vanished. For example, sürk, a raw-milk cheese from the Hatay region, declined after the area’s annexation by Turkey introduced new dairy regulations. War and displacement have also caused the loss of specific local variations of dishes, as traditional ingredient sources become inaccessible and communities scatter.