Turkish-born anthropologist Ellie Romain Ors explores the implications of gastro-nationalism through the humble sweet pastry
In the rich folds of baklava – a dessert that is as intricate in construction as it is in historical implication, Ellie Romain Ors finds a metaphor for national identity; layered, fragile and relentlessly contested. Having made Athens her home, the Turkish-born anthropologist is a connoisseur of not just pastry but the cultural significance it carries. In this interview with the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, Ors shares her exploration of gastro-nationalism, the field where food becomes a battlefield, and walnuts and pistachios bear the flag of national pride.
Ors arrived in Athens in the late 1990s, a move that spurred her journey into charting the complex cartographies of everyday Mediterranean life. “You don’t look Turkish,” she was told, as if ethnicity was a spice too strong to misplace. She refused to accept this shallow framing, pushing back against the essentialism that so often simmers beneath polite conversation.
Shaped by long afternoons of Greek coffee and long-distance memories of Istanbul, her project is less about who has the right to claim patrimony over baklava, but rather why do we feel the urge to do so. She compares it to “supporting your national football team.” Ultimately: “your team will always be better than the opponent”. And yet in the historical “baklava wars” – where both Byzantium and the Ottoman court lay claim to the desert as a cultural heirloom – Ors finds not only division, but a map of shared longing.
These themes are drawn out in her ‘Muhabbet’ (‘coffeehouse conversations’) lecture series, hosted alongside historians Katerina Boura and Elias Kolovou. Over wine and salted nibbles, folks gather in Plaka to hear Ors draw connections between cuisines and community. Here, food is both an artifact and an offering. In one lecture, Ors showed a picture of a mosaic of baklavas shaped into the portrait of Mehmed II, a sugary act of soft power by the Turkish National Baklava Association. It was then she realised how important it was to have a safe and neutral space to digest nuanced understandings of nationalism, identity and cultural inheritance.
For Ors, the stories behind certain dishes like moussaka and mahlepi, dolma and muchaleb, offer more than nostalgia. She believes these recipes can offer a mode of reconciliation. Proposing an “Aegean vision” that honours the maritime mingling of cultures beyond borders, religions and rivalries. After all, she notes, food is often passed down more easily than language; forging its way across the gaps of untranslatable vocabulary of family, grandmothers, of smells wafting from kitchens where no flag is flown.
Perhaps that is why the question of who owns baklava – unanswerable in itself – is still asked. It speaks to a longing built on diaspora, memory, and the joys of eating something both familiar and foreign.
Original article (“Ιλάι Ρομαίν Ορς στην «Κ»: Ο μπακλαβάς ανήκει στα φιστίκια του”/ “Elie Romain Ors on “K”: Baklava belongs to its pistachios”) by Maro Vasiliadou first appeared in Greek in Kathimerini on 2 June 2025.
It’s available here.
Kathimerini is a daily political and financial newspaper based in Athens, Greece.
Summary by TMH
