War and Baklava

Samuel Dolbee, New York University

A Syrian refugee in Istanbul named Hilmi recently told a Turkish newspaper reporter, "Here even finding a hot pepper sometimes makes people cry. When I see peppers, Damascus comes to my mind."  Authorities estimate at least 100,000 Syrians have made Istanbul their home since 2011, temporary or otherwise.  Today's document shows how these links between Syria and Istanbul go back much further and, as Hilmi's words demonstrate, how food provides a particularly intimate view of these connections between people and places.

In this petition, written on August 15th, 1916, a man called Şamlı Haci Mustafa told the Interior Ministry that several years before he established a baklava shop in the Köprübaşı neighborhood of Istanbul.  Everybody loved it.  Or, as he put it in the special patois of petition-ese, his baklava and börek - both made from clarified butter - garnered the "affection and desire of the esteemed people" of Istanbul.

But the requisitioning of the Great War left Şamlı Haci Mustafa without his key ingredient, taking the wrong kind of bite out of his business.  With a government ban on the import of Şamlı Haci Mustafa's special butter from Aleppo to Istanbul, the phyllo maestro wrote, "Naturally, as regarding the making of pure and delicious baklava and börek, difficulties have been encountered." Stuck between his pastry shop's high rent and his store room's low butter, Şamlı Haci Mustafa characterized his situation as tahammülfersa, an Arabic-Persian compound that means exhausting of endurance.  Şamlı Haci Mustafa further intimated that the situation "will make miserable and destroy my family."  In the name of fiscal solvency, familial harmony, and confectionary excellence, the baklava man politely asked the Interior Ministry to pass the butter.  Or at least let the butter pass.

A few scrawled words on the reverse side of the paper typically decided the fate of a petitioner's request.  This one is no different, and it is unclear whether the authorities fulfilled Haci Mustafa's plea.  The final message called for clarification on the status of clarified butter between different arms of the Ottoman state, namely, the Fourth Imperial Army - based in Syria - and the Interior Ministry.

What is clearer than backside chicken scratch and bureaucratic wrangling is that two years later, the Ottoman Empire lost all political control of its provinces in Syria.  As Şamlı Haci Mustafa's case demonstrates, meanwhile many struggled to retain control of the goods that gastronomically bound Istanbul with the Ottoman provinces of Syria.  As Hilmi and his peppers show today, these links have endured.

Source: BOA DH-İ-UM-EK 20/6 (15 11 1334 [September 13 1916])

      

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