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Nektaria Anastasiadou, A Recipe for Daphne, Hoopoe Fiction, 2021. 326 pgs.
“A monstrous confusion of civilization and barbarism”—so Constantinople was described in the 18th century. “And so it is to this day,” adds Kosmas, the romantic protagonist in Nektaria Anastasiadou’s novel, A Recipe for Daphne. What exactly does he mean?
Set in Istanbul in 2011, among the city’s dwindling Greek Orthodox or “Rum” community, the book appears at first to be a predictable love story about an American woman searching for her roots and a local man whose love for the city and its history form the basis of their courtship.
Daphne, a beautiful 32-year-old teacher, fluent in English, Greek, and Turkish, has come to the city to visit her mother’s sister Gavriela. Her parents had emigrated from Istanbul to Florida years earlier and brought their daughter up in Miami. But Daphne, currently in a dubious five-year relationship with an American tango fanatic who she suspects is unfaithful, is questioning not only the future of her relationship but also where she wants to spend the rest of her life.
Gavriela and Daphne first appear at a tea garden where a group of Rum friends traditionally gather each afternoon, and the younger woman immediately arouses the interest of two men. Fanis, a lively 76-year-old, lifelong womaniser, and cantor at the Orthodox cathedral, is determined to find a wife and settle down in his old age. Kosmas, a master pastry chef and owner of a highly regarded bakery, is a shy 41-year-old who lives with his overbearing mother and who has never had a serious relationship. Because there are so few eligible young women remaining in the community, he sees Daphne as possibly his last chance, but realises that he desperately needs romantic advice—for which he unwittingly turns to Fanis, no less.
It’s a perfect set-up for a humorous love story, and Anastasiadou writes it well, enlivening the dialogue between her cast of engaging characters with racy and folkloric Turkish and Greek proverbs. As Kosmas shows Daphne the city, and they travel with some of the older members of the community on picnics and outings, we are given vivid descriptions of Istanbul’s sights, shops and markets, music and dancing, beaches and high lookouts, old and new neighbourhoods, and—especially—its food. Daphne is gradually seduced by Istanbul’s rich multicultural heritage and the prospect of a new exciting life there. When asked about Miami, she replies, “I don’t know if it is the home of my soul.”
We also come to admire the resilience, humour, and determination of the older people. Fanis is the novel’s most fully fleshed character, and it’s impossible not to cheer for him as he tries to find a wife, deals with health worries, shows his love of music, and tries to make peace with a great loss—and his own guilt—from the distant past.
The conversations and actions of the older generation, however, reveal a darker history. Why does Gavriela tuck her gold crucifix inside her blouse so that it can’t be seen? Why is Fanis careful not to speak Greek on the streets? What actually happened to his beloved fiancée during the pogrom of 1955? Why is this once-thriving community of Byzantine Greeks now struggling for survival, after living in the city and greatly influencing its culture since the days of Constantine himself? Why have so many of the young people left?
The author describes the 1955 Istanbul pogrom targeting the Rums in which many were assaulted, raped, and killed, and their businesses looted and destroyed. She speaks of a history of minority status and painful memories but does not go into detail about the full story of the persecution of Christians in Turkey. When her older characters repeat stories of what happened, and why they continue to harbour mistrust and resentment, the younger characters listen with impatience: they want to move on.
The Byzantine Empire—a continuation of the Roman Empire and Eastern Church, with its capital in Constantinople, and its predominant language as Greek—lasted from the 4th century AD until Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453. Constantinople remained as the seat of the Eastern Church, and a community of Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, called “Rum” from the Greek for “Roman”, has made it their home for at least seventeen centuries.
The Ottomans once ruled a far greater territory than that occupied by modern Turkey. It stretched all the way across the Balkans, encompassing Greece, Romania and Moldavia, through western Syria and Lebanon and across North Africa. Within that empire lived people of many ethnicities, languages, and religions—among them Muslims, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Eastern Catholics, and Jews. In the 19th century, as the Ottomans began to suffer defeats at the hands of European and Russian armies, their territory began to shrink. In the Balkan Wars, prior to the First World War, the Ottomans lost nearly all of their European holdings, and the mass expulsion of Muslims from the Balkans that followed created anger and a desire for revenge against Christians. Internally, a series of revolutions weakened the Sultan’s power within Turkey, and ethno-nationalist sentiment grew. The legal end of the Ottoman Empire came with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, and the Republic of Turkey was established later that year.
The genocides of 1914–1922 were carried out against Ottoman Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians, Syriacs, and Chaldeans—all Christians—who lived in Turkey. It is estimated that by the end of the First World War, 50 per cent of the Christian population of Turkey had been killed. In 1924, an enforced population exchange was carried out, under the auspices of the League of Nations, which involved 1.2 million Turkish Greeks who were deported to Greece and 400,000 Greek Muslims who were sent to Turkey. This population exchange remains controversial, with some critics saying it was a final act in Turkey’s ethnic cleansing, and others saying that it probably prevented a future genocide. The Rums of Istanbul were exempted from the exchange. In any case, by 1924 the Christian population of Turkey had dropped from 4.4. million to only 700,000.
Unfortunately, that was not the end of the story. In 1942, a compulsory one-time wealth tax was imposed, arbitrarily assessing the wealth of minority citizens without right of appeal. Armenians were taxed the most, at 232 per cent of their supposed wealth, Jews at 179 per cent, Greeks at 156 per cent, and Muslim Turks at 4.94 per cent. This meant that Muslim Turks would be able to buy up the assets of the ruined, bankrupted minorities at extremely low prices.
In 1955, there was the anti-Greek pogrom in Istanbul. Nine years later, the deportation of 13,000 Rum citizens, whose assets were seized by Turkey, reduced the population further. By the end of the 1960s, the Rum community of 90,000 had been depleted to 18,000. Now, fifty years later, it numbers around 1,800 people, whose average age is 60-70.
In A Recipe for Daphne, we see a sharp difference between the way older and younger people perceive the Turkish government, and the future. All of the elders are worried about another sudden unforeseen persecution; for instance, we watch as Fanis checks every corner of his apartment before settling down for the night, we hear the distrust the Rums have of their Turkish neighbours and see the ways they try to cover their identification as a minority. While they all have friends and acquaintances who are Muslim, they speak disparagingly of the trend toward greater religious conservatism, and they don’t like the idea of mixed marriages. At the same time, as witnesses of the exodus of so many younger people, they’re thrilled that Daphne might want to stay and marry Kosmas, because children are the only hope for a future. Daphne’s parents, however, are aghast.
“They know how to live,” Daphne tells her mother.
“If the government lets them live,” Sultana retorts.
“It’s a democracy, Mom.”
“The twilight of a democracy…. You’re insane. It’s like moving to Germany in thirty-nine.”
But Daphne is an idealist who wants “the Byzantine and Ottoman salt” that makes life in Istanbul so savoury, and her suitor Kosmas is a pragmatist who can’t imagine a life outside of his beloved city. When she presses him about the Turkish president’s conservative views, he sees her as hopelessly American. He muses, “How could she understand that a politician’s ideas about condoms and social media were of secondary importance when that politician respected your long-deprived right to live, work, and be happy?”
“All I want is to live in peace,” he says. “As long as I have that, I can ignore the rest.”
Kosmas also turns out to be a romantic idealist, as symbolised by his search for a recipe for a once-famous pastry called the Balkanik. While Daphne returns to the United States to see her parents and make a final decision about moving, he spends months trying to recreate the delicacy for her, from notes in an old Ottoman cookbook unearthed by his Muslim assistant. The Balkanik was a sort of large éclair, filled with eight differently coloured and flavoured creams, representing each of the original tribes of the Balkans: Bulgarians, Romanians, Albanians, Greeks, Serbs, Croats, Jews, and Turks, all existing together in harmony.
I understand this longing. My own father-in-law was an Arab Protestant from Damascus who had lived under Ottoman rule, in a family that had survived persecution, and yet spoke movingly of the vibrant multiculturalism of all the great cities of the Near and Middle East, and his friendships with the local Orthodox priest, and Jewish, Muslim, and Maronite schoolmates. He too was a lover of proverbs. My mother-in-law was an Armenian, born in Turkey, whose father was killed in the Armenian genocide along with all the other men of their village, and who had managed to escape with her mother and small brothers for a life in Alexandria and then Beirut. During their lifetimes, they watched as the once-thriving Christian communities in many of these ancient cities became smaller and smaller, and deplored the religious and political fanaticism that caused it. Like Daphne’s parents, they had wistful memories, but little desire to go back.
A few months ago, I was in Greece myself, and spent a week in Thessaloniki, the largest major city close to Turkey. Once under Ottoman rule, and still retaining many ties to Istanbul through the Orthodox Church, Thessaloniki also offers many Turkish culinary traditions—like the Rums of Istanbul, we ate gilt-head bream, sesame bracelets, cream-filled pastry shells, and honey-drenched baklava, and sat for hours over our plates of delectable mezze while watching ships come and go on the sea. I could well imagine wanting to stay there for a lifetime. In Thessaloniki we also saw an exhibition of Armenian photographs taken in Turkey between 1900 and 1950, documenting the history of a family whose lives mirrored that of my mother-in-law. Thessaloniki is close to the Turkish border, but the exhibition would never be allowed in that country, where the Armenian genocide has never been acknowledged.
For all of these complicated reasons, I found myself wishing for a sweeping, Tolstoian, multi-generational literary saga about the Rum of Istanbul. But will it ever be written? And by whom? Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most famous novelist, was not even protected by his Nobel prize in literature when, in 2005, he tried to stand up for free speech by stating in public that 1 million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds had been killed. Threatened by trial for “publicly insulting the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly” and subjected to a hate campaign, he fled the country for a time, returning eventually to face trial. The charges against him were finally dropped, but in 2008 an ultranationalist plot was uncovered, with the intent to assassinate specific political figures, Christian missionaries, and intellectuals, of whom Pamuk was alleged to be one. One of the plotters was the man who had originally brought the charges against him. I suspect that if a serious large-scale work of literature about the history of the Rum is ever to be written, it will probably have to originate outside Turkey.
For her part, Anastasiadou chooses to remain on the lighter side, presenting a positive vision of the elders in the Rum community for their courage and determination to live fully in each moment, tempering negative views of Muslims and the present Turkish government, and promoting an idealistic vision of hope, renewal and harmony through a younger generation. Whether that optimism is realistic remains to be seen; the numbers are not favourable, but a community is renewed one family as a time. In the long run, the most enduring character in Anastasiadou’s novel may be Istanbul itself, in its “monstrous confusion of civilisation and barbarism”, but also in its ability to change, adapt, and survive.
Header photo by Durrie Bouscaren.
How to cite: Adams, Beth. “On the Lighter Side: Nektaria Anastasiadou’s A Recipe for Daphne.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 19 Dec. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/12/19/daphne.
Elizabeth (Beth) Adams is a writer, artist, and publisher. She is a dual Canadian-American citizen, and has lived in Montreal since 2005. Her biography of Bishop Gene Robinson was published in 2006, and Snowy Fields, a book of her drawings and essays has just come out. She was a founder/co-managing editor of the former e-zine qarrtsiluni, is founder/editor of the independent press Phoenicia Publishing, and her blog, The Cassandra Pages, has considered questions of arts&letters, culture, and spirit since 2003. She is a member of PEN Canada. [All contributions by Beth Adams.]
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