Memories of Gaziantep, Turkey

Beyza Koca is an alumni of Amity College in Sydney’s west. Her family come from Gaziantep, the epicentre of the earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria last month. Tens of thousands of people have died and hundreds of thousands been displaced. Beyza’s family survived. Many of their friends have not. Below is an edited version of the story she contributed to Recipes for Ramadan in 2020.

Beyza Koca

I am Australian with a Turkish background. For our special occasions, my dad becomes our Masterchef and does most of the shopping. My mum and I help him with the preparation and organising in the kitchen.

My father is from Gaziantep. It’s known as the Paris of South East Turkey and the best city for its economy, living standards and food. It is included in UNESCO Cities of Gastronomy and the only city in the world named for its cuisine. Antep means delicious food and generous, skilled and talented hosts and hostesses. As Gaziantep is at the border with Syria, you can see and taste the influences of Arab cuisine too.

My father told me that he remembers at iftars in his youth, there would be hundreds of people sitting on their knees around sofras (sofra is a piece of cloth that you put on the ground to serve a meal instead of using a table). Young men and women are serving many dishes and it’s so loud. Then when everyone is seated and has their plates, no one talks and everyone waits for the Adhan (the call to prayer) which tells us we can break the fast. And then come the sounds of spoons touching the plates, drinks pouring into glasses, eating, drinking and talking…

Our Ramadan is always characterised by the theme of giving and giving in as many ways as we can. In Gaziantep, iftar means not only sharing with your relatives but also sharing with your neighbours and with those in need. Next to maximising our Zakat, my family strives to host as many guests as possible during Ramadan. We like to host intercultural iftar dinners at our house in Sydney. We hope you will enjoy trying our food and getting to know a little of our story.

When my father was about 5 years old, my Dede (grandfather) went to Germany to work. At that time, many Turkish people went to Germany for work. They were called Gastarbeiter. My father studied the first 2 years of his primary education in Koln (Cologne) and had his first experiences tasting national and international food in Germany.

My grandparents had friends from different parts of Turkey who all loved to cook cuisines unique to their cities, plus German cuisine and some other European cuisines too. After they moved back to Gaziantep, my father really got into Gaziantep cuisine and learning to cook.

He came to Australia in 1995 to study at Wollongong University, finished his Bachelor of Mathematics and Master of Education at La Trobe University, became a teacher and settled in Australia. My parents met in Istanbul. I was born in Melbourne and we moved to Sydney in 2015 when I was 13 years old.

We used to go to Turkey every second year to visit our relatives and many of my memories of Gaziantep are based around food. Stuffed dolma, eggplant kebab, onion kebap, lahmacun, yuvalama, cigkofte, baklava, kunefe and much more…

Ali Nazik kebab is a scrumptious Gaziantep specialty and one of our favourites. There are different beliefs about where the name Ali Nazik came from. One of them dates back to the 16th century Ottoman Em- pire and the reign of Yavuz Sultan Selim. Visiting the city of Antep (today’s Gaziantep), the Sultan was greeted with this local delicacy of delicious eggplant and yoghurt mash with grilled lamb on top. Sultan Selim liked the dish so much and asked “Whose ‘gentle hand’ (“Eli nazik” in Turkish) made this?”

The story goes that the name “Ali Nazik” has stuck since then. Another story claims the name was adopted from the old Ottoman Turkish language. In this language, “ala” meant “beautiful” and “nazik” meant “food.” Over the centuries, this turned to “Ali Nazik”. In modern Turkish, “nazik” means “polite,” thus the phrase “polite Ali”.

My grandparents and most of my aunts and uncles live in the same apartment building. It is 16 storeys high and for a long time, it was the tallest building in Gaziantep. You could see most of the city and a big park with beautiful playgrounds, walking trails and cafes. With the elevator in our apartment building we used to go up and down the levels to visit my cousins and play with them. At night, we used to go out to that park as a whole family and stay there till late at night, eating delicious foods, snacks both sweet and savoury.

I miss those days. Although living standards here in Australia are well above Turkey and Gaziantep, I’ve always wanted to live there. It may be because of the strong family ties and level of engagement amongst them – but the food is also a factor. Maybe one day I will return to my grandfather’s home to live.