As everywhere in Anatolia, bread in Amasya is the crown of the table. A piece of bread that falls to the floor is picked up, kissed and raised to the forehead, and not even a crumb is wasted. To make bread in this city is more than to bring flour and water together; it is a small ceremony that gathers patience, neighbourliness and a belief in abundance around one table. The process, from the dough prepared the day before to the loaves lined up beside the tandır, also orders the daily life of the district: when baking day comes, women gather, courtyards fill with smoke, and a warm smell spreads through the neighbourhood.

Amasya's cuisine rests on a settlement history of more than seven thousand years and on the court life of the city known as the City of Princes, and it holds a wide repertoire of dough-based dishes. From katmer to yakasal börek, from hengel to döndürme, the foundation of this variety is bread in its plainest form. The traces of the city's relationship with bread do not stay in the kitchen alone; they can be followed in the vineyards and fields where the wheat grew, in the mills along the Yeşilırmak, in the bakehouses of the imarets, in the bakeries of the market and in the memory of famine years. Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar's Amasya Tarihi and Osman Fevzi Olcay's Amasya Hâtıraları are the two local sources that recorded a large part of these traces.

Wheat, Mill and Larder

The story of Amasya's bread begins in the field. Speaking of the city's vineyards and gardens, Hüsameddin writes that Amasya's wheat, together with its apples, okra, quinces, walnuts and cherries, was counted first everywhere; he adds that wheat, barley, maize and oats grew in abundance and were widely traded. This fertile soil, watered by the Yeşilırmak and its tributaries, supplied the raw material of bread right at the city's edge. The mills that turned the wheat into flour ran on the same water. The Soğuk Pınar stream, coming down from Mount Lokman, drove the mills on both its banks and watered the vineyards, giving life to the neighbourhoods below; along both banks of the stream that took the name "Deliçay" (the Mad Stream) when it flooded there were many mills, workshops, vineyards and gardens.

In Amasya the mill was also part of the system of pious endowments (waqf). According to Hüsameddin's records, Ayas Ağa added the mill in front of the gate of the Bayezid Paşa residence to the revenues of the bathhouse he built in 900 [1494-95] and endowed them to the mosque, madrasa and school in the Şamlar quarter. Among the revenues of the Qur'an school (dârülkurrâ) founded by Hacı Efendizâde Şeyh Mehmed Ağa, ten shops in the row of the Yâkûtiye Mosque are listed together with a large mill opposite them. Describing the Amasya of his childhood, Osman Fevzi Olcay recalls that on the city's main street there was a flour mill belonging to Kazasker Sudur Ahmed Efendi, and that it was later pulled down by the municipality together with the neighbouring madrasa and tomb.

Wheat held a special place in a household's preparations for winter. A compilation based on the memories of the Armenians of Amasya relates that each household stored an amount of wheat suited to its size, that most of it was ground into flour, that some was boiled and pounded into hulled wheat, and that some was cracked like bulgur into coarse, medium and fine grades. The same source also says that erişte and home-made pasta were cut from thinly rolled dough in the last days of autumn, dried in an oven that was cooling down and stored in cloth bags. Bread thus ceases to be only a daily baking task and settles at the centre of a larder system spread over the whole year.

The Patience of Leavened Dough

In a traditional Amasya household, bread preparation begins the day before. The flour is sifted and kneaded in large troughs with lukewarm water, salt and yeast. The dough rises for hours under a clean cloth, and this waiting is regarded as the most important part of the craft. As with most sourdough breads of Turkish cuisine, a piece of sour dough saved from before leavens the new dough; the dough kneaded early in the morning is left to rest and, once well risen, is rolled out with a rolling pin. This joint work of yeast and time determines both the aroma of the bread and its shelf life.

Chickpea leaven has a place of its own in Amasya's culture of leavening. It is one of the ingredients that raise the dough of Burmalı Amasya Çöreği, the twisted Amasya pastry registered with a geographical indication in 2022. According to the registration document, about fifteen chickpeas are crushed in a mortar and put in a glass jar, lukewarm water and a little sugar are added, and the jar is closed and left for three days in a warm, sunny place. When the leaven matures, a thick foam forms on top and it is ready to be added to the dough. The document also records that the first production of the pastry is known to have taken place in 1925. This method, often used in Anatolian homes in times when factory yeast was unavailable or expensive, lives on in Amasya today as part of a registered product.

In Amasya and its surroundings an unleavened bread called güdül is also known. This practical bread is baked quickly on the griddle or in the tandır and comes to the rescue especially during work in the fields and vineyards, on days when leavened dough leaves no time for waiting. The distinction between leavened and unleavened dough also shows the two separate functions of bread in local life: leavened bread serves the orderly table of the household, while güdül serves the haste of the working day. Across Anatolia, too, yufka is made from unleavened dough, while lavaş and bazlama are made from leavened dough; the differences between regions mostly arise from the thickness of the dough and the surface on which it is baked.

Flavours Baked on the Griddle

The indispensable bread of Amasya's cuisine is the kind baked on a hot griddle (sac). Bazlama, rolled out to about a finger's thickness, is baked on a griddle set over embers until both sides turn golden, and is eaten hot, brushed with butter. Bazlama is a round, even, leavened bread. It is expected to measure on average 20-25 centimetres across and about one centimetre thick; traditionally it is baked on a clay griddle over a wood fire, while today an electric griddle or an ordinary stove is also widely used. The dough rolled slightly thicker than yufka is called şebit in some regions, and the thicker one bazlama. The same bread goes by different names in different places: bezdirme in Aydın, tapıl in Eskişehir, bazdırma around Isparta. Bazlama is said to be among the breads eaten in the Anatolian Seljuk period and to have been served buttered then; the habit of buttering hot bazlama thus appears to carry an old continuity that reaches the table of today.

Thinly rolled yufka becomes both a bread that keeps for a long time and the base of dishes such as gözleme and börek. This round, thin bread, made from unleavened wheat flour, water and salt, was one of the staple foods of the Turkish communities that lived a nomadic life, because it lasts so long. That yufka and lavaş were inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2016 together with their culture of sharing shows that this plain bread is a common memory belonging to a wide geography. Lavaş, unlike yufka, is made from leavened dough and is baked by sticking it to the wall of the tandır rather than on the griddle; for this reason lavaş is called tandır bread in some regions. The sound of the rolling pin of women who sit at the griddle rolling out yufka is one of the most familiar sounds of village houses through the day.

The griddle is not used for bread alone. In local accounts, the poppy-seed and walnut katmer baked on the griddle is called Amasya yağlısı and counts among the leading examples of the city's pastry table. The study that compiles the cuisine of the Armenians of Amasya describes a similar pastry: the dough, divided into five balls, is rested for two hours, the layers rolled out with a rolling pin are oiled, sprinkled with poppy seed or walnuts and stacked, then sliced, rolled out again into ovals and baked on a hot griddle until both sides are browned. Most of the products approved as regional dishes by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, such as Amasya çörek, yağlı or katmer, cırıtka (also called cızlak or akıtma), döndürme, poppy-seed and walnut çörek, kaypak, mayalı and yakasal böreği, represent different sides of the same dough and the same baking craft.

Kete, listed among the pastries, is also part of the district's tables. Its most distinctive feature is the roasting of flour in butter; it can be made filled or unfilled, and its name changes with the region. Kete holds an important place in daily food in Eastern Anatolia and the Eastern Black Sea, and in some places it is preferred at the pre-dawn meal because it is nourishing; traditionally it is baked in tandırs sunk into the ground. In Amasya it is mentioned together with yağlı, yanuç and gömbe among the pastries offered at gatherings of mutual help such as the barama.

Somun, Pide and the Bakeries of the Market

Beside these home-baked breads, somun and stone-oven bread are also eaten from the city's bakeries. Somun, the most common bread type in Anatolia, is produced in almost every bakery with its risen top and golden colour; the one made from wholemeal flour is darker. Stone-oven bread takes its name from being baked on pebbles heated in the oven and is best when eaten fresh. These breads, produced and eaten daily, and the loaves baked in large batches in the home tandır that can be kept for weeks, represent two different rhythms of the same dough culture.

Information compiled from the memories of the Armenians who lived in the city in the late Ottoman period shows in detail how these two rhythms ran side by side in old Amasya. The many bakeries in the market made bread easily available, and the bakers baked it in large ovens. Yet every house also had its own oven, and the housewife baked bread once a week, though buying bread from the market was common. The most popular bread in the city was the somun, oval in shape and weighing between one and one and a half kilograms. To bring the heat of the oven down a little, housewives baked a few pides before the loaves, kneading the bread dough into an oval and spreading it on the peel with wet fingers.

The pides of Amasya were sought after and well known. Pastırma pide was made by arranging pieces of pastırma on the dough, and cheese pide by placing pieces of cheese in a crescent; on fast days plenty of onion and walnut were added to the dough. The "market pide" (çarşı pidesi) baked by the market bakers was eaten with butter spread on top or with halva inside, and was often sold wrapped around roasted meat. The "market çörek" (çarşı çöreği), made and sold by Armenian pastry makers by folding thin layers over one another, was the pastry of family celebrations; the bakers also sold poğaça, simit, walnut and chickpea çörek, and kete.

Olcay's memoirs list one by one in which streets these bakeries stood and in whose hands they were at the beginning of the twentieth century. The bread of Ekmekçi Buusoğlu's bakery, which came after a butcher's shop beyond the street of the Kaçoni School, level with the Vakıfhan, had won great fame in Amasya; elsewhere Olcay mentions the same master as "Ekmekçi Şekeroğlu Buus", the owner of a famous pide bakery. At the corner of Selağzı stood the shop of Ekmekçi Pandili, and the house of Ekmekçi İbrahim Ağa from the village of Yenice, who worked as a baker in the same quarter, was near the Gümüşlü Mosque. Right next to the pide bakery was the famous tandır shop of Hacik Usta, the kebab maker. One of the liveliest scenes Olcay relates is that of a gentleman working at the post office, whom people called Baba Efendi, having bread from Buusoğlu's bakery given under his own supervision every morning and evening to the more than twenty dogs that followed him.

The Tandır That Warms the Neighbourhood

The most striking evidence of how old the tandır is in Amasya has come out of the ground. In the nineteenth year of the excavations at Oluz Höyük, a tandır about two thousand six hundred years old, dated to the Persian period, was brought to light. The excavation director, Prof. Dr. Şevket Dönmez, says that the body of this tandır, made of fired clay, was set below the floor and that it is identical to the tandırs used in Anatolia today, its only difference being its age. A workbench stone thought to have been used for rolling out dough or grinding wheat was also found opposite the tandır. Two years earlier, at the same excavation, a clay pot containing bone fragments and cereal grains had been found in a palace kitchen of the Persian period, and Dönmez suggested that keşkek was made in this pot and was probably cooked in such tandırs.

In Amasya's rural neighbourhoods the tandır is the heart of a house. This traditional oven, sunk into the ground and plastered inside with clay, is heated with wood or dried dung. The dough stuck to the inner surface of the well-heated tandır bakes in minutes in the fervour of the embers; the result is a bread with a crisp crust and a soft inside. In its dictionary sense, tandır means a closed hearth or oven. According to research published on DergiPark, the tandır was first conceived in old village houses for heating and placed beneath earthen houses, and in time turned into an oven for baking bread, humanity's basic need. The same research also notes that building a tandır is quite laborious and requires effort and skill.

The most detailed account of its construction comes from another corner of Anatolia, from a bread maker in the Çatak district of Van; since the method is shared across the Anatolian tandır tradition, it also helps in understanding the tandırs of Amasya's villages. A mortar is prepared from clayey soil, straw and goat hair, this mortar is given the shape of a tandır and dried in the sun for a few days, then placed in a pit dug in the floor of the tandır house. Before use begins, a fire is kept inside for a few days and no bread is baked. In general, tandırs are said to be 130-150 centimetres deep and 50-65 centimetres across. On baking day the inside of the tandır is filled with wood in the morning and the wood is left until it turns completely to embers. Meanwhile the dough is leavened in a large basin; this takes one to one and a half hours, and when the fire of the tandır has calmed, the dough is ready for baking.

Tandır bread takes its name from the oven in which it is baked. The dough, whose basic ingredients are water, flour, salt and yeast, is kneaded and rested, then rolled out like yufka with a rolling pin, sometimes brushed with a mixture of flour, sesame and water, and stuck to the hot inner walls of the tandır. The thinness of the bread makes it bake quickly, while the heat and steam of the tandır give it a natural moisture that helps it keep its freshness for a long time. The tandır breads of Malatya, Midyat, Elmadağ and Konya are today registered with geographical indications, which shows that tandır bread continues in almost every part of Anatolia with its own regional identity.

The tandır and the home oven also have uses beyond bread. The patient heat of the embers suits long, slow cooking; meat dishes cooked in vessels placed inside come out as tender as Turkish delight in this way. The memories of the Armenians of Amasya also tell that every household bought a special clay pot from the potter for keşkek and for sheep's head and trotters, that after the bread was baked this pot was buried in the oven with the still-smouldering ashes heaped around it, and that with the oven door and air vent closed the keşkek was left there all night. The remains of the bread fire thus cooked the next day's meal.

In the past, in regions with harsh winters, the word tandır was also used for a heating arrangement in which a brazier was placed under a low table and covered with a quilt and rugs. The tales and stories the family told as they warmed themselves around this table were called tandırname. This information is not specific to Amasya but belongs to general Turkish culture, yet it also shows that the tandır was more than a cooking tool and was the gathering point of winter evenings. A trace of this tradition in Amasya appears in Hüsameddin's work: he records that he saw a treatise containing the stories and legends of Pîrî Baba, who died around 879 [1474-75] and lies in the tomb built by Sultan Bayezid, that it was written in the form of a "Tandır-nâme", and that it contained many stories.

Baking Bread Through Communal Labour

Lighting the tandır is mostly a matter of imece, communal labour. In Amasya and its surroundings, when baking day comes, neighbours gather; some roll out the dough, some slap it onto the tandır, some stack the loaves as they come out. The dough is kneaded together, loaves are baked in turn at the tandır, and the work is coloured with conversation, tea and solidarity. A tandır full of bread is enough for several households at once. The women who gather at the tandır helping those who bake, the conversation and the tea drunk are inseparable parts of this tradition. For centuries the custom has been passed from generation to generation within a master and apprentice relationship.

This communal labour can be seen continuing today in new forms. In the autumn of 2025 a group of women in Amasya put aside the gold days they had held for years, because of rising gold prices, and began holding "yufka days" instead. The women of the neighbourhood meet each month in a different house, roll out dough with rolling pins all day at hearths set up in the garden, and together bake the roughly three hundred sheets of yufka each family needs for the winter. One of the hosts relates that they drink tea and eat through the day and that they prepared together the three hundred yufkas her household needed. The gözleme baked at the hearth, in the words of one of the participants, is offered to anyone who happens to pass.

The account of the bread maker in Van shows vividly how this transmission works. This woman, who spent her childhood watching her grandmothers and her mother in the tandır house, began baking at fourteen and has baked bread for about fifty years. According to her, on baking day all the children gathered in the tandır house, the little ones ate their meals there and were even put to sleep there. Bread is baked every second day in summer and once a month in winter because of snow and cold; the winter bread is stored in the freezer or in damp-free places. The same account says that this bread is additive-free and can be eaten for a long time without spoiling, even that it lasts a year. Another emphasis of the narrator is the weight of the labour: bread work takes more than half the day, so it is becoming harder to keep the tradition alive. Even so, the women who gather at the tandır do not want this culture to disappear.

The durability of bread baked in the tandır is one of the practical sides of the tradition. Loaves baked in large quantity at one time can be kept for a long while without going stale; when dry, they are crumbled into soup or softened with water and returned to the table. In this way no slice goes to waste. In this respect tandır culture serves as a school that teaches a sense of value and thrift as well as baking. Unleavened breads are prepared by the same logic; made with care so that they last until the next baking day, these breads are the cornerstone of families' tables.

Imarets, Guesthouses and Endowed Bakeries

The most institutional form of the tradition of sharing bread in Amasya was the imaret, the public kitchen. Listing the imarets built by sultans, viziers and notables to feed students, support teachers and host the poor and travellers, Hüsameddin names the imarets of Bayezid Paşa, Yörgüç Paşa, Sultan Bayezid, Mehmed Paşa and Hatuniye; he writes that each also had a hospice (tabhane) beside it, so that the city had five imarets and five hospices. When he describes the location of the Qur'an school in the complex of Sultan Bayezid, he places it "north of the bakehouse of the imaret, on the west side of the hospice". The description of this building, completed in 891 [1486], shows that the complex had a separate bakehouse baking its own bread from its very first years.

Beside the imarets there were also guesthouses (ziyafethane) open to travellers and the poor. Hüsameddin lists the chief of them as the guesthouses of Pervâne Bey in the Mevlevi lodge, Hacı Mahmud Çelebi, Yakub Paşa, Şeyh Cû'î, Şeyh Hüsameddin Kubâvî, Ehlî Hatun, Hoca Sultan, Ahî Darbhane, Hızır Paşa, Yakut Paşa and Ahî Sadeddin. He states that the food of these eleven guesthouses was plentiful, that their cook and their baker were appointed and their overseers salaried; he adds that there were private guesthouses besides, and that until forty years before his own time nearly all the houses of Amasya's notables functioned as guesthouses. Within the endowment system the baker was regarded as a fixed and permanent officer, just like the cook.

Olcay's observations give the traces of these institutions that reached the twentieth century. He writes that in his time nothing remained of the Yörgüç Paşa quarter but the mosque with its derelict bakehouse inside and the family's gravestones. In the madrasa built by Mehmed Paşa of the Kösemihaloğulları, dated 902 [1496] as Olcay remembered it, there was a bakehouse and an oven beside the first room on the Yeşilırmak side. Its founder had thought of this social aid when building the madrasa, and in the oven pides were made especially throughout the month of Ramadan and distributed to the townspeople, to the poor of the quarter and to charitable causes. Below the Mehmed Bey Madrasa, built by Mehmed Bey of the Kurdoğulları, there was also, in Olcay's words, an excellent bread oven; the oven and the shops beside it had been built to bring income to the madrasa.

The bond between endowment and bread continued in small tradesmen's shops as well. The famous simit shop at Selağzı was attached to the tomb of the son of Şeyh Abdurrahman Gümüşlüzâde, known as Aşağı Pirler, to provide it with income, and was managed by a trustee called Kayyumzâde. Every year on the eve of the Feast of Sacrifice, Karcı İmam Tevfik Efendi had flour halva made; the halva was wrapped in pides and carried in large laundry baskets to the Aşağı Pirler tomb. There, after the hafızes had recited the whole Qur'an and prayed, the halva was distributed. Olcay stresses that this custom was observed without fail on its set day every year.

Sons of Bakers: The Habbâzîs

In Amasya baking did not remain merely a livelihood; it also turned into the nickname of some families. In Hüsameddin's section on scholars, the sons of an Amasya baker named "Etmekçi Halil" are mentioned. One of them, Hâfızeddin Mehmed Çelebi, was known among the people as Etmekçizâde and among scholars as "Habbâzî Çelebi", from the Arabic word "habbâz" (baker). After acquiring his first learning in Amasya, he went to Kayseri and studied the religious and rational sciences under Mevlânâ Hüsameddin Hasan bin Ömer el-Kayserî; on his return he taught for years in Amasya, won the favour of Hacı Şâdgeldi Paşa, the ruler of Amasya, and for a time served as deputy to the judge of Amasya. Hüsameddin describes him as a learned jurist and writes that he died after 783 [1381-82].

In the same work Bünyâd Çelebi also appears with the nickname "Etmekçizâde" and as the son of Etmekçi Halil of Amasya; having studied, he became a teacher and judge and died after 848 [1444-45]. Since there is a gap of more than sixty years between the death dates given for the two brothers, it is also possible that different generations bearing the same nickname are meant; the work offers no explanation on this point. Another Habbâzî is Halil Çelebi, that is, Mevlânâ Ebû Ali el-Habbâzî. Hüsameddin writes that he was the son of Mehmed Çelebi, who worked as a baker in Amasya, that he was counted among the well-known scholars in 817 [1414-15] as a public lecturer and teacher, and that he lost his life in the earthquake of 818 [1415-16]; he explains his nickname as "veled-i habbâz, that is, the baker's son". These family stories, reaching from the oven to the madrasa, also show that baking was a respected trade in medieval Amasya.

Famine Years and Bread

Behind the belief in the sanctity of bread also lies the bitter memory of years when there was no flour. Hüsameddin records the famines Amasya went through one by one within his chronology. He writes that after the earthquake of 818 [1415-16] the people lived under tents for about three months, that the gardens, vineyards and fields that had survived the earthquake dried up, and that famine spread over the land. In 1185 [1771-72], because of the war and war levies that had gone on for six years, agriculture came to a halt and famine gripped the city once more. Hüsameddin also notes that in the same year the famine grew steadily worse.

This famine year also gave rise to a nickname in Amasya. Ahmed Efendi, son of es-Seyyid Abdullah Efendi of the Zanalızâde, one of the scholars of Amasya, received the title "Bakırcı" (the Copper Man) because during the famine of 1185, caused by the Russian war, he distributed grain and seed to the poor free of charge with a copper measure. Hüsameddin commemorates this charity with a play on words, saying that while his name was copper, his generosity turned it into silver. He records that Ahmed Efendi died in 1195 [1780-81] and that he was one of the city's influential notables.

The days when bread was distributed by ration and through officials are also in the city's recent memory. Hüsameddin writes that Hikmetzâde Hilmi Mehmed Bey, an Amasya officer born in 1277 [1860-61] in the Hatuniye quarter, trained at the War Academy and given to poetry, was assigned to bread distribution during the First World War, but was retired again because he could not manage this task well either. It is a short entry, yet it shows that in the war years bread in Amasya had become a matter of regulated distribution.

Life Around Bread

In Amasya, bread does not merely fill the stomach; it also builds a moral language. Saying "may the bread strike me" counts as the gravest of oaths; "eating one's bread" is the name of the loyalty felt toward a person. Taking hot bread to a neighbour and sharing freshly baked bazlama are among the most natural behaviours in this city. The steam rising from the oven also reflects the way a community holds on to one another.

Bread and pastries also have a place in the district's communal labour and ceremonies. In sericulture, one of Amasya's basic occupations, recorded as practised in seventeen villages, the head of the household invites his neighbours to the cocoon-gathering (barama). The main dishes of this invitation are stuffed broad beans (bakla dolması) and bat; some families who will serve only one kind of dish close the griddle and offer pastries such as yağlı, yanuç, kete and gömbe with samovar tea. In seeing off pilgrims, bread is prepared as provisions (azık). In the past, because the pilgrimage was made under very long and difficult conditions, foods that spoil easily were not made; muska kneaded with butter, rusks cut to the size of two matchboxes and lokul twice fried in the oven were given to pilgrims as a gift for the road. When the pilgrims returned, a thanksgiving meal of toyga soup, pilaf, meat and dates was laid out.

The plainness of bread was also held up as a measure among Amasya's people of the spirit. Of a recluse whose biography Hüsameddin gives, it is told that he lit no fire in his hearth on winter days, never ate onion or garlic, and that his food consisted of bread, grape molasses, raisins, walnuts and dates. He would also share these simple provisions with those he loved at unexpected moments. That bread and molasses, with dried fruit and walnuts, made up the whole table of a dervish is another face of the meaning the city attached to bread.

From Stale Bread to Dessert

The respect shown to bread also becomes concrete in Amasya's cuisine in the refusal to throw away stale bread. According to local accounts, a fresh pastry eaten in the princes' palace turned, through the ingenuity of a poor family, into vişneli ekmek (sour cherry bread), and stale bread, not thrown away, became a new type of dessert under the name unutma beni (forget-me-not). There is no definite documentation of these accounts; but both desserts are made from bread and reflect very well the attitude of Amasya's cuisine toward bread. In the publication of the Central Black Sea Development Agency introducing the region's flavours, vişneli ekmek is mentioned as a dessert eaten in the princes' palace, and unutma beni is also said to be prepared with stale bread and sweetened with grape molasses.

Vişneli ekmek is prepared by slicing bread one centimetre thick, spreading plenty of butter on it and frying it in the oven until pink. Sour cherries are boiled with sugar, the breads that come out of the oven are cooked in this syrup; once cooled they are arranged on a plate, covered with syrupy sour cherries, sprinkled with walnuts and served cold. Ekmek aşı (papara) is another example in the district's list of pastries. Yakasal böreği is a plain börek likened in structure to bazlama: dough kneaded from flour, water and salt is folded with butter and rolled out, eggs are poured between the sheets of yufka laid in a tray, and the börek is turned on the griddle until both sides are browned.

The habit of making use of stale bread appears with the same care in the cuisine of the Armenians of Amasya. Among the recipes compiled is a breakfast dish in which slices of stale bread are dipped in salted egg, fried on both sides in hot oil and eaten with honey. Stale breadcrumbs mixed with onion, tomato, pepper, herbs and walnuts are eaten uncooked, scooped up with vine leaves; walnuts and breadcrumbs are also added to a hot dessert made of grape must and starch. Stale bread was crumbled into a garlicky, peppery fatty meat broth and into yogurt and egg soups before they were brought to the table. Sheep's head and trotters, too, were eaten with each person crumbling bread into his own plate and adding garlic and vinegar.

The yufka rolled out daily, the weekly baking days, the keşkek pots buried in the oven after the bread, the bakehouse of the imaret and the halva wrapped in pide on the feast all draw on the same system of values. Holding bread sacred, kissing what falls to the floor and raising it to the forehead, sharing with the neighbour and wasting no piece are everyday expressions of this system. In Amasya these values have passed from generation to generation together with the memory of famine years and the long tradition of endowed bakeries.

Chronology

c. 6th century BC: At Oluz Höyük, a tandır of fired clay, dated to the Persian period and resembling today's Anatolian tandırs, is in use.

After 783 [1381-82]: Hâfızeddin Mehmed Çelebi Habbâzî, son of Etmekçi Halil, dies.

818 [1415-16]: The Amasya earthquake; Halil Çelebi Habbâzî, son of the baker Mehmed Çelebi, loses his life in it, and famine follows.

After 848 [1444-45]: Etmekçizâde Bünyâd Çelebi dies.

891 [1486]: The Qur'an school in the complex of Sultan Bayezid, located north of the bakehouse of the imaret, is completed.

900 [1494-95]: Ayas Ağa endows the mill in front of the Bayezid Paşa residence together with his bathhouse.

902 [1496]: According to the date Olcay remembered, the Mehmed Paşa Madrasa, with its bakehouse and oven, is built.

1185 [1771-72]: Agriculture halts because of war and famine grips Amasya; Ahmed Efendi distributes grain and seed to the poor with a copper measure and earns the nickname "Bakırcı".

1925: The first known production of Burmalı Amasya Çöreği.

2016: The culture of making and sharing yufka and lavaş is inscribed on UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

2022: Burmalı Amasya Çöreği, raised with chickpea leaven, is registered with a geographical indication.

2025: Women in Amasya begin holding "yufka days" instead of gold days; a 2,600-year-old tandır is brought to light at Oluz Höyük.

Bibliography

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