The History of Baklava — The Dessert Empires Still Fight Over

On the 9th of May, 2006, the European Union put out a poster about dessert. Every member state got one sweet. Austria got its Gugelhupf, Belgium got waffles, Denmark got its famous pastry. Next to the word Cyprus sat a tray of baklava. Within days, Turkish bakers were vowing to take the fight to Brussels, and the office of Turkey's chief negotiator with the EU was promising to raise it at headquarters. All this over a pastry. The strangest part is that nobody on either side could prove where it came from. That's not for lack of looking. Historians have combed through Roman farm manuals, medieval Arabic cookbooks, a health guide written for a Mongol emperor, Sufi poetry, and the account books of an Ottoman palace kitchen. Every trail leads somewhere real. None of them leads all the way to the end. So this is the story of a pastry that crossed deserts, steppes, and seas. It fed sultans and soldiers, outlived the empire that perfected it, and still makes grown adults argue in public. It's also the story of why the fight was never really about who baked it first. Start with what baklava actually is, because the whole argument depends on it. Strip it down, and you've got four things. First, dough rolled so thin you can almost read through it. Second, fat, usually clarified butter, brushed between the sheets. Third, a filling of chopped nuts. Fourth, syrup or honey poured over while it's still hot from the oven. Stack the sheets, bake them until they turn gold and brittle, flood the tray with sweetness, and let it rest. That's it. Four ingredients. Almost every one of them points to a different corner of the old world. Nuts and honey are ancient and nearly universal. Butter is old, too. The hard part, the part that separates baklava from a simple honey cake, is the dough. Greeks call it phyllo, which means leaf. Turks call it yufka. Making it by hand is a real craft. Master bakers in the Turkish city of Gaziantep told NPR in 2025 that learning the trade properly takes at least eight years. One of them said that if you bite into a piece and hear a sharp crack, the dough is too thick. What you want is a soft, airy rustle. So the real question isn't who first put nuts in something sweet. It's who first learned to stretch dough into those impossibly thin sheets and stack them, layer after layer. Food historians usually boil the candidates down to three. The first is a layered cake from ancient Rome, with Greek roots. The second is a delicate almond pastry from the courts of medieval Baghdad. The third is the folded breads of Turkic nomads on the Central Asian steppe. Each has passionate defenders. Each has a weakness. The evidence for each one sits in a very different kind of document. The oldest of those documents is a farm manual. In the 2nd century BC, the Roman statesman Cato the Elder wrote a book on running an agricultural estate. Tucked in among advice on olive presses and crops, he included recipes, One of them is for a cake called placenta. It's built from layers of dough with cheese and honey spread between them, then baked. That gives you layered dough, sweetness, and an oven. To some historians, that's the ancestor. The Dutch food writer Patrick Vos pointed straight to it as the origin of baklava. On the Greek island of Lesbos, a layered nut pastry soaked in syrup is still called placenta today. Greek scholars found more. In 1971, the historian Sparos Vrionis identified several pastries mentioned in an ancient Greek text about banquets, the Deipnosophiste, as early forms of baklava. One of them, called gastris, had a filling of nuts and honey. Case closed? Not quite. The American food historian Charles Perry, who spent decades translating medieval Arabic cookbooks, went back to the same sources. He pointed out that gastris didn't contain any dough at all. It was closer to a sesame and honey sweet, something like modern halva. Cato's placenta, meanwhile, used thick sheets and cheese, with no nuts. In Perry's view, it simply wasn't much like baklava. So the Roman trail has layers, but not thinness. The Greek trail has nuts, but no dough. That gap matters because the next candidate has thinness to spare. It comes from a city that, for a few centuries, was arguably the culinary capital of the world. Medieval Baghdad, under the Abbasid caliphs, was enormous, wealthy, and obsessed with food. Its cookbooks survive in remarkable detail. One sweet appears again and again. It was called lausinage. It was a paste of ground almonds and sugar, wrapped in pastry so fine that one medieval description compares it to the wings of a grasshopper. Then, the whole thing was soaked in syrup. Read that, and it's hard not to see baklava. In the 13th century, the cookbook writer Mohammed bin Hassan al-Baghdadi recorded similar recipes. Some writers argue lauzinage is the closest medieval relative baklava has. Perry was skeptical here, too. Lousinage was a small wrapped package, more like a delicate almond parcel than a stacked tray. The wrapper was thin, but it wasn't layered dozens of times. It had the right flavors. It didn't have the architecture. That architecture, Perry argued, came from people who didn't use ovens at all. Picture the Central Asian steppe a thousand years ago. Turkic herders moved with their animals and cooked over open fires or on iron griddles. They didn't have big bread ovens. What they had was a gift for dough. Perry gathered evidence that these nomads loved layered and folded breads, rolled thin, stacked and cooked. The word yufka itself is Turkic. Among later Turkic peoples you can still find relatives, like Uzbek and Tatar pastries, made with 10 or 12 layers of dough. The old breads had no nuts and no syrup. What they had was the technique, the layers. Then there's a document from an unexpected place. In 1330, a court dietician named Hu Sihui presented a food and health manual to the Mongol emperor of China. It's called the Yin Shan Jing Yao, roughly Important Principles of Food and Drink. The Mongol court gathered dishes from across its vast empire, so the book records Turkic foods alongside Chinese ones. Among them is an early mention of a dish called gulakh. In Turkey today, gulakh is a dessert of paper-thin sheets layered in sweetened milk, and some historians see it as a proto-baklava, a layered sweet written down at a Mongol court in China more than a century before any Ottoman record. Even the name seems to point east, though not cleanly. Turkish etymological sources list early forms of the word as bakla and baklau, and the Turkish linguist Tuncer Gülensoy traced it to proto-Turkic roots. But there's also a Persian form, baklava, and the ending looks Persian. Linguists still disagree about where the first part of the word comes from, so the name, like the dessert, seems to have been assembled from more than one place. Here's where Perry landed, and it's the closest thing the field has to a consensus. He suggested baklava took shape in a kind of shatter zone, where Turkic nomads met the settled oven-baking cultures of the Iranian world. The nomads brought layered dough. The settled peoples brought sweet nut fillings and proper ovens. Put them together, and you get something new. Not a Roman cake. Not a Baghdad almond parcel, not a step flatbread, a bit of all three folded into one. The place where those worlds collided most completely was Anatolia, and finally a city on the Bosphorus. From the 11th century on, Turkic groups moved into Anatolia, then a heartland of the Byzantine Empire. Over the following centuries, Greek-speaking Byzantines and Turkish newcomers fought, traded, intermarried, and borrowed each other's habits. Kitchens weren't sealed off from any of that. Whatever baklava was becoming, it was becoming it in a mixed world. Then, in the 15th century, it finally appears in writing under its own name. One of the earliest appearances is in a poem. Kägissüz Abdal was a wandering Sufi dervish poet who lived in the first half of the 15th century. In a playful verse imagining a lavish feast, he lists the dishes he dreams about. Among them are trays of baklava, some filled with almonds, and some, strangely, with lentils. The almonds make sense. The lentils remain a puzzle. But the poem tells us something important. Baklava was already a word people understood, a symbol of abundance a poor dervish could fantasize about. A few decades later, it shows up somewhere far more powerful. In 1453, Sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople. Within a few years he was building a new palace at the tip of the old city, overlooking the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. That palace, Topkapı, would house the Ottoman court for centuries. Its kitchens became something close to an industrial operation. By most accounts they fed several thousand people on an ordinary day, and far more on feast days. They employed hundreds of cooks, organized into specialist groups. And crucially, they kept accounts. In those kitchen account books, in the month of Shaban in the Islamic year 878, there's an entry recording that baklava was baked in the palace. The date is usually given as 1473, though it falls right at the turn of 1474, depending on how you convert it. It's widely cited as the oldest surviving Ottoman record of baklava. It also carries a frustration historians love to point out. According to the food historian Priscilla Mary Işın, the entry doesn't specify the filling. The oldest palace record of baklava tells us it existed. It doesn't tell us what was inside. Later records fill in the picture. The Ramadan baklava made for the palace came to include walnuts, honey, and butter. The standards were famously demanding. A story still told in Turkey says a palace baklava had to pass a test. A gold coin dropped from about half a meter above the tray should slice through every layer and strike the metal underneath. There's no way to prove any cook was ever judged like that. The story survives anyway because it captures what the palace wanted. Not just sweetness. Precision. Layers so fine a coin could fall straight through. Then the palace turned the dessert into politics. Every year, on the 15th day of Ramadan, the sultan visited the chamber, holding a mantle believed to have belonged to the Prophet Muhammad. It was one of the most solemn ceremonies of the year. What came after was much louder. It was called the Baklava Alayı, the Baklava Procession. Tradition traces it to the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century. By the late 17th century, it had become a full formal ritual. Here's how it worked. The palace kitchens prepared huge round trays of baklava for the janissaries, the elite infantry who served as the sultan's household troops. One tray for every ten men. Each tray was wrapped in cloth and lined up outside the kitchens. Officers stepped forward to receive them. Then, two soldiers to a tray, the Janissaries hoisted them up and marched back to their barracks while crowds lined the streets of Istanbul to watch. The next day, the trays and their cloths were supposed to come back to the palace. It sounds like a charming festival. It was also a carefully calculated gift to the most dangerous men in the empire. The Janissaries were the backbone of Ottoman military power, and by the 17th century, they'd become kingmakers. They could depose sultans, and more than once they did. They also had a famous way of announcing a revolt. They overturned their cauldrons. The great kettles the palace used to feed them were a symbol of their bond with the sultan. Flipping them over meant rejecting his food, and with it, his authority. So when the sultan sent sweets to the barracks, it wasn't just generosity. Food was the contract. That contract frayed. A popular account told in Turkey says that as discipline collapsed in later centuries, the procession grew rowdy, and the janissaries began keeping the trays. They'd joke that the baklava was so good, they'd eaten the trays and the cloths, too. Whether every detail is true or not, the ending isn't in doubt. In June 1826, the Janissaries overturned their cauldrons one last time. Sultan Mahmud II answered with artillery, and within days the corps was destroyed. The men who'd carried the Sultan's baklava through Istanbul for generations were gone. The procession went with them. The baklava didn't. By then, it had escaped the palace entirely. At its height, the Ottoman Empire stretched from Hungary to Yemen, and from North Africa to the Caucasus. Governors copied palace fashions. Wealthy households copied governors. Bakers copied whatever sold. In the 17th century, the great Ottoman travel writer Evliya Çelebi recorded I recorded eating baklava as a guest of the ruler of Bitlis in eastern Anatolia. It was still a luxury, still a food for special occasions, but it was traveling, and every place it reached changed it. In Greece, it became a walnut pastry scented with cinnamon and cloves, soaked in honey syrup, and served at Christmas and Easter. A story often told there says a proper Greek baklava has 33 sheets, one for each year of Christ's life, though plenty of bakers use more. Armenian versions lean on cinnamon and cloves too. In Lebanon and Syria, it became baklava, rich with clarified butter and perfumed with orange blossom or rose water. In Iran, baklava took on almonds, pistachios, cardamom, and rose water, cut into small diamonds. In Algeria, the city of Constantine became famous for its own version. In Bosnia, it became a Ramadan staple. Sephardic Jewish families served it at Rosh Hashanah and Purim. That's what makes baklava so unusual. Very few foods have crossed religious lines this easily. Muslims break the Ramadan fast with it. Christians bring it out at Easter. Jews set it on the New Year table. For centuries, inside one sprawling empire, it didn't need a passport. It was simply the festive thing you made when you could afford the butter, the nuts, and the hours of work. That arrangement held, right up until the empire itself fell apart. The Ottoman Empire collapsed after the First World War and was formally abolished in 1922. In its place stood a patchwork of nation-states, some new, some recently independent. Turkey, Greece, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Bulgaria, and more. Each one needed a national story. A flag, an anthem, a language, a history. And, quietly, a national cuisine. Dishes that had been shared for centuries suddenly had to belong to someone. Baklava was too famous and too symbolic to stay unclaimed. That brings us to the city that would make the strongest claim of all, and to an awkward detail in its own origin story. Gaziantep sits in southern Turkey, close to the Syrian border, surrounded by pistachio orchards. It used to be called simply Antep. In 1921, after its residents endured a long siege by French forces, Turkey's new parliament gave the city the honorary title Gazi, meaning warrior or veteran. Antep became Gaziantep. Today the city is so devoted to baklava that shops are dressed in green and gold. Green for pistachio and gold for the crust. Pistachio sculptures line the road outside the airport. When people in Turkey say the best baklava comes from one place, they usually mean here. The most famous name in Gaziantep baklava is Güllüoğlu. The family says its shop, opened in 1871, is the oldest baklava shop in Turkey, and its owners describe themselves as the sixth generation in the trade. Their founding story goes like this. In the mid-19th century, an Antep man named Celebi Gullu set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca. Along the caravan route he passed through Aleppo and Damascus. There, he saw something Antep didn't really have—shops that sold baklava as a profession. Back home, baklava had mostly been made in private kitchens, Accounts differ on the details. Some say he learned from a chef in Damascus. Others put the weight on Aleppo. But the core never changes. The bakery that became Turkey's emblem of baklava, in the city that would one day win European protection for it, traces its own recipe to Syrian masters. The family is open about it. The current Güllü brothers have told visiting writers that a hundred years ago there was neither a Turkey nor a Syria. Antep and Aleppo were two Ottoman cities only a short journey apart. Celebi Gullu didn't cross a border. He crossed a region. Back home, the family leaned on local pistachios instead of the walnuts he'd seen in Syria. That one substitution became an identity. In 1949, the family opened a shop in Istanbul's Karaköy district, and for many Istanbul residents, baklava came to mean Güllüoğlu. Then the business itself split. Brothers went separate ways, and what customers thought of as one famous name became several rival companies. Even the dynasty that carried baklava from Syria to Istanbul couldn't keep it under one roof. It was a small preview of what was coming on a much bigger stage. That bigger stage was the poster. In 2006, Austria held the rotating presidency of the European Union. For Europe Day on the 9th of May, it organized a cultural project called Café Europe, with events in cafes across the capitals of the member states and the two countries about to join. Part of it was called Sweet Europe, a presentation of one typical sweet from each member. Cyprus, which had joined the EU in 2004, was represented by Baklava. To see why that landed like a slap, you need one fact about Cyprus. The island has been divided since 1974, when Turkey invaded after a short-lived coup backed by Greece's military government. The south is governed by the internationally recognized, Greek-Cypriot-led Republic of Cyprus, the state that joined the EU. The north is a breakaway Turkish-Cypriot state, recognized only by Turkey, At the time, Turkey was a candidate trying to join the EU itself, and it refused to recognize the Republic of Cyprus. So when a European poster presented baklava as the sweet of Cyprus, many Turks saw the Greek Cypriot side taking something Turkish and wearing it in Brussels. The reaction was instant. Turkish baklava makers protested loudly. The head of a Turkish baklava and dessert producers foundation declared it was time for Turkey to stand up for its national treasures, insisting the Turks had brought baklava all the way from Central Asia. One producer promised to go to Brussels and let EU ministers taste the real thing. The matter was raised with the EU through the office of Ali Babacan, Turkey's chief negotiator. The The press had a name for it within days, the Baklava War. On the Cypriot side, the response was more mixed than the headlines suggested. The head of the Cyprus Chefs Association told Reuters that, personally, he thought of baklava as a sweet served in Turkey, but that Turkey couldn't claim it exclusively because it's made in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and beyond. A prominent Cypriot politician told the Cyprus Mail he had no idea who'd chosen baklava, or why. An organizer for the Austrian presidency admitted the posters went out before anyone noticed the problem. At some events, he said, they switched to a different Cypriot sweet, a fried pastry dipped in syrup called Lady's Fingers. Step back and look at what had happened. A pastry that probably took shape where nomads met farmers, that was refined in a palace built in a captured Byzantine city, that spread through an empire holding all of these peoples at once, had been printed on a poster under one modern flag, and people with an equally tangled claim objected. Neither side was entirely wrong. Neither side was entirely right. Historians weren't going to settle it. Lawyers, in a sense, were. A few years earlier, Gaziantep's Chamber of Industry had registered Antep Baklava as a geographical indication in Turkey. On the 10th of July 2009, it applied to the European Union for the same protection. The process dragged on for years. In August 2013, the application was published in the EU's official journal. On the 18th of December 2013, the European Commission formally entered Antep Baklavasa. Also called Gaziantep Baklavası, into its register as a protected geographical indication. It was the first Turkish product ever to receive that status, joining a short list of non-European foods that included Darjeeling tea and tequila. In Greece and Cyprus, plenty of people took it as a defeat. In Turkey, it was celebrated as vindication. But read the regulation closely, and something surprising emerges. The European Union didn't rule on who invented baklava. It didn't declare baklava Turkish. It protected a single name, tied to a single place and method. The specification describes thin layers of pastry filled with semolina cream and Antep pistachios, with the pistachio giving the bottom of each slice its dark green color. A Greek baker can still make baklava. A Lebanese baker can still sell baklava. What they can't do in the EU is call it Gaziantep baklava. So the climax of the baklava war wasn't a verdict on origins at all. It was, in effect, a brand. Europe settled the question of one city's name and left the 500-year-old mystery exactly where it found it. And the city that won owes its most famous recipe, by its own baker's account, to Aleppo and Damascus. The biggest legal victory in baklava history rests on a recipe that crossed what is now an international border. That border soon became painfully real. After war broke out in Syria in 2011, millions of Syrians fled, and Gaziantep, just across the frontier, took in hundreds of thousands of them. Among them were cooks and pastry makers from Aleppo, the city where Celebi Gulu's story began. Some rebuilt their businesses in Gaziantep. So, about a century and a half after an Antep pilgrim carried Syrian baklava home, Syrian bakers carried their craft into the same streets. The recipe had come full circle. This time, it had to cross a guarded frontier to do it. In 2015, UNESCO named Gaziantep a Creative City of Gastronomy. Then, in February 2023, catastrophic earthquakes struck southern Turkey and northern Syria, killing tens of thousands of people. Gaziantep province was among the areas hit, and so was Aleppo. Two cities bound together by a recipe were bound together again by the same disaster. Today, nearly every country that was once part of the Ottoman world has its own baklava, and many have a theory about who made it first. Greeks point to Byzantium and ancient Greece. Turks point to Central Asia and Topkapi. Arabs point to Baghdad and Damascus. Iranians have their own long tradition. Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Bosnians, and Bulgarians all have recipes going back further than anyone can remember. The arguments flare up online, in restaurants, and now and then in diplomacy. Before President Obama visited Turkey in 2009, a Güllüoğlu baker even made a tray of baklava bearing the American president's face. So who's right? Charles Perry, the historian who spent so long untangling the evidence, offered an answer worth sitting with. He argued that baklava was an urban creation, not an ethnic one. No nation invented it. Cities did. It was made in kitchens, where Turkish, Greek, Arab, Persian, Armenian, and Jewish cooks worked side by side, borrowed from each other, and fed whoever was paying. It came from an empire, not a country. The nations that came afterward are each holding one layer and calling it the whole pastry. At Topkapı, the trays never went to one man. They went to ten, carried together and eaten from the same metal. In 2006, in the middle of the poster row, the Cyprus Mail printed a view that got far less attention than the outrage. On an island split between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, it suggested baklava wasn't really a symbol of division. It was one of the few things both halves of the island already shared. That's the strange fate of Baklava. Its oldest palace record says it was baked and says nothing about what was inside. Five centuries later, the argument looks much the same. Everyone agrees the dessert exists. Nobody agrees on what's inside its story. Maybe that's because the honest answer is all of it. Step dough, Persian nuts, Byzantine kitchens, Arab syrup, an Ottoman palace that stacked them together, and an empire that scattered them across three continents. The empires are gone. The borders are younger than the dessert, and every tray still tastes like the world that existed before those borders were drawn. If you'd like to follow another Ottoman treat that slipped out of the palace and conquered half the world, our story of how Turkish coffee reached Venice, Vienna, and beyond is the perfect next watch. And if you enjoy history told through the things people still eat, drink, and argue about, subscribe. There's plenty more on the table.