"The Gastronomy of Smyrna" is a flavorful journey to Asia Minor with a special focus on Smyrna. Emotionally charged pages that convey a heavy cultural load on a path that resembles a deep, distant gaze into space and time. Asia Minor has always had a way of taking you to its most hidden corners and touching your mind and heart.
This place still has that unique ability to invite you to honor it and be honored by it. To follow it through its flavors and the charm of its people and discover its various expressions.
The book records the aromas, colors, light, history, customs, habits, and even the small moments of everyday life that constituted the cultural cell of this particular place for many centuries and that also defined its taste identity.
"The Gastronomy of Smyrna" attempts a journey into the richness of traditional dishes of Asia Minor and a communication through flavors with our modern culture. An authentic traditional dish from Asia Minor has the ability not only to transform into a ritual and pleasantly stimulate the senses but also to transport us to space, time, history, and values.
In the book, a wealth of information will guide us through the customs, traditions, habits, and secrets of Smyrna's tradition, from colors and aromas to traditional recipes for weddings and major celebrations, to the art of coffee. Finally, it will reveal the clothing habits and songs that accompanied every event in the cities of Asia Minor and throughout Hellenism, which flourished and thrived, leaving us the legacy of their knowledge. Exceptional photographic material, old engravings, lost memories will awaken memories and nostalgia, a glossary with the words that characterized the dialect of the Asia Minor Greeks will revive the language that is being lost, while the recipe index will take us on a journey of taste of our ancestors. Magical words like Sarai ekmek kadayıf, Seker pare, Tabuk Giosou, Babas and Saragli, Malebi and Kazan dipi will sound sweetly in our minds, revealing their enchantment.
With "The Gastronomy of Smyrna," we attempt to meet again the past, the homelands that were lost but always remained in our hearts with the grandeur of the senses that characterized them, the flavors that enchanted and still enchant the palate, the customs and traditions of a Hellenism that never surrendered but continues to live in the smartest way, through the pleasure of taste."