It was early, my hotel bed still plush, but I could already smell the baklava. In the ancient Turkish city of Gaziantep, whose nearly 2,000-year-old citadel watches over the country’s southeastern plains, baklava bakers kindle their oak-fired ovens many hours before dawn.
Photo courtesy of GoTürkiye
They warm clarified butter while apprentices stir boiling syrup over blue flames. Few things are so motivating as a deeply pleasant smell arriving just when wakefulness rumples the edges of sleep. The scent of woodsmoke and burnt sugar erased my fatigue; suddenly hungry, I set out on foot through the old city’s narrow streets.
That’s how I found my way to İmam Çağdaş, a century-old baklava bakery and restaurant. A buttery aroma twined through its neighborhood, a tangle of bazaars and workshops punctuated by minarets of travertine and basalt. When I arrived, a local crowd was gathering inside its cavernous dining room before tulip-shaped glasses of tea. On tall metal racks, I saw pan after pan of crisp, golden baklava — the exquisite dessert that has become a collective passion for roughly 1.8 million residents of the city.
Gaziantep
Photo courtesy of GoTürkiye
“In Gaziantep, it is a culture, a whole way of life — there is air, water and baklava,” said Burhan Çağdaş, the bakery’s fourth-generation owner, who joined me for tea and pastries in the back of his family’s eatery.
Photo courtesy of GoTürkiye
The city has more than 500 licensed producers, he explained, who stay busy because the city’s signature sweet is essential to nearly every one of life’s milestones. “When you get engaged, you have baklava, then again when you get married. When you have a baby: baklava,” he said, smiling across a plate of tidy pastry squares fresh from the ovens upstairs. “When you die, it’s still baklava.”
The dessert is not unique to Gaziantep, of course. It’s beloved from Athens to Aleppo, in versions stuffed with walnuts, chocolate and sesame-seed paste. Gaziantep, however, is renowned for an iteration filled with the city’s famed pistachios, which are reputed to be the best in the world. They fetch higher prices on the international market than those grown in the U.S. and Iran, but the cream of each summer’s crop is quickly snapped up by local bakers.
Photo courtesy of GoTürkiye
Photo courtesy of GoTürkiye
Photo courtesy of GoTürkiye
“Their color is like green emeralds, and they have a sweeter taste than other pistachios — perfect for baklava,” said Çağdaş, who began working in the family bakery when he was just 12 years old. I picked up a square of the “classic” version, a deceptively simple diamond of dough, pistachios and butter. Before I bit in, Çağdaş stopped me. To properly eat a piece of Gaziantep baklava, he explained, you should slip it into your mouth upside down — the syrupy belly is the first thing you taste, followed by a buttery rush of pistachios.
Already buzzing from the day’s first sugar, I left İmam Çağdaş, embarking on a self-guided baklava tour of Gaziantep, with the goal of eating the pastry for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Just a five-minute walk away, I spotted the teensy storefront of Güllüoğlu Baklava, a family-owned shop inside a covered bazaar, whose 1871 founding makes it the oldest baklava shop in Turkey. According to Güllü family lore, the recipe for their signature treats emerged when the bakery’s founder, Güllü Çelebi, returned to Gaziantep following a mid-19th-century pilgrimage to Mecca. He loved the walnut baklava he tasted along the way, in Damascus and Aleppo. Back home, he began experimenting with local ingredients, using pistachios in place of walnuts and sugar syrup instead of honey or molasses. His tweaks helped transform the city’s baking traditions.
“If you look to the past, there really was no pistachio baklava,” Aylin Öney Tan, a Turkish food writer and the editor of “A Taste of Sun and Fire: Gaziantep Cookery,” told me. “Now, it’s impossible to imagine any kind of sweets in Gaziantep — but especially baklava — without them.”
In the picture window at Güllüoğlu gleamed tawny trays of pistachio baklava: classic diamonds, like the one I’d tasted at İmam Çağdaş, but also slender triangles and scalloped mounds wrapped protectively around bright-green fillings. I ordered one of each, chasing my tiny bites with sips of tannic Turkish tea.
Photo courtesy of GoTürkiye
It seemed prudent, following my second baklava feast of the day, to go for a walk, in hopes that a bit of movement would ease my blood sugar back to earth. From Güllüoğlu, I walked through the narrow lanes and spice markets of the old city, filled with shoppers just as pastry-obsessed as I. Lines formed inside baklava shops next door to other, equally crowded, baklava shops. Business travelers bought neatly packed tins for transit. (Flights departing Gaziantep surely fill with the same delectable aromas that perfume the city’s early-morning streets.) Green neon signs in the windows of bakeries rhythmically flashed the Turkish word for pistachio: fıstık, fıstık, fıstık.
You could wander from shop to shop in Gaziantep, eating a new slice of baklava each day for months. Locals are not so promiscuous.
“Every family has their baklava producer, and they always buy from the same person,” Filiz Hösükoğlu, a gastronomy expert from Gaziantep, told me.
Decades ago, when Hösükoğlu married, she woke the day after her wedding to find her new father-in-law had purchased a box of baklava from a different shop than the one her family used. “I came up with some excuse — I think I said I didn’t have a sweet tooth,” Hösükoğlu recalled, laughing. “In that moment, I felt like it would be disloyal to my family’s baklava producer to eat it.”
Free of such allegiances, I flagged down a cab for the trip to Koçak Baklava, a chic temple of pastry that’s Gaziantep’s sugar-scented retort to the glittering Parisian patisseries along the Champs-Élysées — the Ladurée of baklava. Waiters in smart vests and ties rushed plates to tables of diners lingering over tea; glass cases cast a warm glow over pistachio baklava twisted into coils, curled into turnovers and rolled into cylindrical dolama as glossy and green as spring leaves. My questions in clumsy Turkish swiftly ran aground, but not before securing me a plate laden with several pieces.
Koçak Baklava
Photo courtesy of @kocakbaklavacomtr/facebook
“What would you do if your king wished to enter an already-crowded room?” asked the grand vizier. “I’d make space for him somehow,” replied the ambassador. “That is what you must do for the baqlawa, the king of sweets,” said the grand vizier. Good advice is timeless, I thought. I polished off the last bite on my plate, then flagged down the waiter. One more slice, and I’d be done for the day.
What to Do in Southeastern Turkey
Baklava is just the beginning. Gaziantep is equally renowned for seasonally driven savory cuisine, which earned it a designation as a UNESCO City of Gastronomy. Highlights include tender lamb kebabs, yogurt stews and the spicy breakfast soup beyran. It also makes an ideal jumping-off point for exploring southeastern Turkey’s extraordinary historic riches. Begin in the city itself, where exquisite Roman antiquities are on display at the Zeugma Mosaic Museum. Rising above the historic center near some of the city’s best bakeries is the newly renovated Gaziantep Castle, erected in its current form by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I in the sixth century. Within Gaziantep’s centuries-old Coppersmith Bazaar, craftsmen etch designs into hand-hammered platters; the region’s copper trade dates to the Chalcolithic period.
No trip to southeastern Turkey is complete without a visit to Şanlıurfa, an exquisite city 93 miles to the east of Gaziantep, believed by some to be Abraham’s birthplace. According to later Jewish and Islamic tradition, its carp-filled lake, Balıklıgöl, marks the site where a miracle saved the prophet from a fiery death ordered by King Nimrod, transforming flames into water and burning logs into fish. Just outside the city limits is the nearly 12,000-year-old settlement of Göbekli Tepe, containing the oldest known religious construction in the world, where hunter-gatherers engraved images of fierce animals on enormous human-shaped pillars. It’s one of an array of 12 Neolithic sites near Şanliurfa — collectively known as Taş Tepeler — each of which offers a fascinating glimpse at archaeology’s cutting edge.
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Zeugma Mosaic Museum
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Coppersmith Bazaar
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Balıklıgöl
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Gaziantep Castle
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Göbekli Tepe
Getting There
Nonstop Turkish Airlines flights from Miami to Istanbul make onward connections to the Gaziantep Oğuzeli International Airport (GZT), located about 13 miles from the city center.