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Börek
Börek or burek are a family of pastries or pies found in the Balkans, Middle East and Central Asia. The pastry is made of a thin flaky dough such as filo with a variety of fillings, such as meat, cheese, spinach or potatoes. Boreks are mainly associated with Anatolia, the Middle East, Armenia, and also with the former Ottoman Empire, including the Balkans and the South Caucasus, Eastern European and Central European countries, Northern Africa and Central Asia. A borek may be prepared in a large pan and cut into portions after baking, or as individual pastries. They are usually baked but some varieties can be fried. Borek is sometimes sprinkled with sesame or nigella seeds, and it can be served hot or cold. It is a custom of Sephardic Jews to have ''bourekas'' for their Shabbat breakfast meal on Saturday mornings. In Bosnia and Herzegovina it has become commonplace to have borek as a breakfast food with coffee. It is commonly served with afternoon tea in Bosnia and Herzegovina ...
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Bourekas
Bourekas or burekas ( he, בורקס) are a popular baked pastry in Sephardic Jewish cuisine and Israeli cuisine. A variation of the burek, a popular pastry throughout southern Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East, Israeli bourekas are made in a wide variety of shapes and a vast selection of fillings, and are typically made with either puff pastry, filo dough, or brik pastry, depending on the origin of the baker. Etymology As knowledge of Ladino is lost among the younger generation of Sephardic Jews, Judeo-Spanish has become a "language of food". Food names have been described as "the last Judeo-Spanish remains" of the cultural memory of Ottoman-Sephardic heritage. The word ''boureka'' (or ''borekita'') is a Judeo-Spanish loanword from the Turkish ''börek''. Spanish does not have the front rounded Turkish ''ö'' sound, so the word becomes ''boreka''. As one Turkish food writer put it, "Ladino is the ''borekitas'' of the granmama". In Judeo-Spanish ''boreka'' origin ...
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Filo
Filo or phyllo is a very thin unleavened dough used for making pastries such as baklava and börek in Middle Eastern and Balkan cuisines. Filo-based pastries are made by layering many sheets of filo brushed with oil or butter; the pastry is then baked. Name and etymology The name ''filo'' (phonetic) or ''phyllo'' (transliteration) comes from Greek 'leaf'.Alan Davidson (2014). '' The Oxford Companion to Food'. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . p. 307. In Turkish, it is called ' 'thin', a word which is also used for a kind of thin unleavened bread. In Arabic, it is called ''reqaqot''; in Morocco, warqa ( ar, ورقة). The Albanian flia also may be named for ''fije''/''fli'' 'sheet, leaf'. History The origin of the practice of stretching raw dough into paper-thin sheets is unclear, with many cultures claiming credit.Mayer, Caroline E.Phyllo Facts. Washington Post. 1989Archived Some claim it may be derived from the Greeks; Homer's ''Odyssey'', written around 800 BC, ment ...
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Shekarbura
Shekarbureh (. Azeri şəkərbura) is a sweet pastry, dating back to at least the Sassanid era. Originally, it was like a halva made from sugar and almonds. Its alternate names in Persian include ''Shekarborak'', ''Shekarbora'', ''Shekarpareh'' and ''Shekarpirah''. In its different variations, the dessert is also common in Azerbaijan, Iran, and Turkey. Versions In Anatolia this pastry is called Şekerpare in Turkish and is one of the popular desserts in the Turkish cuisine. Mainly prepared by baking some soft balls of almond based pastry dipped in thick lemon-flavored sugar syrup, şekerpare is pronounced “''sheh-kehr-PAH-rih''” in Turkish. In the Republic of Azerbaijan it is called ''şəkərbura'' and is used as a dessert. It is a sweet pastry in half-moon shape, filled with ground almonds, hazelnuts, or walnuts, and sugar. Shekerbura, '' shorgoghal'', and ''pakhlava'' are the iconic foods of Novruz holiday in Azerbaijan. In Azerbaijan, it usually involves teamwork ...
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Ottoman Cuisine
Ottoman cuisine is the cuisine of the Ottoman Empire and its continuation in the cuisines of Turkey, the Balkans, Caucasus, Middle East and Northern Africa. Today, Turkish cuisine is a continuation of Ottoman cuisine. Sources The Ottoman palace kitchen registers (''matbah-i amire defterleri'') are important primary sources for studies of early modern Ottoman cuisine containing information on ingredients and names of food dishes cooked by the palace kitchens. Many cookbooks were published beginning in the 19th century reflecting the cultural fusions that characterized the rich cuisine of Istanbul's elites in the Late Ottoman period as new ingredients like tomatoes became widely available. There are few extant recipe collections before this era. The earliest Ottoman cookbook is credited to Muhammad Shirvânî's 15th-century expansion of the earlier Arabic ''Kitab al-Tabikh'' by Muhammad bin Hasan al-Baghdadi. '' Diwan Lughat al-Turk'' (the earliest Turkish language dict ...
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Brik
Brik ( ; ) or ''burek'' is the north African version of borek, a stuffed filo pastry which is commonly deep fried. The best-known version is the egg brik, a whole egg in a triangular pastry pocket with chopped onion, tuna, harissa and parsley. With a slightly different shape, but with identical ingredients and method of preparation, the ''brik'' is known in Algeria and Libya as ''bourek'' (). Brik is also very popular in Israel, due to the large Tunisian Jewish population there. It is often filled with a raw egg and herbs or tuna, harissa and olives and is sometimes served in a pita. This is also known as a ''boreeka''. Brik pastry is made by slapping a sticky lump of dough onto a hot non-stick surface in overlapping circles to produce the desired size and cooked for a short amount of time. The brik dough sheets are called malsouka or warka. Typical fillings include tuna, ground meat, raw egg, chicken, or anchovies garnished with harissa, caper ''Capparis spinosa'', th ...
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Sephardic Jews
Sephardic (or Sephardi) Jews (, ; lad, Djudíos Sefardíes), also ''Sepharadim'' , Modern Hebrew: ''Sfaradim'', Tiberian: Səp̄āraddîm, also , ''Ye'hude Sepharad'', lit. "The Jews of Spain", es, Judíos sefardíes (or ), pt, Judeus sefarditas or Hispanic Jews, are a Jewish diaspora population associated with the Iberian Peninsula. The term, which is derived from the Hebrew ''Sepharad'' (), can also refer to the Mizrahi Jews of Western Asia and North Africa, who were also influenced by Sephardic law and customs. Many Iberian Jewish exiles also later sought refuge in Mizrahi Jewish communities, resulting in integration with those communities. The Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula prospered for centuries under the Muslim reign of Al-Andalus following the Umayyad conquest of Hispania, but their fortunes began to decline with the Christian ''Reconquista'' campaign to retake Spain. In 1492, the Alhambra Decree by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain called for the expulsi ...
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Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language, and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE or its daughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the comparative method) were developed as a result. PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BC to 2500 BC during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe ...
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Middle Persian
Middle Persian or Pahlavi, also known by its endonym Pārsīk or Pārsīg () in its later form, is a Western Middle Iranian language which became the literary language of the Sasanian Empire. For some time after the Sasanian collapse, Middle Persian continued to function as a prestige language. It descended from Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid Empire and is the linguistic ancestor of Modern Persian, an official language of Iran, Afghanistan ( Dari) and Tajikistan ( Tajik). Name "Middle Iranian" is the name given to the middle stage of development of the numerous Iranian languages and dialects. The middle stage of the Iranian languages begins around 450 BCE and ends around 650 CE. One of those Middle Iranian languages is Middle Persian, i.e. the middle stage of the language of the Persians, an Iranian people of Persia proper, which lies in the south-western highlands on the border with Babylonia. The Persians called their language ''Parsik'', meaning "Persian" ...
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Persian Language
Persian (), also known by its endonym Farsi (, ', ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and used officially within Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Iranian Persian (officially known as ''Persian''), Dari Persian (officially known as ''Dari'' since 1964) and Tajiki Persian (officially known as ''Tajik'' since 1999).Siddikzoda, S. "Tajik Language: Farsi or not Farsi?" in ''Media Insight Central Asia #27'', August 2002. It is also spoken natively in the Tajik variety by a significant population within Uzbekistan, as well as within other regions with a Persianate history in the cultural sphere of Greater Iran. It is written officially within Iran and Afghanistan in the Persian alphabet, a derivation of the Arabic script, and within Tajikistan in the Tajik alphabet, ...
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Sevan Nişanyan
Sevan Nişanyan ( hyw, Սեւան Նշանեան; born 21 December 1956) is a Turkish-Armenian writer and linguist. An author of a number of books ("The Wrong Republic", "The Etymological Dictionary" and others), Nişanyan was awarded the Ayşe Nur Zarakolu Liberty Award of the Turkish Human Rights Association in 2004 for his contributions to greater freedom of speech. He is also known for his work to restore a semi-derelict village, Şirince, near Turkey’s Aegean coast. Sevan Nişanyan was given a cumulative prison sentence of 16 years and 7 months for alleged building infractions, after he criticized the government’s attempts to prohibit the prophet Muhammad's criticism in a blog entry in September 2012. He escaped from the prison in July 2017 and moved to Athens, where he intended to apply for political asylum, as stated in his interview to the Belgian daily ''La Libre Belgique''. He subsequently went to live in exile in Samos, stating that he is "grateful to the provide ...
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Tunisia
) , image_map = Tunisia location (orthographic projection).svg , map_caption = Location of Tunisia in northern Africa , image_map2 = , capital = Tunis , largest_city = capital , coordinates = , official_languages = Arabic Translation by the University of Bern: "Tunisia is a free State, independent and sovereign; its religion is the Islam, its language is Arabic, and its form is the Republic." , religion = , languages_type = Spoken languages , languages = Minority Dialects : Jerba Berber (Chelha) Matmata Berber Judeo-Tunisian Arabic (UNESCO CR) , languages2_type = Foreign languages , languages2 = , ethnic_groups = * 98% Arab * 2% Other , demonym = Tunisian , government_type = Unitary presidential republic , leader_title1 = President , leader_name1 = Kais Saied , leader_ti ...
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Albania
Albania ( ; sq, Shqipëri or ), or , also or . officially the Republic of Albania ( sq, Republika e Shqipërisë), is a country in Southeastern Europe. It is located on the Adriatic and Ionian Seas within the Mediterranean Sea and shares land borders with Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, North Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south. Tirana is its capital and largest city, followed by Durrës, Vlorë, and Shkodër. Albania displays varied climatic, geological, hydrological, and morphological conditions, defined in an area of . It possesses significant diversity with the landscape ranging from the snow-capped mountains in the Albanian Alps as well as the Korab, Skanderbeg, Pindus and Ceraunian Mountains to the hot and sunny coasts of the Albanian Adriatic and Ionian Sea along the Mediterranean Sea. Albania has been inhabited by different civilisations over time, such as the Illyrians, Thracians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Veneti ...
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