Food and Dining in Seljuk Anatolia

The Anatolian Seljuks, a dynasty that ruled much of present-day Turkey from the late eleventh to early fourteenth centuries, first held court at Nicaea (İznik) and moved it to Konya in the early twelfth century. The region included Greek, Armenian, Syriac and Muslim communities. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, people ground grain into flour for bread, boiled pulses and wheat in pots, and roasted meat for court guests. Evidence comes from different settings: the poet Jalal al-Din Rumi, who lived in Konya in the thirteenth century, used familiar cooking scenes in his verse; later histories recorded banquets; and endowment deeds specified institutional meal service.

On this page4 sections

Grinding grain and baking bread

Wheat and barley were among the grains people used for food. A millstone crushed grain into flour, which could then be sifted and mixed with water. Seljuk-era references name both leavened and unleavened bread. Leavening let dough rise before baking, while unleavened dough could be cooked soon after mixing. Rumi’s verses mention both, and his images of bakers kneading and shaping dough show that bread-making was a familiar urban occupation.

A tandır was a deep, heated oven, often set into the floor. Historian Ömer Uzunağaç describes bread dough pressed against its hot inner wall; the same heat could cook food in a vessel lowered into the oven. Thin yufka flatbread followed another route: the cook rolled the dough into a broad, thin sheet, laid it on a heated iron plate, then turned it to bake the other side. Bakers also sold bread from shops, giving city residents another way to obtain bread without preparing it at home.

Wheat bread appears as a more valued food than barley or bran bread in Rumi’s poetry. The kind of grain in a loaf could carry social meaning. Other texts mention rice, millet and rye. A saint’s-life narrative about Hacı Bektaş, a thirteenth-century religious teacher, tells of a Christian villager near Ürgüp who offered him rye bread and said wheat did not grow there.

Pots, milk and meat

Grain and pulses could also be cooked in liquid. In a spiritual dialogue, Rumi turns a chickpea boiling in a pot into a familiar image of a pulse softening in hot liquid. A related wheat-and-meat dish, herise, appears in accounts of Seljuk food. It was made by cooking wheat and meat together; the specialist cooks were called herrâs, and a shop selling it was called a dukkân-ı herrâs.

Dairy foods supplied several textures and uses. The written record names yogurt, ayran, a yogurt drink, cheese and butter. Yogurt and cheese transformed milk into foods with different textures and keeping qualities; butter could be used as cooking fat. Rumi also used dairy foods in poems, where a familiar food could carry a metaphor as well as its ordinary meaning.

Meat could be roasted, boiled or grilled. Rumi’s poetry uses the image of kebab meat turned on a skewer over fire, while Uzunağaç’s study identifies sellers and kebab shops in the period’s urban sources. Butchers cut and sold meat, separating slaughter and preparation from the customer’s own kitchen. Sheep, goats and poultry recur in the sources; game birds and fish appear in particular settings.

Fruit, vegetables and keeping food

Texts name grapes, pomegranates, apples, pears, melons, nuts and other fruit, along with onions, garlic, eggplant, spinach and leafy greens. They also mention herbs and seasonings such as mint, basil, saffron and clove. Rumi’s poems, for example, refer to pomegranate sherbet, a sweet drink made from fruit juice.

Preservation helped extend the use of seasonal food. Texts describe fruit dried for later use. A chronicle also describes grape juice boiled down into pekmez, a concentrated syrup; boiling drove off water and left a thicker sweet liquid.

Feasts, foundations and meal times

Court meals were organized occasions rather than a record of daily household fare. A later Seljuk history by Yazıcızâde Ali reports a feast in May 1237 by Sultan Alā al-Dīn Kayqubād, ruler from 1220 to 1237. The guests included envoys, sayyids, people regarded as descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, and scholars; the meal featured kebabs, roasted goose and chicken, and fragrant sherbets. The account makes the work of a court table visible: animals were roasted and brought out with drinks to host people summoned from different places. A feast displayed the ruler’s hospitality to guests, while its scale depended on servants and supplies gathered for the occasion.

Rumi’s poems refer to Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, the predawn sahur meal, and iftar, the evening meal that ends the day’s fast.

Endowed institutions set food service into a more durable arrangement. A waqf, or pious endowment, assigned income or property to support stated services. A study of endowment deeds cites Karatay’s caravanserai, a roadside lodging for travelers, whose deed required food including bread and meat for guests. It also records the Sahib Ata hospitality foundation in Konya, whose deed required meals twice a day for thirty people from named groups that included scholars. Each deed specified who should receive meals and when.