Suna Cagaptay, a professor of architectural history and archaeology at Istanbul's Bahcesehir University, describes in her article for New Lines magazine about how the storied desert also made its way into Greek and Armenian culinary traditions, and how variants exist across the Middle East and Eastern Europe, though as a child she associated it with where she grew up: the south-eastern Turkish city of Malatya in a neighbourhood inhabited by both Sunnis and Alevis.
