Topig and Cosmopolitan Istanbul
If there is one thing Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought has taught us, it is that there is no inherent or essential congruence between an object, concept, or system’s current utilisation and its original, intended use. From the most sacred to the most profane, from the most exceptional to the most trivial, from the most revered to the most loathed, all that is becomes what it is in time. Needless to say, food or mezzes are no exception.
Foxy, Karaköy
From a Lenten Dish to a Mezze
Topig, an Armenian vegan dish that very much looks like a bindle, featured prominently in Lenten diets. As those who observed the lent avoided meat products and refrained from eating after sunset during the lent, they needed nutritious, filling, healthy but also tasty alternatives and topig emerged as the most satisfactory of these. In fact, so strong was the identification with the religious fasting ritual that many knew topig as the vartabed dish; vartabed being the name given to highly educated archimandrites (equivalent of a superior abbot or abbot of an important monastery) in the Armenian Apostolic and Catholic Churches, who observed the fasting rules more rigorously than laypeople.
Some recipes, such as the one Tovmasyan offers in her May Your Table be Full of Joy, suggest boiled and mashed potatoes should be added to the chickpea mix. However, Boğos Piranyan’s 1886 Chef’s Book, the first Armenian cookbook published in the Ottoman Empire, strongly advises against it.
How to Make the Perfect Topig
Tovmasyan offers the following recipe for the perfect topig in the Encyclopaedia of Rakı:
Soak chickpeas in water overnight. The next day, boil them and after draining, remove their skin. Then mash them and add a teaspoon of salt, granulated sugar, and cinnamon, and a teacup of tahini, and knead the mixture well.
According to Artun Ünsal, an expert on food culture, Istanbul’s cosmopolitan complexion is reflected in its cuisine as well: Albanian liver; Circassian chicken; Armenian stuffed mussels; salted silverfish imported by the Marseillais sailors; Bosnian pasties; topig; Bulgarian bean stew; Persian pilaf; Turkmen roast; Şambalı (a dessert orginating in Damascus); Baghdad pudding; Izmir meatballs; Laz (people living in Black Sea coasts of Turkey and Georgia) pasty; Aleppo-style stuffed dried aubergines; and pandispanya (literally Spanish bread).
Cut the onions in half moon slices and fry them in low heat. Add a teaspoon of salt as you occasionally mix. Once they are thoroughly cooked, add blackcurrant, pine nuts, cinnamon, allspice, black pepper, and granulated sugar, mix well and let it cool. Once it has cooled down add tahini.
Rakı Ansiklopedisi, p. 535
Lay out ten to twelve pieces of cheesecloth (or, Tovmasyan notes, cling film if it is more convenient) and divide the chickpea mix into the same number of chunks. Spread each chunk on the cheesecloth until it is as thick orange peel. Put the same amount of topig filling right at the heart of the spread chickpea chunk. Make a bindle out of each cheesecloth by bringing four sides together.
Leave them in the refrigerator for a day. Then remove the topigs from the cloth, cut them into four, sprinkle with fresh lemon juice and olive oil, and serve with extra cinnamon.
Istanbul, a Cosmopolis par excellence
Topig, like many other mezzes about which you have read on these pages, is a representative, or perhaps a nostalgic reminder of a cosmopolitan Istanbul that has all but disappeared during the interminable, callous, deleterious twentieth century and its neurotic desire to create nationally or even racially homogenous polities. It is an everlasting symbol of a time in which difference was at the very heart of what it meant to be an Istanbulite, and a time in which Istanbul was an indubitable cosmopolis.
12th century traveller Benjamin de Tudèle: “Constantinople is the shared capital of the world.”
As historian Philip Mansel also points out, Byzantion and Constantinople, like all imperial capitals that are also port cities, were already of a cosmopolitan complexion but with the conquest in 1453 and Mehmed II’s demographic politics, which were centred around bringing in the city a variety of groups as wide as possible, turned the city into a real cosmopolis. Pera (Taksim today; historically where countless groups with different religious, ethnic, political, sexual, and cultural identities have inhabited) was the perfect representation of this cosmopolitan existence, which baffled even the most experienced European travellers of the time. English writer and poet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s observations are worth quoting at length just to give us a glimpse of this chaotic order:
Rakı Ansiklopedisi, p. 217
“Pera resembles the Tower of Babylon; you can hear Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Slavonic, Aromanian, German, Flemish, French, English, Italian, and Hungarian spoken. And ten of these are being spoken in my household: my stablemen are Arabs; servants French, German, and English; nurse Armenian; maids Russian; butlers and pagers Rum (Ottomans of Greek descent); kitchen staff Italian; and, Janissary a Turk.”
Takuhi Tovmasyan: “When I was a child, the smell of fried onions prepared for topig would linger in the streets for three-four days before Christmas.”
To understand that Istanbul, we need to recognize the difference between a multi-cultural metropolis (as Istanbul is claimed to be today) and a cosmopolis. The signifier “multi-cultural” implies, or better put, reduces Istanbul (or any other city or polity) to a container. Different groups, representing multi-cultures and with their identities always already defined, come together in the city and live side by side. A cosmopolis, on the other hand, is a living organism that breeds and concurrently is bred by difference itself. In other words, a cosmopolis doesn’t contain but is produced by difference; it is different groups’ interaction with each other, within each other, and with the city itself that produces and maintains a cosmopolis. And groups – non-contained and non-compartmentalized – are in a constant flux of change, of transformation, of becoming what they are. They define and re-define themselves, others, the city, and their relations to each other, creating what German thinker Martin Heidegger called, their “shared world”.
That shared world is no more. In fact, it hasn’t been around for a long while now. Cosmopolitan Istanbul has had a painful, tragic, elongated death that started with the Balkan Wars in early 20th century and continued with population exchanges, poll taxes levied on minorities, pogroms, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) racist laws, in short, as a result of the malaise we came to call nationalism. And cosmopolis, today, exists not as a viable, material goal, but an ethos, a comportment towards others, our selves, and our shared world that does not merely tolerate but actively seeks and affirms difference.