Each year Hrant Dink Foundation prepares an agenda on a particular topic in three languages, Turkish, English and Armenian. The theme for 2017 is 'Food'.

In our land, food is not just about eating. It is also one of the essential pillars of life, culture and existence. Seasons, holidays, births and deaths are commemorated by food. Religious rituals are performed with food; in this land, there are periods in which eating is prohibited and plenty of foods which are traditionally eaten during certain periods or which cannot be eaten without being blessed. There is also an abundance of foods that had been forced to leave this land, which is probably the homeland of wine, grain and cheese. Nevertheless, food is the common ground of the people of this land. Attempts to pretend heroism by starting disputes over the origin of foods always fail. The holiest food harisa and keşkek, anuşabur and aşure, halva cooked in the memory of the deceased; they all spring from the same source. Thus, food does not belong to a nation; rather, it belongs to a land. That is why this land, where the civilization had blossomed, is also the holy land of food and eating.

This year’s agenda tells about food, hence the life itself in a sense; food is the reason of the fall from heaven according to the myth of genesis and sometimes it is offered as bribe, like Amira Bezciyan did with pastrami. Including many stories like these, this agenda will whet your appetite at times, but it will leave a bitter taste most of the time, as you will find many stories such as “topik”, which was a monastery dish once and ended up in taverns and then became the primary and maybe the sole reminder of the culture of one of the most ancient peoples of this land; the chef who committed suicide because he could not have found decent ingredients; imaginary feast tables which were set by women in concentration camps in order to survive and stay sane; evolution of fruits from antiquity to the present day. Well, dishes are not always sweet anyway; we should know bitterness in order to appreciate sweetness.

We hope 2017 won’t be a year in which we keep experiencing the worse, as we think that it cannot get any worse. May our agenda nourish the souls of the ones, whom Hrant Dink described as “the people who are seeking to turn the hell they live in into heaven.”

The agenda includes Muslim, Alevi, Armenian, Greek, Syriac, Kurdish holidays and special days, as well as the national holidays in Turkey.

Attachments:

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