Serbs will tell you with considerable pride about their heroic resistance and their eventual deliverance from the Ottoman yoke—while Serbian culture goes on preserving the Ottoman inheritance with the greatest care. This remarkable interweaving of the struggle for independence with cultural diffusion has produced the singular character of the modern Balkans.
A Linguistic Feast
Nowhere is this more vivid than in the vocabulary of the kitchen. Consider this excellent table: proja (cornbread), krompir (roast potatoes), rakija, and džigerica (liver).
Any Turkish speaker will recognise three of these at once:
- Krompir = kumpir—baked potato (in Thrace, kumpir means potato in general).
- Rakija = rakı—the recipes differ somewhat, but the root is one and the same.
- Džigerica = ciğer—the spelling diverges, but the pronunciation gives the etymology away.
When Words Deceive
These examples demonstrate the presence of vocabulary inherited from the Ottomans—but that is by no means the same thing as Turkic origin. On the contrary: as in any empire, Ottoman terminology is a mirror held up to the diversity of the cultures beneath it.
- Krompir / kumpir: reached Turkish by way of Bulgarian, from the German Grundbirne, ‘ground pear.’
- Rakija / rakı: from the Arabic ʿaraq, meaning ‘sweat,’ hence ‘distillate.’
- Džigerica / ciğer: goes back to the Persian jigar. The word grows from the same Proto-Indo-European root as the Greek ἧπαρ (hēpar)—whence our familiar hepatitis and heparin.
Remarkable: three terms that arrived by way of the Turks, and not one of them Turkic—two Indo-European and one Semitic.
In Search of Balkan Cool
Strolling through the leafy comfort of Belgrade and enjoying the aromas of Serbian cooking, one cannot help wondering what drew the Ottomans here in the first place. Perhaps they were simply escaping the heat, the dryness, the excessive sweetness, and the kalabalık—the crush and press—of Anatolia, into the coolness, the greenery, and the refined simplicity of this corner of the Balkans…
That word, incidentally, has travelled further north than the Ottomans ever did. Swedish has kalabalik, meaning “uproar, tumult”—a souvenir of the so-called Skirmish at Bender of 1713, when Charles XII, holed up in Ottoman Moldavia after Poltava, fell out with his hosts and had to be dragged from his burning house by janissaries. A Turkish word for a crowd entered Scandinavian by way of one very memorable brawl.
And while the historians dispute the influence of empires, the linguistic purists keep their silence. When a man is hungry, it seems, etymology gives way before the smell of supper.
P.S. And yes: the restaurant Vuk, on Vuk Karadžić Street, where this photograph was taken, comes warmly recommended.
