🌍 Before Veganism: What Academic Research Reveals About Istanbul’s Multicultural Plant-Based Heritage

Why does Istanbul have so many traditional dishes based on vegetables, olive oil, grains and legumes?

The answer lies partly in its multicultural history.

Recent academic research challenges the idea that Istanbul's cuisine developed from a single national tradition. Instead, researchers describe a culinary culture shaped by centuries of interaction among different religious, ethnic and regional communities.

For vegan and vegetarian visitors, these studies offer an interesting perspective: some of the foods they can enjoy in Istanbul today have roots in culinary practices that existed long before the word vegan was invented.

Here is what the research tells us.

🏛️ 1. Byzantine Istanbul: Plant-Based Cooking Before Modern Veganism

Research: Murat Doğan, The Effects and Contributions of Byzantine Cuisine to Modern Istanbul Cuisine (2025)

A study published in the academic journal Discover Food examines how Byzantine culinary traditions influenced Ottoman and modern Istanbul cuisine.

Researcher Murat Doğan identifies olive oil, vegetables, grains and legumes as important elements of Byzantine food culture.

One particularly interesting finding concerns religious fasting.

☦️ Orthodox Christian fasting traditions encouraged diets that excluded meat, dairy products and eggs during certain periods of the year.

These restrictions helped sustain cooking traditions based on vegetables, pulses, grains and olive oil.

The study argues that Byzantine culinary practices survived and evolved through their interaction with Ottoman food culture.

🥬 What survives today?

Olive oil dishes, vegetable preparations and legume-based meals remain important parts of Istanbul's culinary identity.

The research does not establish that individual modern recipes were invented by Byzantine cooks. Rather, it identifies continuity in ingredients, techniques and eating habits.

📚 Read the academic study in Discover Food

🇬🇷 🇦🇲 ✡️ 2. Three Communities That Helped Shape Istanbul's Kitchen

Research: Banu Özden, Minority Cuisines of Istanbul and Their Contribution to the Formation of Istanbul Cuisine (2025)

Published in Research in Hospitality Management, Banu Özden's study examines the contributions of three communities:

🇬🇷 Rum: Istanbul's historic Greek Orthodox community.

🇦🇲 Armenians: A community with a long-established culinary heritage in the city.

✡️ Sephardic Jews: Descendants of Jewish communities whose migration to Ottoman lands helped shape local food traditions.

The research examines how these communities contributed to Istanbul's culinary identity through recipes, hospitality practices and the transmission of food knowledge.

Its central finding is that Istanbul's cuisine cannot be understood solely through the history of Ottoman Turkish cooking.

🌱 Why does this matter for vegetarians and vegans?

Each community preserved vegetable-based cooking traditions, although for different cultural and religious reasons.

Greek Orthodox and Armenian Christian fasting customs encouraged the preparation of meals without certain animal products.

Sephardic Jewish cooking developed distinctive preparations involving vegetables such as eggplant and leeks, alongside broader Ottoman and Mediterranean influences.

Not all these dishes were vegan. Some traditionally contained eggs, cheese or other animal products.

Nevertheless, the research helps explain why vegetable-based cooking occupies an important place in Istanbul's multicultural culinary heritage.

📚 Read Banu Özden's research

📜 3. Ottoman Cookbooks Reveal a History of Culinary Exchange

Research: Özge Samancı, Osmanlı ve Cumhuriyet Dönemlerinde Yemek Kitapları (2020)

Food historian Özge Samancı examines historical cookbooks as sources for understanding changes in Ottoman and Turkish cuisine.

Her research demonstrates that Ottoman culinary traditions incorporated influences from several regions.

One particularly revealing example is Kitabü't-Tabih, a medieval Arabic cookbook translated and adapted into Turkish during the 15th century by the Ottoman physician Şirvani.

The translation included additional recipes reflecting other culinary traditions.

This provides written evidence of something that remains visible in Istanbul's food culture today: recipes traveled between regions and communities, changing as cooks adapted them to local tastes and ingredients.

🌾 What does this tell us about plant-based food?

The historical development of Istanbul's cuisine cannot be reduced to a simple distinction between meat-based Turkish dishes and vegetable-based minority dishes.

Grains, legumes, vegetables and dairy products appeared in different culinary traditions, often prepared in contrasting ways.

Importantly, Samancı's research also reminds us that historical cookbooks frequently reflect elite urban cooking rather than the daily diets of every household.

📚 Read Özge Samancı's academic article

🫒 4. Olive Oil: A Culinary Tradition That Crossed Religious Boundaries

One of the most interesting findings in Doğan's research concerns the historical importance of olive oil.

The study identifies Byzantine and Greek Orthodox food traditions as significant influences on the development of Istanbul's zeytinyağlı cooking culture.

Today, zeytinyağlı describes a recognizable category of Turkish dishes prepared with olive oil, usually involving vegetables or legumes.

Examples include:

🍆 Zeytinyağlı patlıcan: Eggplant prepared with olive oil.

🫘 Zeytinyağlı fasulye: Green beans cooked with olive oil and vegetables.

🥬 Zeytinyağlı lahana: Cabbage prepared with olive oil.

🌿 Zeytinyağlı enginar: Artichokes cooked with olive oil and vegetables.

The historical significance lies not in proving that one community invented these dishes, but in understanding how a cooking tradition developed across centuries.

Doğan's study describes this continuity through a combination of historical literature, documentary research and expert interviews.

For vegan travellers, olive oil dishes are among the most useful expressions of Istanbul's culinary heritage.

However, the name alone does not guarantee that a dish is vegan. Ingredients should still be checked.

📚 Source: Doğan, Discover Food (2025)

🥣 5. Was Historical Istanbul Actually Vegetarian?

Here the academic evidence requires some caution.

The existence of strong plant-based culinary traditions does not mean that Istanbul's population was predominantly vegetarian.

Meat, fish, eggs and dairy products were important elements of Byzantine, Ottoman and minority cuisines.

Religious fasting created periods when certain animal products were avoided, but these practices should not be confused with modern ethical veganism.

Similarly, vegetable-rich diets could reflect economic circumstances, agricultural availability and seasonal cooking rather than a deliberate commitment to vegetarianism.

Historical sources document the importance of plant foods, but they do not provide sufficient evidence to calculate the proportion of Istanbul residents who followed vegetarian diets over the centuries.

The defensible conclusion is that Istanbul developed a substantial tradition of meatless cooking, not that it was historically a vegetarian city.

📚 6. What Culinary Historians Tell Us Beyond the Research Papers

Three books provide additional perspectives on the development of Istanbul's multicultural food culture.

📖 Priscilla Mary Işın: Bountiful Empire: A History of Ottoman Cuisine (2018)

Işın explores Ottoman food history through historical documents, culinary practices and the movement of ingredients.

Her work helps place vegetable-based cooking within the broader development of Ottoman food culture.

It also demonstrates why the history of Istanbul's cuisine extends beyond palace kitchens and individual national traditions.

📖 Claudia Roden: The Book of Jewish Food (1996)

Roden documents Jewish culinary traditions across different regions, including Sephardic communities.

The book provides valuable context for understanding how migration, religious customs and local ingredients shaped family cooking.

It is particularly relevant when examining the vegetable-based traditions associated with Sephardic Jewish communities, although it is not exclusively about Istanbul.

📖 Musa Dağdeviren: The Turkish Cookbook (2019)

Dağdeviren's collection documents the geographical diversity of Turkish cooking.

Its recipes illustrate how vegetables, legumes and grains feature prominently in regional cuisines.

Unlike the academic papers, this is primarily a culinary collection rather than a historical research study.

Together, these books provide context for understanding how regional recipes became part of Istanbul's everyday food culture.

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🌍 7. What Does This Research Mean for Vegan Visitors?

The academic literature suggests that Istanbul's plant-based culinary heritage developed through several overlapping historical processes.

☦️ Religious fasting: Orthodox Christian and Armenian traditions helped preserve meatless cooking practices.

🌾 Agriculture: Grains, legumes, vegetables and seasonal produce provided the foundation for many everyday meals.

🚢 Migration: Families arriving from Anatolia, the Balkans, the Caucasus and other regions brought their culinary knowledge.

🫒 Cultural exchange: Recipes, ingredients and cooking techniques crossed religious and ethnic boundaries.

🏠 Family traditions: Recipes survived through household cooking, adaptation and transmission between generations.

For visitors, this means that discovering Istanbul's vegan and vegetarian food heritage does not necessarily require seeking out modern plant-based restaurants.

Traditional vegetable dishes, lentil soups, bean stews and olive oil preparations can provide an introduction to centuries of shared culinary history.

Just remember that historically meatless does not always mean vegan. Butter, yogurt, cheese, eggs and meat stock may still appear in traditional recipes.

🌱 Istanbul's Plant-Based Heritage Belongs to More Than One Community

Academic research provides a useful correction to simplified accounts of Istanbul's food history.

The city's cuisine was not created by one community, nor can every familiar dish be assigned a single ethnic origin.

Its food culture emerged through interactions among communities that sometimes shared ingredients and cooking methods while maintaining distinct religious and family traditions.

The evidence does not support describing historical Istanbul as a vegan city.

But it does support a more interesting conclusion:

Long before veganism became a modern movement, Istanbul's multicultural communities had already developed a remarkable variety of vegetable-, grain- and legume-based dishes.

That heritage remains part of the city's everyday food culture.

🌍 Explore more: Read veganistanbul.com's guide to Istanbul and Anatolia's multicultural vegan meze traditions