Culinary Culture of Balkan Immigrants: Tekirdağ Malkara Case

The Balkan peninsula is geographically the route of the east to the west and the west to the east. Therefore, it has been both home to many civilizations and a transit route over the years. It has contributed to the increase in food diversity thanks to the interaction of communities living in the Balkans with different civilizations. With the settlement of various Turkish tribes in the Balkans and the return of some settlers to Turkey after many years, the culinary culture they brought with them led to the diversification of the culinary culture of the society in which they interacted. If we explore the Balkan cuisines on a country-by-country basis; We can see that it consists of Albanian, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Greek culinary cultures. Balkan cuisines are very similar for geographical, economic, religious, cultural, etc. reasons. Even today, many products are called by the same name in different countries and there are even meals and tools used in Turkish.In the study, 47 people from 20 neighborhoods from various provinces of the Balkans living in The Malkara district of Tekirdag were interviewed and culinary culture, table manners and recipes were recorded. The aim of the study is to record the knowledge of the elderly and hard-to-reach 1st and 2nd generation immigrants and pass them on to future generations. Due to the lack of studies on culinary culture in the Thrace region and the presence of many different ethnicities, it is aimed to be the source for future studies. In addition, given the richness of the culinary culture of the region, suggestions for promotional activity are presented in the last section.