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A 12,000-year-old food culture is being brought back to the table in southeastern Türkiye, where a chef has spent years reconstructing what people in Mesopotamia ate and how they cooked it during the Neolithic era.
As part of the Culture and Tourism Ministry’s Sanliurfa Culture Route Festival, chef and culinary researcher Omur Akkor presented a series of dishes inspired by findings from Karahantepe, one of the key sites within the Tas Tepeler (Stone Mounds) archaeological project.
The menu draws directly on ingredients and preparation methods believed to have been used during the Neolithic era.
Visitors were offered bread made from local wheat varieties, wheat porridge, bone-in lamb, lightly roasted Karacadag rice, sheep yogurt, clarified butter, and seasonal herbs, reflecting a diet closely tied to the region’s natural environment.
Akkor said his work is based on five years of research within excavation areas, combined with a broader career spanning more than three decades, traveling across Türkiye and studying regional food traditions.
Rather than simply replicating ingredients, he focused on how food was prepared. “I refined the dishes by asking how they were cooking 12,000 years ago,” he said, noting that some herbs were used raw while others were cooked, reflecting variations in early culinary techniques.
One of the most significant findings, according to Akkor, is the central role of wheat.
He described Anatolia as a foundational source of global agriculture, pointing out that wheat originating from this region is now grown in more than 120 countries and provides a major share of calories for a large portion of the world’s population.
Chef Akkor emphasized that early communities in the region did not produce a single type of bread but practiced what he described as a form of early baking culture.
“We recreated bread in Tas Tepeler using original wheat,” he said. “We know this was not just a single bread-making practice. They produced many different types of bread.”
Beyond wheat, the menu also incorporates ingredients identified through archaeological research, including raw broad beans, green chickpeas, wild herbs, and a local variety of a local desert mushroom referred to as "truffle" in the region, though it is a different variety.
He highlighted Karacadag, a region between Diyarbakir and Sanliurfa, as a key area where wild ancestors of cultivated crops have been identified. “If a wild form grows somewhere, science tells us that is its homeland,” he said, framing the region as a historical center for early agriculture.
Chef Omur Akkor linked these food practices to a broader understanding of how early societies adapted to environmental challenges, arguing that communities in Mesopotamia developed long-term resilience through close interaction with nature.
“This geography has overcome every earthquake, flood, drought and disaster for 12,000 years,” he said, describing the region as a shared cultural memory shaped by survival and adaptation.
He also stressed continuity, noting that many of the ingredients and techniques identified in Neolithic contexts are still present in rural food traditions across Türkiye today, particularly in villages where locally produced yogurt, grains, and herbs remain part of everyday diets.
For Akkor, the project is not only about historical reconstruction but about reconnecting food with cultural heritage.
He described Tas Tepeler as “one of the greatest riches in the world,” arguing that while fine dining exists globally, the deeper authenticity of food lies in its connection to land, history and collective memory.
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