Breakfast

They love a big breakfast banquet in the far east of Anatolia. In the city of Van (pronounced ‘wahn’), they’ll take three hours to consume as many as forty-one courses, and then eat nothing else for the rest of the day. Most of the courses will be small—like a dish of olives, a few slices of watermelon, a pot of rose jam and bread rolls in various shapes—but they add up to a feast. There’s a famous Turkish romantic poem, written by Yılmaz Erdoğan in 2002, in which an ardent suitor tells his sweetheart: ‘I’d love the chance to have breakfast with you in a breakfast salon in Van.’