People go about their day in Deir ez-Zor, the largest city in Eastern Syria. October 1994. Photo by Haubi Gerhard Haubold via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
“Do you know what foura is?” my friend Reem Kado, who hails from the city of Deir ez-Zor, asks me with a wide smile, pronouncing the word in her warm local accent. She then tries to explain this traditional Deiri dish, which few people outside this eastern Syrian province have heard of.
“Foura is a soup made from jashaj and awyeen,” she says. “Jashaj is what you know as kishk in our dialect. It’s made from fasheeq, which is crushed wheat, mixed with khather, a thick yogurt. After soaking, squeezing, and boiling it, we add awyeen, which are dried black-eyed peas. Everything is then cooked together with ghee, garlic, and salt.” She adds that foura is a beloved winter dish among families in Deir.
Reem and her sister Majda were displaced at the start of the war in Syria and moved from their hometown to Damascus when it became impossible to return to their devastated province Deir ez-Zor. Every time I visited them, I found myself admiring their ability to preserve every detail of their region’s heritage, and their insistence on passing it down to the younger members of the family.
“For me, it was a form of resistance against the war,” says Majida, a fifty-something mother and school teacher. “We want to remain the children of our homeland. Of course, we’ve changed a lot over the years; Deir itself is no longer what it used to be, and neither are our souls. But I’m deeply attached to our culture.”
Deir ez-Zor has a special culinary culture, with its vegetables and red meats having a unique taste due to the unique soil and water in the city. October 1994. Photo by Haubi Gerhard Haubold via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A rich culture of food
Majida elaborates in her conversation with Al Rawiya about the uniqueness of her city’s culinary culture, which she attributes to its layered flavors and distinct soil and water, which, she says, give vegetables and red meat a different taste than elsewhere in Syria. “In Deir ez-Zor, livestock graze in the steppe, and the feed they consume gives the meat a much richer aroma and flavor. I noticed that meat from Deir is more tender, has a brighter color, and cooks more quickly.”
Among the most famous dishes in Deir ez-Zor are tharoud al-bamyeh, made of okra, tomatoes, and a large quantity of meat with bones. Majida notes the way it’s served: “When you serve tharoud, the meat should completely cover the platter. The okra pods shouldn’t dominate the dish — the meat should be what you see on top. We also have tharoud al-masareen, made with all parts of the sheep.”
As for Deiri kebab, it is tightly linked to memories of evening gatherings along the banks of the Euphrates River. At least once a week, families would head out for an outing on the river promenade, where the scent of grilled kebab and the sound of traditional Deiri Mawliya songs were the defining features of the scene. Majida says, “Kebab is the one dish that all Deiris share, during celebrations and even at funerals. Our condolence traditions are food-based; friends of the deceased bring what we call gharf al-‘aza’, which is at least five kilos of kebab or mansaf.”
Desert truffles also hold a prominent place in the province, as they are abundant in spring and summer and are accompanied by special rituals. During the season, women gather to clean the truffles together in a ritualistic and meticulous manner. The same care is given to mouneh (preserved food jars), which the people of Deir treat “almost obsessively,” as Majida puts it. “There’s no family that doesn’t stockpile at least 30 kilos of cheese. Wealthier families store much more. We’d even keep our cheese supply in the city’s refrigerated storage units so it wouldn’t spoil at home in the heat, and we’d be given receipts for it.”
Majida concludes: “For us, food is not just consumption, it’s a way of life. In Damascus, people cook and eat quickly because of the pace of life. But for us, we plan the next day’s lunch everyday, and a large part of our spending is dedicated to food.”
Unfortunately, all of that has changed, or even disappeared, in the crushing machine of the Syrian war.
Desert truffles are widely found during warmer seasons in Deir Ez-Zor. They are used in a variety of different Deiri dishes. Photo by Lamied Khaled via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
“So we don’t forget”
Majida was displaced from Deir ez-Zor in 2012, along with her husband, two daughters, and son. They eventually settled in Damascus, where they still live today. The war between the Syrian regime forces, opposition groups, and later the Islamic State destroyed most of the city’s landmarks and infrastructure. When Majida speaks about what they left behind on their journey of displacement, she never forgets to mention “the cheese preserves in the city’s refrigerator.” They had brought the storage receipts with them as if they were valuable belongings, thinking they would return home soon, but the displacement lasted much longer than expected, and with each passing year, things became increasingly difficult.
“When we left, we had a decent amount of savings, and we tried as much as possible to keep our children connected to Deiri food culture. After all, it’s a part of who we are. When we recall our memories, they’re always tied to the dining table, the nature of our meals, and how we describe people, like saying someone is generous or that a woman is a skilled cook,” she says.
Majida continued cooking tharoud al-bamyeh, foura, and other dishes, though with increasing difficulty. The family’s savings shrank year after year, and eventually, it became impossible to prepare some of the more expensive meals like tharoud al-masareen (stuffed sheep intestines) or sheep heads, which also require significant effort and family participation from members who were no longer present. She also notes how the family’s food culture was affected by the new environment, as the ingredients in Damascus taste different.
She recalls the first time the family received a precious gift, “Deiri kishk”, five years after displacement: “We screamed and celebrated as if we had found treasure. Making Deiri kishk requires strong sunlight and wide open land for drying, both of which are unavailable in Damascus. And of course, the yogurt here is very different from what we used to have there.”
At last, Majida could make foura again, with the same flavor, memory, and longing.
“I’ve succeeded in teaching my children about Deiri food culture, maybe not through every dish, but at least by passing down the knowledge of it, or trying to replicate it. It became a matter of insisting on knowing the dish, not just tasting it, so that my son, for example, won’t forget what tharoud al-bamyeh, foura, or siyyala mean,” she concludes.
A selection of Aleppine dishes cooked by Aleppo native Suhaib Anjarini. Photo by Suhaib Anjarini.
“A carnival of food and taste”
Over the past decade, journalist Suhaib Anjarini has moved between Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, and most recently Spain, all while carrying with him the food culture of Aleppo, which he loves and proudly calls “a way of life.” He’s also skilled in preparing many of its rich and famous dishes. Just as his life changed significantly throughout his journey during the war in Syria, this food culture was influenced by new environments along the way.
Suhaib tells Al Rawiya: “Naturally, when we’re exposed to new regions and countries, our concepts around food evolve, and this leaves a mark on our culture. For example, I’m from Aleppo, where we don’t use pomegranate molasses much, but after living in Damascus, I adopted the habit of adding it to many dishes. When I visited India ten years ago, I learned recipes I still cook to this day, and I also gained a deeper understanding of Aleppine cuisine by comparing it with Indian and other Asian cuisines. But the most transformative experience was moving to Spain in 2020. Though it’s also a Mediterranean country, its cuisine is quite different from that of the Levant. Spanish cuisine leans toward seafood, while Syrian food is based more on grains, legumes, vegetables, and red meat.”
Preserving Aleppine and broader Syrian culinary traditions wasn’t just an “attempt” for Suhaib and his family; it was a “given,” he explains with pride: “Without it being a conscious decision, I found myself constantly searching for the food I was raised on. It was easy for me since I know how to cook, but the main challenge was finding the right ingredients. Some ingredients are hard to come by here, like molokhia, pomegranate molasses, tomato paste concentrate, and freekeh, while others, like spices, are easier to find and are essential in Aleppine cooking.”
Ultimately, Suhaib believes he has successfully preserved Syrian food culture within his small family: it’s “their daily meal, and a source of pride. Pride in the food itself, its ingredients, and the stories and knowledge that come with it.”
Of course, it requires some creative adaptation, as he explains: “Take qarni yariq, for example, an Aleppine dish made with small eggplants. I can only find large ones here, so I cut them in a certain way to approximate the traditional cooking method and recreate the flavor we associate with authenticity. On the other hand, I’ve never succeeded in making kibbeh safarjaliyyeh (a quince-based kibbeh dish) due to the unavailability of quince, nor have I made summaqiyyeh because it requires large quantities of sumac. Some dishes I can only enjoy when I travel back to Syria.”
When Suhaib returns to Aleppo, he feels like he’s in a “carnival” of food and taste. “There, I reconnect with the way Aleppines treat food. It’s an event in itself, worthy of celebration. Even if I make the same dishes in exile, I enjoy them more in Aleppo. Despite some small details changing in the meals due to economic conditions, it still feels rooted in the ingredients and flavors that shaped our taste memory. There are also dishes you only find in restaurants and specialty shops, like grilled meats, or ‘ash al-bulbul made of dough, meat, pomegranate molasses, spices, and pine nuts; or sujuk and basterma, which came from Armenian cuisine but evolved uniquely in Aleppo. Going to Aleppo is like refreshing my palate’s memory.”
Having moved between Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, and Spain over the past ten years, Suhaib Anjarini has learned to adapt his Aleppine dishes depending on the availability of ingredients in each location. Photo by Suhaib Anjarini.
A kitchen in exile
Twelve years ago, Rita Barich, a Syrian blogger and researcher in culinary culture, moved from Damascus to Germany. She previously had worked in the banking sector, but the trajectory of war rendered her a refugee. Forced exile led her to search for a way to reconnect with her identity and communicate with others, and she found in the kitchen a form of healing as well as a living, intimate space. The result was the founding of a project called “Matbakh Ghurbeh” (The Exile Kitchen) on Facebook, as she tells Al Rawiya.
The kitchen project began in 2015 as a personal attempt by Rita to reconnect with her Syrian cultural identity by preparing traditional recipes, finding substitutes for ingredients in exile, and sharing food-related memories. Over time, the project attracted participants from diverse backgrounds — refugees, artists, researchers, and members of the host community — evolving into a collective platform for storytelling and shared experiences. The content grew beyond traditional recipes to include documentation of endangered cooking techniques and articles that link cuisine to identity and exile. Today, the kitchen community includes over 24,000 members.
Now in her forties, Rita says the kitchen grew from “a need to turn estrangement into an interactive experience, where cooking becomes a tool for memory retrieval, storytelling, and creating dialogue between cultures. The project isn’t just about making food; it’s about documenting Syrian culinary heritage and asserting that cooking is a cultural act of resistance against forgetting.” She notes that the kitchen has also allowed her to participate in events in Germany, where she presented Syrian cuisine as a means of cultural engagement. She also organized cooking classes in schools, using food as a bridge for dialogue and exchange. She hopes Matbakh Ghurbeh can one day contribute to peacebuilding in Syria by creating gatherings centered on food, where stories of war, displacement, and siege can be told in human terms, and where the diversity of dishes becomes a symbol of pluralism and acceptance.
Matbakh Ghurbeh is a kitchen project started by Rita Barich, a Syrian blogger and researcher in culinary culture, when she moved to Germany from Damascus as a result of the Syrian war. Photo courtesy of Rita Barich.
One of the things that struck Rita most was how food becomes a space of resistance, and a channel for longing and a way to preserve identity. “I noticed that many women held onto their mothers’ and grandmothers’ recipes not just because they taste good, but because they offer a sense of security and belonging in a new, unfamiliar environment. One example that stuck with me was a woman who insisted on cooking molokhia in Germany despite the difficulty of finding its ingredients, because, as she put it, ‘she wanted a smell that felt like home.’ Another woman, who never cooked back in Syria, learned in exile just to pass on the taste of memory to her children, who had never known the homeland. We managed to preserve this relationship despite all the challenges, and our food rituals became a soft form of resistance. It’s as if every time we made waraq enab or kibbeh, we were saying: we’re still Syrian, even from afar.”
Rita also reflects on how exile changed Syrians’ relationship with food: “Back home, we might not have thought much about the meaning of cooking. But in exile, it becomes a conscious act, one that demands time and takes on a ritualistic nature. From hunting down ingredients to planning when to cook, choosing guests, and plating the dish — it’s all part of a process of searching for ourselves, asserting who we are, and restoring what was broken by war and forced migration. In some cases, this relationship also becomes tinged with a colonial or orientalist tone, reflected in how we see ourselves through Western eyes, or how our cuisine gets presented as part of the ‘refugee’ or ‘Oriental’ narrative.”
A sentence on their Facebook display photo reads “ All the hearts of the world are my nationality.” Photo by Jamil Farah on Matbakh Ghurbeh’s Facebook Group page.
Preserving Syrian food culture throughout war and exile
Preserving Syrian food culture over the past fourteen years, during which the country has endured a brutal war, mass displacement, and the killing of millions, hasn’t been an easy feat. For many, it was a deliberate yet very difficult choice. For others, it simply wasn’t possible due to the extreme conditions of displacement and refuge.
There are countless examples like the stories of Majida, Suhaib, and Rita. And while there are many losses, there have also been some unexpected gains. Because of displacement and war, people in Damascus were introduced for the first time to dishes from Deir ez-Zor, with a Deiri restaurant opening in the city center. We started to see dishes from different provinces on the same table, flavors from across Syria blending, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes in odd and unfamiliar ways.
Today, with the collapse of the Assad regime, many Syrians will return to their towns, villages, and homes. Some will carry the new flavors they’ve acquired in their suitcases and might choose to preserve and blend them into their lives. Rita says: “Maybe our culture has changed, but it hasn’t lost its essence. Innovations and transformations have emerged, shaped by circumstance, and the exile experience has added a dimension that’s hard to ignore. Syrians discovered and immersed themselves in new cuisines and borrowed from them. Meanwhile, inside Syria, some dishes have disappeared from people’s tables as extreme austerity has taken hold. Cooking has become a luxury many can no longer afford, especially those living in camps or under siege. But I believe the core identity of Syrian food will endure.”
Zeina Shahla
Zeina is a Syrian journalist based in Damascus. Her work focuses on environmental, cultural, and social matters, and she particularly works on documenting non-material Syrian heritage. Zeina is also the creator of Turath Masmou3, a podcast focusing on Syrian culture and heritage.
- Zeina Shahla
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