Archaeobotanical findings suggest that menengiç – or something resembling it – may have even deeper roots. At the Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe, a Unesco-listed site two hours east of Gaziantep, researchers have found the remains of wild pistachios amid its art-inscribed megalithic structures erected nearly 12,000 years ago.
Today, the landscape surrounding the site is dry and sparsely treed. But researchers believe that in the early Neolithic period, it was far more temperate – a forest where resident hunter-gatherers could harvest the fruits of wild pistachio and almond trees.
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When Zor explained how his family harvests menengiç, I found it easy to picture the region’s ancient people gathering wild pistachios in much the same way. “We just roll out a curtain under the tree, and we shake it until the menengiç falls to the ground,” he’d said. Archaeologists have found thousands of grinding stones at Göbekli Tepe – the largest such collection from Neolithic Mesopotamia – suggesting that these harvests could have been crushed and processed into pastes like those still sold in the Gaziantep bazaar.
They might have used more creative preparations, too. At Tahmis Kahvesi, coffee is served with a small dish of nostalji çerez, a crunchy mix of roasted menengiç, chickpeas and hemp seeds that’s often given to children as a healthy snack. Decades ago, traditional cooks in south-eastern Turkey used menengiç as a spice; blended it into breads and pastries; cooked it with pilaf; crushed it for oil; or mixed it with grape molasses and wheat flour to make a thick, sticky sweet. Such dishes are “about to be forgotten”, wrote Abdullah Badem, a researcher at Karamanoğlu Mehmetbey University, in a 2021 paper on menengiç’s traditional uses.
