Döner kebab Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Döner kebab took its recognizable form in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, around the middle of the nineteenth century (roughly 1850 to 1870), during the late Ottoman period. That the meat was turned onto a vertical axis in this era is borne out both by photographs from the time and by the work of food historians. Who first stood the spit upright, however, is a different question, and it has never been settled.

Lamb and beef were long at hand in Anatolia, and grilling meat on a skewer was an old habit here. Meat turned on a spit was nothing new: a fifteenth-century manuscript records the phrase "çevirme kebabı" (turning kebab), and Istanbul miniatures from around 1616 to 1620 show meat roasting over a horizontal spit turned outdoors.

What changed in the mid-nineteenth century was that this horizontal spit was set on end. According to the food historian Priscilla Mary Işın (Bountiful Empire, 2018), the vertical spit emerged in Istanbul shops as a way to pack more meat into a tight space. Stacking the meat high, turning it, and shaving off the cooked surface to serve one order at a time ties the method to the urban shop and eating-house, the world of food bought and eaten out. The word "döner kebap" itself first appears in print in 1908, already into the twentieth century.

Several traditions name the person who is supposed to have stood the spit upright. The most often repeated has İskender Efendi (Hacı İskender) of Bursa turning the horizontal roast vertical in the mid-nineteenth century and so completing the modern döner. According to his grandson, Yavuz İskenderoğlu, İskender hit on the idea as a child in the 1850s, at his father's restaurant: roast the lamb standing upright rather than lying flat. The English-language Wikipedia, at the passage that reports the grandson's account, carries a note saying that a source beyond the family's own telling is needed. İskender's name does survive in İskender kebab, a dish of shaved meat dressed with melted butter and tomato sauce. But the claim that he invented the vertical spit itself has no support outside this İskenderoğlu family tradition, and the street vendor in the oldest photograph of an upright döner is not him; on both counts, the claim has been rejected.

Nor is his the only such claim. Another tradition puts Hamdi Usta of Kastamonu ahead of him, around 1830, and neither account rises above family memory. And the oldest photograph points to neither man. A photograph taken by James Robertson around 1853 to 1855 shows a street vendor cooking on a vertical döner spit, the earliest surviving image of the upright form, and as National Geographic notes, that vendor is neither İskender nor Hamdi.

Who first stood the meat on end remains unknown. What can be traced instead is the date by which it had happened. The oldest photograph dates to the 1850s; the word "döner kebap" appears in print in 1908. The word's first appearance shows only that the dish was being called by that name by 1908 at the latest. It is the photograph that shows the upright döner had appeared by the middle of the nineteenth century.