Fading food, lost language

"Liparidas!"… Remembering the word, her face instantly lights up with joy. She travels back to her childhood in Ortaköy, a neighborhood once densely populated by Jews in Istanbul. One could apparently see that she feels the taste, too. This is one of the highlights of the delightful documentary by Deniz Alphan shown at the special screening section of the 36th Istanbul Film Festival this year. The documentary, "A Fading Language, A Fading Cuisine," is about the Ladino language and Sephardic food culture in Turkey, and their cultural evolution due to the changing conditions of the past century. 

Eliza Pinhas is one of the narrators of the documentary talking about the nearly extinct Ladino language and disappearing Sephardic food. She talks about her happy childhood memories, and liparidas, a dried fish delicacy, is one taste she remembers fondly from her long-gone days in Ortaköy. She recalls that her mother and her friends would take a short break from household work just to have a little feast of liparidas wrapped in lettuce leaves. It was as normal as having a coffee break. Eliza is unfortunately one of the few remaining people who speaks Ladino as a mother tongue. 

As the documentary reveals, Ladino is a fading language, no longer the mother tongue of young Jews in Turkey or even in Israel. The original Castilian Spanish the Sephardic Jews used to speak changed over the centuries with many loan words from the various languages the Jews encountered in their new land after the expulsion from the Spain in 1492. The destination of most Jews was the Ottoman lands, especially the Balkans, Thrace and Aegean regions and inevitably Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. However, Ottoman Jewry did not start with the Iberian new comers, as there were...

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