In a limestone house in Mardin, south-east Turkey, chef Ebru Baybara Demir is busy at her kitchen table. She organises the evening menu for her restaurant, Cercis Murat Konaği, while sampling fresh quince to be used in a dessert, fielding calls about the opening of a second restaurant, and spooning out sujuk, a fatty fermented sausage, from a copper pot for friends she has invited for breakfast.
On the balcony, a group of women – the talk shifting between Turkish, Arabic and Kurdish – boil a tub of quince jam.
“When people ask what I do, I say I’m a chef,” says Demir, “But my job is so much more than just cooking.” As well as running her restaurant, she sources and revives heirloom grains – including sorgül, a drought-resistant indigenous wheat, which is made into flour at the nonprofit co-op she founded in 2018. She also prepares south-eastern Turkish fare for events at the parliament and at Turkish embassies abroad.
On top of this, Demir oversees humanitarian initiatives, building ties between locals and Syrian refugees, a community displaced by a war just across the border, 20 miles away, who now form approximately a tenth of Mardin’s population.
Her work reflects the diversity of the city in which she was born. A settlement since Babylonian times, Mardin was a trading centre on the Silk Road, hosting a variety of ethnicities and religions. “People often refer to Mardin as a mosaic, but I don’t agree,” she says. “Actually, Mardin is like ebru,” the art of mixing and sprinkling paint over water to form something completely new.
The city’s cuisine is distinct from other parts of the country, built as it is on a blend of civilisations and cultures. Mardini cuisine uses a liberal amount of spices, from sour sumac to sweet fenugreek, serves fruit in its meat-dishes, and adopts traditions from various religions.
She pushes forward a tray of kiliçe, a cardamon-infused cookie that Syriac Christians traditionally prepare for Easter. Also on the menu at Cercis Murat Konaği are starters flavoured with mahlep (a spice made from cherry pits), kaburga dolmasi (stuffed lamb ribs with almonds and pepper paste), and incasiye (lamb and plum stew with grape molasses).
After studying tourism in Istanbul, Demir returned to Mardin in 1999 with the aim of attracting tourists to the hilltop city with its rich history. Her father begged her not to come back, concerned that Mardin’s patriarchal culture would be disastrous for a young woman trying to start a business. Security was another concern in this area near both the Syrian and Iraq borders which had suffered from ongoing fighting between the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Workers’ party, a separatist group.
The city received fewer than 10,000 visitors that year, Demir says, and most were truckers travelling to and from the borderlands.
Demir’s cooking career started by chance. A German tour group refused to return to Mardin’s sole restaurant after a disappointing meal there, so Demir’s aunt told her to bring the tourists to her home instead. The ensuing feast and conversation with Demir’s relatives were so good that the group abandoned the rest of the day’s plans.
Demir was so energised by the connections made at that meal that she convinced 21 unemployed women in Mardin to open their homes for other tour groups, assuring them that they would be paid for their work. Two years later, inspired by the popularity of the communal dining, Demir moved the cooking from houses into an empty 19th-century mansion, known as Cercis Murat Konaği, along the city’s main street.
The restaurant was an instant hit with visitors but less welcomed by the male-only teahouse opposite. A young divorcee, working solely with women (with distrustful husbands), serving food and alcohol to foreigners, was viewed with suspicion. “It was a very dangerous situation,” Demir recalls, laughing. Yet the restaurant was bringing money into an area with the highest unemployment rate in Turkey.
One evening, an elderly man walked over from the teahouse. “He said: ‘I have been watching you … I have a home like this too. What can I do with my home? Should I turn it into a restaurant or a hotel? What do you recommend?’”
It was a turning point. The man and other locals followed suit, opening restaurants, hotels and shops, and attracting people from Turkey and beyond to enjoy the tastes of Mesopotamia. Tourism grew from a few thousand visitors a year to a few million today.
With the commercial success of her restaurant, Demir turned to social gastronomy. The war in Syria led to an influx of refugees and instability in Mardin. In 2016, she applied for funding from the UN’s refugee agency for the women employed under her to teach and train others – both locals and refugees – culinary techniques.
Two years later, she opened an agricultural development co-op that employs locals and refugees in food production, including mushroom cultivation, beekeeping and growing sorgül. The co-op started to sell soap after noticing that a preference for animal fat in cooking led to an excess of olive oil. This created an opportunity for Syrians, with a tradition in soap-making, to lead the co-op’s olive-oil soap production.
“Food is not only for taste. Food is a tool for change,” says Demir.
When earthquakes ripped through southern Turkey in February this year, Demir snapped into action, operating “soul kitchens” in the affected area, preparing tens of thousands of hot meals a day. For six months in the wake of the disaster, she lived in Hatay, the worst-hit province, to ensure that the dishes were of a quality she too would enjoy. National favourites, such as kuru fasulye, a white bean stew, were sent to survivors, as well as local Hatay delicacies, including harissa, a meat porridge, served for special occasions.
Demir won the 2023 Basque Culinary World prize for her work in empowering women. With the €100,000 prize money, the co-op will open a cafe next year, run by Turkish and Syrian chefs, on Mardin’s main drag. Profits from the restaurant will go towards supporting operations for the soul kitchens, which now deliver food to schoolchildren.
At her restaurant, Demir watches with pride as a group of women cook, sing, dance and clank their metal ladles to keep the melody going in the dining room, where the guests are eating dobo, a stuffed leg of lamb with bulgur pilaf.
“Twenty years ago, these women couldn’t get permission from their husbands to work outside. Now they have their freedom,” says Demir.