Döner Kebab comes from Turkey
You often hear that, but it’s not even half the truth. The principle of the doner kebab clearly comes from Turkey and is documented as early as the beginning of the 19th century in the western Anatolian city of Bursa.
What does “Döner” mean?
“Döner” means “rotating”, “kebab” is grilled meat (the Balkan dish “Ćevapčići” is also derived from this) and “Döner Kebab” means “rotating grilled meat”.
This method: skewering meat of various kinds (initially primarily beef or veal, mutton or lamb), rotating it, grilling it and then always cutting off the outer edge – this was already in use in Bursa at the time. It may have been more widespread even then, but it is certainly documented for Bursa.
There also lived a cook named Iskender, who established the famous variant of the Iskender Kebab named after him: doner meat with yogurt, grilled peppers and tomatoes.
Where does the claim that Döner is a German invention come from?
And yet we often hear that the kebab was invented in Berlin in 1972. Where does this story come from?
In fact, there was a guest worker from Turkey at the time, Kadir Nurman, who had first come to Stuttgart in 1960 and moved to Berlin in 1966. He first worked as a salesman, then as a mechanic and finally had an idea. He knew doner kebab from his Turkish homeland. However, it was a normal meal there, often served on plates in good restaurants, with rice or other side dishes.
The German thing about the kebab is above all the bread
He, on the other hand, had the impression that there could be a market for quick meals in busy Germany. At that time, the concept of “snacks” only existed in the form of bratwurst or currywurst.
How did the currywurst come about?
And so Kadir Nurman turned the former plate dish “Döner Kebab” into a snack meal, put the meat cut from the skewer into a flatbread (pide) with a few onions on it, and thus gave Döner to go.
It was still very simple, without a lot of sauce, not “with everything and spicy” – that came later. But Kadir Nurman was the founder of a unique German kebab snack culture that spread from Berlin to the rest of Germany and has long been copied worldwide.
In this respect, one can say: Kadir Nurman introduced the doner kebab to Germany and invented the flatbread and thus snack variant – but the dish “doner kebab” had already existed in Turkey at least 150 years earlier.
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