FAQsTurkeyIstanbulIstanbul FoodIstanbul KebapsIstanbul Kebaps History

Where did the kebab originate from?

There’s nothing definitive in history, as the use of fire for cooking (790,000+ years ago) predates the pen and paper by many moons. In the Kitab al-Tabikh, a 10th-century Baghdadi cookbook there are descriptions of kabāb as cut-up meat, either fried in a pan or grilled over a fire. Stone supports for skewers however were unearthed in excavations of the ancient Minoan settlement of Akrotiri.

The ancient Indian text of Mahabharata and even Homer’s Iliad also mentioned pieces of meat roasted on spits which could be kebaps. Meat kebabs were also believed to have been grilled on swords by Nomadic tribesmen. In 17th-century Turkey, Evliya Celebi, an Ottoman journeyman, describes the kebeb as a horizontal bundle of meat which is long before the vertically skewed, Iskender Kebap, was made famous in the 19th century. 

So while there’s no definitive answer, kebaps have most likely been around a very, very long time.