The Origins of Baklava: A 1,000-Year Disputed History

Ask a Turkish food enthusiast where baklava comes from and you'll get one answer. Ask a Greek, Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian, or Armenian one and you'll get a different answer. None of them is straightforwardly wrong. The honest answer is that baklava — like most great dishes — evolved over a thousand years across an enormous geographical area, with multiple groups contributing to what is now a family of related desserts.

Untangling the history matters, partly because food origin is a real cultural question, and partly because understanding the family tree helps you understand the dish.

The Assyrian baseline (8th century BCE)

The earliest plausible ancestor of baklava is an Assyrian dish from roughly the 8th century BCE — a stacked bread of unleavened layers, nuts, and honey. Archaeological references to it appear on Assyrian cuneiform tablets.

This isn't baklava in any modern sense — there was no phyllo, no syrup, no thin-stretched dough. But the basic concept of "layered nuts and sweetener" was in place.

The Byzantine evolution (4th–11th centuries CE)

Byzantine cookbooks include a dish called gastris, which uses ground nuts, honey, and sesame seeds in layers. This is the first attested European recipe in the baklava family.

The Byzantines also developed plakountas, a thin flat baked dough that was used as a vehicle for sweet toppings. Plakountas may be the linguistic ancestor of "baklava" — though this is disputed.

The Ottoman synthesis (15th–17th centuries)

The dish we recognise as baklava — thin layered phyllo, ground pistachios or walnuts, butter, syrup — was assembled in the kitchens of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul during the Ottoman period, probably in the 15th and 16th centuries.

The two innovations that made it baklava as we know it:

1. Hand-stretched phyllo. The Ottoman court bakers developed the technique of stretching dough into translucent sheets — a technique that almost certainly came from earlier Central Asian traditions of stretched dough (which also gave the world strudel, yufka, and other thin-pastry traditions). With phyllo, baklava became layered in 30+ sheets, not 4–5.

2. The sugar syrup. Earlier nut pastries used honey directly. The Ottomans switched to a hot sugar syrup poured over baked baklava, which gave it the soaked-but-crisp texture that defines it today.

There is a documented annual tradition from the 17th century: the Sultan would send a special tray of baklava — the Baklava Procession — to the Janissary military corps as a Ramadan gift. This is the first attested instance of baklava as a registered, named, prestige dessert.

The diaspora (17th–19th centuries)

From the Ottoman court, baklava spread across the empire — to what is now Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Armenia, the Levant, Egypt, and North Africa. Each region developed its own variant.

• Greek baklava uses walnuts instead of pistachios, often with cinnamon in the spice mix, and a honey-heavy syrup.
• Lebanese baklava is smaller, sweeter, often soaked in orange blossom or rose water syrup.
• Iranian baklava is thinner, often diamond-shaped, with cardamom in the syrup.
• Armenian baklava uses walnuts and often includes cloves.
• Syrian baklava is among the most varied, with elaborate shaped variations (bracelets, baby birds, twists).

The Turkish version, particularly the Gaziantep version, has remained closest to the original Ottoman court style: pistachios from Antep, hand-stretched phyllo, a simple lemon-sugar syrup, and minimal spice.

What's the "real" baklava?

The honest answer: there isn't one. There's a family of related desserts, each of which has been refined over centuries in a specific region, each of which has a legitimate claim to its variant.

That said, three observations:

1. The phyllo, syrup, and ground nut combination crystallised in Istanbul in the 15th-16th centuries. In that narrow technical sense, Turkish baklava is the closest descendant of the dish's most consequential historical form.

2. The pistachio version is uniquely Anatolian. Pistachios were a key ingredient in baklava only because of the Gaziantep pistachio supply. Lebanese baklava uses pistachios too, but the supply chain has historically run from southeastern Turkey.

3. The walnut version is older. Walnuts were used in baklava-ancestors centuries before pistachios became standard. Greek and Armenian walnut baklavas may be closer to the medieval ancestor than the modern pistachio version.

So you can argue Turkish baklava is the most Ottoman, Greek baklava is the closest to the medieval root, and Lebanese baklava is the most refined modern Levantine version. All true. All baklava.

What this means for ordering baklava

Two practical points:

1. Don't argue with a shop about the country of origin. Greek baklava is wonderful. So is Lebanese baklava. So is Turkish baklava. If a shop you respect calls their baklava Greek and it's excellent, the food is more important than the label.

2. Pay attention to what variant a shop is making. A shop that does Turkish-style pistachio baklava and one that does Greek-style walnut baklava are making meaningfully different desserts. Both can be great. Neither is "less authentic" than the other.

For where to find serious baklava in the GTA — across multiple traditions — see our GTA baklava guide.