Thanksgiving? Turkey?
Did you ever wonder how the turkey, a bird eaten in celebration of Thanksgiving and Christmas in England and America, became to be named after Turkey, a country of mostly Muslim people?
Read on for more…
Thanksgiving in the United States is a major holiday celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. Eating turkey for Thanksgiving in America is a tradition, allegedly going back to the early colonists. It seems there are contending origins of the first Thanksgiving.
Some argue that the earliest celebration was by the “Spanish in 1565, around the area of Saint Augustine, Florida…the first thanksgiving celebration in the United States (may have been) held in Virginia, and not in Plymouth…A day of Thanksgiving was codified in the founding charter of Berkeley Hundred in Charles City County, Virginia in 1619.”
Abraham Lincoln
Snopes.com mentions the first date as 1621 between the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians.
“The only items we can be certain were on the table during that first Thanksgiving were venison and some type of wild fowl, as described by Edward Winslow in his 1621 ‘Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth’. Although contemporary accounts of the first Thanksgiving mention “wild Turkies,” the Pilgrims and Wampanoag likely feasted on a variety of other fowl, such as geese, ducks, and partridges, and even birds we no longer commonly consider as food, such as cranes, swans, and eagles.”
“Due to a poor harvest the next year…the pilgrims never celebrated another Thanksgiving, and it remained an irregularly-observed holiday in America for more than two centuries. The first time all the states in the U.S. celebrated Thanksgiving together was in 1777, but that was a one-time only affair prompted by the Revolutionary War. Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday celebrated on the last Thursday in November in 1863, and Franklin Roosevelt moved it to the fourth Thursday in November in 1939.”
Who?
The turkey which, unfortunately for the bird, is the one which usually ends up as the main course for Christmas in America, England and many European countries. In recent years Turkish people have also started having turkey for their New Year celebration meal.
There are at least two and slightly different versions of the story.
Version One comes to us from Professor Larry E. Tise, a Professor of History at East Carolina University, who tells us that the bird was brought back to the Mediterranean by Columbus, domesticated in Turkey, exported to England and then made its way back to America by way of early colonists.
Version Two comes to us from another Professor, Giancarlo Casale, who received what he believed was the definitive answer from distinguished Harvard Professor of Ottoman and Turkish Studies, Şinasi Tekin. Professor Tekin told Casale in this version that the name of the turkey is a case of mistaken identity. He claimed a bird called the çulluk, a bird native to Turkey, was mistaken for the Meleagris gallopavo or wild turkey in America and the name stuck.
So which story do you believe is the “real” one? Please read on for more details and links to the characters in this centuries old detective story.
Version One:
Our first version comes from Larry E. Tise who is a “Wilbur & Orville Wright Distinguished Professor of History at East Carolina University.”
Replica of Columbus' Ship
He tells us that when Columbus “discovered” that he had not found a new trade route to India but instead a new land of whose location he had no knowledge, he had to bring back something to his benefactors. Since he could not bring back treasure nor trading goods he decided to bring back native animals and plants which the indigenous people had domesticated. Among those animals was the “Aztec huexoloti (Meleagris gallopavo or wild turkey).”
When Columbus returned with his birds, other animals and plant, Spain was at war with almost everyone and even though they had thrown out first the Muslim Moors and later the Jews, they nonetheless needed trade with all the Mediterranean countries. Professor Tise surmises “Probably before a single ship from America had been unloaded, contraband in seeds, birds, and beasts were headed from Spanish ports to points of call across northern Africa and the Middle East. When corn, tobacco sprouts, and, of course, our huexoloti arrived in the heart of the thriving and vibrant Ottoman Empire—seated in what we now know as Turkey—they came into the hands of probably the most advanced farmers and husbandmen in the world at that time…savvy Turkish farmers…”
Within a few years, these farmers had a surplus which they exported and these exports, including a “new and improved” version of the huexoloti, found their way to England. Professor Tise writes “By 1577, what was once nouveau, the huexoloti, had become the principal food bird in the entire English realm—surpassing even chickens and other fowl in both production and consumption…Corn arrived in England as Turkish maize. Tobacco took an identity it still has today–Turkish tobacco. And the good old huexoloti had lost all association with the new world and would be forever known in English simply as the turkey.”
Wild turkey
So how did this bird, which originated in the New World, make its way back to the New World via Turkey and England?
It seems that the wild American turkey was considered a pest by the colonists because they ate their crops and were hard to catch or kill. Later arrivals to the colonies brought their own domesticated animals, among them the English “turkey” to the shores of the New World. “English turkeys deriving from Turkey arrived in Jamestown in 1614 and in Massachusetts prior to 1629. As European settlements spread, so did their herds of domestic turkeys.” Settlers quickly discovered that the domestic variety, far from a pest, actually “considered the hornworms that infested and destroyed tobacco plants a very tasty delight.” This ensured the continued domestication of the bird and its eventual fate in becoming the main fare not only for Thanksgiving in America but as a holiday centerpiece throughout England, Europe and, of course, Turkey!
Professor Wise ends by saying “this Thanksgiving when we gather to partake in this most hallowed and quintessential of America’s holidays, we should remember as we look toward the big bird in the middle of our table that it is after all a turkey that came to us from Turkey; that it was brought into our culture by European forbears deeply influenced by their connections to Islamic commerce and culture in the Middle East; and that we have been a part of a shared planet for a very long time.”
Version Two:
(Türkçe’si için lütfen buraya tıklayın.)
Giancarlo Casale, a specialist in the history of the early modern Ottoman empire and a professor at the University of Minnesota also sought the origins of this holiday bird. His encounter with professor Şinasi Tekin, a distinguished Ottoman scholar at in the department of Ottoman and Turkish Studies at Harvard University, gave him the answer that he was seeking.
turkey by tree
Dr Casale wrote an article titled Talking Turkey: The Story of How the Unofficial Bird of the United States Got Named After a Middle Eastern Country. In this article he asks “how did such a creature end up taking its name from a medium sized country in the Middle East?”
He went on a seemingly exhaustive search for these origins and interviewed native speakers of different languages asking what the turkey was called in their language. He found a virtual babel of answers. For example, in Portuguese the word for turkey is peru, in Arabic the word means Ethiopian bird, while in Greek it is gallapoula which means French girl, and the Persians it seems call them buchalamun which means chameleon.
In Italian he found the word for turkey is tacchino which means (uh) turkey. In French the word is dinde, meaning from India, just as it does in Turkish where the bird is called a hindi and where corn is called misir the Turkish word for Egypt!
The good professor thought he was about to clarify the issue at this point. “The words in both German and Russian had similar meanings, so I was clearly on to something. The key, I reasoned, was to find out what turkeys are called in India, so I called up my high school friend’s wife, who is from an old Bengali family, and popped her the question.”
“Oh,” she said, “We don’t have turkeys in India. They come from America. Everybody knows that.”
“Yes,” I insisted, “but what do you call them?”
“Well, we don’t have them!” she said.
She wasn’t being very helpful. Still, I persisted: “Look, you must have a word for them. Say you were watching an American
movie translated from English and the actors were all talking about turkeys. What would they say?”
Well…I suppose in that case they would just say the American word, ‘turkey.’ Like I said, we don’t have them.”
Even more confused but in an attempt to follow the Turkish connection to its logical end he met with Harvard Professor Şinasi Tekin, “a world-renowned philologist and expert on Turkic languages. If anyone could help me, I figured it would be professor Tekin.” (Professor Tekin, who died in 2004, was also the editor of the Journal of Turkish Studies.)
çulluk
Professor Tekin told Casale that, “In the Turkish countryside there is a kind of bird, which is called a çulluk (chulluk). (It is an Eurasian Woodcock in English and its scientific name is Scolopax Rusticola.) It looks like a turkey but it is much smaller, and its meat is very delicious. Long before the discovery of America, English merchants had already discovered the delicious çulluk, and began exporting it back to England, where it became very popular, and was known as a ‘Turkey bird’ or simply a ‘turkey.’ Then, when the English came to America, they mistook the birds here for çulluks, and so they began calling them ‘turkey’ also.”
Professor continued, “But other peoples weren’t so easily fooled. They knew that these new birds came from America, and so they called them things like ‘India birds,’ ‘Peruvian birds,’ or ‘Ethiopian birds.’ You see, ‘India,’ ‘Peru’ and ‘Ethiopia’ were all common names for the New World in the early centuries, both because people had a hazier understanding of geography, and because it took a while for the name “America” to catch on…Anyway, since that time Americans have begun exporting their birds everywhere, and even in Turkey people have started eating them, and have forgotten all about their delicious çulluk. This is a shame, because çulluk meat is really much, much tastier.”
Dr Casale ends by saing “Deep down, however, I was ecstatic. I finally had a solution to this holiday problem, and knew I would be able once again to enjoy the main course of my traditional Thanksgiving dinner without reservation.”
Now we are more confused than ever!?!
So in the holiday spirit, Happy Holidays and Have a Great New Year!
