Like so many other Greek specialties, bougatsa has a long history, in this case one that stretches all the way back to Byzantine times. Bougatsa is mainly a breakfast pie with a phyllo pastry made of flour, softened butter and oil that requires a great deal of skill to prepare. This pie is made and enjoyed all around Greece, but particularly famous are those made in northern Greece, especially in Thessaloniki and Serres. Turkish börek is a close relation, and similar pies are traditional to many eastern Balkan countries that were formally part of the Ottoman Empire. The tradition of bougatsa making really took off around Greece in the early 1920s with the arrival of the Greek refugees from Asia Minor and Cappadocia.

Thessaloniki, the capital of Greek Macedonia and the country’s second largest metropolis after Athens, 500 km to the south, is a youth-loving, vibrant city that never sleeps – and always eats. Most locals here are friendly, laid-back, natural-born foodies who love going out and enjoying good wine and tsipouro. It’s a city with a very long history of culinary hospitality. Founded by King Cassandros in 315 BC and named after Thessalonike, his wife – half-sister of Alexander The Great – it’s referred to by Greeks as symprotevousa, “co-capital,” because of its historical status as a co-reigning city of the Byzantine Empire, along with Constantinople. In 1492 the city welcomed a large number of Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula.

As one approaches the central square of Kalyvia, a small village only 10 minutes from Athens International Airport, the irresistible smell of grilled meat fills the nostrils. The whole area is packed with traditional grill houses, and many Athenians will make the 45-minute drive just to enjoy a meal there. The oldest taverna and one of the most famous is Kollias, which still boasts the traditional butcher shop that gives these grill houses their Greek name (hasapotaverna, or “butcher taverna”). Anastasios Kollias opened the place in 1930 just up the road, but it gradually became too small to accommodate the growing clientele, so it took its current spot on the square in 1991.

Wild greens or horta (χόρτα) are an ancient and still very important ingredient in traditional Greek cuisine (and happen to have exceptional nutritional value to boot). Every season brings different varieties: some more bitter, some milder and sweeter, some naturally salty, all with different textures and shades of green. Almost every single taverna around Greece includes horta in the salad section of the menu. These boiled greens served with virgin olive oil, sea salt and plenty of freshly squeezed lemon juice are one of the most common salads enjoyed throughout the year, usually with fish, but sometimes also with meat. When eating out, Greeks typically ask the waiter what type of horta the restaurant serves, as they know it depends on season, region and availability of each variety.

All over Athens (not to mention the U.S. and other parts of the world), one of the hottest grains around is also among the oldest known to man. While farro, or zea, as it’s known in Greek, has been found in excavations of prehistoric settlements in parts of what was once Ancient Greece (the oldest, in Asia Minor, dating back to 12,000 BCE), in the early 20th century, its cultivation was banned, largely because it was cheaper to import other grains (though many incredible conspiracy theories behind the ban abound). Thankfully, zea began making a comeback about 15 years ago, and it is now popular again, not just in grain form, but also as flour for making baked goods and pasta.

Editor's note: Our recurring feature, Building Blocks, focuses on foods and ingredients that are fundamental to the cuisines we write about. Here we look at phyllo, an essential element of the Greek kitchen that tastes best when made by hand. It is thin, fragile, difficult to roll out and fiddly to work with – at least to the uninitiated – and yet phyllo is one of the pillars of the Greek kitchen. This delicate pastry is almost as ubiquitous as bread, turning up in the form of scores of sweet and savory pies with myriad fillings and dozens of shapes that vary depending on what part of Greece you’re in or even whose home you may be visiting. The phyllo-based pita, or pie, is the most versatile of foods: It can be served hot or cold; as a starter, a main course or dessert; eaten on the run or sitting down; lifted out of the frozen food section or made at home.

You can’t have Christmas in Greece without melomakarona and kourambiedes, two traditional cookies that are present in every household this time of year. The former were once prepared for Christmas and the latter for New Year’s, but gradually the two treats became inseparable (because why have one when you can have both?). Kourambiedes (the singular is kourambies) are believed to originate from the Azeri Iranian city of Tabriz, where they are called qurabiya. The Greeks, it appears, borrowed the name for their cookie from the Ottomans, who called them kurabiye (kuru meaning “dry” and biye meaning “biscuit”). Besides in Greece, variations of kourambies can be found throughout the Middle East, Turkey (kurabiye), Cyprus (kurabies), Albania (kurabie) and Bulgaria (kurabiiki), as well as the Andalusian part of Spain and Mexico (polboron).

The subject of frequent arguments over who actually invented it, baklava has a history as multilayered as the flaky dessert itself. The story may actually go all the way back to the 8th century BCE and the Assyrians, who layered bread dough with chopped nuts and honey and baked the result – a kind of proto-baklava – in wood-burning ovens. Perhaps carried by the winds of trade, different versions of this ancient dessert appeared on Greece’s shores a few centuries later. The 3rd-century-CE Deipnosophistae ("Banquet of the Learned") – sometimes referred to as the oldest surviving cookbook – provides the recipe for gastrin, aka Cretan “Glutton Cake,” a sweet that also seems to presage the arrival of baklava as we know it. The instructions, attributed to Chrysippus of Tyana, one of the leading dessert experts of antiquity, calls for turning various chopped nuts, boiled honey and poppy and sesame seeds into a paste which is then spread between two sheets of thin, rectangular dough. At a certain point, ancient Greek cooks started using thinner sheets of pastry, better known as phyllo – Greek for “leaf” – getting closer to today’s baklava.

Along the southwestern coast of Turkey, the vibrant blue waters of the Mediterranean crash against dry, rocky mountains jutting from the water’s edge. For centuries, pilgrims and adventurers alike have scrabbled over the unforgiving terrain between Fethiye and Antalya known as the Lycian Way. Ruins dating back to Greek and Roman times nestle between the scrubby trees and undergrowth, melding with the landscape and painting a picture of the life that has always dotted the shore. The Turquoise Coast is a popular place to visit in the summer, with massive sand beaches and countless pansiyons catering to every type of tourist. While most people visit this region for its stunning vistas and beaches, it has exceptional food if you know where to look.

Dear Culinary Backstreets, I keep hearing about the wonders of Cretan cuisine, but is it really any different from regular Greek cooking? And is there anywhere nice to try it in Athens?

Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment in our street food series this week, featuring dispatches on the best streetside eating in all the cities Culinary Backstreets covers. Before we get down to the business of discussing the best of Athens’ street food, a disclaimer: Athens is at a disadvantage when it comes to streetside eats. For one thing, a lot of venues – souvlaki joints, pizza parlors and even offal soup places – are open all night or even 24/7; they are just not serving on the street, though.

Forget about Christmas. In Greece, Easter is the main event, one where food, naturally, plays a starring role. It is also very much a holiday celebrated in the countryside: most Athenians go back to their villages during the holiday to be with their extended family and enjoy the Easter-related culinary delights of their home region.

Kadınlar Pazarı – a pleasant, pedestrian-only square in Istanbul’s Fatih neighborhood – is the closest thing the city has to a “Little Kurdistan.” The area is populated by migrants from Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast region, and small market stalls and butcher shops selling honey, cheeses, spices and other goodies from the region surround the square. Visiting the atmospheric area is a great way to get a taste of Southeast Turkey without having to leave Istanbul.

Peynir means cheese in Turkish and peinirli (derived from the Turkish word peynirli, meaning “with cheese”) is a delicacy adored by pretty much everyone in Greece that strongly resembles the Turkish pide. It is a boat-shaped bread that is high in yeast and butter, with a buttery, cheesy filling.