TOPLUMSAL İŞLEVİYLE ANKARA ELMADAĞ’DA “TANDIR EKMEĞİ” KÜLTÜRÜ
WITH ITS SOCIAL FUNCTION “TANDOORI BREAD” CULTURE IN ANKARA ELMADAĞ

Summary/Abstract: In the Elmadağ district of Ankara, tandoori bread has a special function with its dough leavening, kneading and cooking in the tandoor. While tirit constitutes the main purpose of making tandoori bread in Elmadağ, it has created the application area of folk belief by making and distributing it as “votive”. The “Exchange”functionality of tandoor bread made in roomshaped covered tandoori with bazaar bread has increased its functionality. In Elmadağ, tandoori bread has created a unique ritual area with its time and purpose, just like in tirit. Thus, wedding, circumcision, pilgrimage and soldier farewell, forty bread took place on the table as a complementary element of the food rituals of the transition periods such as the first feast. Although it is called “Elmadağ Bread” in Ankara and its surroundings, due to its hard structure among the people; Tandoori bread, which was named "The Rabbit Kills" and "Beef Tongue" due to its long shape, was seen as the source of the flavor left on the palate by the tirid with its hard and durable structure. Although there is a common opinion among the people that the hardness and durability of tandoori bread is due to the harsh winter of Elmadağ, there are also those who attribute the hard structure of the bread to "it is the hometown of people who make their bread out of stone”. Names such as “Avrat Bread”, “Avrat İşi” and “Möhkem Avrat Bread” were influential in the definition of tandoori bread as the "strong woman's bread" in Elmadağ with its hard structure and strong leaven. In Elmadağ, the dough that the woman kneads by hand and leavened with her tongue becomes the symbol of “woman” and salt becomes the symbol of “man”; Tandoori bread, which is obtained by cooking the leavened dough in the tandoor, has been accepted as the “coexistence of man and woman”. The absence as well as the presence of salt in the dough of tandoori bread is considered the social criterion of the union of men and women. The phrase “the bread has no salt” used for women who lost their spouses in Elmadağ refers to both their marital status and the mourning they hold for their spouses through “the right to salt and bread”. With many symbolic meanings, tandoori bread has become one of the biographical elements in Elmadağ where the stories of men and women are fermented with salt dough and cooked with fire. Thus, with its social functions, tandoori bread became the flavor, salt and leaven not only of Elmadağ cuisine but also of family life.

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