"And in the soup kitchen food shall be cooked twice every day": gustatory aspects of Ottoman mosque complexes

Abstract

An important component of many mosque complexes built throughout the Ottoman Empire’s long history and extensive territory was the soup kitchen (imaret).2 In these kitchens, food was cooked and distributed to the poor and needy, as well as to the many employees working in and around the mosque, tomb, schools, caravanserai, hospital, and other dependencies. Their expenses were paid via charitable foundations whose administrators produced voluminous documentary evidence. In fact, soup kitchens became one of the signature institutions of the empire, promoting the ruling dynasty’s beneficence and imperial vision (and taste). The seventeenth-century Ottoman travel writer Evliya Çelebi, in his multi-volume Seyahatname (Book of Travels), wrote:

I, this humble one, have traveled for fifty-one years and in the territories of eighteen rulers [meaning, he traveled as far as Vienna in the north and Upper Egypt in the south] [and] there was nothing like our enviable institution. May the beneficence of the House of Osman endure until the end of days.