Is Yogurt Turkish or Greek? The Long History of Yoğurt in Türkiye

For readers in a hurry: the word *yogurt comes from Turkish, entering English in 1625 as "Yoghurd." Milk processing in Anatolia and Mesopotamia goes back thousands of years further, but archaeology can't tell whether those early foods were yogurt specifically or something else made from soured milk. What supermarkets sell as Greek yogurt is strained yogurt, called süzme in Turkish, and the name is a modern branding outcome rather than proof of where straining yogurt began. Read on for the etymology fight nobody's won, and an Ottoman doctor's son who ended up founding Danone

In a village kitchen, milk is boiled, then left to cool until a finger can rest in it without burning. A spoonful of yesterday's yogurt goes in. The bowl is covered with a cloth, wrapped in a blanket, and pushed to the warm side of the stove. Then everyone leaves it alone.

The Turkish for that last stage is sütü uyutmak, to put the milk to sleep. The milk is not being processed or cultured or worked on. It is sleeping, and nobody wakes it early.

The Word is Turkish, and the Paper Trail is Long

The English word arrived in 1625, in a compilation by Samuel Purchas, an Essex clergyman who never traveled two hundred miles from the town where he was born. He collected accounts from sailors and travelers instead, and one of them reported that the Turks did not drink much milk unless it had soured, which they called Yoghurd. That is the earliest evidence the OED has.

After that, the spelling wandered for three centuries. The OED lists thirty-four variants because English writers copied whichever language they had encountered the word in.

A 1687 translation from French gave Yogourt. Others came through Greek giaourti or French yaourt, which is why some historical English spellings have no g at all.

The Turkish record goes back much further. The word appears in Old Uyghur texts, and by the eleventh century, it is sitting in two of the foundation documents of Turkic literature. Kaşgarlı Mahmud's Dîvânu Lugâti't-Türk, compiled between 1072 and 1074, records not only the noun but the verb around it: udıt-, to leave yogurt to ferment, with the example sentence Ol yugrut udıttı, "he left the yogurt to set." Yusuf Has Hacib's Kutadgu Bilig lists it among basic foodstuffs.

Turkish linguists still disagree about the root. Emin Erdem Özbek, writing in Oğuz Türkçesi Araştırmaları Dergisi in 2022, works through the historical and modern Turkic forms and concludes the word derives from yoğur-, to knead or to thicken, with the noun-forming suffix -t. Gökçen Durukoğlu had proposed a different line in 2017, arguing from expressions like sütü uyutmak that the root is the Old Turkic verb û-, to sleep. Neither reading has closed the case.

The word also traveled sideways across the Turkic world and picked up local phonology on the way. Kyrgyz has cuurat. Khakas has çoort. Yakut, spoken in Siberia, has suorat.

Same word, four thousand kilometers apart.

The Food Itself is a Different Matter

Archaeologists can detect milk fats absorbed into ancient pottery and identify them by carbon isotope ratios. Some of the earliest evidence for dairying anywhere comes from Upper Mesopotamia and Anatolia: a small number of vessels from Tell Sabi Abyad carry milk residues dated to roughly 6400 to 5900 BCE, and comparable residues turn up at Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia not long after.

A 2024 study in PLOS One analyzed 805 Neolithic potsherds from Barcın Höyük in northwestern Türkiye, covering 6600 to 6000 BCE, and found milk residues abundant even among the earliest ceramics at the site. The authors concluded that the first farmers who moved into the region already knew how to process milk before they got there.

What all of this confirms is that milk was being heated, separated, and turned into something. It cannot tell yogurt apart from cheese, whey, or clarified butter, because none of those leave a distinct chemical signature once they have soaked into clay for eight thousand years. Milk processing in this land predates the recorded word by several thousand years; whether any of it was yogurt specifically, as opposed to an early cheese or a butter byproduct, is not something the residue can settle.

Two more facts are worth knowing. Genetic evidence indicates that lactase persistence was rare among Neolithic adults. Some way of transforming milk was plausibly in use well before anyone's body could handle it fresh, whether that meant souring it, separating out the whey into something like cheese, or churning it into butter.

The evidence can't rank these possibilities against each other or say which came first at any given site.

Türkiye did not invent fermentation. What Central Asian and Anatolian Turkic communities contributed, and the part of the story that's actually documented, is a wide and thoroughly recorded range of methods for drying, salting, and straining yogurt so it would keep through the winter.

Turning Yogurt into Food That Keeps

The methods are still practiced. Kurut is yogurt strained, salted, hand-shaped into small pieces, and dried in the sun for one to two weeks; producers report it keeping for years when stored dry and cool. It reappears in winter soups and in Eastern Anatolian dishes like keledoş and ayran aşı. Related dried fermented dairy products include Iranian kashk and Lebanese kishk, although their ingredients and production methods vary.

Tuzlu yoğurt, salted or winter yogurt, is boiled down in copper kettles with salt, jarred, then sealed under a layer of olive oil or clarified butter to keep air out. Roughly two and a half to three and a half kilos of ordinary yogurt yield one kilo of it, and producers report it keeping about a year under those conditions. Antakya Salted Yoghurt now holds its own Turkish geographical indication.

Then there are the products made from yogurt rather than from milk. Çökelek is made by diluting yogurt, churning out the butterfat, and boiling the remaining liquid until it curdles. Keş is pressed and dried for days until it behaves like cheese; the dried version has been recorded at around 89% total solids, which is what gives it a shelf life measured in months. In Sivas, peskütan is churned, cooked with cracked wheat and salt, then pressed into containers where producers report it lasting one to two years.

In the Koramaz Valley near Kayseri, yogurt is salted into hollowed blocks of porous dorak stone that strain it slowly, and villagers there have reportedly stored it in caves for months at a stretch.

A 2025 review in the Journal of Dairy Research also credits the Seljuks with carrying yogurt into Iranian and Arab cooking and notes that Turkic communities in Central Asia used the word tuzluk for yogurt used to season soups. Both points come from the review's own secondary sources rather than primary documents anyone has independently verified, so they belong on the page as reported rather than settled.

The Starter, and the Strange Things That Have Served as One

Turkish calls a starter maya. The verb is mayalamak, to inoculate, to set something fermenting.

In principle, a starter never has to end. Each new batch carries a spoonful of the last one forward, so a household culture can in theory run for as long as somebody keeps making yogurt, though nothing tracks how long any specific lineage has actually gone unbroken.

When a household had no starter on hand, Anatolian fieldwork recorded some unusual substitutes: ant eggs, crushed and stirred into the milk, or in some places, soil from the ant nest itself; raw chickpeas or a handful of wheat, left in warm milk in a sealed container for twenty-four hours, then strained out; fresh green pine cones near Kazdağı, said locally to give yogurt that resists souring.

Thistle, nettle, mastic, and yarrow also appear in the record, alongside çiy yoğurdu, dew yogurt, a Hıdırellez tradition in which morning dew collected from daisies, pine needles, and linden flowers is added to milk and left to set within a day, with metal utensils avoided throughout. These are traditional practices recorded by folklorists, not claims that any of them work as fermentation starters in a tested sense.

A Katık for Almost Anything

Turkish has a word, katık, for whatever is eaten with bread to make a full meal. In some regions, and in some historical Turkic usage, the word narrows and points specifically at yogurt, which says something about how central yogurt was at the ordinary table without meaning the word belonged to yogurt everywhere Turkish was spoken.

Turkish cooking treats yogurt less as a dish than as a completion. Mantı, the small dumplings, are served under a layer of garlicky yogurt, sarımsaklı yoğurt, with melted butter and red pepper poured over the top; the yogurt is most of the point, not a side note. Fried eggplant and zucchini get the same treatment as yoğurtlu kızartma.

Cacık, thinned yogurt with cucumber, garlic, and dried mint, moves between soup and drink depending on how much water goes in. Yayla çorbası, a rice and mint soup, is finished with a whisked yogurt and egg mixture added carefully so it doesn't curdle.

Plain rice, stewed vegetables, kebab, İskender: most of them get a spoonful of yogurt within reach, and in practice, it is rarely optional even when it is technically a side dish.

Turkish has already defended this habit in proverb form. Kimse ayranım (yoğurdum) ekşi demez, nobody says their own ayran or yogurt is sour, is the standard way of saying people never criticize their own goods or their own side, recorded by the Turkish Language Association in both variants.

Sütten ağzı yanan yoğurdu üfleyerek yer describes someone whose mouth was burned by milk blowing on yogurt before eating it, roughly "once bitten, twice shy," except specifically dairy.

And her yiğidin bir yoğurt yiyişi vardır, every man has his own way of eating yogurt, is what Turkish reaches for whenever it needs to say that people do the same ordinary thing in different ways.

All three sayings assume the reader already knows the bowl, which sits alongside the wider collection of Turkish idioms built from exactly this kind of everyday material.

Ottoman Istanbul treated yogurt the same unremarkable way. Özge Samancı's research on Istanbul's culinary culture through the reform and Republican eras describes nineteenth-century palace kitchens drawing milk, yogurt, and kaymak from the city's ordinary markets as a matter of routine rather than luxury. Yogurt appeared at breakfast, beside pilaf, and folded into soups and vegetable dishes, the same functions it still serves now.

Regional Yogurts

As of December 2024, the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office had registered eleven geographically indicated varieties of yogurt. Silifke Yoğurdu later received European Union Protected Geographical Indication status on 16 January 2025, becoming the first Turkish yogurt registered by the EU. According to its official specification, it is made entirely from goat’s milk or, when goat’s milk is scarce, from a mixture containing at least 20 percent goat’s milk and up to 80 percent cow’s milk.

Tavas Yanık Koyun Yoğurdu, the region's smoked sheep yogurt, already holds Turkish national geographical indication status, registered by TÜRKPATENT on 25 June 2024; a separate EU-level PGI application was pending as of late 2024. Afyon Water Buffalo Yoghurt's PDO application was reported the same way in the most recent academic review, and neither status should be assumed current without checking again closer to publication.

The registered varieties are genuinely different foods. Silifke yogurt is heated over fast-burning local brushwood, thicker in summer than in spring because the milk itself changes.

The yogurt has worked its way into regional culture beyond the dairy itself: Silifke'nin Yoğurdu is also a well-known folk song and spoon dance from the area, opening with the line "Silifke'nin yoğurdu, ah seni kimler doğurdu" and still performed by local folklore troupes today. Tavas smoked yogurt gets its burnt aroma from a single glass of milk scorched deliberately in a copper kettle over a wood fire. Trabzon külek yogurt is made in the evening from full-fat cow's milk, stirred continuously with a wooden spoon, then set in earthenware.

Kanlıca yogurt tells a messier story than the rest. In Ottoman Istanbul, it was made from a mixture of cow, sheep, and sometimes buffalo milk, boiled down hard, poured from a height into glass bowls to build up a cream layer, and left to set for about six hours.

The Journal of Dairy Research review describes the original pastures and itinerant milk vendors as gone, and what's sold in Kanlıca today as a reconstruction for gastronomic tourism using ordinary milk. At least one family business in the neighborhood tells a different story, dating its production back to 1893 without a break.

Which account is closer to the truth probably varies from one stall to the next, and nobody selling yogurt in Kanlıca has much reason to describe their own version as the reconstruction.

Kanlıca yogurt is eaten sweet, with powdered sugar added spoonful by spoonful rather than stirred through, a habit documented at least as far back as a 1953 feature in the magazine Yedigün and still the main draw for a lot of Istanbullus who make the trip.

Ayran

Ayran is yogurt, water, and salt. The Turkish Food Codex defines it as a fermented milk product made either by diluting yogurt or by fermenting milk whose solids have already been adjusted downward, which is how the industrial version is made.

The word ayran is also recorded in the eleventh-century Dîvânu Lugâti’t-Türk. Its origin, though, is contested rather than settled. One line, favored particularly outside the Turkic linguistic tradition, derives it from ayır-, to separate, which would fit the older production method of churning butter out of yogurt and keeping what remained.

Zhazira Otyzbay's 2019 study argues against exactly that derivation, on both formal and semantic grounds, and traces the word instead to ürüŋ, an old word for white, by way of an intermediate form yürüŋ attested in the eighth-century Orhon inscriptions with that same meaning. Neither side has settled the question.

Yayık ayranı is what remains once butter has been churned out of yogurt, whichever etymology one prefers for the name. Related drinks exist across a wide arc: doogh in Iran, tan in Armenia, dhallë in Albania.

Two Routes into Europe

Yogurt reached Western Europe through more than one channel, and it's worth being clear about which parts are documented and which are legend.

The documented route runs through the Balkan Wars. Isaac Carasso, a Sephardic entrepreneur born in Ottoman Salonika, present-day Thessaloniki, relocated to Barcelona and began making yogurt commercially there in 1919, at a time when yogurt was already circulating in the European press as a health product. Some of that was owed to Ilya Metchnikoff, a microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute who had shared the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for identifying phagocytes and their role in immunity.

The Nobel recognized that immunology work, not what Metchnikoff did next: in the years around it, he separately proposed that lactic acid bacteria in fermented milk could clear the gut of aging-related toxins and extend life, a theory the prize didn't cover but whose author's prestige helped it travel across Europe anyway.

His son Daniel later took the business to Paris and built it into Danone, a name taken from Daniel's own childhood nickname. The company that eventually turned yogurt into an industrial product across Europe traces back to an Ottoman-born entrepreneur, even though nothing about the branding says so.

The other route is older and far less certain. Turkish popular histories tell of Kanuni Sultan Süleyman sending a physician to Paris in the sixteenth century, who cured King Francis I of a stomach ailment with a yogurt cure, after which the king supposedly called it "the milk of eternal life," le lait de vie éternelle.

Ali Özden's widely cited 2008 history of yogurt records this story in the same section as two others, about Abraham and about Genghis Khan's army, and treats all three explicitly as legend rather than documented medical history. It belongs on this page as exactly that: a story Turks tell about yogurt reaching Europe, with no primary source behind the specific episode.

The Greek Yogurt Question

Ancient Greek cuisine had its own fermented milk tradition, entirely separate from the Turkic one. Galen and other Greco-Roman writers describe oxygala, literally "sour milk," a soured dairy product eaten with honey, documented centuries before Turkic peoples reached Anatolia. Whether oxygala was closer to modern yogurt, a soft curd cheese, or something in between isn't fully settled, but it establishes that Greek dairy fermentation has its own separate root, with no connection to the word yoğurt or its Turkic history. The two traditions developed independently before either one had reason to compete over a name.

What is sold as Greek yogurt is strained yogurt, made by draining part of the whey to concentrate the protein and thicken the texture. The international Codex standard covers this broader category as "concentrated fermented milk" without assigning it to any single country; modern producers reach the same result through methods ranging from traditional cloth straining to industrial ultrafiltration.

In Greek, the strained product is called straggistó. In Turkish, it is süzme yoğurt, or torba yoğurdu and kese yoğurdu, bag yogurt, after the cloth sack it drains in. Both are old, well-attested culinary practices, not competing claims to the same invention.

The commercial phrase "Greek yogurt" has a narrower, legal history. Fage, based in Greece, brought its strained yogurt to Western export markets under that name.

Hamdi Ulukaya, born in Türkiye, later founded Chobani in the United States and sold his own strained yogurt as "Greek Yogurt," a category American consumers already recognized, even though Chobani's name comes from the Turkish çoban, shepherd.

Fage brought a case against Chobani in Britain, and the Court of Appeal of England and Wales ruled that UK consumers understood "Greek yoghurt" specifically to mean yogurt made in Greece, a finding of "extended passing off" rather than a ruling on trademark ownership or on where straining yogurt actually originated.

The ruling prevented Chobani from selling its US-made product in the UK as “Greek yoghurt.” The ruling only settled what the phrase means to a British consumer. It doesn't establish that the two products are identical, and it says nothing about the method's actual origin.

Özbek and Esen's 2025 review notes that Türkiye has never built an equivalent international brand position for its own yogurt, despite holding more registered regional varieties than it has promoted abroad. That's a real gap for Turkish producers to close.

The Word and the Food

The word is Turkish, documented from the eleventh century onward. Milk processing on this land predates the recorded word by thousands of years, and whether early Anatolians were making yogurt specifically, as against cheese, butter, or something else the residue can no longer distinguish, isn't something archaeology can settle.

According to an estimated calculation in Türkiye's National Dairy Council's 2017 report, per capita consumption that year stood at about 31 kilograms of yogurt and 19 kilograms of ayran. Milk, cooling on a stove. A spoonful from yesterday's bowl. A cloth over the top, and everyone leaves it alone.

Vocabulary

yoğurt — Yogurt. The word appears in medieval Turkic sources and later entered many other languages.

maya — A starter culture used to begin fermentation. In Turkish, maya can also mean yeast or leaven.

yoğurt çalmak — To add a starter culture to warm milk and leave it to ferment.

sütü uyutmak — Literally “to put the milk to sleep.” A traditional expression for leaving the milk undisturbed while it becomes yogurt.

süzme yoğurt — Yogurt concentrated by draining away some of its whey.

ayran — A drink made by mixing yogurt with water and usually a little salt.

kurut — A salted and dried fermented dairy product traditionally prepared for long storage.

cacık — A cold yogurt dish made with cucumber and herbs, usually served alongside a meal.

Add Learn Turkish with Seda as a Preferred Source on Google for more entries on Turkish language, history, and culture.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: Is yogurt Turkish or Greek?

A: The word is Turkish, documented from the eleventh century onward. Milk processing in Anatolia predates the Turkic presence there by thousands of years, though archaeology can't confirm those early foods were yogurt specifically. What is sold as "Greek yogurt" is strained yogurt, known in Turkish as süzme, and the name is a modern branding and legal outcome rather than evidence of where straining yogurt was first practiced.

Q: Did ancient Greece have its own yogurt tradition too?

A: Yes. Ancient Greek writers describe oxygala, a soured milk product eaten with honey, documented well before Turkic peoples reached Anatolia. It developed independently of the word yoğurt and its Turkic history.

Q: What does the word yoğurt actually mean?

A: One line of scholarship derives it from the Old Turkic verb yoğur-, to knead or thicken, plus a noun-forming suffix. A competing account traces it to a verb meaning "to sleep," based on expressions like sütü uyutmak, to put milk to sleep. Neither has settled the debate.

Q: What is the difference between Turkish yogurt and Greek strained yogurt?

A: Both are concentrated by removing part of the whey, and the international Codex standard covers this broader category without assigning it to any nationality. Traditional Turkish süzme yoğurt and Greek straggistó share the same basic technique; production methods, from cloth straining to industrial ultrafiltration, vary by producer today.

Q: What is ayran made of?

A: Yogurt, water, and salt, or industrially, milk fermented after its solids have been adjusted. Its etymology is genuinely disputed: one theory derives it from ayır-, to separate; another traces it to ürüŋ, an old word for white. Neither has been settled.

Q: Did the Ottomans bring yogurt to Europe?

A: Two separate stories claim this. Isaac Carasso, a Sephardic entrepreneur born in Ottoman Salonika, founded what became Danone in Barcelona and Paris starting in 1919, which is well documented. An older story about a Kanuni Sultan Süleyman-era cure for King Francis I of France is popular in Turkish gastronomy writing, but its own most-cited source treats it as legend rather than documented history.

Sources

• Oxford English Dictionary, entry for yogurt: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/yogurt_n

• Jeremy Butterfield, "Yogurt or yoghurt? Wherefore the 'h'?" on the OED's thirty-four recorded spellings: https://jeremybutterfield.com/2019/04/16/yogurt-or-yoghurt-are-both-right/

• Emin Erdem Özbek, "Yoğurt Sözcüğünün Etimolojisi Üzerine Bir Deneme," Oğuz Türkçesi Araştırmaları Dergisi, 4 (2022): https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/oguztad/article/1178168

• Gökçen Durukoğlu, "'Yoğurt' Sözcüğünün Kökenine Dair Bir Deneme," TÜRKLAD, 1/2 (2017): https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/386605

• Çağla Özbek and Mustafa Kadir Esen, "Exploring Turkish yoghurts: a comprehensive study on product characteristics," Journal of Dairy Research 92/2 (2025), 250–262: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022029925101088

• "From bowls to pots: The dairying revolution in Northwest Turkey, a view from Barcın Höyük, 6600 to 6000 BCE," PLOS One (2024): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0302788

• "Fermented Dairy Foods along the Southwest Asian–European Neolithic Trajectory," Current Anthropology 62/S24: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/714961

• Ali Özden, "Yoğurdun Tarihi," Güncel Gastroenteroloji 12/2 (2008), 128–133, on the François I story's status as legend: https://guncel.tgv.org.tr/journal/26/pdf/293.pdf

• Zhazira Otyzbay, "Ayran Sözcüğünün Etimolojisi, Anlamı ve Türk Kültüründeki Yeri," Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları 123 (2019), 219–232: https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/851340

• Özge Samancı, "Culinary Culture in Istanbul in the Reform and Republican Eras," A History of Istanbul: https://istanbultarihi.ist/482-culinary-culture-in-istanbul-in-the-reform-and-republican-eras

• RPC Legal, "Total win for Fage in Greek yoghurt appeal," on the UK "extended passing off" ruling: https://www.rpclegal.com/thinking/ip/total-win-for-fage-in-greek-yoghurt-appeal/

• European Commission, Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/112 registering Silifke Yoğurdu as a Protected Geographical Indication: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_impl/2025/112/oj

• Denizli Yeni Olay / Pamukkale Haber, on Tavas Yanık Koyun Yoğurdu's Turkish national geographical indication, registered 25 June 2024: https://denizliyeniolay.com/guncel/82658-baklavanin-ardindan-yanik-yogurt-da-tescil-edilecek

• Ulusal Süt Konseyi, "Türkiye Süt Sektörü İstatistikleri Özet Raporu," estimated 2017 per capita yogurt and ayran consumption: https://ulusalsutkonseyi.org.tr/wp-content/uploads/Turkiye-S%C3%BCt-Sekt%C3%B6r%C3%BC-%C4%B0statistikleri-2017.pdf

• "Asırlık Kanlıca Yoğurdu," on the 1953 Yedigün feature and the tradition of eating Kanlıca yogurt with powdered sugar: http://www.asirlikkanlicayogurdu.com.tr/tarihce/

• Nobel Prize Outreach, "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1908," on the phagocytosis/immunity basis of Metchnikoff's award: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1908/summary/

• Mut'un Sesi Gazetesi, "Silifke Yöresi Halk Oyunları," on Silifke'nin Yoğurdu as a regional folk song and spoon dance: https://www.mutunsesi.com/silifke-yoresi-halk-oyunlari/

• Türk Dil Kurumu, proverb entries for Kimse ayranım (yoğurdum) ekşi demez and Her yiğidin bir yoğurt yiyişi vardır