Bougatsa Iordanis

"The Arabs called it the city of cheese. With graviera like this, mizithra like this, athotyros like this — how could they not?

Years passed, and Chania — for that is the city — became famous for its lighthouse and for Venizelos.

I never met Iordanis, but his name always told me he was from Asia Minor. I guessed Smyrna, until I learned he was from Constantinople.

So I concluded that this teasing pastry had come from Constantinople through Iordanis. Nowhere else in Greece will you taste a pastry quite like it.

Except Iordanis was a shoemaker, not a baker. Another mystery, until I was told that the man who taught him was his father-in-law, also from Constantinople.

The truth surfaced by chance. A Muslim of the town, at the population exchange, sold his oven to Iordanis’s father-in-law — and with it, the duty to teach the new owner the craft of the pastry.

Conclusion: the famous pastry known as the bougatsa of Iordanis belongs here, through and through."

Theokritos · Chaniotiki Eleftherotypia, 31 January 1992.

Today

Bougatsa comes from the Ottoman word pogatsa, a filled pie. At Iordanis the traditional filling is pichtogalo.

In 1924 a Muslim of the town taught the craft to my great-grandfather, a Constantinopolitan who arrived after the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Then my grandfather Iordanis took over, and gave the shop its name. My father followed. Today the fifth generation keeps the family tradition.

Iordanis Akasiadis