Roubina Margossian

Around Easter, Movses Karoian asks the director of the orphanage, Hovhanness Aharonian, permission to set out on a lone journey to visit Beylan, his birthplace. He somehow gets to his native village Kerk-Khan. He looks for familiar faces, he wants to find the village baker, but no one is to be found. “Then I head towards our home.

Food plays an important part in shaping identities, culture and society as a whole. In Armenia, everything has a legend or story attached to it, imparting a deeper meaning: our mountains, rivers and lakes, apricots and pomegranates, grapes and wine, and bread. All those legends and traditions come to define us as a nation and our perception of the world. In all this, food holds a special place. Hospitality is a value that Armenians hold dear.

When the morning sun streamed in through the window, the flakes of aged cheese floating in the bowl of olive oil would glitter like particles of gold. My father would break off a piece of pita bread, shape it into a small cone and then reverently dip it in the olive oil to scoop up the orange colored cheese. But this wasn’t the kind of cheese you could buy in a supermarket, especially not in Toronto in the 1970s.