Who owns mousaka? Is it Greek, or is it Turkish? And by extension, what about baklava, melitzanosalata (roasted eggplant puree), tzatziki (yogurt-cucumber-garlic sauce), and myriad other dishes that find their place on the tables of both Greece and Turkey, and many other Middle Eastern neighbors?

In this part of the world, where ethnic identity is an often heated issue, the provenance of specific recipes is a matter of national pride. Any Greek cook worth his proverbial salt will tell you that mousaka is absolutely Greek, but of course any Turk will swear to fact that his beloved meat and eggplant dish is 100% Turkish. To my mind, cooking is like language, alive and ever-changing, and there is no dogmatic answer regarding the origins of any one single dish. Greece has always been a crossroads, a land that by sheer geographical chance has forever straddled East and West. That more than any other factor has shaped the country's cooking. From the beginning of her history, Greece has been host to migrations and invasions, to settlements and resettlements. It stands to reason then that the country's cooking should reflect many different influences, and, indeed, it is a cuisine that has been shaped by the land (and sea), and by the myriad peoples who have come and gone over the long course of Greek history.

Greek cooking is at once a paradigm of continuity from the farthest reaches of the past, as well as the ultimate "fusion" cuisine, melding influences that are still palpable from the likes of the Venetians and Ottomans, who controlled so much of the country for so many centuries to the newest, and amorphous, invader that only recently reared its powerful head: "globalization." Now, at the beginning of the third millennium, one is as likely to sample the pleasures of simple island sheep's or goat's milk cheeses, sesame-honey confections, snails, the most laconic grilled meats and fish, olive oil, pulses and more -all foods that have been consumed since antiquity, many prepared in the same way even today -as much as one is likely to find "traditional" foods with Turkish, Italian or Slavic names, or dishes that have barraged the country in much more recent times, such as "Greek sushi" and "cornflakes," the generic name Greeks use to refer to all breakfast cereals.

The ancient roots of the cuisine still thrive, mainly in the long list of raw ingredients that still form the basic Greek culinary alphabet: wheat and other grain products, wild foods such as greens and game, lentils, chick peas and fava beans, fish and seafood, goat and lamb, honey, and herbs, such as oregano. Some dishes, such as the small, sweetened cheese pies found throughout the Aegean, or the multigrain and legume dishes (polisporia), that have religious significance and are still made as offerings for church have remained virtually unchanged, even by the passage of so much time.

Despite Greece's relatively homogeneous contemporary society, there is a multi-ethnic facet to the cooking, one that takes its cue from the long-lingering occupations of the Venetians and Ottomans, as mentioned above, but also from its more immediate neighbors in the Balkans and even in North Africa. Throughout the north of Greece for example, the food is not that different from what one encounters on tables in Bulgaria or Albania: savory pies, pickled cabbage, and peppers are among the many pan-Balkan leitmotifs in northern Greek cooking. It's probably not correct to say that Greece has been "influenced," by those immediate neighbors to the north, but rather that the cuisines are similar, because the physical land is similar.

Discerning the Venetian or Turkish influences is more difficult. In the Ionian islands, as well as in places such as Hios, which was ruled by the Genoans for several centuries, there is an Italian hue in the kitchen. In Corfu, for example, there are foods with names like "nioki," "pastitsada," "sofritto," "bianco," "mandolato," and more, all clearly Italian. Venetian cuisine was the cuisine of the landed aristocracy in the Ionian as well as in the Cyclades, while the poor ate a very simple diet based on olive oil, cornmeal, greens and whatever protein they could afford. In islands such as Tinos, where there is still a sizeable Catholic population, one encounters dishes such as blood pudding, poutinga, which would be all but anathema to a Greek Orthodox cook, because the Greek Church eschews the consumption of animal blood. I think this is one reason why Greeks still prefer their meat cooked until it is absolutely well-done. There are sweets called "ravioli" in the Cyclades, as well as in parts of the Peloponnese, especially around Monemvasia, which was once a Venetian fortress. They are usually small, bite-size pastries filled with nuts. In Tinos there is veritable savory ravioli, filled with chard. Beyond specific recipes, though, what the Venetians added to the Greek larder stayed on permanently, for they were privy, because of the mercantile and naval prowess, to all the foods that were sweeping through Europe from the New World. It is likely that tomatoes, peppers, potatoes and beans -all now so thoroughly entrenched in Greek cooking, it would be impossible to imagine the cuisine without them- made their way to Greece via the Venetians.

I am not one of those hot headed Greeks who believe that the Turks gave our cuisine nothing. On the contrary, the Ottomans were great disseminators of culinary traditions. They may have stumbled upon a formidable culinary heritage in the final years of the Byzantine Empire, and certainly had all the spice trade at their doorstep, as well as all the riches of Persian cooking at their fingertips, too, but they also made the cuisines of the entire eastern Aegean and parts of North Africa fluid, so that today it is no accident that the Syrians claim baklava as their own, but so do the Turks, the Bulgarians, the Armenians and the Greeks. We share an awful lot of dishes with Turkey. The Greeks who lived in Asia Minor until the 1920s and then fled as refugees, flooding Greece proper en masse, brought with them the urbane, aromatic cuisines of Smirni and Constantinople, cuisines that were a hybrid of the entire East, that borrowed from age-old Greek and Byzantine cooking, from Persian, Armenian and nomadic Ottoman, to forge something unique, complex, and delicious. It is to that tradition that mousaka, as well as so many other wonderful "Greek" dishes, belongs.