Greece & Turkey

The eastern Mediterranean is where two of this wing’s threads finish: the container and the law.

The Balkans page traced cheese ripened in fir bark, sheepskin and bladders. Here the container is a skin sack or, in one case, olive oil. And the legal thread — four regions, four incompatible theories of what a protected name protects — reaches a court judgment that settled the question by rejecting the most reasonable-sounding argument in it.

Why these cheeses are white, salty and rindless

Same climate logic as the Balkans, harder: hot dry summers, sheep and goats, transhumance, no cold cellars.

So the region’s dominant answer is brine — see brined and pickled cheeses. If you cannot manage a surface, get rid of the surface. Feta, beyaz peynir, telemea and sirene are all the same solution to the same problem, and it is why the default cheese from Greece to the Caucasus is a white block sitting in liquid.

The second answer is a sack, and the third — which I had not met before writing this — is oil.

⭐ The container, at the end of its road

Tulum (Turkey) is the one everybody cites. Tulum means a skin bag, and the cheese is goat’s-milk curd packed into one and matured for up to about six months. It comes principally from the Aegean and the Black Sea regions, and the two you’ll see side by side in any Turkish deli are İzmir tulumu and Erzincan tulumu.

⚠ One correction to my own plan document, which said “aged inside a whole goatskin.” The sources describe it as cured in kidskin or cloth sacks — so the skin is traditional but not universal, and the modern trade uses cloth and plastic freely. The romantic version overstates it, and the honest version is more interesting anyway: what matters is a sealed, anaerobic, slightly permeable bag, and the skin was simply the bag people had.

Eski kaşar — aged kaşar — is likewise matured in sacks in cold storage for around six months, giving a hard, salty cheese with very small eyes. Sacks are not a curiosity here; they are the region’s standard maturation vessel.

Touloumotyri (Greece) is the Greek member of the same family, and the name gives it away: touloumi is a skin bag, cognate with Turkish tulum. Same object, same idea, two languages.

⭐ And then Ladotyri Mytilinis — Lesbos’s “oil cheese” — which is matured submerged in olive oil. The name is transparent (λάδι, oil; τυρί, cheese), and the logic is the same as brine and the same as a sack: exclude air. Brine excludes air with salt water; a skin excludes it with a membrane; olive oil excludes it with fat. Three different ways of solving one problem, and all three are older than refrigeration.

⚠ Flagging the limit of my checking: I verified tulum’s kidskin-or-cloth maturation and eski kaşar’s sacks directly. Touloumotyri’s and Ladotyri’s methods I have taken from general reference rather than a primary source, and their names are doing a lot of the evidential work. The etymologies are unambiguous; the practices should be read as well-attested tradition rather than as something I confirmed.

⭐ The formula is written — Cheese, Tulum-Style — as a cloth-sack version, and it carries the kidskin correction rather than the goatskin story.

⭐⭐ Feta, and the court case that decided a name is a place

This is the capstone of the wing’s legal argument, and the losing side had the better-sounding case.

Feta was added to the EU’s protected-designations list by Commission Regulation 1829/2002. Germany and Denmark — both large producers of white brined cheese sold as “feta” — sued to annul it.

On 25 October 2005, in joined cases C-465/02 and C-466/02, the European Court of Justice rejected their actions. “Feta” is reserved to cheese made in Greece.

Their argument is the part worth knowing, because it is the same argument the EU accepts elsewhere:

Denmark and Germany argued that what made feta specific was the technique of making it, not the geographical origin.

The Court rejected it. The Advocate General’s position was that the term had not become “generalized” and is “inextricably associated with a specific foodstuff.”

🔴 Now line that up against the rest of this wing, because the EU has genuinely decided the same question four different ways:

Region	What the protection protects	And raw milk?
France — Camembert de Normandie AOP	A place, with a recipe attached	Required (as the state currently describes it)
Britain — Stilton PDO	*A place and* a process**	Forbidden — the traditional version must be called Stichelton
Netherlands — Boerenkaas TSG	A method, no region at all	Compulsory
Greece — Feta PDO	A word, reclaimed from genericness	Permitted, not the issue

Denmark’s rejected argument — “it’s a method, not a place” — is precisely the basis on which Boerenkaas is protected. The instrument exists. The EU simply declined to treat feta that way.

I don’t think that’s incoherent, and I want to be fair to the Court: a name can genuinely become inseparable from a place through use, and “generic” is a real category that “Cheddar” fell into and “Feta” hadn’t. But it does finish the argument this wing has been making since France:

A protected name is a political settlement, not a description of nature. Four schemes, four theories, one union, one decade. Read a specification as a technical document and you will conclude the current rules are the only possible ones — which is exactly the mistake that makes people think the 60-day rule is a fact about Listeria.

What feta actually is, since the PDO settles it: sheep’s milk, or sheep with up to 30% goat, brined. Which is why I keep having to admit that my all-goat feta has tradition and now case law against it, and I make it anyway.

The ones worth knowing

Greece

Graviera — the great Greek hard cheese, gruyère-descended in name and idea, made on Crete, Naxos and in Epirus, mostly from sheep’s milk. If you think Greek cheese means feta, this is the correction.

Kefalotyri and Kefalograviera — hard, salty, sheep-and-goat grating cheeses. Kefalotyri is what saganaki is properly made with.

Kasseri — pasta filata, sheep’s milk, and the Greek member of the kashkaval/kaşkaval/caciocavallo family that runs from Italy across the Balkans to Anatolia. One stretched-curd tradition, five languages.

Manouri, Myzithra and Anthotyros — the whey cheeses, made from the whey off feta and graviera. Manouri has cream added back and is the luxurious one; dried myzithra is grated over pasta and is essentially Greek ricotta salata.

Metsovone (Epirus, PDO) — smoked pasta filata, from a mountain town that also happens to make a good cheese out of being on a trade route.

Kopanisti (Cyclades, PDO) — and this one deserves attention. It is repeatedly kneaded during ripening to distribute a blue-ish mould through the paste, producing something sharp, peppery and spreadable. A blue made by hand and by hand alone — no needles, no piercing, no P. roqueforti packet. Mechanically the most interesting cheese on this page.

Ladotyri Mytilinis — per above. Lesbos, matured in oil.

Sfela (PDO), Formaella, Xynotyro, Batzos — the regional cheeses that never leave the country, and the reason the reported claim that Greece has the highest per-capita cheese consumption in the world is plausible. ⚠ Widely repeated; I have not verified it against a statistical source, so treat it as reported.

Turkey

Beyaz peynir — “white cheese,” the everyday brined cheese and the centre of the Turkish breakfast. Close kin to feta and, since 2005, legally not it.

Kaşar and eski kaşar — young and aged. Turkey’s most-eaten hard cheese.

Tulum — per above.

Van otlu peyniri — ⭐ “Van herbed cheese,” made with wild herbs gathered on the mountains around Lake Van — most characteristically sirmo, a wild garlic. The herbs are seasonal and foraged, which makes this a flavoured cheese whose flavouring has a terroir of its own. The closest parallel in this wing is Schabziger’s blue melilot, and neither is a novelty product.

Çeçil / civil — cheese pulled into fine threads and often wound into a braid or a bundle. It is the same impulse as the Georgian tenili on the next page, and it is the pasta filata family taken to its extreme: not stretched into a ball, stretched into hair.

Sürk / Hatay sürkü — cone-shaped, made from drained yoghurt-curd or çökelek, rolled in chilli, thyme, cumin and other spices and dried. The spice crust is both the flavour and the rind.

Mihaliç / kelle — a hard sheep’s-milk cheese from the Marmara region, brined and grating-hard.

Çökelek and lor — the skimmed and whey cheeses. As everywhere in this wing, the by-product has a name and a use.

Kars gravyeri — a large-format alpine-style cheese from Kars in the far northeast, and unmistakably a gruyère by descent. It is usually explained by a nineteenth-century Swiss connection in the region; ⚠ I have not verified that history, so take the resemblance as documented and the explanation as reported.

What to take to the bench

⭐ Kopanisti is the technique I’d actually steal. Making a blue by kneading the mould through the paste during ripening instead of piercing a wheel needs no needles, no wheel and no cave discipline — and it sidesteps the reason I’ve been cautious about blue, which is that P. roqueforti spores travel and colonise everything else in the space. A small kneaded batch in a sealed crock is a much more containable experiment than a pierced wheel in a shared cave.

Oil as a maturing medium is trivially available. Ladotyri’s principle — exclude air with fat — works on a small hard cheese in a jar, and it is a genuinely different finish from wax, bandage, natural rind or wash. Cheap to try, and it is the one option my kit has never touched.

And a spice crust is a rind. Sürk’s chilli-and-thyme coating does the same job as Majorero’s gofio and paprika: protect the surface, flavour it, and skip the wax.

Next in this wing: the Middle East, then the Caucasus and Central Asia — where cheese gets buried in clay pots and dried on the roof of a ger.

Sources

Feta: added to the PDO register by Commission Regulation 1829/2002; Germany and Denmark’s annulment actions rejected by the European Court of Justice on 25 October 2005 in joined cases C-465/02 and C-466/02; their argument that “what made feta specific was the technique of making it, not the geographical origin”; and the Advocate General’s position that the term had not become “generalized” and is “inextricably associated with a specific foodstuff”: EUR-Lex, CELEX:62002CJ0465, World Trademark Review, “Control of feta name handed to Greece”, and The Seattle Times, “Exclusive ‘feta’ rights are granted to Greece”
Tulum from the Aegean and Black Sea regions, goat’s milk, cured in kidskin or cloth sacks, matured up to six months, with İzmir and Erzincan the best-known types; and eski kaşar aged in sacks in cold storage for about six months: Travel Atelier, “Turkish Cheeses”, Daily Sabah, “Best traditional cheese varieties to enjoy in Türkiye”, and The Guide Istanbul, “Introduction to Turkish Cheese”
⚠ Stated as reported, not verified against a primary source: Touloumotyri’s and Ladotyri Mytilinis’s maturation methods; the Kars gravyeri Swiss connection; and Greece’s rank in per-capita cheese consumption. Each is flagged in place on the page.