Levantine cuisine is the traditional cuisine of the Levant, in the sense of the rough area of former Ottoman Syria. The cuisine has similarities with Egyptian cuisine, North African cuisine and Ottoman cuisine. It is particularly known for its meze spreads of hot and cold dishes, most notably among them ful medames, hummus, tabbouleh and baba ghanoush, accompanied by bread.
A spread of classic Levantine meze dishes, including, from top, clockwise: hummus, fried haloumi, baba ganouj, makdous and salad
Baba ghanoush
Falafel
Fattoush is a Levantine pita bread salad that includes mixed greens and other vegetables.
The Levant is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of West Asia and core territory of the political term Middle East. In its narrowest sense, which is in use today in archaeology and other cultural contexts, it is equivalent to Cyprus and a stretch of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea in western Asia: i.e. the historical region of Syria, which includes present-day Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories and most of Turkey southwest of the middle Euphrates. Its overwhelming characteristic is that it represents the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia. In its widest historical sense, the Levant included all of the Eastern Mediterranean with its islands; that is, it included all of the countries along the Eastern Mediterranean shores, extending from Greece in Southern Europe to Cyrenaica, Eastern Libya in Northern Africa.
French medal commemorating the Franco-Turkish War in Cilicia, c. 1920
1909 postcard depicting Ottoman Constantinople and bearing a French stamp inscribed "Levant"