Street food Breakfast, from early

Bougatsa

The city's breakfast: crisp filo, warm custard or cheese, cut into squares with scissors.

Ask anyone from Thessaloniki what you should eat first when you arrive and they'll say bougatsa. Not because it's rare, because it's everyday. It's the breakfast eaten standing up, out of paper, at eight in the morning.

Where it came from

Bougatsa was not born in Thessaloniki, and that's worth knowing. Its roots are Byzantine and its journey begins in Constantinople. The name comes from the Turkish pogaça, meaning dough, but the dish itself is older: accounts of it being made survive from the 16th and 17th centuries, after the Fall.

At first bougatsa had no filling and was called "the poor man's pie". The cream-filled version spread through refugees who settled in Serres in the early 20th century. There it acquired its character and its fame, and from there it came to Thessaloniki, largely with craftsmen from Serres who brought the art of the filo with them.

How it became an institution

In Thessaloniki's refugee neighbourhoods the bougatsa sellers went round with small carts, keeping it warm over charcoal. The bougatsa makers' guild of Thessaloniki was founded in 1917, and from 1922 onward — with the arrival of the refugees from Asia Minor — its spread accelerated dramatically.

So Thessaloniki didn't invent bougatsa; it adopted it and made it an identity. Today, when someone says "bougatsa", this is the city that comes to mind.

The versions

With cream: the sweet one, dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon. The best known.
With cheese: savoury, usually feta or mizithra.
With minced meat, savoury and more filling.
With spinach. The closest to a spanakopita.

How it's eaten

Hot, straight out. The seller cuts it with scissors into squares inside the paper, that sound is part of the experience. For the sweet one, the sugar and cinnamon go on in front of you. It isn't ordered "for later": it cools and loses its crispness.

Where to find it

Traditional bougatsa shops operate across the city, most densely in the centre and around the markets. They open very early, several of the historic ones start before 6 a.m., serving both those coming home from the night and those heading to work.

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