About this Event
What do you call the dish on your plate? Your answer might reveal more about empire, migration, and identity than you think.
Join us for an exploration of how food vocabulary in the Balkans encodes millennia of indigenous evolution, alongside contact, borrowing, and contested belonging with Irina Janakievska and Irina Georgescu, award -winning food writers of cultural and culinary books on Balkan cuisines.
While empires brought words such as čorba/ciorbă, manti/mantije, sarma/sarmale, dolma, burek/börek, štrudel - these terms often mask deeper, older stories. Many dishes emerged from local landscapes, seasons, and cultural traditions long before—or entirely separate from—imperial influence, acquiring new techniques, layers of meaning, and names as trade routes intersected with home kitchens.
Food vocabulary carries the region’s multilingual, multiethnic, multi-religious history as a linguistic palimpsest: some words grew organically across generations of local cooks, others were written and rewritten with conquest and commerce.
Through interactive examples spanning Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Turkish and other languages, this panel reveals how the same dish can have different names and why the kitchen remains a site of living linguistic memory.
Bring your questions, your recipes, your Balkan kitchen objects and your untranslatable food words. Let's talk about what we're really eating when we eat the Balkans.
Speakers/Presenters
Irina Janakievska is an award-winning Macedonian-British food writer. Her debut cookbook, The Balkan Kitchen (Quadrille, 2024) won a James Beard Foundation Award (International category, 2025), a British Library Food Season Narrative Cookery Book Award (2025), and a 'Special Jury Award' and 'Best of the Best In the World - 30 Years' at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards (2024, 2025). It was shortlisted for the Jane Grigson Trust Award (2023) and the Fortnum & Mason Debut Cookery Book Award (2025), and also featured as one of Saveur's Best Cookbooks of 2024, and on Nigella Lawson's Cookbook Corner. She has contributed to the Guardian, National Geographic, Olive Magazine, Foodnetwork US, Whetstone Magazine, and Pit Magazine, among others. She has featured on BBC Woman's Hour, BBC Radio London, Times Radio, and ABC Radio Australia discussing Balkan cuisine. She lives in south London with her husband and young son, where she cooks, researches, and writes about Balkan history, food culture, and culinary traditions.
Irina Georgescu is a UK-based food writer and author from Romania whose work celebrates her Eastern European roots. Her books highlight the region’s rich culinary heritage with authenticity and depth, earning prestigious awards for showcasing its food traditions, history and cultural connections. Her writing and recipes have been featured in National Geographic Traveller, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and other major publications, and she has appeared on BBC One and Channel 4.
Ana Ilievska Završnik is a lecturer, translator, and chartered language consultant, with expertise in Macedonian and Slovene languages. Her consultancy services span the public and corporate sectors across the UK, Slovenia and N. Macedonia. Committed to humanitarian causes, Ana generously volunteers her translation and teaching skills in offering integration mentorship for international human rights organizations.
Ana is a founder of Language Yoga – School of Macedonian and Slovene language, as well as the organiser of Walk and Talk session for language professionals. Her commitment to advancing the field of linguistics is further demonstrated by her role as a Member of Council at the Chartered Institute of Linguists.
Her culinary preferences include savouring potica and боза, although she prefers to savour each flavour separately, indulging in their unique tastes to the fullest.
(b. 1997, London) is a writer, curator, visual artist and community organiser of Kosovar heritage.
Since founding Balkanism in 2020, a grassroots archival, educational, visual arts platform and print publication, Arbër has actively researched themes related to Balkan and diasporic historical and cultural representations. He is also the co-founder of the progressive events initiative, the Balkan London Collective. Through visual arts, repurposing archives, musical and cultural exploration, and community organising, his practice heavily engages wider socio-political themes related to Balkan communities and their diasporas.
Arbër holds a BA in History from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture from Birkbeck, University of London. He most recently co-curated the exhibition Inside/Outside And All In-Between at the Migration Museum, and is currently undertaking a curatorial residency at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art. Across his diverse practices, Arbër is committed to building community with an anti-ethnonationalist ethos, focused on fostering dialogue and interethnic solidarity.
Mirela Xhaferraj
Dr Mirela Xhaferraj has been teaching Albanian at UCL SSEES since 2017. She obtained her PhD degree in 2012 with a comparative study of the verbal systems of Greek and Albanian from the University of Tirana, Albania, where she worked as a Lecturer of Greek Language in the Faculty of Foreign Languages until 2016. Her research interests are focused on Albanian and Greek language, literature, and culture. She has authored several articles in scientific journals and has presented at various scientific conferences on the Greek and Albanian languages. Additionally, she is a published literary translator from Greek to Albanian. Author of textbooks "Η γλώσσα μου 7" and "Η γλώσσα μου 8" for pupils of Greek Ethnic Minority in Albania, approved by the Albanian Ministry of Education and published by SHBLU (currently BOTEM), 2012.
Ramona Gonczol
Ramona Gonczol is Associate Professor in Romanian language studies at SSEES, UCL. She convenes the PROLang group and is an academic coordinator for the Language Short Courses programme at SSEES. She is the (co)author of Romanian an Essential Grammar (2nd edition, 2020) and Colloquial Romanian(4th edition,2014). Her research interests lie in the area of language acquisition, heritage speakers, cultural identities, language policy, multilingualism and ethnographic pedagogy. Ramona is a fellow of the HEA and the recipient for the Order for Cultural Merit in Promoting Romanian Culture and Language Abroad (2018).
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Masaryk room, 16 Taviton Street, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
