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Abstract
Halloumi/hellim is a cheese that does not belong to any one ethnic group or nation alone. Rather, its messy genealogy mirrors the complicated histories of the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean. Historically the multi ethnic and multi-religious population of Cyprus had many food traditions in common, and Peter Loizos in his work repeatedly referred to the importance of commensality and the shared culinary practices of Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Recendy however, Greek Cypriots are laying claim to halloumi cheese as an ethnicised national product. Since the EU accession of 2004, the Republic of Cyprus has become eligible to apply to the European Commission's programme for protective food labels to be awarded to so-called origin products. When a food item is declared an origin product, it is taken to represent the group's history and its distribution is mapped onto the group's territory. The conflicts that ensued with the Republic of Cyprus halloumi application to the EU are evidence of this type of 'gastronationalism' (DeSoucey 2010), but also show how the claim to exclusive cultural property is contested by local actors under conditions of globalising markets and supranational political regulation.
Keywords: European Union, Cyprus, dairy products, nationalism, heritage
In 2006, a German enterprise based in Stuttgart registered the trade mark 'hellim' for one of its dairy brands called Gazi' with the European Union. Hellim is the Turkish-language name of the cheese known among Greek Cypriots as halloumi. Taking the perspective of social anthropology, one has to contend that halloumi, or hellim, is a cheese that does not belong to any one ethnic group or nation alone. Historically, the multi-ethnic and multi-religious population of Cyprus held many food traditions in common, and Peter Loizos in his work repeatedly referred to the importance of commensality and culinary practices to both Greek and Turkish Cypriots (Loizos, 2008). In his 1998 paper, 'How might Turkish and Greek Cypriots See Each Other More Clearly?', he explores commonalities in daily life and social terminologies, many also mentioned by r^padakis (2005), asserting that 'bridges might be built by understandings in historical depth of more detailed and specific local similarities - and differences' (Loizos, 1998, p. 46).
However, immediately after the German registration of the trade mark for hellim, an association that represents...