There’s a Kebab in My Tapestry!
By ANDREW FINKEL
ISTANBUL — In 1990, the year that globalization shifted into high gear and McDonald’s opened an outlet in Moscow, a paper delivered at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery entitled “The Bayeux Tapestry Shish Kebab Mystery” had French academics reaching for indigestion tablets. Its author, the textile specialist Robert Chenciner, pointed to a panel of that famous embroidery in which Norman knights celebrate their victory over the Saxons by grilling skewers of meat over an open fire. From this, Chenciner drew the bold conclusion that the tapestry must be a forgery or at least a much oversewn bit of cloth. There were no kebab takeaways in the Hastings of 1066, he reasoned, and it wasn’t until the Ottomans visited Versailles in the mid-18th century that Turkish food came to France.
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