spanakopita

The Persian word aspanakh (اسفناج) named spinach in the Sassanid empire, and Persian farmers were cultivating the plant by the sixth century CE. Arab traders encountered spinach in Persia and borrowed the word as isbanakh (إسبناخ), carrying both plant and name westward through North Africa and into al-Andalus by the ninth century. The eleventh-century Arab agronomist Ibn al-Awwam described spinach in his Kitab al-Filaha, written in Seville, marking the plant's arrival in Europe via the Arab Mediterranean rather than via ancient Greek cultivation. Greek cooks received spinach through Ottoman intermediaries, not from any classical tradition.

Ottoman Turkish made the word ispanak from the Arabic isbanakh, reshaping it to fit Turkish phonology. Greek borrowed it as spanaki (σπανάκι) during the medieval or Ottoman period, dropping the initial vowel in a process typical of Greek loan adaptation. The second element of the compound, pita, has its own history: Byzantine Greek pita (πίτα) named a flatbread or enclosed pastry, with proposals for its further etymology ranging from Medieval Greek pektos (solidified) to a Semitic root. Whatever its origin, by the medieval period pita had come to mean any dough-enclosed filling.

Spanakopita as a fixed compound and recipe appears in Greek sources from the nineteenth century, though spinach-and-cheese fillings in filo dough are certainly older. The dish crystallized in domestic kitchens of mainland Greece and the Greek communities of Anatolia as a practical Lenten food: no meat, easily made with spring greens and local feta from sheep's milk. The triangular single-serving form, spanakopitakia, became a standard at Greek street-food stalls and bakeries by the early twentieth century and is now the most replicated shape in Greek pastry.

Today spanakopita is probably the most recognized Greek food name in English-speaking countries, ahead of moussaka and souvlaki. It entered English food vocabulary through Greek-American diners and bakeries in the mid-twentieth century and now appears on deli menus across the Anglophone world, often spelled phonetically and sometimes made with puff pastry rather than filo. The word has become a culinary loan, passing from Greek into English with its meaning intact and its Persian-Arabic-Turkish etymology invisible to most of the people who order it.