Burek: The Breakfast You Find All Over the Balkans
In Albania they handed me byrek straight into my hand: a triangle in a scrap of paper that you can eat while walking without dropping a thing. In Skopje the woman at the Silbo bakery did the opposite - she cut me a huge wedge from a tray as wide as a car wheel, slid a metal spatula under it and set it on a plate.
Burek (Macedonian: бурек) is a savory pastry of thin layers of phyllo dough with a filling; in Macedonian cooking it is baked in a big round tray and sold by the wedge - most often in quarters, eaten for breakfast with a cup of yogurt or soured milk.
One Pastry, Ten Names
The word arrived with the Ottomans and is most often traced to the Turkish root bur-, to wind or to wrap. The rolled burek is still around - in Bosnia the filled dough gets coiled into a spiral - but the Macedonian one is layered flat, so the winding survives in the name, not on the tray. The name then traveled farther than the recipe. Turkish cooking uses börek for the whole family, and its tepsi böreği, baked in a wide tray, comes closest to the Balkan one; Albania has byrek, thinner and cut into pieces you eat out of your hand; Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia and North Macedonia all stick with burek. Bulgarian cooking knows the word, but prefers to call its own phyllo pastry banica and saves byurek for the Turkish version with cheese. The Greeks use bureki as an umbrella term for tyropita and spanakopita, and Sephardic Jews carried the Ottoman fillings to Israel and wrapped them in crisp pastry as bourekas. Even the Greek dessert galaktoboureko carries burek in the second half of its name, though what's inside is custard, not meat.
Who Gets to Call What a Burek
Nobody argues about the origin: it's an Ottoman legacy, and North Macedonia doesn't claim it as its own even in its national encyclopedia. The argument is about the word. In Sarajevo, burek is only the one with meat; cheese is sirnica, spinach zeljanica, potato krompiruša, and together they go by pita. In Niš, in Serbia, burek is anything that comes out of the tray, apple or sour cherry included - and Macedonia, where the labels read "burek so sirenje" next to "burek so meso", clearly sees it the Niš way. In 2018 people from Niš and Sarajevo took the argument to social media, and nobody won. Niš also has a legend that the first round burek was baked there in 1498 by an Istanbul baker called Mehmed Oğlu; the sources differ on the year by as much as nine years, which is no surprise with a legend, but the Buregdžijada festival has been building on it every August since 2003 without the slightest hesitation. Macedonia's burek history is more modest: a Skopje columnist writes of old legends that burek used to be food for sultans and that in Skopje it was first sold by barbers and wheat merchants, before the first burekdžilnici - dedicated burek bakeries - opened.
A Quarter, a Sixteenth and a Cup of Yogurt
Albanian byrek is baked in a similar round tray, only the layers are thinner, and it gets divided right away into small triangles that the byrektore sells by the piece as a street snack. Macedonian burek is taller, its layers are richer, and it's sold in quarters, and a quarter is a whole breakfast - hence the plate and the cutlery. When energy prices went up in 2022, bakeries in Skopje debated cutting sixteenths instead of quarters: better to shrink the burek than to raise the price. Back home, our grandmothers baked cakes in a rectangular tin and cut them into squares; here the baker cuts a round tray like a layer cake, only savory. Two fillings are the favorites, ground meat with onion and crumbled white sirenje cheese, and after them come spinach, potato, leek and, in bakeries, modern combinations like cheese with ham. Sweet burek in Macedonia usually goes by a different name: the pumpkin one is called tikvenik and the word burek is rarely on the label. A fresh quarter comes with a cup of yogurt or soured milk.
A Wedge Off the Tray in Skopje
Burek was my regular breakfast at the Silbo bakery in Skopje (see Where to Eat in Skopje), which never closes. I picked cheese with ham, the newer bakery variant, and only because the people ahead of me in the queue had snapped up the more tempting fillings and I didn't feel like waiting. Out of curiosity I added a croissant with kaškaval that was sitting on the same counter. A quarter cost 95 MKD (1.60 EUR).
