Gata: The Armenian Sweet Cake
In the bakery below Haghartsin Monastery, a woman in traditional dress stood at a metal table arranging balls of filling on colorful trays, side by side, as if she were wrapping candy. I asked what was inside them. Flour, butter, sugar. Which is almost exactly what the dough around them is made of, just in a different ratio and toasted in a pan. A cake filled with its own dough sounds like a cost-cutting measure. And that is precisely what gata is built on.
Gata (Armenian: գաթա) is a sweet buttery pastry of Armenian cuisine: a round or oblong bun with a layer of crumbly khoriz filling of flour, butter and sugar inside, and a golden, egg-washed, often patterned top.
What Gata Means and Who Else Bakes It
You can work out a gata recipe in an afternoon. Linguists haven't cracked the origin of its name in a hundred years. The word has cousins in Turkish (kete), Georgian (kada) and Kurdish (kad), and Hrachia Acharian, the greatest Armenian etymologist of them all, marked every one of them as of unknown origin; he rejected the homegrown theory about milk (kath) himself, and the resemblance to the French gâteau is a coincidence. In Spanish gata means a female cat, which has nothing to do with the pastry - it just makes every Spanish speaker read the menu twice. Gata is the Armenian national cake, but it belongs to a family of filled buttery pastries that runs across the whole South Caucasus and eastern Anatolia: Turkish cuisine bakes kete in dozens of regional shapes, Georgian has kada, and in Iran gata is called "Armenian bread", spread there by the Armenian minority.
A Pig, a Stamp and a Monastery Legend
The oldest Armenian text in which gata turns up isn't a cookbook but a fable: the medieval preacher Vardan Aygektsi wrote the story "The Pig and the Gata" in the 13th century. The cake even has a tool of its own, the gatanakhshich, a wooden or stone stamp that presses diamonds and zigzags into the surface; decorating gata with that stamp is inscribed on Armenia's list of intangible cultural heritage. The popular story that gata was born at Geghard Monastery as a "sweet of freedom" for persecuted Christians, on the other hand, appears nowhere in Armenian sources - what made the monastery famous is the spear from the crucifixion of Christ and the churches carved into the rock, not a cake. Geghard gata is an ordinary round gata sold to tourists outside the monastery.
Two Doughs, One Filling and One Coin
Gata has two schools of construction. The round version is a yeast dough with milk, eggs and butter, so it eats more like a sweet bun; the Gavar version rises on baking soda with a splash of vinegar in soured milk, gets rolled out, folded into layers and peels apart like puff pastry once baked. What they share is the filling, and that is what this is all about: khoriz is really just streusel, the crumb we scatter over a cake back home and an Armenian baker seals inside it. Flour is toasted in butter and sweetened, sometimes with walnuts or vanilla added, and the result holds its shape thanks to the fat alone. Without it gata would fall apart; with it, it falls apart only in your mouth. These days bakeries also fill it with cheese and tarragon, or with fruit, and during Great Lent they bake a Lenten gata with no butter and no eggs.
Gata has a fixed place in the Armenian calendar, at New Year. A coin called dovlat is hidden inside the festive loaf before baking, the cake is cut into as many pieces as the family has members, and whoever finds the coin is set for the year. Breaking a gata over the heads of newlyweds, which other travel sites report, is unknown to Armenian sources; all sorts of sweet breads get broken there - gata doesn't. For the rest of the year gata is an everyday pastry to go with tea, and you can buy it shrink-wrapped in a supermarket: a piece cost 250 AMD (0.60 EUR); it was a little dry and shared nothing with the one from the oven but its name. For gata straight from the oven, head for the monasteries, where they bake it over wood and will reheat it if you ask; at Haghartsin they even let tourists have a go at rolling the dough.
Six Fillings Below Haghartsin and a Gift from Tatev
I never made it to Geghard for gata, but the bakery by Haghartsin Monastery above Dilijan had six kinds and an oven fired with wood. The plain one cost 1,000 AMD (2.40 EUR), apricot with thyme, blueberry with lemon and cheese with tarragon 1,500 AMD (3.60 EUR) each, figs with walnuts 2,000 AMD (4.80 EUR) and brie with apricot jam 4,000 AMD (9.60 EUR). I tried the blueberry and the apricot: the crust dark from the fire, soft buttery dough underneath and a filling sweetened just right. The bakers there are happy to pose, and they'll put a cooled piece back in the oven for you.
At Tatev Monastery the sisters then gave me a small gata sprinkled with sesame, blessed by Father Mikayel. It was the size of my palm, with flaky layers and a pale, crumbly filling, and if they hadn't told me what it was, I'd have guessed an entirely different pastry. Four letters of an Armenian name hold together more shapes of one cake than could ever fit inside them.
