How did turkey get its name?
A year and a half after the Great Seal was adopted by Congress – with the bald eagle as its centerpiece – Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to his daughter and shared his disagreement with this new symbol of America. Benjamin Franklin had thought it would be proper to change it from the bald eagle, which he described as a “Bird of a bad moral character”, to the wild turkey, which he characterized as “a Bird of Courage” and “a true original Native of America”.
Why does this bird, which was American enough to be nominated as the Representative of the United States and is an indespensable part of Thanksgiving dinners, have the same name as the country Turkey ? How did this bird ended with the name turkey after being called “huexoloti” by the Aztecs and “guajolote” by the Mexicans for centuries?
The curiosity grew in me -as a Turkish native- especially as I started hearing more turkey jokes around Thanksgiving time:
“Hey, do you guys eat turkey in Turkey?”
“Hey, How does it feel to eat your country?”
“Thanksgiving must not be your favorite holiday as you eat Turkey!”
Finally, to quench my curiosity, I decided to google the question. It seemed like there was a whole nation curious about the same question; Google querried about 90 million results! As I was glancing through, I came across an article written by Giancarlo Casale who seemed to be the most daring of the curious. [1] Casale went beyond wondering and did a thorough research on this topic. From his landlord whose wife was from Brazil, he learned that in Portuguese, the word for turkey was “Peru”. The same bird, but a different country! This puzzled him even more. He found a Turkish person and asked the same question. Turks called it “hindi”, meaning “from India”. As he kept asking more people from different nationalities, he ended up discovering more countries sharing the same name as turkey.
In Arabic, the word for turkey corresponded to “Ethiopian bird”, while in Greek it meant “French girl”. Persians called it “buchalamun” meaning “chameleon”. In italian, it was “tacchino”, “the bird”. He decided to focus on “India” as, like in Turkish, in French, Russian and German, the word for turkey meant “from India”. He asked his high school friend’s wife, who was from an old Bengali family. The answer was surprising: they did not have any turkeys in India and, hence, did not have any name for it. They simply used the English word “turkey” when needed.
He was at a dead end. So, he scheduled an appointment with Prof. Sinasi Tekin from Harvard University, a world-renowned philologist and expert on Turkic languages. Sinasi Tekin said that when the British came to America, they mistook the bird for chulluks (woodcock), a smaller but a similar bird, which they had first seen in Turkey and began exporting it to England for its delicious meat long before the discovery of America.
This seemed to be a reasonable explanation but did not explain why Turks called it “hindi”. [2] An article from from Larry Tise, a Distinguished Professor of History at East Carolina University, made it all clear. In 1492, when Christopher Colombus returned from his voyage to the New World (thinking that it was the Asian continent), he brought home maize (corn), tobacco and the good old huexoloti, in place of the Asian commodities -spices, textiles, ornaments- he had expected to find. Since Spain and England were at war, all goods imported from the New World were state secrets to be hidden from all enemies – especially the English. However, there was a vivacious sea trade in the Mediterennian, at the time, that could not be stopped. Therefore, some of these goods ended up at the Ottoman ports which included the American bird huexoloti.
Turks named the bird “hindi”, meaning “from India” due to the common belief at the time that Columbus had acquired it from Asia. In just twenty years, using refined growing and seeding techniques, the skilled Turkish farmers were able to raise enough number of birds and plants to be exported across Europe. When these exotic exports first came to the hands of the English upper class, they called the bird “turkey”, and the corn “Turkish maize”. They referred the tobacco as “Turkish tobacco” when they wanted to emphasize its quality.
Thomas Harriot, the first English scientist to set foot in America, quickly recognized the hueloxoti and mentioned it as “turkey” in his notes. These wild turkeys, unlike their cousins in Europe, were very greedy and they attacked the cultivated crops. According to Prof. Tise, “they lacked the proper manners to live in an agricultural society. They were, in fact, killed everywhere by European colonists as nuisance birds.” Spoiled by its taste, in the early 17th century, the English settlers began importing the domesticated Turkish turkeys which did not harm any of their plants.
So, our answer is here! Turkey is called “turkey” because it, actually, came from the country “Turkey” after a long journey from its American homeland. Prof. Tise captures this connection nicely in the ending of his article:
“Thus, this Thanksgiving when we gather to partake in this most hallowed and quintessential of America’s holidays, we should remember as we look toward the big bird in the middle of our table that it is after all a turkey that came to us from Turkey; that it was brought into our culture by European forbears deeply influenced by their connections to Islamic commerce and culture in the Middle East; and that we have been a part of a shared planet for a very long time.
And, then, let us say our thanksgiving prayers to Yahweh, Allah, or by whatever name might be known the God of these shared faiths.”
[1] The Story of How the Unofficial Bird of the United States Got Named After a Middle Eastern Country by Giancarlo Casale
[2] Why Is Our Thanksgiving Bird Called a Turkey? by Larry E. Tise