Kadir Nurman

Kadir Nurman (c.1933 – 24 October 2013)^[1] was a Turkish restaurateur, widely credited with having in 1972, in West Berlin, introduced or "invented" the fast food sandwich commonly known as the "kebab" (German: der Döner), consisting of traditional Turkish döner kebab meat stuffed together with mixed salad into a flatbread.^[2][3] Nurman received a lifetime achievement award from the Association of Turkish Döner Manufacturers in 2011.^[3] Afterwards, Nurman told the German magazine Frankfurter Rundschau that he was unhappy with modern döner kebab sandwiches, as "there are too many ingredients" in them.^[2]

Several people have been credited with being the "inventor of the döner kebab" in Germany, but such claims – including that for Nurman – are widely considered inaccurate.^[4] The familiar rotating döner kebab meat, roasted on a vertical spit and sliced with a sword, has been well known in Turkey since the mid-19th century. Its invention is attributed to the town of Bursa,^[5] and often credited to İskender Efendi; though it has also been ascribed to a cook named Hamdi, decades earlier in Kastamonu.^[6]

Introduced in Nurman's native Istanbul in the 1940s by restaurateurs such as Beyti Güler, it became a world-famous delicacy.^[7] Döner kebab has been sold in sandwich form there since at least the mid-1960s.^[6] The Greek gyro, was already a popular sandwich item in Athens and in New York City by 1971.^[8] Nurman himself did not claim to be the first person to have sold a sandwich of döner kebab meat even in Germany, saying in German: "Maybe someone else also did it, in some hidden corner, but no one noticed. The kebab became well-known through me."^[9]

Nevertheless, Nurman’s early kebab shop at West Berlin’s central railway station is widely regarded as an early example of a trend that later spread internationally. His approach to the dish influenced the development of the Berlin-style döner kebab within the Turkish Gastarbeiter community, a variant that later became one of the most popular fast foods in Germany and across much of Europe, before spreading globally.^[10]

Nurman was born in Istanbul, Turkey.^[2] He emigrated to Germany from Turkey in 1960, aged 26, and moved to Berlin from Stuttgart in 1966. In 1972 he set up a fast food stall at Berlin's Berlin Zoologischer Garten railway station, in what was then West Berlin.^[3][9] At his stall, Nurman sold grilled meat and salad inside a flat bread. He had thought that busy Berlin workers might like a portable meal.^[3] Though he did not become wealthy from his widely imitated shop, Nurman later said he was happy that so many Turkish people were able to make a living selling kebabs. At the time of his death, there were approximately 16,000 döner outlets in Germany, with over 2.5 billion euros ($3.3 billion) in annual sales.^[3][10]