What is “Ninda“?

Ninda means ‘bread’ in one of the oldest languages, Hittite. The language and the Hittite Empire have long been gone but one thing has remained: the love of bread. The Hittite Empire was centered in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) about 3,600 years ago. Like many ancient civilizations, they traded, fought wars, built monuments, and worshiped their gods. Yet unlike many, they also left behind an extraordinary record of their bread culture, documented in cuneiform texts on clay tablets. They baked more than 180 distinct breads, ranging from an everyday bread made of barley to sacrificial breads enriched with honey, cheese, and dried fruits. Bread played a central role in the Hittite culture, so much so that Ninda more generally meant food and nourishment.

I was born and raised in Adana, Turkey, which was once a prominent city of the Hittite Empire. I grew up in a family where we had dinner together. We always had bread that we passed around the table. Sundays were particularly exciting. We would wake up and go to a local bakery to buy freshly baked Turkish pide, a type of flatbread, with my brother and father. When we came back home with warm pide, the breakfast table would be full of mouthwatering food prepared by my mom. These are traditions shared by many Turkish families. In 2017, I came to the U.S. with my wife, Bahar, to pursue a Ph.D. in Biology at UNC Chapel Hill. It wasn’t long before we started to feel homesick. We missed dinners and Sunday breakfasts that we had with the whole family. We soon found ourselves looking up Turkish pide recipes online and baking it for Sunday breakfast. Sometimes, all it took was homemade pide to make us feel at home again.

A couple of years later, Bahar started to have eczema flares on her hands. The two doctors we saw prescribed eczema medication to help with the symptoms, but neither offered a cure. Over time, her eczema worsened and the medications became less effective. As time went on, we realized that Bahar’s eczema flares were affected by the food she ate, especially restaurant meals, fast food, and processed, packaged foods. We made gradual but significant changes in what we ate and where we sourced our food. I started baking sourdough bread again because it was the easiest food we could make ourselves using simple, wholesome ingredients. About two years later, Bahar’s eczema cleared. Baking our own bread was the first step toward improving the quality of the food we ate, and bread became a token of health and healing.

In late 2022, I earned my Ph.D. in Biology. After that, I worked as a data scientist in my postdoctoral research, applying machine learning to drug discovery. When I finished my postdoc in early 2024, I began exploring opportunities in industry. By that time, baking had already become part of my everyday life. As I continued baking and sharing bread with family and friends, I realized I felt most like myself in the kitchen. Soon, I started imagining people choosing my bread over the commercially made bread, my bread being passed from hand to hand around the table and becoming part of hearty conversations, making people feel at home… Just imagining it filled me with joy. But what would be the name of this imaginary bakery?

Ninda.

A word that captures everything bread had come to symbolize in my life and much more…

So, what is Ninda?

It is certainly not just bread.

Kemal OZALP
Baker and Founder of Ninda Bakery