Cretan Kalitsounia are small Cretan cheese pastries, made in both sweet and savory forms. They sit in this catalog as a pita-family relative rather than a sandwich, and that is the right way to read them: little hand-shaped pies, not bread folded around a filling. The angle that makes them worth a page is how one cheese filling, depending on a pinch of sugar or a turn of honey at the end, swings the whole thing between a savory bite and a dessert.
The make is small-scale and repetitive in a good way. A thin dough, often worked with olive oil and sometimes a little raki or citrus, is rolled out and cut into rounds or squares. The filling is fresh Cretan cheese, typically mizithra or anthotyro, sometimes mixed with egg and a little mint for the savory ones. Each piece is filled and shaped: some are folded and crimped closed, some pinched into open-topped baskets so the cheese shows and sets in the oven, some pleated into a star. They are baked or, in some households, pan-fried. Good kalitsounia show a thin, short dough that stays tender, a filling that is creamy and set rather than runny or rubbery, and a clean shape that holds through baking. The sloppy ones go wrong at the dough: too thick and it eats heavy and bready, too wet a filling and it bursts and weeps in the pan. The sweet finish, honey poured over while warm or a dusting of sugar and cinnamon, goes on at the end; baking it in makes them cloying and dark.
The split is filling plus finish rather than form. The savory ones lean on mint and salt and are eaten as they are; the sweet ones take honey or sugar and edge toward dessert, and the open-topped baked style is the most recognizable Cretan presentation. They are a different preparation from the layered zucchini-and-potato boureki, which deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here. Made small and in batches, they keep well for a day or two and are as much an everyday bake as a festive one, which is why nearly every Cretan kitchen has its own shaping habit.