Gyros - The Name Debate

A cook at a Greek counter stands beside a cone of stacked pork, waits for the face nearest the heat to go dark and blistered, and draws a long knife down it so thin curls drop onto a pita already oiled and softened on the griddle. On top go tomato, raw onion, tzatziki by the spoonful and a handful of fries, and a few seconds later the round is wrapped in a paper cone. The cone turns to offer its next face, which is where the name comes from: γύρος (gýros) is the Greek noun for a turn or a circuit, the word inside Γύρος της Γαλλίας, the Tour de France, and it grows from the verb γυρίζω, to turn. Each pass of the blade lets go a small dry scrape off the crust, and the smell of rendering fat and dried oregano goes down the street with it.

The word stretches in a Greek window. An order for πίτα γύρο gets the wrapped sandwich, and the same word names a plate of shaved meat sold without bread, so the label follows the cone wherever the knife sends it. Souvlaki comes from the skewer, souvla, and a Greek menu can list both over one set of coals. The paper darkens with grease at the seams while the bundle is still in the hand, the fries inside gone soft where the meat juice reached them, and the sound of the shop is the hiss of fat on the burner and a short call for one more with everything.

The turning in the name arrived by translation. Turkish döner comes from dönmek, also to turn, and gýros is a calque of it, the same image in Greek vocabulary. For a time Greek menus carried the Turkish word itself, spelled ντονέρ, and it drew criticism for exactly that origin, with γύρος put forward in its place. By 1970 the wrapped pita was already popular fast food in Athens, and the Greek name was well on its way to covering a sandwich that had begun life under a Turkish one.

In Greek the word is said YEE-ros, stress on the first syllable. The initial gamma softens before the following vowel into a y-sound, the same softening that makes γη, earth, sound like "yee," and the transcription [ˈʝiros] records it. The final -os is an ordinary masculine ending, so the s belongs to the word, and the Greek plural is γύροι. English spelling offers a second reading. Written g-y-r-o, the word matches gyroscope, and a good share of English speakers say JY-ro for that reason, so ordering one at an American counter means choosing a pronunciation out loud before the pita comes across, hot enough that the wrapper clings to the fingers.

In the United States the cone turned from a hand-stacked cylinder into a factory product, and the name traveled with it. In December 1970 Gyros Inc. of Chicago was making vertical rotisseries while the stacks of meat were still built by hand, and several Greek-American businessmen in the Chicago area later claimed the first mass-produced cone, Peter Parthenis among them. By then the Greek final s had been read as a plural and clipped away, and that clipped form happens to match the accusative a Greek customer uses when ordering, έναν γύρο, so the English singular and the Greek order arrived at the same shape from opposite directions.

Where the Word Came From

Vertical-spit grilling developed in Bursa in the nineteenth century, and the cooking is usually said to have crossed into Greece with the Asia Minor Greeks displaced by the population exchange of 1922 and 1923. After the Second World War, lamb on the vertical spit was being sold in Athens, probably brought by immigrants from Anatolia and the Middle East, under the Turkish-derived ντονέρ. The year the menus switched to γύρος is unconfirmed; the stretch around 1970 is when both names were in circulation and the Greek one was gaining.

English dictionaries date the sandwich sense of gyro to 1971, the year the New York Times printed it, and a New York magazine item that year glossed doner kebab as "also known as a gyro." Through the 1970s some Greek restaurants in the US sold the same cone under both names, doner on one line of the menu and gyro on the next. In 1975 Giakovos Dizikirikis published Let Us De-Turkify our Language, which objected to ντονέρ and proposed γυριστό, "the turned thing," as the replacement. The shorter word had already won.

The Turkish name made its own return trip. Peter Gamoulakos, who had arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, from Greece, was selling gyros at Velos Pizza in Bedford in the early 1970s, adapted the recipe to local taste, and in 1973 opened King of Donair on Quinpool Road, putting donair on the sign above a Greek sandwich that had spent a decade losing the word.