Spanakopita (Σπανακόπιτα) is the spinach pie: phyllo pastry wrapped around a filling of spinach, feta, onion and dill, baked until the pastry shatters. It is the defining savory pie of the Greek kitchen, and the whole thing turns on the tension between two opposite textures, brittle layered pastry on the outside and a soft, herb-heavy, salty interior. Get either one wrong and it stops being spanakopita and becomes a soggy or a dry disappointment.
The filling is built first and the single hardest rule is moisture. Spinach is wilted or thawed and then wrung hard, because water left in the greens is what turns the bottom pastry to paste. The drained spinach is mixed with crumbled feta, softened onion or scallion and a generous hand of fresh dill, the herb that gives the pie its character; sometimes egg binds it. The phyllo is the other half of the work. Sheets are laid one at a time, each brushed with olive oil or melted butter, building a base of several layers, the filling spread across, and several more layers sealed on top. The fat between the sheets is what makes them separate and crisp instead of fusing into a slab. Good execution is unmistakable: a top that fractures and flakes under a knife, a filling that holds together moist but not wet, the dill and feta clear on the tongue, the bottom layers cooked through rather than gummy. Sloppy execution is the common pair of failures, a pale underbaked base soaked grey from spinach that was not drained, or pastry brushed too sparingly so it bakes dry and dusty and cracks to powder with no give underneath.
The shape it takes splits into its own forms. The large pan-cut pie shares this filling and pastry logic at scale, sliced into squares from a tray. The coiled rope version and the small triangular handheld are distinct builds with their own folding and their own crust-to-filling ratio, and each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here. The savory-pie family it belongs to is wide, cheese pies, leek pies, and others, but spanakopita is the spinach-and-feta benchmark against which the rest are measured, and the discipline is always the same: dry filling, fat between every sheet, baked until the pastry truly crisps.