Hand-opened phyllo baked around either semolina custard or sweet myzithra, cut into squares with a scraper, then dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon. In Heraklion it is breakfast, and it is eaten standing up.

Bougatsa came to Crete with refugees from Asia Minor after 1922. Phyllosophies traces its own line to a bougatsa master from Hamidiye, a district of Smyrna, and dates its trade on Lions Square to 1922. Kirkor has worked the same square for close to a century. The Thessaloniki version of the pie sticks to semolina cream. Heraklion made a local variant by swapping in sweetened myzithra, the fresh whey cheese that Cretan dairies produce in quantity, which gives a tangier, less sugary pie. The ritual has not changed in a century: order at the counter, watch the pie cut into squares on the board, take it outside while it is still too hot to hold.

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