Ribbons of thin dough wrapped around sour myzithra and coiled like a turban, fried in olive oil and finished with honey and walnuts. The name comes from the sariki, the fringed headscarf Cretan men wear.
Sarikopites belong to the same family as kalitsounia but are shaped differently: the filled dough is rolled into a long rope, then coiled flat so the finished pie looks like a wound headscarf. That headscarf, the sariki, is still worn in Cretan villages and gave the pie its name. Sour myzithra is the traditional filling, sharper than the fresh cheese used in sweet kalitsounia, which is why the honey at the end is not optional. They are fried rather than baked, which makes them a treat rather than an everyday pie, and they turn up on Heraklion dessert menus more often than at breakfast.
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