Turkish cuisine is largely the heritage of Ottoman cuisine. In the early years of the Republic, a few studies were published about regional Anatolian dishes but cuisine did not feature heavily in Turkish folkloric studies until the 1980s, when the fledgling tourism industry encouraged the Turkish state to sponsor two food symposia. The papers submitted at the symposia presented the history of Turkish cuisine on a "historical continuum" that dated back to Turkic origins in Central Asia and continued through the Seljuk and Ottoman periods.