Gonca Aras

Tea in Rize is not ancient – it’s almost shockingly recent. It was introduced barely three generations ago, and the first proper harvest didn’t happen until 1945. Before that, Turkey 🇹🇷 was overwhelmingly a coffee-drinking culture, and most of that coffee was imported. The early Republican governments wanted to change this dependency and actively pushed for a domestically grown alternative. So they campaigned – quite insistently – for Turks to switch from imported coffee to locally grown tea. Shortly after the Republic was founded, the government established a commission to map agricultural potential across the country. Someone – Turkish historians may know the name – championed tea for the eastern Black Sea, especially around Rize, where earlier pilot plantings had shown promise. After WWII, the state went all-in: propaganda, education campaigns, posters, slogans – tea became the national drink by design! Incidentally, years ago, I spoke with a man from Rize who casually mentioned they receive 2,000–2,500 mm of rainfall per year. I thought he was exaggerating wildly, so I checked. He wasn’t. Two or three consecutive years at 2,500 mm would destroy a hundred Sicilian towns – roofs, walls, foundations, roads… everything. Yet somehow Rize survives, even thrives. And last but not least there is the mystery of “turist çayı.” @Dealtrade_Group once asked me on here something like (apologies for the quoted rewording!): “Wasn’t that around the time when a confusion between siyah (black, in Turkish) and siyyah/suyyah (tourist, in Arabic) occurred – the supposed origin of the strange expression ‘turist çayı’?” For years before that I assumed turist çayı simply meant high-quality tea packaged for tourists – something you’d find in souvenir shops. When I travelled in Turkey, I always returned with two or three kilos of tea: usually at least a kilo from Ceylon, the rest from Rize – partly because it is quite good, partly because it was much cheaper than back home. But Ondřej maybe onto something 😇 some Arabic speaker may have unwittingly invented “turist çayı” mistranslating “black tea”!