From Coffee to Tea: The Atatürk Policy
In Ottoman Turkey, tea was a minor beverage — associated with Persia and the East. The coffeehouses of Istanbul were the social and intellectual institutions of Ottoman public life. Coffee was the Ottoman national drink. When Atatürk's Turkish Republic was established in 1923, it inherited a country economically devastated by World War I and the subsequent War of Independence. Foreign exchange for importing coffee was a burden the republic's economic planners wanted to reduce.
The solution was domestic tea production. Rize province — on the eastern Black Sea coast, with high rainfall, mild temperatures, and steep terrain unsuitable for other major crops — was identified as climatically suitable for Camellia sinensis cultivation. Government-sponsored cultivation began in 1924, and by the 1950s–60s, domestic tea production had scaled to the point where tea was genuinely cheaper and more available than imported coffee. The policy worked more completely than most: Turkey transformed from a coffee culture to the world's highest per-capita tea consumer within two generations.
The Caydanlik: Turkey's Brewing Innovation
The caydanlik is Turkey's distinctive tea vessel — a two-chamber device derived from the Russian samovar concept but distinctively Turkish in design. The lower chamber is a large kettle that maintains water at near-boiling continuously. The upper chamber is a smaller teapot in which a very concentrated tea (çay) is brewed. To serve, a small amount of tea concentrate is poured from the upper pot into the tulip glass, then diluted to the drinker's preferred strength from the lower kettle's hot water. This variable-strength system — like the Russian zavarka — allows a single preparation to serve multiple guests with different strength preferences.
🧠 Expert Tip: The Tulip Glass
Turkey's ince belli glass (literally "thin-waisted" from the hourglass shape) is one of the most recognisably specific tea vessels in the world. The design is not merely aesthetic: the narrow waist allows holding the glass from the bottom without burning the fingers, while the top-heavy shape concentrates heat above — keeping the tea warm while the lower portion cools to drinking temperature. The clear glass allows assessment of colour — the quality benchmark for Turkish tea is a deep amber transparency called "tavşan kanı" (rabbit blood).
Turkish Tea Culture Today
Turkish tea is inseparable from Turkish social architecture. The çay ocağı (tea hearth) exists in nearly every workplace, bazaar, and public institution — tea is offered and expected on virtually every commercial and social occasion. Refusing tea is a social signal of distrust or unwillingness to engage. A negotiation that begins without tea on both sides is a negotiation that hasn't started. This social embeddedness makes Turkey's tea consumption genuinely structural — it would persist through economic changes because it is tied to the social protocols that predate and will outlast any economic cycle.
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