A Country That Runs on Tea
Walk into any Turkish home, shop, or government office and the first thing you will be offered is not a handshake, not a seat, but a small tulip-shaped glass of dark tea, set on a saucer with two cubes of sugar. It arrives within seconds of your arrival, often before you have even said why you came. In a barber shop in Istanbul, the apprentice will hand you a glass while you wait for your haircut. On a ferry crossing the Bosphorus, a man in a white vest walks the deck with a metal tray, selling tea to commuters. In a carpet store, the salesman will pour you glass after glass while you pretend to consider a kilim you cannot afford. In the eastern city of Erzurum, at minus twenty degrees, the tea seller on the corner still does brisk business.
This is not a habit. It is a national infrastructure. Turkey leads the world in per capita tea consumption at 3.16 kilograms per person per year—nearly four glasses a day for every man, woman, and child in the country. Ireland, in second place, drinks 2.19 kilograms. The United Kingdom, the nation that built an empire on tea, manages 1.94. China, the birthplace of the leaf, drinks only 0.57 kilograms per person. India, the world's largest producer, sits at 0.32. The gap is not close. It is a landslide.
The visitor to Turkey often finds this baffling. The country is famous for its coffee—"Turkish coffee" is a UNESCO-listed tradition in its own right, served thick and muddy in tiny cups with a glass of water on the side. Yet the Turks themselves drink tea at a rate that makes the British look like a nation of herbal-infusion sceptics. The coffee is for tourists and for special occasions. The tea is for life. How did this happen? The answer is not a matter of taste or tradition. It is a story of empire, economics, and a state that decided, nearly a century ago, that its people would drink homegrown tea or nothing at all.
When the Turks Drank Coffee
For most of Ottoman history, the drink of the empire was coffee. The Ottomans embraced coffee in the sixteenth century with an enthusiasm that alarmed their own clerics, who briefly banned it on the grounds that it was an intoxicant. Coffeehouses spread across Istanbul, becoming centres of gossip, politics, and poetry. The word "coffee" itself comes from the Arabic qahwa, and the Turkish method of preparation—finely ground beans simmered slowly in a cezve, served with the grounds settled in the cup—became the international standard. When Europe discovered coffee, it discovered it largely through the Ottoman example. The English word "coffee" passed through Turkish on its way from Arabic.
Tea, meanwhile, was a luxury import. It arrived in Anatolia in the early centuries via the Silk Road, then later through Russian trade routes. It was expensive, exotic, and consumed mainly by the wealthy. The Ottoman elite drank it on occasion, but it was coffee that defined the culture. The famous "Turkish coffee" of today is not a marketing invention; it is the genuine descendant of a centuries-old habit.
Here is the irony that strikes every traveler: the drink that carries Turkey's name around the world is coffee, but the drink that Turks actually consume, in quantities that dwarf every other nation on Earth, is tea. The coffee is the ambassador. The tea is the resident. To understand why, you have to look at what happened when the Ottoman Empire collapsed.
The Coffee Crisis
By the end of the First World War, the empire was gone, and the new Republic of Turkey found itself with a serious problem. The coffee that Turks had drunk for centuries was now a foreign import costing hard currency. The traditional source of Ottoman coffee—Yemen and the port of Mocha—was lost to the new political order. Coffee was now coming mainly from Brazil, and Brazil wanted money Turkey did not have. Coffee had become a luxury the young republic could not afford.
The state's solution was not to ban coffee or to ration it, but to find something that could be grown at home. In 1924, the new government passed Law 407 on 6 February, a piece of legislation that reads, in its official title, as a law "on the cultivation of hazelnuts, oranges, lemons, mandarins and tea in the province of Rize and the district of Borçka." Note that tea appears here not as a special passion but as one item in a list of agricultural projects. The state was not responding to a national craving for tea. It was responding to a balance-of-payments crisis and looking for anything that would grow in the rainy, mountainous northeast.
The man who made it work was Zihni Derin, now remembered in Turkey as "the father of tea." Derin was sent to Rize in 1923, and in 1924 he traveled to Batumi, just across the border in what was then Soviet Georgia, to study the Russian tea gardens and factories there. Batumi's climate and soil were strikingly similar to Rize's—both sit on the same stretch of the Black Sea coast, both receive the same heavy rainfall, both have the mild, humid conditions that tea plants love. Derin brought back seeds and seedlings, and in 1924 the state established the Central Tea Nursery in Rize and distributed roughly 50,000 seedlings to local farmers.
The earlier attempt in Bursa had failed in 1878, when seeds brought from Japan proved unable to cope with the Marmara region's drier, hotter summers. Rize, by contrast, was ideal. The tea took hold. By the late 1930s, the first large-scale harvests were coming in, and by 1945 the crop had stabilized. The republic had its domestic source of caffeine.
The Atatürk Story: What Is Actually Known
You will often hear, in Turkey and abroad, a neat story: Atatürk, the founder of the republic, personally ordered the nation to switch from coffee to tea. The popular version has him issuing a decree, or instructing Zihni Derin directly, or declaring that the nation must drink its own tea rather than foreign coffee. It is a good story. It fits the image of a modernizing leader who made decisive choices for his people. But the historical record is more complicated.
What is documented is this: in the early years of the republic, coffee had become an expensive import requiring foreign currency, and the state actively encouraged the cultivation of a domestic alternative. Law 407 was part of that effort. Zihni Derin's work in Rize was state-sponsored. The nursery, the seedlings, the long-term investment in tea—all of this happened under the republic that Atatürk founded, and it is reasonable to assume that he was aware of and supported the general direction of agricultural policy. The English Wikipedia article on tea in Turkey, notably, does not credit Atatürk with any specific role in the tea policy.
The honest way to put it is this: the story that Atatürk personally commanded the nation to drink tea is a popular narrative, widely repeated, but not rigorously documented. What is documented is that the early republic, facing a coffee shortage it could not afford, invested decades of effort and state resources into building a domestic tea industry. Whether Atatürk issued a personal decree or simply allowed the agricultural bureaucracy to do its job, we cannot say with certainty. The tea arrived, but it arrived through the slow, unglamorous work of agronomists, nurseries, and subsidies—not through a single dramatic announcement.
A State Project That Took Decades
The transformation of Turkey into a tea-drinking nation did not happen overnight. It took the better part of fifty years. The 50,000 seedlings distributed in 1924 were a start, but it was not until the late 1930s that the first significant harvests appeared, and not until 1945 that the crop was stable. The state did not simply plant tea and hope for the best. It built the entire infrastructure: nurseries, processing facilities, a purchasing system that guaranteed farmers a buyer for their leaves, and a marketing network that put tea in every shop in the country.
In 1971, Law 1497 established the Çay İşletmeleri Genel Müdürlüğü—the General Directorate of Tea Enterprises, known universally as ÇAYKUR. It began operations on 1 March 1973, bringing production, purchasing, processing, and marketing under a single state roof. Today, ÇAYKUR operates 49 tea factories across the Black Sea region, with the capacity to process up to 9,250 tonnes of fresh leaf per day, and it controls roughly 60 to 65 percent of the domestic dry-tea market. This is not the result of a decree. It is the result of a sustained, multi-generational state project that treated tea as strategic infrastructure.
The point is worth making because it explains something about the Turkish relationship with tea. The Turks do not drink tea because they always have. They drink tea because, at a critical moment in their history, the state made a deliberate choice to replace an expensive import with a homegrown crop, and then spent fifty years making sure the crop succeeded. The tea habit is not ancient tradition. It is modern policy, so thoroughly embedded that it now feels ancient.
The Ritual and the Glass
Whatever the historical reasons, the result is a tea culture with its own distinctive mechanics. The centerpiece is the çaydanlık: a double teapot, with a large pot of boiling water on the bottom and a smaller pot of loose-leaf tea steeping on top. When it is time to serve, the host pours a small amount of the dark, concentrated brew into a glass and tops it up with boiling water. This is the genius of the system: every person at the table can adjust their own strength. One guest wants it almost clear, another wants it dark enough to walk on—the çaydanlık serves both from the same pot.
The glass is as important as the tea. The ince belli—literally "thin-waisted"—is a tulip-shaped glass, narrow in the middle and flaring slightly at the top. Its design goes back to the late Ottoman period, to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and it went into mass production in the 1930s at the Paşabahçe glassworks. The shape is not decorative. It is engineering. The narrow waist fits comfortably in the palm, the glass is transparent so you can see the colour of the tea, the thin waist protects your fingers from the heat, and the wide top cools the tea quickly so you can drink it fast. It is a perfect object, designed over decades for a single purpose.
Turks describe their tea in a vocabulary of colour. Açık is light, koyu is dark, and the ideal, for many, is tavşan kanı—"rabbit's blood," a phrase that describes the bright, clear, reddish-brown colour of a properly brewed glass. Sugar comes as cubes of white beet sugar, served on the saucer. Milk is almost never added. Lemon is almost never added. A British reader should understand this plainly: the Turks regard milk tea the way the British regard a cup of instant coffee—a thing that exists somewhere, but not here, and not for them.
Tea as Social Glue
The ritual is not a private pleasure. It is the social fabric of the country. When you visit a Turkish home, the tea appears before the conversation does. When you conduct business, the tea arrives before the paperwork. When you buy a carpet, a pair of shoes, or a kilo of olives, the shopkeeper will serve you tea while you decide. There are çay bahçesi—tea gardens—in every town, where men play backgammon over endless glasses and students nurse a single cup for three hours of conversation. The tea is not the point. The point is that the tea creates a space where the conversation can happen.
In 2022, this culture received international recognition. On 28 November 2022, at the 17th session of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee, the "Culture of Çay (Tea): A Symbol of Identity, Hospitality and Social Interaction" was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, as a joint submission from Turkey and Azerbaijan. The listing does not celebrate the tea itself but the culture around it: the rituals of preparation, the hospitality, the social bonding. It is a recognition that the Turkish relationship with tea is not about the drink but about what the drink makes possible.
The Numbers Nobody Gets Right
One final correction is necessary, because it is repeated constantly across the internet and it is always wrong. Turkey produces about 260,000 to 280,000 tonnes of dry tea per year, placing it in the top five producers worldwide. But you will often see a figure of 1.45 million tonnes attributed to Turkish tea production. Both numbers are correct, and they are measuring different things. The 1.45 million tonnes is fresh leaf—the wet, green leaves as they are picked from the bush. When those leaves are processed and dried, they lose roughly eighty percent of their weight. The ratio is about five to one. So 1.45 million tonnes of fresh leaf becomes roughly 260,000 to 280,000 tonnes of dry tea.
The confusion is understandable, but it matters. If you quote the fresh-leaf figure as if it were the dry-tea figure, you will make Turkey look like the world's second-largest tea producer, when in reality it is a solid but not dominant member of the top five. The distinction is the difference between a headline and a footnote. In 2023, high temperatures and irregular rainfall reduced production—a reminder that even the tea economy is vulnerable to the climate it depends on.
And the market is overwhelmingly black tea. In 2023, black tea accounted for 98.2 percent of Turkey's retail tea sales. The green tea, the white tea, the oolong—these are novelties, sold to tourists and health enthusiasts. The Turkish drink is black tea, brewed strong in the top of a çaydanlık, cut with boiling water, served in a thin-waisted glass with beet sugar on the side. That is the whole story.
The next time you are in Turkey and someone hands you a glass of tea before you have even sat down, you will know what is happening. You are not being offered a beverage. You are being offered a century of state planning, a failed coffee economy, a successful agricultural project, and a culture that has turned a hot drink into a way of being. Drink it. It will be tavşan kanı, if they know what they are doing. And it will not be the last one you are offered today.
