Turkish Tea
When you wake up in the morning in Turkey, your first
thought is to enjoy a tiny glass of ruby tinted tea. The day goes
on, and after lunch it is time to chat over more tea. Then around
5 o'clock in the afternoon comes tea accompanied by crisp simit rings
sprinkled with sesame seeds with white cheese. Tea is an important
part of Turkish daily life, as it is in Britain, China and Japan.
The most widely consumed drink in the world, tea is made from the
tender leaves at the tips of the branches of the evergreen plant Thea
sinensis or Camellia sinensis. There are three principal varieties
of tea plant, Chinese, Assam and Cambodian, and many hybrids produced
from these. Different processing results in three categories of tea:
fermented tea (black), unfermented (green) and semi-fermented (oolong).
Black tea is amber in colour and has an astringent flavour, green
tea is slightly bitter in taste, and oolong has a delicate flavour
and a pale greenish brown colour.
The world's foremost tea producers are India, China, Georgia, Iran
and Turkey. The first significant attempt to cultivate tea in Turkey
was made around Batum (now in Georgia) at the southeastern extremity
of the Black Sea in 1918. Until the 1940s locally grown tea was processed
by hand in small workshops. Then in 1941 and 1942 came tea rolling
machines, and in 1947 the Rize Tea Factory was established, the first
in Turkey. The autonomous state tea corporation, Çay-Kur, was
founded in 1971 to coordinate both the cultivation and processing
of tea, and in 1973 it went into active operation. Çay-Kur
aimed to expand tea cultivation, keep up with innovations in tea processing
technology, and import and export tea as necessary. Until 1984, when
tea processing and packaging were opened up to private enterprise,
Çay-Kur enjoyed a monopoly over Turkish tea production.
While British, Indian and Pakistani tea lovers mix their beverage
with milk, in Turkey tea is generally flavoured only with sugar and
occasionally lemon. Winter and summer, steaming hot fragrant tea is
served in little narrow waisted glasses, preferably crystal. The small
metal spoons produce an agreeable tinkling sound as the sugar is stirred;
a sweet impromptu melody. Although tea drinking in Turkey has no particular
ceremony attached to it, and is drunk hurriedly standing up before
the rush to work on weekdays, on Sundays it enjoys a festive place
at the breakfast table. The inhabitants of southeast Turkey claim
that hot tea has a cooling effect in the blazing summer heat. The
eastern city of Erzurum is renowned for the habit of drinking tea
kitlama fashion, which involves placing a sugar lump in the mouth
and sipping the tea through it, rather than sweetening the tea in
the glass. Pondering our tea drinking habit, Turkey has a tea culture
in no way inferior to that of countries where it is a habit of far
greater antiquity.
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