Not to the Turks, though, for whom the eastern Black Sea is synonymous with the production of their favorite beverage. This was something that came about almost by accident when, after the British cut off Russian access to tea from the subcontinent in 1917, the Russians were forced to start growing their own leaves along the Georgian coast. Then in the 1930s Zihni Derin introduced the idea to the thin coastal strip on the Turkish side of the border.
For most visitors working their way east along the Black Sea coast the road terminates in Trabzon with its fine church-mosques and the restored Sumela monastery as the ultimate prizes. For the hardy few who’re heading on to Georgia, Rize is the best place to make a last overnight halt with some of the best hotels in an area which is notoriously short of good places to stay. Ditto for those heading up into the Kaçkar Mountains for whom the town offers enough of interest to fill a quick few hours between buses.
Today’s Rize is a thoroughly modern-looking town that does its best to conceal the fact that it started life as the Greek city of Rhizaion. It’s rather prouder of its lingering Ottoman heritage, however, with the central square backed by three imposing mansions and the post office beneath them decked out in pseudo-Ottoman finery. Two of the mansions house museums, the better of the two, the Sarı Evi (Yellow House, also known as the Tuzcuoğullari Konağı
, focusing on local life. Come here to see not just the ornate furniture in the then popular Western style that once filled the mansions but also the costumes worn by two of the minority populations that live around Rize: the coastal Laz and the inland-dwelling Hemşin.
Beside the museum is a serander, a curious wooden building on struts that was once used to store grain safely out of the reach of rats. Beside it the second of the mansions houses the Çaykur Tea Museum honoring one of the two products (the other is hazelnuts) that keep the wheels of business rolling around here. Unless you’re particularly interested in what goes on inside tea factories you may find the displays of old machinery a little ho-hum. The house itself, on the other hand, is magnificent and you can only wonder how it is that people who once lived amid such beauty can now settle so seemingly happily for concrete suburbia.
The third of the mansions houses a restaurant named Evvel Zaman (Past Times) that is almost as chock-a-block with memorabilia as the museums. But by now you may be feeling the urge for a cuppa in which case the most obvious thing to do is hop on the bus that stops right in front of the museums and whisks people up to the hilltop Çay Arıştırma Enstitüsü (Tea Research Institute). Here, beneath the shade of giant magnolia trees, you can sip tea from a samovar and contemplate the view of Rize and the Black Sea unfolding in front of you.
From the Tea Institute you can also spot its main competition in the pleasant places to drink tea stakes, and that is the small castle that perches on a lower hill across town to the west. This castle dates back to the reign of the Emperor Justinian (he of İstanbul’s Aya Sofya fame) although, like most castles, it’s been patched up time and again, especially during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor in Trabzon, Alexios II (1297-133
. Today you approach the tea garden via the courtyard of the Kale Camii (mosque), mounting steps until you emerge in front of the tomb of Ekrem Orhun, an ex-mayor known as the Father of Rize, who so loved the view from this spot that when he died in 1983 he was buried overlooking it. Beyond that you emerge in one of Turkey’s loveliest tea gardens with roses ringing an old cannon and tables set up to sco-op the views in every direction.
What else does Rize have to offer? Well, the Orta Camii may be a 19th-century building but it has a glorious wooden ceiling that’s well worth a quick look, while the nearby bazaar sells a variety of handicrafts including colorful filigree copper trays from Erzincan, and handy wooden stools and baskets made rather closer to home. Here, too, you’ll see the roundels of local cheese that look like so many piled-up yellow frisbees.
For those with more time on their hands Rize makes the best base for exploring the Laz lands to the east. In Turkey the Kurds tend to grab all the attention when it comes to the minority populations. It’s often forgotten that northeastern Turkey is also home to several ethnic minorities, amongst them the Laz. Not a great deal is known about the Laz who probably migrated into what is now Turkey from Caucasia, setting up their own kingdom here in the third century AD. The Laz have their own language which is more closely related to Georgian than to Turkish, and they’re well-known for their love of falconry, for playing a three-stringed violin called the kemençe and for the over-enthusiastic building of concrete apartment blocks. Once upon a time Laz men were also renowned for their ferocity which made them especially popular as bodyguards. Today visitors are more likely to comment on the glorious maroon, black and white striped shawls, called keşans, worn by Laz women.
Strictly speaking, Lazland consists of the five small towns of Pazar, Ardeşen. Fındıklı, Arhavi and Hopa that lie to the east of Rize. The mountainous terrain has ensured that they remain separate settlements rather than blurring one into the other but in every other way the five towns are virtual clones of each other. In each case the town boundaries are marked by rivers that cascade down from the mountains and out to sea while their centers are dominated by fine, newly built mosques and the smoke-belching towers of the Çaykur tea factories on which so many local livelihoods depend.
The largest of the towns is Ardeşen whose inhabitants are so fond of atmacalılık (falconry) that even the town’s logo incorporates an image of a bird. To catch the falconers at their busiest you really need to visit in autumn or winter when the birds return from summering in Africa. Aficionados gather at the offices of a dernek (foundation) dedicated to falconry that can be found tucked up beside the small fish market. They’ll be more than happy to fill you in on the details of their hobby.
As you wander round Ardeşen you’ll probably spot a handful of mainly elderly women whose heads and shoulders are covered by the traditional keşan. Not so long ago the only other places that you would spot these colorful cloths would be in the workplaces of homesick members of the Black Sea diaspora. Today, when hardly any young woman would be seen dead with her head covered by a keşan, enterprising individuals are finding a myriad new uses for them. Poke about in the bazaar in Rize and you’ll spot them turned into everything from shirts and dresses to cushion covers and oven mitts.
WHERE TO STAY
Dedeman Rize. Tel: 0464-223 4444
Hotel Milano. Tel: 0464-213 0028
Otel Kaçkar. Tel: 0464-213 1490
Otel Keleş. Tel: 0464-217 4612
HOW TO GET THERE
Plentiful buses and dolmuşes ply the eastern end of the Black Sea highway calling in at Rize on the way from Trabzon to Hopa and Sarp (for Georgia). Buses to the Tea Institute (marked Ziraat) leave on the hour from in front of the museum; those to the castle leave from the local bus terminal in the town center which is also where you can pick up dolmuşes to Ardeşen.
