The emerging archive sheds light on the history of Turkish Tea.

It has been revealed that the history of tea in Rize dates back to even earlier times with the emergence of an archive after many years. The history of tea production in Rize, which was known to have started in 1938, gained clarity with the archive of Rauf Başar, who started working as a Technical Officer in 1934 at what is today the Agricultural Garden, but was then the Nursery Center. The archive, which includes everything from the initial studies to soil analyses of Rize, revealed that not only tea but also many other products were produced at the Nursery Center. Mandarin, orange, and lemon seedlings were produced at the Nursery Center, and these seedlings were distributed to the public completely free of charge during that period. Additionally, it was recorded in the documents kept by the Technical Officer Rauf Başar that in the first year of production, the tea amounted to only 35 kilograms, with a total production of nearly 500 thousand tons of tea exudates in exile. The ...