Beer, the Drink of a Changing World: Beer Consumption and Production on the Shores of the Aegean in the 19Th Century
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Malte FUHRMANN 79 BEER, THE DRINK OF A CHANGING WORLD: BEER CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION ON THE SHORES OF THE AEGEAN IN THE 19TH CENTURY B eer is nowadays a highly controversial drink in Turkey.1 In May 2013, a law seriously limited the sale, promotion and, in part, also the consumption of all forms of alcohol, threatening draconic fines in case of transgression.2 The bill’s passing was accompanied by an aggressive ver- bal campaign against alcohol consumers. The prime minister R. T. Erdoğan had stated on television that regular drinking amounted to alcoholism. Erdoğan’s statements comply with the position of Yeşilay Cemiyeti, an Islamist organization targeting alcohol and drug consumption.3 At the organ- ization’s congress in April 2013, the prime minister had declared that, unfortunately, the early Turkish Republic (1923-1950) had encouraged Dr. Malte Fuhrmann, Türk-Alman Üniversitesi, Sahinkaya Caddesi 86, 34820 Beykoz- İstanbul, Turkey. [email protected] 1 My great thanks go to Canay Şahin for her help with this article. Also many thanks to Marie Charbonnier, Müzehher Selçuk, and Jan Tasci for their assistance in researching beer matters, and to Dietrich Daur, Edhem Eldem, Christoph Neumann, Florian Riedler, Funda Soysal, Avner Wishnitzer and the audience at my presentation at the Institut français d’études anatoliennes for their invaluable advice, critique, and shared sources. 2 “‘Torba Kanun’ teklifi”. 3 The same law restricted alcohol and re-founded Yeşilay as a state foundation (vakıf); see ibid. Turcica, 45, 2014, p. 79-123. doi: 10.2143/TURC.45.0.3032666 © 2014Turcica.Tous droitsréservés. 997040.indb7040.indb 7799 112/08/142/08/14 114:394:39 80 MALTE FUHRMANN youths to drink beer. However, according to him, not beer but ayran (a salted yoghurt drink) was the true Turkish national drink.4 The new law and the prohibitionist propaganda were but a final piece in a series of measures, including a steep rise of taxes on alcoholic beverages, especially on beer; successful campaigns by Yeşilay against Efes, the nigh-monopolist on beer in Turkey, to end sponsorship of sport events and music festivals; and increasingly restrictive zoning practices for licensed bars in several Turkish cities. On the other hand beer consumers have not been idle in defense of their lifestyle. In Istanbul’s central district of Beyoğlu (Pera), citizens and trade organizations have protested against the ban on outdoor seats of cafés and bars in force since 2011 with recurrent street parties. Already in 2008 citizens had demonstrated against the “drying up” of a popular restaurant in Moda by regular drink-in picnics in front of it.5 More impor- tantly though, beer lovers have been creative in finding ever new locations, organization and sociability forms, for their consumption. In the anti- government protests that led to the occupation of Gezi Park in Istanbul in June 2013, the new anti-alcohol law was one of the elements that moti- vated demonstrators to protest against Erdoğan’s intolerant, authoritarian, and violent rule. The conflict is clearly one of the many struggles between republican, leftist, and postmodern lifestyles on the one hand and conservative and Islamist ones on the other, that have dominated the Turkish public sphere in recent years. Partisans to this struggle frame their conflict as one between tradition and innovation that has lasted for at least the last 200 years. According to the view expressed by Erdoğan in his speech on ayran, the Ottoman Empire had strictly enforced Islamic morals includ- ing the ban on alcohol until the Republic, when the reformist presidents Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and İsmet (İnönü) in their zeal to adapt to the West did away with Islamic codes of conduct, a mistake that should now be rectified. Ironically, consumers of beer often share the same dichoto- mous view of history, but choose the opposite side to identify with. According to them, the secular rules laid down in the early Republic were the stepping stones to end century-old superstitions and establish codes of conduct suited to the 20th and 21st centuries, an accomplishment now 4 “Erdoğan.” As the word içki in Turkish explicitly means an alcoholic drink, Erdo- ğan’s statement became the subject of much ridicule about ayran’s intoxicating quality; see “Milli İçkimiz Ayrandır.” 5 “Moda İskelesi için şerefe!” 997040.indb7040.indb 8800 112/08/142/08/14 114:394:39 BEER, THE DRINK OF A CHANGING WORLD 81 endangered by diehard reactionaries. Both sides have adopted beer as a symbol of this struggle. However a more historical approach must reject such a dichotomous view and the belief that the founding of the Republic was the only criti- cal juncture for the role beer plays in the cities around the Aegean. Beer had long before been the object of social and cultural struggles dur- ing its short history in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, and these con- flicts did not at all resemble today’s secular-vs.-Islamic-lifestyle struggle. Rather, the specific meaning beer assumed changed according to time periods and their fashions, ideological shifts, local context, and the size and modes of production. While in the early 21st century, religion is seen as a prime factor for explaining social and cultural conflict, it was not the dominant trope for discussing the role of beer in the period from 1830 to 1920. Other studies have already established that religion was not the context for discussing alcohol, or at best, religious authorities adopted arguments of safeguarding public health, and even this mostly towards the end of the period under discussion here.6 This study will therefore highlight the frameworks contemporaries used to reflect upon beverage in the first 90 years of its existence in the Ottoman Empire and it will focus not only on Turks or Muslims, but will include perspectives of other residents of the large cities in the Empire, including both Ottoman subjects and foreigners. These will be integrated into a picture of spatial practices that enables us to judge the beverage’s role in the respective cities. However, such a history of changing attitudes and dissemination must be set against a history of the production of beer, as widespread production and distribution presupposed lenient attitudes towards the beverage, and on the other hand easy availability furthered both positive and negative reactions. Despite some very labor-intensive pioneering work, we cannot consider the history of beer production in the late Ottoman period sufficiently studied. Therefore the article will pro- ceed by outlining production and distribution patterns and contrasting these with the various attitudes and spatial practices assumed vis-à-vis beer. It will first proceed in a chronological matter to then discuss more intensely the question of which images different milieus projected onto beer within the framework of the highly diverse late Ottoman society. A history of beer, its diffusion and the attitudes attached to it, must bring together a variety of different sources. So far research has relied heavily 6 Georgeon, “Ottomans;” for a comparative perspective see Matthee, “Alcohol.” 997040.indb7040.indb 8811 112/08/142/08/14 114:394:39 82 MALTE FUHRMANN on anecdotal material in contemporary literature, travelogues and travel guides, memoirs, and historical works based on oral tradition. This remains the most informative and significant material and is of prime importance, especially for a study concerned with the subjective dimen- sion. However a problem arises if this material is used alone and at face value. Some individual subjective impressions or statements out of con- text have been canonized by historians who do not contrast them with material of a different quality. Luckily E. Eren has already reconstructed the legal and institutional framework that was used to control the produc- tion of beer.7 Valuable quantifiable sources are insurance maps, business directories, and statistical material, which are however available only for limited periods of the era under discussion. For other periods we have some estimates by well-informed merchants, but the exact object of study varies from observer to observer, so that no continuous quantifiable results can be found. Lastly the article makes use of official documents of the Prime Ministry’s Ottoman Archives (BOA): either applications, mostly for the founding of breweries, or police reports about incidents believed to affect the public order in the widest sense. The applications give us an impression of the expectations towards the market and the institutional difficulties (or non-difficulties) applicants could face in a particular period. The police reports would ideally be our key to the fear, apprehension, anxiety, and disorder provoked by beer, i.e. all the dark emotions that do not find their way into dry statistics, formal applica- tions, or whitewashed memoirs or guidebooks. However, as their style for this period is extremely terse, many just consisting of a single sen- tence, they provide limited insights. These sources — beyond those that warranted in-depth scrutiny and will find more detailed discussion — have been used for a statistical survey based on the catalogue entries which in many cases sampled were identical with the whole length of the source. The survey’s purpose is to roughly quantify trends of socio-cul- tural change that are evident from the sources discussed in more detail. For the sake of statistic comparability I have divided the time under scrutiny into four periods of equal length (except the first, as it has been lengthened to include the early years for which we have memoirs and trade reports but no archival material). Between 1830 and 1922, the proliferation and cultural role of beer changed repeatedly. The years demarcating the beginning and end of one 7 Eren, GeçmiştenGünümüzeAnadolu’daBira. 997040.indb7040.indb 8822 112/08/142/08/14 114:394:39 BEER, THE DRINK OF A CHANGING WORLD 83 of the four phases I have divided the process into are not to be taken as harsh cleavages, but simply as markers of a very gradual process.