Bursa
More actions
| Bursa | |
|---|---|
| Brusa | |
| HistoricalGrown here in the past; no recent record either way | |
| Geography | |
| Country | Turkey |
| Province/State | Bursa |
| Coordinates | 40.19, 29.06 |
| Landscape | |
| Area | 12,500 km² |
| Terrain | Approximately Bursa Province |
| Climate | |
| Seasons | Esrar makers arrived at the end of May; the plants were cut about 15 days after topping |
| Growing history | |
| Grown | 1864[1]–1939[2] |
| Earlier names | Brusa |
| Documentation | |
| Appellations | 0 |
| Accessions | 0 |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
Bursa is a historical landrace cannabis growing area in Turkey, mapped on Bursa Province. According to Dr L. Mongeri, writing in 1864, the country around Bursa was one of the areas of the Ottoman Empire that led in the amount and quality of the cannabis grown for esrar, with the country around İzmit and Mosul.[1] Its hashish was traded as the "hashish of Brusa"; J. Bouquet wrote in 1951 that it "has always enjoyed an excellent reputation in the world of hemp consumers".[3]
Esrar in the 19th century
Turhan Baytop's account of the drug, drawn from Dr L. Mongeri's study of mental illness in the East, published in Istanbul in 1864, describes how esrar was made in these areas. Buyers and makers came with their helpers at the end of May. The makers worked in groups in the fields they had contracted for and broke off the flowering heads of the plants, so that the leaves would grow well. About 15 days later the plants were cut at the base, and the leaves were spread on kilims to dry. The dry leaves were rubbed between the two halves of a kilim until they turned to powder, which was sifted: the fine dust that passed the sieve, sıyırma, was the first quality, and the coarse part, rubbed and sifted again, gave hurda, worth a quarter as much. The esrar came to Istanbul packed in two bags, one of hair outside and one of leather inside. By Mongeri's account, esrar production in the Ottoman lands passed 25,000 kilograms a year in the 1860s and was rising despite the government's ban, and more than half of what reached Istanbul was sent on to Syria and Egypt.[1]
After the Ottoman ban on sowing of 1872 and 1876, a document cited by Onur Gezer argued that esrar worth 60,000 lira a year could be grown around Gemlik, İnegöl and Kirmastı (now Mustafakemalpaşa) and exported to Europe. It said that the ban had handed this trade to Greece, to the loss of the people of the area and of the treasury, and asked the Ministry of Trade and Public Works whether sowing could be allowed. Gezer found no reply to it, and later documents, as far as he could tell, show no relaxation of the ban.[4]: 81 Gezer cites Vital Cuinet's survey of Asia Minor, published in 1894, for 71,100 kilograms of hemp (kenevir) produced a year in Bursa alone.[4]: 82
The 20th century
Bouquet wrote that between the Greek ban on cannabis of 1920 and Turkey's law of 1933, the hashish seized in Egypt and North Africa was chiefly Turkish, from Istanbul and Brusa. He described its making and trade, together with opium, as "a source of considerable profit for part of the rural population of certain vilayets of Asia Minor", and thought in 1951 that illicit plantations probably still existed.[3] A Russian commission that collected cannabis in Anatolia in 1925 with the economic botanist Peter Zhukovsky found a drug type at Bursa, the third of the six types into which Zhukovsky divided the country's cannabis.[5]: 4
Hemp for fibre was grown there too. The Kastamonu yearbook of 1938 counted about 10,000 hectares of land fit for hemp, in a scattered area, in İzmir and Bursa.[2]: 1230 The German specialist Tobler, brought in by the Ministry of Agriculture, studied hemp growing in several parts of Bursa in 1937.[2]: 1232 A publication of the Ministry of Agriculture of 1939 listed Bursa among the places with small-scale hemp production.[2]: 1233
Accessions
No accessions documented yet.
Recent news
No news items are recorded for this growing area yet.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Baytop, Turhan (1995). "Esrar". TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (in Türkçe). Vol. 11. İstanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı. pp. 431–432. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Akpınar, Deniz; Nizamoğlu, Ahmet (2019). "Osmanlı'dan Cumhuriyet'e Kenevir Üretimi" [Hemp production from the Ottomans to the Republic]. Turkish Studies – Social Sciences (in Türkçe). 14 (4): 1223–1236. doi:10.29228/TurkishStudies.23448.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Bouquet, J. (1951). "Cannabis (concluded)". Bulletin on Narcotics (1). United Nations: 22–45.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Gezer, Onur (2016). Osmanlılarda Keyif Verici Bir Madde: Esrarın Hikayesi [A pleasure-giving substance among the Ottomans: the story of esrar] (MA thesis) (in Türkçe). Eskişehir: Anadolu Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü.
- ↑ Clarke, Robert C. (2023). "Anatolian hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) cultivation, processing, and production: history and recent observations". Agrociencia Uruguay. 27. e1166. doi:10.31285/AGRO.27.1166.