Talk:Aegean Region (Turkey)

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Aegean Region (Turkey) treats the hemp-growing country of western Turkey on the Gediz, the Büyük and Küçük Menderes and the upper Sakarya in Kütahya as one growing region, from the Ottoman dockyard hemp to the seed sown in Kütahya in 2019. Its growing area is Küçük Menderes Valley.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Why the region is mapped

Clarke (2023, p. 4) names the tract: "The traditional Aegean (Ege Bölgesi) hemp producing region includes the watersheds of" the Büyük Menderes (Kütahya, Uşak, Denizli and İzmir provinces), the Sakarya in Kütahya Province, the Gediz (Kütahya and İzmir) and the Küçük Menderes (İzmir).
Akpınar and Nizamoğlu (2019) and Taşlıgil and Şahin (2019) document hemp in Aydın, İzmir, Ödemiş, Tire and Kütahya from the 19th century to 2005; Göre and Kurt (2021) report seed hemp sown in Kütahya in 2019.
The title follows Clarke's Ege Bölgesi and the form of Black Sea Region (Turkey). The border is drawn on his watersheds, so it is narrower than Turkey's Aegean geographic region: the coast north of the Gulf of İzmir and most of Muğla lie outside it.

Growing status

Sources dated 2000 or later on growing in the region: Taşlıgil and Şahin (2019, pp. 469 and 471, from national statistics) give 82 hectares of hemp in Kütahya Province in 2000, with 83 tonnes of fibre and 72 tonnes of seed, and one tonne of each in 2005. Aydoğan and co-authors (2020, p. 41) write that hemp was grown in Kütahya, Çorum, Kastamonu and Samsun up to 2004. Göre and Kurt (2021, pp. 142–143) give 100 decares sown for seed in Kütahya in 2019, after none in 2015–2018.
These figures are for Kütahya Province as a whole; no source read names the districts. Clarke places three of his watersheds in Kütahya (the Sakarya, the Gediz and the Büyük Menderes); the parts of the province that drain to the Sea of Marmara lie outside the border.
Taşlıgil and Şahin (p. 471) write that seed growing in Kütahya ended commercially after 2005, and Aydoğan and co-authors that from 2008 hemp was grown only in Samsun. The sowing of 2019 came after that.
No source read reports a sowing since 2000 in the İzmir, Manisa, Aydın, Denizli or Uşak parts of the region. İzmir, Kütahya and Uşak were among the provinces where hemp was allowed under licence in 1990 and 2016 and are in the current list; that is permission, not a crop.
A licensed crop of fibre and seed hemp was harvested on 22 decares at Helvacı, Aliağa district, İzmir Province, on 28 August 2024 (İHA, in Cumhuriyet), the first licensed crop in the province. Aliağa drains to the coast north of the Gulf of İzmir and is outside the border.

How the border is drawn

The border is the union of four catchments traced on a digital elevation model (AWS Terrain Tiles, Terrarium, at zoom 8, about 500 m cells; priority-flood filling and D8 flow directions): the Gediz above its delta west of Menemen (about 16,600 km²), the Küçük Menderes above Pamucak (about 4,100 km²), the Büyük Menderes above its delta below Söke (about 26,800 km²), and the part of the Sakarya catchment that lies in Kütahya Province in OpenStreetMap (administrative relation 223172; about 4,300 km²). The line of the Küçük Menderes Valley area is taken in whole. Simplified, the region is about 51,800 km².
OpenStreetMap holds no river-basin polygons for these rivers, so the catchments come from the elevation model. Clarke names only the rivers and the provinces they cross; the whole basins are drawn, which takes in parts of Manisa, Aydın, Afyonkarahisar and Muğla provinces that he does not name. The Sakarya is limited to Kütahya Province, as he limits it.
Burdur, named by Baytop (1995) and by Taşlıgil and Şahin among the western hemp places, lies outside the four basins and outside the border. So do Simav and Tavşanlı in Kütahya, which drain to the Sea of Marmara.
The map point (38.31, 28.79) is near the middle of the region, between Alaşehir and Sarıgöl.

Sources

Clarke (2023), Taşlıgil and Şahin (2019) and Akpınar and Nizamoğlu (2019) are cited throughout; Aydoğan and co-authors (2020) and Göre and Kurt (2021) for their sections on hemp areas in Turkey; Baytop (1995), Gezer (2016, chapter 4) and the regulation of 1990 as cited.
Taşlıgil and Şahin's figures for 1990–2017 are national statistics (TÜİK); their Ottoman figures for 1913 and 1914 come from Güran (1997), whose table is garbled in the text layer, so no figure is taken from it; Ödemiş's 23.3 per cent comes from Güran (1998), which was not seen.
Clarke's statements sourced to an unreferenced conversation (raw hemp exported from Manisa and İzmir in the 14th century; 16th-century hemp on the Adala plain of the Gediz and at Ayasuluğ, Tire, Ödemiş, Birgi and Bademli) are not used.
Zhukovsky's survey is cited through Taşlıgil and Şahin, who use the Turkish edition of 1951; it was not seen directly.

Where the sources disagree

Clarke (2023, p. 8) writes that hemp was about a quarter of the crops of Ödemiş "throughout the eighteenth century", citing Taşlıgil and Şahin. Taşlıgil and Şahin (2019, p. 466) give 23.3 per cent for the middle of the 1800s, citing Güran (1998). The article follows Taşlıgil and Şahin.
Clarke (p. 7) dates the Aydın and İzmir hemp supply to the early 18th century, citing Akpınar and Nizamoğlu; they (p. 1227) give the early 19th century. The article follows Akpınar and Nizamoğlu.
Clarke (p. 4) dates Zhukovsky's visit to Turkey to 1925; Taşlıgil and Şahin (p. 468) place his commission in the 1930s. The article gives no year.