A Turkish town's test with tea and Atatürk

The row began last week when Re?at Kasap, the mayor of the eastern Black Sea town of Rize, said a statue of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, in the town?s main square could be removed.

His justification was a renovation of the square, and the presence of the Atatürk statue there was blocking traffic during official ceremonies. These ceremonies involved simply saying an oath, singing the national anthem by the protocol, a minute of respect and could take more or less half an hour in total three or four times a year.

The Rize branch of an NGO, the Atatürkist Thinking Association (ADD), spoke up against the plan, claiming the mayor, who was elected from the Justice and Development Party (AK Parti), was actually planning to place a statue of a giant, tulip-shaped Turkish tea glass (Rize has almost all of Turkey?s tea plantations).

Then the row started to escalate. Mayor Kasap said he might call for a referendum in the town on whether the Atatürk statue should be kept in its current place after the construction work or if it should be replaced with the giant tea glass.

If there is going to be a referendum, it will be the first one in Turkey over the removal of a statue of its founder.

The point is that the tea growing and processing industry in Rize (and in Turkey) is very closely related to Atatürk and the republic he established in 1923 after a war of independence.

There had been attempts in Ottoman times to grow tea in Turkey but in the wrong places; the works in the western town of Bursa did not produce any results.

It was Atatürk himself who, based on some agricultural and ecological reports, decided to send experts to Batumi in neighboring Georgia and passed a law from...