Of Motherlands and Fruit Countries

Published as part of the “Encounters Across the Eastern Mediterranean” series, this article by environmental historian Samuel Dolbee traces the story of grapes, figs, and oranges from Izmir to Crete, Aydın to Fresno, and Jaffa to Mersin. It examines the circulation of plants and their fruits in relation to migration, labor politics, and changing borders amid the transition from empire to nation-state.

Motherland 

At the center of so many stories of return are fruit trees. Whether Armenians or Greeks in Turkey, Turks in Greece, or Palestinians in Israel, it is these quotidian yet redolent objects of orientation that root a lost geography. There are memoirs and ethnographic accounts that reference this relationship, certainly, but there are also the stories that people shared with me when I’ve spoken about this project: the pear tree left behind in Grevena, the grove of walnuts in Erzincan, pomegranate seeds finding their way from Diyarbakır to the Bronx, fig cuttings moving from Gaza to Charlotte.⁠¹ 

As some of these stories suggest, the trees and their fruits of course moved, too, sometimes great distances. Their success in one place always awakened anxieties that it could well transfer to another place, too.⁠² Maybe the terroir was special, the fruit always at its best in its “motherland” (anavatan) as no shortage of agronomists intoned. But maybe that wasn’t enough. Maybe the seemingly perfect in fact improved in a different kind of sun, with a different set of tax breaks, or as part of a different labor regime. 

The stories of Izmir grapes in Crete, Aydın figs in Fresno, and Jaffa oranges in Mersin all carry some element of these dynamics. But they also speak to a broader theme in which the produce of the late Ottoman Empire catalyzed an agricultural and environmental transformation of the region and the world. Some worked to recreate the fruits of the place they once called home in some place new, albeit with August sun that was preternaturally similar; others tried to recreate the now far-away produce of the erstwhile empire within the borders of the Republic. In all of these cases the rootedness of the fruit trees overlapped with the uprootedness of people, and vice versa, a reminder of the ways that talking about plants and their fruits mimicked talking about people.⁠³

Izmir Grapes in Crete 

The grape, as many agronomists were keen to note, had its motherland in the Aegean. But as with many commodities, it entered a halcyon era in the late 19th century.⁠⁴ The sultana variety provided a naturally seedless fruit, and the August sun in Izmir provided the heat to dry the fruit with minimal processing. A newly enclosed and industrializing Europe had become hungry for sweets born of Mediterranean sunlight, and the sultana became a key ingredient for various baked goods and puddings. Its already powerful position became even more so thanks to the plant disease phylloxera.⁠⁵ Hailing from the United States and likely having hitched a ride on a steamship across the ocean, the small aphid-like creatures sucked the roots of grape vines and devastated vineyards across Europe beginning in the 1860s. Its impact in France was especially pronounced, and the country’s wine industry was brought to its knees. What was bad for grapes in France was good for grape growers further east, such as in the Ottoman Empire where the phylloxera had not yet appeared. In the meantime, currants in Greece and sultanas from Izmir commanded high prices. Some raisins were even used to produce sweet wine to make up for the French shortage. 

But by the 1890s, the French vineyards had begun to rebound while the arrival of phylloxera in the Ottoman Empire (likely a result of illegal and surreptitious import of European rootstocks by Ottoman winemakers) had left the growers in a parlous state. Many capitalists—Abdülhamid II and the Privy Purse among them—refused to waste the crisis, and used it to scoop up land at low prices, turning former landowners into sharecroppers.⁠⁶ At the same time, the Ottoman state engaged in a massive distribution program to save viticulture. Because phylloxera came from the United States, American rootstocks were more resistant to the pest’s impact. By grafting local vines onto American rootstocks, growers could hope to survive the depredations of the insect. State officials established a set of nurseries from which they distributed hundreds of thousands of American rootstocks (largely obtained from France and then reproduced in the Ottoman Empire) free of charge. Growers were also granted tax exemptions for the time that was required for the vines to bear fruit once again.     

As with all crops, growers worried about competition elsewhere. California was an omnipresent source of anxiety, and, indeed, the most popular raisin in the United States—Thompson’s Seedless—is in actuality the same as the sultana (indeed, there is even a Sultana, California). But the sultana would also come to have competitors closer to home. From the onset of the phylloxera epidemic, various states in the Eastern Mediterranean had used the disease as an excuse to close off their countries to Ottoman grapes and raisins. “The excuse of phylloxera,” fumed Ottoman Minister of Agriculture, Forests, and Mines Selim Melhame, implying that only recently post-Ottoman states like Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania were exploiting the vine disease to nurture their own grape economies.⁠⁷ The devastation of World War I and the Izmir fire further upended conditions. These were human tragedies above all, and so it was callous when British newspapers noted on the topic of “Christmas pudding” that “fire, and destruction, and chaos, could not, from the commercial point of view, have come to Smyrna at a worse time of year.”⁠⁸ An “All-British plum pudding” was marketed, relying on, among other things, Australian grapes, but it was really “a remarkable invasion of England” by California raisins that made the difference in 1922.⁠⁹

The Greek-Turkish Population Exchange—which involved the transfer of at least 1.5 million people—further complicated the grape economy. Not only did the population movement deprive the Izmir hinterlands of a large portion of the labor force that cared for sultanas, leaving abandoned vineyards in their wake.⁠¹⁰ It also sent them to places with ecologies quite like those of where they left. One Turkish agronomist complained in 1938 that Greek Orthodox refugees from Urla had settled on Crete, where they found environmental conditions quite familiar.⁠¹¹ Whether they had taken vines with them or acquired them by other means, the grapes did quite well, not least because these people had the knowledge required to take care of them. As a result, the nationally distinct places of Crete and Izmir resembled each other.  

Aydın Figs in Fresno

By the late 19th century, the dried figs of Aydın had earned renown around the world, tightly connected to the local terroir. Growing in the valleys of the Great and Little Menderes Rivers but only producing quality products about 30 miles inland, they were apparently at their highest quality when picked, particularly “while the north wind blows.”⁠¹² After drying in the sun and being transported via camel and rail to the port of Izmir, they were handled by workers—often women—who pressed the fruits into the ideal form, keeping their hands moist and free of fig-borne stickiness all the while with sea water from the Bay of Izmir. A rather impressionistic piece in Harper’s described them as follows: “round heaps of figs, are squatted girls, young women, old women, Greeks, Jews, Turks, and Armenians, all very talkative, and most very busy” (so busy, in fact, that few images captured them holding still).⁠¹³ Among the leaders of the industry was Aram Hamparzum, the so-called Fig King of Smyrna. He was a man who clearly understood import-export, but who also had ideas about marketing with an eye toward health, claiming figs were key to ending the “autointoxication” caused by constipation and ample evidence could be found in the robust stature of local peasants.⁠¹⁴ Hamparzum’s former warehouse is today the restored Izmir Economic Congress Building.⁠¹⁵  

 
As observers noted the particularities of the process of both fig production and elimination, they also could not help but imagine planting the fruits elsewhere. The British consul suspected it would “not be uninteresting” to the Governor of South Australia.⁠¹⁶ With some disappointment, the American consul wrote, “What would seem extraordinary is the fact that fig trees from Aidin planted in other localities never give good results.”⁠¹⁷ This did not stop people from trying. There were reports in 1887 that someone in California had managed to obtain “30,000 fig cuttings of the best varieties.”⁠¹⁸ Reports several decades later revealed an even more intimate situation among the fig groves of Aydın, noting that “agrarian diplomats” were seen “circling around our fig trees, picking the best figs, examining them, feeling them, sucking them, then,” worst of all, “pulling out a notebook and taking notes.”⁠¹⁹ While shipments of fig saplings had initially failed due to misunderstanding of the precise nature of fly-abetted pollination of the fruits, by the early 20th century California had succeeded in producing Aydın figs. It could well portend, one newspaper complained, “the ruin of our businessmen who, in order to prosper in their business, have up to now counted on the figivorous appetite of the Yankees.” Even in the tumult of late July of 1908, the Ottoman state saw it fit to ban the export of cuttings of fig trees.⁠²⁰

But it was too late. Enough fig saplings had already gotten out, and they began to take root in places with just the right mix of sun and rain.⁠²¹ In Fresno, California, the portmanteau variety Calimyrna emerged, its very name bringing together California and Smyrna. And it was not only the late August perfume of fresh figs that made a place like Fresno seem not so far away from Izmir. It was also people connecting these places. Beginning in the 1880s, Armenians had made their way to dusty Fresno. In the shadow of American racial hierarchies, they slowly acquired land and some measure of power through raisin, melon, and fig production.⁠²² Aram Hamparzum may have been the Fig King of Izmir, but in Fresno there were contenders vying for the title, including Henry Markarian, whose father had emigrated from the Ottoman Empire.⁠²³ Turkish agronomists continued to insist that an Aydın fig in Fresno could not be as delicious as one from the Menderes Valleys. But the journalist Hikmet Feridun Es was concerned about competition from California. When he visited Fresno and wrote of it in 1948, he noted that the community welcomed him kindly, and also that they “treat the fig business with an importance like that of the Dashnak cause,” meaning the Armenian Revolutionary Federation.⁠²⁴   

Jaffa Oranges in Mersin

The coastal plains of the Eastern Mediterranean have long been famous for citrus. From Jaffa to Tarablus to Dörtyol, the cities were suffused by the scent of orange blossoms. But Jaffa gained particular renown beginning in the mid-19th century when a new kind of orange appeared, almost miraculously. Rumored to have origins in the Aegean on Chios—and even referred to in Arabic as Saqisli for decades afterward—the orange known locally as shamuti and to the world as the Jaffa orange likely emerged due to genetic mutation.⁠²⁵ As important as their delicious taste was, so, too, important, in this era of expanding long-distance trade, was the fruits’ thick skin, allowing them to endure long journeys to northern Europe and rough handling by stevedores. There were, of course, oranges elsewhere in the empire, on islands like Chios, Crete, and on the Mediterranean coast. Dörtyol was particularly famous for its crops of citrus (products which were said to also be connected to Jaffa thanks to saplings brought by one “Kyuchyuk Sarkisian” upon his return from pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1830).⁠²⁶ Dörtyol citrus, too, became a significant product of export throughout the 19th century. In the wake of the Adana Massacres in 1909, the intellectual Zabel Yessayan eloquently wrote of the way the trees overlapped with the geography of violence against Armenians. She could smell the orange trees long before she reached Dörtyol. When she arrived, she noticed “orange trees torn up by the roots […] the skeletons of the rare trees that had been left standing, literally plucked clean of their foliage.”⁠²⁷ But the name of Jaffa oranges largely eclipsed that of Dörtyol, and spread around the world. Even in the midst of World War I and its various forms of devastation in the Ottoman domains, members of the Ottoman parliament representing Palestine worked to protect tax breaks that they argued kept the Palestinian citrus economy afloat. When some suggested that breaks from the tithe should apply all across the empire in the name of equality, Said al-Husayni insisted, “Fine, but in natural conditions and circumstances there is no equality.”⁠²⁸ In other words, the tax protection was appropriate given the capital-intensive nature of citrus cultivation in Jaffa as opposed to elsewhere. 

 
It was thus a profound rupture, then, when the collapse of the Ottoman Empire left Palestine under British rule as part of the League of Nations Mandate system. Jaffa was suddenly separate from its once reliable markets in the erstwhile imperial capital of Istanbul and elsewhere. Adding to the division was the fact that officials in the newly formed Republic of Turkey, eager to build new national industries, created protectionist barriers essentially eliminating the import of oranges from Palestine. Growers in Palestine—including an increasing number of Jewish grove owners, though the vast majority of workers remained Arab—were so desperate that some even attempted to reinstate the Ottoman Empire as a free-trade regime.⁠²⁹ But to no avail. In Turkey, officials built on longstanding patterns of attempting to rely on the skilled knowledge of refugees for agriculture that had been present, for example, in the employment of Cretan refugees on orange plantations near Antalya.⁠³⁰ There was bluster. One report on plans to redistribute abandoned orange groves of Armenians and Greek Orthodox around Dörtyol declared, “it is well known that its type of orange is preferred to the oranges of anywhere—including Jaffa.”⁠³¹ But many others worried that tastes of empire would not translate in the post-imperial era. “Before,” wrote one article in Akşam, “we were fond of the Yaffa orange. We would eat the Tarablus orange. We would love the Sakız mandarine.”⁠³² But by the 1930s these oranges of empire had been divided between Palestine, Lebanon, and Greece. In contrast, consumer knowledge of Turkish citrus in places like Rize, Finike, or even Dörtyol was scarce.

To remedy the situation, Turkish officials sought assistance from Palestine. To this end, the Munich-born Hebrew University professor F. S. Bodenheimer visited southern Turkey in 1934. He complained that the older groves of Dörtyol and Mersin featured “thin-skinned, primitive” oranges growing on trees planted close to one another. In the half-century-old groves of Dörtyol, he saw trees as high as 10 meters.⁠³³ Bodenheimer advised planting trees more regularly, and keeping them at lower heights, the better to be able to easily dispense pesticides (a predictable conclusion given trends in scientific agriculture and, more immediately, that his trip was funded by Imperial Chemical Industries). Of the newly planted groves near Mersin that he observed, he approved. Indeed, many of these oranges were in fact Jaffa oranges. Bodenheimer reserved judgment on whether the Turkish Jaffa could compete with the Jaffa Jaffa. But what he encountered was a moment of post-imperial reckoning, in which the produce of the empire—in this case citrus—was being recreated in the post-imperial republic, indeed, perhaps with cuttings from Palestine itself. 

Many in Turkey viewed this situation with anxious excitement. After all, the “Mersin Jaffa variety of orange,” explained one press account, accounted for some 2 million of the 8–9 million oranges produced in Turkey in 1934, and fetched “five times the price of the famous Dörtyol oranges.”⁠³⁴ But at the same time, observers worried about the power of the Jaffa oranges of Palestine to compete with Turkish citrus. And then there was the old question of naming. One writer in Mersin complained that despite Jaffa oranges being “the product of our soil, our property,” they received “a foreign name.”⁠³⁵ Palestinian growers would face an altogether different level of alienation after the Nakba of 1948, when almost all lost their groves—groves that had initially emerged with some relation to Ottoman markets, tax benefits—and then saw the newly created state of Israel trademark the Jaffa variety.⁠³⁶ The revolutionary writer Ghassan Kanafani immortalized these ironies in his short story “The Land of Sad Oranges.”⁠³⁷ Alongside this dispossession (which continues to today) was a displacement of a different kind: long before the Nakba, the Ottoman state and its markets had helped bring the citrus industry into being, and even after the Nakba, Jaffa oranges sold in Turkey—though grown in Mersin—were a distant echo of this unspoken history of imperial agriculture. 

Fruit Country

When agronomists and others wondered about the future of Turkey, they often referred to their place as a “fruit country” (meyve memleketi), which registered both the edenic possibility of the land’s produce but also, often, a sneaking sense of insecurity.⁠³⁸ It was related to but more general than “Europe’s California,” as one writer put it in 1945.⁠³⁹ And it was far from the pejorative term of “banana republic”—applied disparagingly to authoritarian regimes deriving their power in part from the production of one product for foreign export—“fruit country” carried with it a different connotation. In the early 20th century, it meant a means of getting foreign exchange, and building a better future on the ruins of empire. And in some ways the sobriquet rings true today with respect to current prospects of grapes, figs, and oranges in Turkey. The country is one of the world’s top two producers of raisins, the world’s largest producer of figs, and within the top ten of orange producers. 

But “fruit country” could well have a different meaning, referring to the ways that fruit has shaped the lives of so many as a commodity requiring labor, care, and capital, as an aromatic food associated with a particular time of year, and as a product derived from seemingly timeless living beings in the form of trees that mark, for so many, homes lost but not irretrievably so: after all, maybe the angle of sunlight through a fig tree’s leaves might bring you back, at least for a moment. At the same time, the fruits popped up elsewhere, whether as part of Republican efforts to cultivate imperial produce within new borders, or as part of migration and forced population transfers that moved people—and fruits—outside of those imperial and national borders. Stretching from Izmir to Crete, Aydın to Fresno, and Jaffa to Mersin, the fruit country—the motherland of so many—is not simply Turkey, but the shadows of its past.

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Samuel Dolbee is an assistant professor of history at Vanderbilt University. His first book Locusts of Power was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, and was the co-winner of the 2024 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association Book Prize. Its Turkish translation Çekirgelerin Saltanatı was completed by Can Gümüş İspir and published by FOL Kitap in 2025. Parts of his new project have appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History and Journal of Global History. He is a member of the editorial team of Ottoman History Podcast.