Presented by: Emine Evered, Associate Professor of History &

Kyle Evered, Associate Professor of Geography

Though Anatolia had many traditions of brewing, distillation, and fermentation that extend to the earliest periods of human societies in the Mediterranean, European-style beer only began to enter appreciably into what would become modern Turkey in the early 19th century as imports to the Ottoman Empire from Western Europe. Within several decades, however, local traditions of brewing emerged, and by the 1890s and 1900s, factory-scale breweries existed in Istanbul and elsewhere. Within the modern Turkish republic—after its very brief prohibition, beer found enthusiastic support from the state itself. Benefitting from state monopoly production and marketing, the beverage also enjoyed acceptance in places where drinks with more alcohol, like rakı, were banned. Depicted by state and eventually private interests in advertising and political debates alike, beer appeared as a safe and social alternative to rakı and other hard drinks. These geographies of endorsement and toleration were not acknowledged universally, however, and the latter half of the 20th century and early 21st centuries reveal significant debates over the moral geographies of beer; redefining recurrently its places of acceptability and unacceptability. Like other moral geographies, identity and ideology often play important roles. In this lecture, Dr. Emine Evered draws on collaborative work completed with Dr. Kyle Evered to address Turkey's spaces of beer consumption and regulation.