Turkish town gets ready to smell the roses
The Turkish town of Isparta is in the midst of this year's rose harvest, a flower the Ottomans revered for its fragrance, taste and medicinal qualities.
Extracting the essence of rose is a labor-intensive project. Roughly 2 million roses must be picked to produce 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of the oil. With spring arriving late in Turkey and the Balkans this year, the perfume industry worldwide is paying close attention to the rose fields in Isparta province, in southwest Turkey, where the rose harvest, typically from mid-May to mid-June, has been interrupted by heavy rains. Isparta is the world’s leading rose-growing region, producing roughly more than half the world’s rose oil, followed closely by the town of Kazanlak, in Bulgaria.
The perfume industry’s most widely used Turkish rose is Rosa damascena, its name derived from the once-Ottoman-held city of Damascus. Following the recent immigration of 3 million Syrian refugees to Turkey, the fragrant Damascus roses have for the last three years been picked primarily by Syrian laborers.
Isparta may be one of the few places in Turkey where the refugees, having fled their country's civil war, have a chance to get a sense or scent of home. While planting roots in a foreign land, even if temporarily, perhaps some of them find some solace in the restorative qualities of the rose extracts.
Compared to the many other itinerant laborers working Anatolia's fields, rose pickers are relatively lucky, as many rose oil manufacturers in Isparta adhere to fair trade rules for agriculture. Numerous cosmetic brands demand compliance with these standards. Nuri Ercetin of Ercetin Gulyagi AS, one of the leading essence producers, told Al-Monitor that his company holds a “Fair for Life” certificate, ensuring fair and decent working conditions, equal pay for men and women, social and environmental responsibility, and no child labor.
