Rize: Green All the Way Down

Rize is wet. Not occasionally, not seasonally — structurally, constitutionally wet. It receives around 2,200 millimetres of rain per year, one of the highest totals in Turkey, and the hills above the city respond to this with a density of vegetation that takes some adjustment. The tea terraces begin at sea level and continue up the hillside until they disappear into cloud, and on the mornings when the cloud lifts briefly, you see how far up they go: hundreds of metres, sometimes the whole hillside, electric green against the grey sky.

Turkey is the world's fifth-largest tea producer and almost all of it comes from here, from this narrow strip of Black Sea coast between Rize and the Georgian border. The first commercial plantings began in the 1930s under a government programme; now the terraces are so thoroughly embedded in the landscape that it is impossible to imagine the hills without them.

The Tea Gardens

Visiting the terraces is a matter of driving or walking uphill from almost any point in Rize and following the lanes between the plots. Picking season runs from May to October, with multiple harvests. The pickers — mostly women, wearing headscarves and rubber boots — work with extraordinary speed, both hands moving, filling baskets that can hold thirty or forty kilograms of leaf.

Stop at a çay bahçesi (tea garden) above the city. Order a glass of Rize çay — very strong, very dark, served in a tulip glass, diluted to your preference from a second pot of hot water. The tea grown on the hillside immediately behind you was probably picked in the last few weeks. There is a flavour to fresh local tea that the boxed version does not quite replicate.

Muhlama

Muhlama is cornmeal cooked slowly in butter until it has the consistency of thick porridge, then loaded with a local soft cheese until the cheese melts into long, elastic strings. It is the Black Sea coast equivalent of fondue — rich, hot, absurd — and it is the thing to order in Rize. Most restaurants that serve it also serve hamsi (anchovy) in a dozen forms: fried, baked, in rice, in bread. The Black Sea anchovy is smaller and more intense than the Mediterranean variety and it underpins the entire regional cuisine.

The Waterfalls

The rivers coming off the Kaçkar Mountains above Rize drop fast and the waterfalls they create are often directly accessible from the road. Ayder Plateau, a two-hour drive into the mountains from Rize, is a highland village at 1,350 metres surrounded by peaks and threaded with streams that fall in long white ribbons through the spruce forest. In spring the meadows above Ayder are covered in wildflowers and the snowmelt is so forceful that you can hear the rivers from the road below.

Rize Town

Rize itself is a working town — a tea-industry town — and the centre is not especially beautiful, but the waterfront is pleasant and the castle above the city gives a view of the terraces and the coast that repays the climb. The tea factory visits (some are open to visitors) show the full process from green leaf to the dried and graded product: withering, rolling, fermentation, drying, sorting. The smell inside a working tea factory — green and grassy with an undercurrent of something darker, almost earthy — is unlike anything else.