The steep hills of the Akbash hazelnut orchard make mechanical harvesting impossible. Moisture-laden winds off the Black Sea produce humid conditions that make the region ideal for the Corylus avellana tree, which produces hazelnuts.

Two and a half millennia ago, during his long, arduous journey home, the Greek commander Xenophon crested a mountain pass overlooking present-day Trabzon on the coast of the Turkish Black Sea. In one of the most dramatic moments of his epic narrative, he recorded how he was moved by the hurrahs of his 10,000 weary soldiers as they shouted, “Thalassa! Thalassa!” (“The sea! The sea!”), which would give them safe passage. Had they been considerably less homesick, they might have instead looked at the trees covering the hills and hurrahed, “Fındık! Fındık!”(Fuhn-duk)—and sat down for a picnic, fındık being the Turkish word for hazelnut or, as it’s often known in English, filbert. 

or this is hazelnut country, a part of northeastern Turkey extending from Trabzon to Samsun, and especially covering the middle provinces of Giresun and Ordu. Altogether, this region grows 99 percent of the hazelnut yield in Turkey, which is 75 percent of the world harvest, amounting to some 750,000 tons annually with an export value of almost $2 billion. A large chunk of this volume ends up in everything from Nutella spread to Italian gelato, from Planters’ nut mixes to Godiva chocolates (the chocolatier was recently bought by a Turkish company with promises of making its bonbons even hazelnuttier).

Each August through September, hazelnuts are hand-harvested by both seasonal workers and local villagers along Turkey’s Black Sea coast. In Geçitköy, near Giresun, women pull nuts from low branches; men often climb into the trees to shake the limbs to drop nuts to the ground.

Here one cannot escape the Corylus avellana tree, a member of the birch family that is said to have originated in China. During the spring, its feathery, newly burst leaves cover some 700,000 hectares (1.7 million ac) of hilly slopes, seemingly blanketing these Pontic Mountains with soft green velvet. In the fall, their leaves turn a uniform shade of yellow, a colorful harbinger of the snow that winters often bring right down to the edge of the sea. And it has been this way for hundreds of years—17th-century Ottoman tax records describe hazelnut orchards as dominating the landscape.

The local bus line is named Fındık Kale (Hazelnut Castle). Nut-shaped kiosks sell nuts bagged and loose. Roadside vendors advertise taze fındık (fresh hazelnuts), even out of season. Candy and ice cream bars both resound with the nut’s familiar roasted crunch—equally so whether sliced, chopped, ground or even kept whole as miniature nuts called pikola—which are under nine millimeters (3/8") in diameter, about half the usual size. 

Hazelnuts, called fındık (fuhn-duk) in Turkish, are a fruit that grows inside a shell covered by a green husk that itself has been valued since antiquity as a folk remedy for sunstroke. More recent research has found that the limbs, leaves and associated fungi of the Corylus avellana tree, as well as the hazelnut’s husks, shells and fruit, are useful sources of the anticancer drug paclitaxel.

Xenophon’s book, the Anabasis, is the first written record of these nutritious kernels, which he described as “the broad kind with a continuous surface.” He found the local Mossynoecians churlish for using them “in large quantities for eating, boiling them and then baking loaves of them,” which fattened the local boys, making “their flesh soft and very pale.” His battle-hardened Greeks, he noted tersely, soundly defeated this enemy tribe, “had their meal here and then marched on.” 

Modern Turks still make bread from hazelnuts, but most often they grind them into flour for baking cakes, and of course there are the phyllo-dough pastries stuffed, in this region, with hazelnuts—not the pistachios nor almonds common elsewhere in Turkey. Those delicacies include everything from basic baklava to its myriad sub-specialties such as şöbiyet (cream-filled), bülbül yuvasi (nightingale’s nest) and kocaman gerdani (giant’s nape), so named because the dough is bunched and wrinkled like the fleshy rolls on the back of a fat man’s neck.

Like all nuts, hazelnuts are rich in protein and key micro-nutrients, but with relatively higher levels of beneficial oleic acid than others. Because they are the fruit of trees rather than subsoil legumes like peanuts, hazelnuts do not contain the earth-dwelling toxins and irrigation-water-borne salmonella bacteria that frequently threaten other nut foods favored by children, who today increasingly suffer from groundnut allergies. 

Scientists have long recognized this nut’s curative power. A contemporary of Xenophon, Greek physician Ctesias of Cnidos, mentioned hazelnuts in the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of early medical texts. In the first century ce, Dioscorides prescribed its oil and milk mixed as a cough syrup in his pharmacopoeia De Materia Medica. The legendary pre-Islamic sage Luqman al-Hakim recommended taking hazelnuts with marzipan (sweetened almond paste) to fight anemia. Later, in the 11th century, the polymath Ibn Sina suggested its paste be applied to dog bites and scorpion stings. The Missouri Botanical Garden of St. Louis, which researches modern ethno-botanical medicine, suggests, however, that the nuts simply be “left for the squirrels.”

Stretching some 800 kilometers (500 mi) from east of Istanbul to the Georgian border, the hazelnut region produces 99 percent of Turkey’s hazelnuts. It actually comprises two distinct growing regions: East to Samsun is the larger, western area that produces just 45 percent of the harvest, and east from Samsun is the smaller, eastern area that produces about 55 percent.

After harvesting, hazelnuts are dried in the sun until the husks turn a crisp brown, at which point a vacuum-fed threshing machine separates the husks—which will be sold as animal bedding—from the nuts.

Trabzon factory owner Sinan Cirav is a third-generation hazelnut processor who also sells sweets and packaged nuts from a downtown storefront. His grandfather Ibrahim opened the city’s first mechanized hazelnut processing plant, and he sent its first exports to Germany. As Cirav explains, the family’s success has depended upon keeping in close touch with suppliers. This has allowed his business to keep pace within an industry where larger and larger players continuously enter. “I visit my suppliers in June, right in their fields,” he says, “both to anticipate the size of their harvest and to reconfirm our contracts. A guaranteed supply in August is essential, when everyone is scrambling for the best product.”

Ahmet Keskinoğlu tends his family’s gaily decorated store on Trabzon’s main square, and its outdoor sign advertises çifte Kavrulmuş (Double-Roasted). His son Lokman stands ready to take over the business, just as Ahmet took over from his own father 30 years ago. At night, the neon light flashes the word “fındık” over and over, for all to see.

Husked, the hazelnuts are bagged and transported. Some will be sun-dried for some 15 to 20 days, and others will be taken for immediate factory processing. Officially, 24 countries produce hazelnuts, a number that has nearly doubled since the 1970s, but Turkey far outproduces the others: In the early 2000s, it produced nearly 90 percent of the world crop; today it produces about 75 percent.

To further understand the place of hazelnuts in local food culture, visit the sweet shop Meşhur Dila Ev Tatlıları (Famous Dila’s Homemade Sweets), where six pastry makers crowd around a marble-topped table. Using up four 50-kilogram (110-lb) bags of ground nuts a week, they turn out 50 large trays a day of all manner of local delights—what they call Trabzon burmalisi (Trabzon roll). Thirty-seven-year-old Nurten Özcan is on her feet 10 hours a day, six days a week, rolling out the dough, five layers at a time, and generously sprinkling in the nuts as if she were sowing seeds. (And what does she do on her day off? “I don’t even own a rolling pin,” she says with a smile. “I only bake cakes.”)

Down the coast, just outside the town of Giresun where Xenophon may have tasted his first nut, Mustafa Şahin sits at his desk at the Keşap hazelnut cooperative. From here he oversees the fields of 120 orchard-men whose average holding is 300 trees. “Four hundred thousand Turkish families make their living directly from hazelnut farming,” he says, “so I feel a great responsibility to keep my members happy.” To maintain the European standards that allow for a brisk export trade, he keeps meticulous records of each farmer’s pesticide treatments, and he receives routine visits from inspectors.

One of Mustafa’s member farmers is 53-year-old Musa Sabırlı, who along with his mother, Binnaz, tends an orchard up the Harşid Valley in the village of Kiliçli. At 200 meters (655') high, the steep, down-slope view takes in the near-shore island that Jason and the Argonauts are said to have landed upon in search of the Golden Fleece. In May, Sabırlı’s crop is just forming its tiny fruit cups as he wanders through his property, past the gravestone of his grandfather Hassan, with a sharp eye and an even sharper pruning hook.

Harvest season brings work for thousands who come from the region’s own cities and villages as well as other provinces.

In Turkey, hazelnuts do not grow on a single-trunked tree as they do in Italy, Spain and the state of Oregon in the us, but rather on a five- or six-branched shrub called an ocak (o-jak). Each shrub produces between one and a half and three kilograms (3.3-6.6 lb) of nuts, alternating years of high and low yields. The mature fruit forms in a three- to five-nut cluster that grows from a red female flower pollinated in January. The catkin, or male flower, grows six months later, at the time of harvest, which is why hazelnut trees here are said to be “always working.”

A local worker prepares tea for workers in orchards near Giresun.

Giresun province, with about 61 million ocaks, is famous for the best-tasting and most useful nut variety, called tombul, or yağlı fındık (oily hazelnut), because, in addition to the high oil content that gives it its flavor, it easily sheds its brown, papery skin during processing, resulting in a stark-white nutmeat prized by confectioners, especially those who use it to make white chocolate. Other varieties include the çakıldak, or gök fındık (sky hazelnut), because it is hardy at 1000-meter (3200') elevations, and it survives the worst winter conditions; kuş (bird); sivri (pointed); uzunmusa (tall Musa); and a still-unregistered cultivar called Allahverdi (God-given), which is a naturally wind-pollinated hybrid.

Every part of the hazelnut is used. Its oil is good for high-temperature frying. Dried husks protecting the nut cluster are sold as animal bedding. The shells can be burned for fuel or pressed and glued to make artificial wood laminate. The branches themselves are used as garden stakes, or they can be split lengthwise and woven to make the pickers’ own traditional conical harvest baskets. A folk belief has it that its branches also can be used as divining rods to find water or even treasure.

Plant physiologist Gökhan Kizilci is director of Giresun’s Hazelnut Research Station, established in 1936. He oversees hybridization studies among 400 varieties of Corylus avellana and a few specimens of the wild, single-trunked and thick-shelled Corylus colurna. Kızılcı’s main preoccupation is to understand why the older trees give alternating harvests of high and low yields: If the annual down-cycle could be stopped, harvests could almost double. 

Teenagers and students working the harvest often stay in dormitory housing such as these rooms on the Akbash farm. In a women’s dormitory, clockwise from upper left, are Fatma, Semia, Neslihan and Suna; in a men’s dormitory, below, are Ibrahim, Ahmet, Hayati, Bunyamin and Cengiz.

His scientists also pursue genetic improvements and pest-control studies, and his economists examine price subsidies and farm extension services. Student entomologist Ebru Gümüş does daily battle against gall gnats, green shield bugs, white butterflies, offshoot moths, oystershell scale and filbert aphids—each a sworn enemy of the hazelnut. Among its latest developments, the station is proudest of a new cultivar called Okay 28, which combines hardiness with high yield and is named not for a thumbs-up sign but rather for the station’s top breeder, Ali Nail Okay. 

Supporting a $2 billion export crop, factories lead the development of quality controls, and among Turkey’s 180 hazelnut factories, one of the largest is Noor Fındık in Giresun, where a worker sorts shelled nuts.

A visit to a modern hazelnut-processing facility is something like entering a high-security scientific testing site. At the Noor Company factory in Giresun, fingerprint readers open the bolted doors, and sterilizing misters decontaminate dirty hands after wristwatches are removed and before surgical-style caps and booties are donned. Everyone wears a white coat, even outside the laboratory where levels of moisture, fat, toxicity and acid in each batch of pre-roasted hazelnuts are machine-measured.

Lasers sort the nuts by size before they are run through the six-tons-per-hour roasting ovens with computer-controlled temperatures—170° Celsius (338 F°) for nuts bound for paste-making, 130° Celsius (266 F°) for those for confectionery and lower settings for blanching those to be fully de-skinned. Then they are sent to milling and pureeing machines. Not all customers want skinless nuts, for the skin deepens the taste. Inspectors cast a final critical eye on the nuts as they move along the conveyor belt toward the packaging unit. All told, 14 million kilograms (31 million lbs) of nuts pass through here each year. 

Another worker inspects the ovens that roast six tons of hazelnuts per hour.

Plant manager Aydin Özturk is responsible for quality control for the bulk of the Turkish crop destined for Europe. The Ottoman army may have been pushed back from the gates of Vienna 330 years ago, but the soldiers left behind their hazelnuts to give Linzer torte its unmistakable taste, and they since then have spread into all things sweet and even savory. 

The Hazelnut Research Station in Giresun has developed genetic improvements, samples of which appear in these jars.

Hazelnut meal is often mixed with ground meat to give köfte balls a more complex, less cholesterol-fueled taste. Hazelnut flour is used for breading fried eggplant. A popular spreadable hors d’oeuvre here is a tangy mixture of hot red pepper and hazelnut butter.

The us market itself is set soon for a boost. According to studies recently carried out by the United States Department of Agriculture, us consumers eat, on average, only 226 grams (8 oz) of hazelnuts a year, whereas the Swiss, for example, eat more than 1.8 kilograms (4 lb) in the same period. But that disparity may not endure given the growing popularity of hazelnut-chocolate spread among American teenagers: New York’s Columbia University made headlines this year when it discovered that students were taking up to 100 pounds a week out of its dining halls, costing the university some $5,000 each week. The students might fairly claim hazelnuts as a study aid, as it is rich in vitamin B6, which promotes neurotransmitter synthesis, a process critical to the development of memory and brain functioning.

While nuts for confectionary are often blanched, such as those bagged below, others are roasted and sorted with the paper-like skin all or partly intact, above, which imparts a more complex flavor.

The Hazelnut Promotion Group, a trade organization representing the Black Sea and Istanbul Exporters Unions, recently published a cookbook originating from a series of international kitchen competitions. It included such standbys as baklava and hazelnut pudding, whose award-winning recipe comes from Giresun housewife Nuran Karaban. 

Not all dishes, however, call for such quintessential Turkish ingredients as sahlep, ground orchid root, and güllaç, a Ramadan specialty of ready-made sheets of starch, flour and milk. Foods of foreign lands, from Italian gnocchi to Japanese sushi and Mexican tacos, stand out beside a recipe for this region’s second most famous delicacy, called hamsi—fried anchovies dredged in hazelnut flour.

The great 17th-century Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi praised Trabzon’s hamsi and baklava to the hilt but never once mentioned fındık, presumably because he visited in late winter, when the anchovies were running and well past the hazelnut harvest. Yet his description of men crazed for a taste of hamsi, to the point of jumping out of warm beds in the dark to go fishing in the cold, is echoed in enigmatic local sayings about fındık such as: “I wouldn’t feed my dark-haired girl anything but nuts” and “I am the hazelnut worm for whom many a life is thrown away.”

Pastry chefs in shops like Dila’s in Trabzon, top, use hundreds of kilograms of hazelnuts each week, which they scatter handful by handful, roll in thin dough, slice, sweeten and bake to make local dessert favorites.

New York-based Austrian chef Tomas Slivovsky supplies cakes to the Cafe Sabarsky at the Neue Galerie art museum, whose dessert menu wins high praise from countrymen who know their way around their Kirshtorte, Topfentorte and Zitronenschnitte. He explains why hazelnuts, and only hazelnuts, are essential: “When it comes to Austrian pastry-making, I am one to follow rules. My Sachertorte uses hazelnut flour because that is how the Hotel Sacher in Vienna makes it, and always has. And Linzer torte? Those who instead garnish it with almonds are breaking with tradition, to their loss.”

Dursun Gürsoy, chairman of the Promotion Group and president of the Gürsoy family factory in Ordu, thinks of himself as his country’s hazelnut ambassador to the world. His job is to increase the us market, which currently buys only 10 percent of Turkey’s export crop. He sees no problem that Oregon is also expanding its harvest. “Our nuts are better,” he says without hesitation and then cites another, no less obtuse Black Sea adage: “What doesn’t fit in a castle fits in the shell of a Turkish hazelnut.” 

Hazelnut production in Ordu province alone amounts to almost half of the area’s total, so it is no surprise that Ordu University enrolls more than 100 students of nut science. Turan Karadeniz (whose surname means “Black Sea”) is dean of the School of Agriculture, whose focus is on trying to double the harvest of the region’s older trees.

In this shop in Trabzon and all along the Black Sea coast, hazelnuts appear in almost every conceivable form: shelled and unshelled; ground, roasted and minced; plain and candied, and more.

A spring cold snap in 2010 reduced the hazelnut yield all over Turkey but especially at the higher elevations above Ordu, so Karadeniz’s team is now cross-breeding the cold-resistant çakildak with other varieties. Because hazelnut orchards in this part of the coast are planted on steep mountainsides, there are also problems with excessive rain runoff. The university is now testing whether the ash of burnt hazelnut branches, which butterflies tend to avoid, might be both a cheaper and more effective pesticide on steep terrain than chemicals.

Ripe hazelnuts fall from the branches over a 20-day period beginning in early August. The declivitous slopes of the Pontic Mountains allow little to no motorized equipment. Picking and collecting, therefore, is by the hands of Georgian and Kurdish day laborers who follow the harvest from lower elevations to higher. One treat for the pickers is that other fruit trees in the nut orchards ripen at the same time, so pears, mulberries, medlars and cherries are part of the workers’ midday picnic. 

Sun-drying unshelled hazelnuts helps them develop the rich flavor that keeps worldwide buyers coming back to the Turkish varieties. Much like the Black Sea itself, hazelnuts sustain the life of the entire coastal region.

Once gathered, the nuts are dumped onto concrete floors where vacuum machines separate out the husks. They are then rotated back and forth with long-handled, wood-toothed rakes (tirmik) to dry in the sun before being sent to de-shelling plants. From here the nuts are taken to processing factories like Noor, where they pour down huge, grated spillways, just as wheat and corn are unloaded at grain elevators in the North American farm belt. 

A statue in a park pays homage to the hazelnut heritage of the city of Giresun, which, although it is smaller than Trabzon, proclaims itself the “hazelnut capital of the world.”

At the other end of the factory floor, vacuum-sealed bags await shipment to 106 countries in lots large and small. An Egyptian company imports 37 tons a month. A 15-ton order from Germany, for blanched and skinned nuts used in ice cream, will likely be repeated several times before summer’s end, and it is ready for loading. Such quantities can boggle the mind when one remembers how a hazelnut begins life as a dainty female flower, fertilized in midwinter by a nearly microscopic grain of pollen dusted off a drooping male catkin.

German artist Wolfgang Laib takes his inspiration from precisely this moment in time. He recently completed a site-specific, 5.4 x 6.4-meter (18' x 21') painting in the atrium of New York’s Museum of Modern Art using pigment of yellow hazelnut pollen precisely because it turns out to be eerily l uminous. He first collected the pollen, flower by flower, from trees near his studio, and then he sifted it onto a horizontal canvas, much like a Tibetan sand painting—or a Trabzon pastry maker scattering her chopped hazelnuts onto a sheet of finely rolled phyllo dough. 

Hazelnut pollen, Laib says, “is as simple, as beautiful and as complex as [the potential beginning of life].” After a bite or two of fresh baklava straight from the oven, the same might be said of the nut itself.

	Louis Werner (wernerworks@msn.com) is a writer and filmmaker living in New York.
	Photojournalist Matthieu Paley (www.paleyphoto.com) specializes in documenting the mountain cultures and lands of Central Asia and Turkey, where he lives.