Between promotions and prohibitions: The shifting symbolisms and spaces of beer in modern Turkey

To be “a real country”, Frank Zappa wrote, “at the very least you need a beer.” In the context of Turkey, however, the place of beer has often been contested. Since before the republic’s 1923 establishment, Turkish national identity enjoyed a strong association with the equally strong anise-flavoured spirit rakı. Meanwhile, Islamic conservatives like President Erdoğan point to non-alcoholic yogurt-based ayran as their alternative. While such debates attract a great deal of attention in discussion of the country’s secular–religious divide, in practice, beer long rivalled – and often far surpassed – rakı in its scales of production, profits, consumption, availability, and even politicisation. Though beer originated in Ancient times in the greater Fertile Crescent region, it was reintroduced to Anatolia as a European beverage linked with modern brewery production and the Bomonti brothers in the late Ottoman era. It survived the empire’s fall and a short-lived prohibition of alcohol in the early 1920s to become a prized concern for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s national republic, which consolidated its production under the state monopoly TEKEL. Profiting from its consumption, the state paradoxically promoted beer while it encouraged moderation. Within post-WWII promotions of an expanded free market, Efes Pilsen and Türk Tuborg became major brands, with the former attaining pre-eminence. Following beer’s history through subsequent developments brought about with rising neoliberalism and political Islam, beer became a major symbol of resistance in the 1913 Gezi Park protests and since amid ongoing Islamist and public health pressures to further regulate – or prohibit – alcohol in modern Turkey. This chapter examines how beer and its shifting places in and flows through Turkish society and politics yield collectively vital perspectives on and critical narratives of the republic’s history. It identifies beer as a late Ottoman introduction and explores its status in the modern republic. Covering the impacts of World War II-era economic stress and scarcities and a post-war push for an expanded free market, the chapter deals with how state and commercial promotions and industry privatisations created new topographies for beer and its consumption. In addition to promising health benefits and connecting the consumption of beer with a modern diet and lifestyle, the promotional provides direct and unambiguous instructions for women on how to entertain their husbands, serve the