Gazoz Is the Drink of Modern Turkey

There are a lot of things to drink in Turkey. Damascene merchants started the world’s first public coffeehouse in İstanbul in 1555 using coffee from Yemen. Salep (ground orchid root served with hot milk) is popular during winter. Şalgam (fermented turnip juice) can be found in southern Anatolia and any of the country’s kebab houses. Turkish tea served in gilded tulip glasses makes appearances after every meal. Ayran, a salty yogurt drink, and raki, a spirit made of twice-distilled grapes and aniseed, duke it out as the top contenders for national drink.

All of these beverages have their occasions, but the full breadth of the country’s flavors bubbles up in gazoz, a type of soda that comes in an encyclopedia of variations in different regions across the country, each reflecting local culinary influences. Today, you can step into any cafe or neighborhood grocer to pick up electric blue, highlighter yellow, or fiery orange bottles in flavors like bubble gum, grape, rose hip, banana, honey, kaymak (clotted cream), and many more.

Beyond sheer variety, gazoz evokes Turkey’s place at the crossroads of global culture, coming into the world as the country transitioned from empire to republic in the 20th century. And the drink continues to evolve alongside the culture, adding new flavors to the country’s already inexhaustible bar.

From sweet apricots to bitter almonds, gazoz flavors represent Turkey’s many cuisines

Just as Italian regions boast their own pastas and U.S. cities lay claim to various types of barbecue, a rainbow of gazoz flavors make up a culinary map of Turkey. While there are brands that distribute across the whole country (and a few that export abroad), most are produced and consumed locally, tapping into hometown pride in a country where provenance is extremely important. You’ll find bottles shaped like local landmarks, like that of Beyoğlu Gazozu, shaped like İstanbul’s iconic Galata Tower, and brands named for local slang, like Noriyon Gazoz (essentially What’s Up, Gazoz) in the central Anatolian town of Nevşehir.

Each area uses its own mineral water and local produce to flavor its gazoz. The Mediterranean city of Mersin features blueberry gazoz. Bağlar Gazoz, named after a neighborhood in the Black Sea town of Safranbolu, produces a saffron and ginger soda that honors the city’s association with the crimson spice. Kayısı Kola from the eastern Anatolian city of Malatya, the apricot capital of the world, offers an apricot and basil pick-me-up. Marmaris, along the Turkish Riviera, is famous not only for its beaches but also its vast pine forests, which flavor a namesake Marmaris gazoz.

“We made a gazoz with a mix of bitter and sweet almonds,” says Kadir Ünal, the owner of Datçam in the narrow Datça peninsula, which is celebrated for its almonds. “We knew it would be a loveable mix.” He boasts that locals and tourists choose it over Coca-Cola and even water.

David Lombeida

The history of gazoz, a drink for 20th-century Turkey

Long before soda emerged in Turkey, locals were drinking sharbat, a sweet concentrate from flowers or fruit, that originated in Persia; the drink eventually spread to Europe and South Asia, spawning a variety of drinks and desserts with similar names. Europeans added fizz, making bubbly water infused with homemade simple syrups, fruits, and aromatics. The French called it gazeuse, and when Ottoman merchants brought this carbonated version back to Turkey at the end of the 19th century, it became gazoz.

In the early 20th century, the tools needed to make sodas began appearing in the Sirkeci and Karaköy neighborhoods of İstanbul. Various communities, including Greeks and White Russians, began producing their own brands. The city’s 1938 records show four soda factories: Olympos, Bomonti, Kocataş, and Yalova.

On the Turkish coast, the city and region of İzmir, rich in mineral water, quickly became a key soda center as well. The Churchill, a mixed drink of bubbly mineral water, lemon juice, and salt named after the city’s native son Churchill Ahmet, became a calling card for the city and helped popularize the soda category. From there, the gazoz trend caught wind across the country.

“We had a strong culture of sharbats, so drinking something sweet as a treat was already popular,” says Turkish food writer Aylin Öney Tan. “But with gazoz, it became all about the fizz, and each city created their own variation.”

David Lombeida

At the same time, Turkey was experiencing dramatic political, legal, and social reforms in an effort to become a secular nation-state. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the Republic, was so impressed with the healing properties of mineral water from the Anatolian town of Gazlıgöl during the country’s War of Independence that he donated a factory there to the Turkish Red Crescent, who used the plant to bottle soda to fund their humanitarian work.

The beverage paired well with the government’s disposition toward European-style modernity. It also fit with nationalization efforts, since it was often sweetened with local sugar beets, which became the primary source of sugar after the Republic’s foundation. Soda companies spread to the south and east, transported by donkey in places without cars. Gazoz became something of a rallying cry for modern Turkey.

“Wherever there are Turks in the world, there is Uludağ Gazoz,” declared Uludağ, a company that started as Nilüfer soda in the northwestern city of Bursa in 1930. In the south, the mayor of Adana encouraged Suleyman Ayman to call his nascent brand Zaman, Turkish for “time,” because it encapsulated the modern age taking over the city and the larger Cukurova region.

“People were looking for some novelty, something different in their lives, including in their drinking habits,” explains Zafer Yenal, a sociology professor at Boğaziçi University. “It was also connected with diversification of leisure activities, and the emergence of public spaces and public life.”

Gazoz quickly usurped its competitors in new and old social spaces. Truck drivers not only delivered crates of soda and ice to cities but also news, reducing the need for social hubs like coffeehouses. Turks began enjoying gazoz while watching a football match or after a good sweat at the hamam or at movie theaters. Children played games in the streets with bottle caps. People drank it to sober up or with an aspirin to cure stomach troubles.

“It was a drink for everyone, becoming accessible for all due to its cheap price. At that time, it unified all elements of society — poor and rich,” says Burak Serkan Çetinkaya, a chef and the film director behind the documentary Kapak Olsun about the culture of gazoz.

By the 1960s, there were thousands of local producers across the country.

Joshua Levkowitz

Joshua Levkowitz

Gazoz and Goliath: Facing down big soda

If the War of Independence set the stage for gazoz’s rise, the Cold War was almost the soda’s undoing. Turkey joined NATO in 1952, bringing American soldiers, tourists, and consumer products to the country. The juggernaut Coca-Cola entered the country in 1964 with its first factory in İstanbul, and Pepsi followed just two years later. Quaint local flavors could not compete with the overpowering citrus, cinnamon, and vanilla that characterized global beverage giants. By the end of the decade, Coca-Colonization was in full force, as the company organized Turkish pop festivals and held bottle cap campaigns for customers to win televisions and trips to Europe.

Some gazoz companies tried to mimic their international rivals, swapping out quaint flavors for colas. While a few, like Uludağ, Niğde, and Çamlıca, were able to pivot from local to national production and distribution, most couldn’t compete with the Americans’ advanced supply chains and deep advertising budgets.

This era of competition has become ripe for mythos. Rumors swirled that international soda companies pressured the Turkish government to establish regulations forbidding manual labor in soda production, squeezing out mom-and-pop producers, or that conglomerates hired goons to smash up local factories, or that Coca-Cola pressured Şişecam, the country’s main glass producer, into an exclusive contract for a decade, forcing gazoz producers to import more expensive bottles from neighboring countries. Turkish leftists saw Coca-Cola and Pepsi as a Trojan horse for hegemonic American influence. A 1965 cover of Yön, a left-wing magazine, warned, “Coca Cola is poison, do not drink it!”

Only a tenth of gazoz companies survived this period, and others have closed since. Though Suleyman Ayman’s son Ali was able to maintain the family business for decades, Zaman stopped producing its iconic red-and-white bottles of gazoz in 2023. His children didn’t wish to continue the business.

“Zaman will remain in people’s mouths forever,” he says bittersweetly.

The gazoz revival

Gazoz still has its fans. Many consumers view brands as fresh and free of pretense as compared to other types of soda, and they purchase gazoz as an opportunity to promote local foodways. Çetinkaya, for instance, says he always tries the local gazoz when traveling to a new city in Turkey.

More fundamentally, as globalization steamrolls over the country’s distinct cuisines and independent brands, small-batch gazoz represents a sweet backlash. As Turkish society deals with cultural and political polarization and economic crisis, gazoz is an escape, churning up the type of nostalji that Turks love.

“People aren’t expecting much from the future these days here,” professor Yenal says. “So there is a renewed focus on the past. Gazoz is a search for stability to bind people to the ground.”

Some of the country’s anxiety comes from its rapid urbanization over the last 20 years. From 2002 to 2018, the percentage of the population that lived in rural areas dropped from 35 percent to 16. For the millions who relocated, a taste of home is just a bottle of gazoz away.

“People come to find the gazoz from their childhood,” says Ufuk, a barista at Kapa Café. The İstanbul cafe serves 85 different brands from across the country. While it seems to defy the locavore spirit of gazoz, it’s also a lifeline for longtime fans and a place of discovery for neophytes.

David Lombeida

It’s not just elderly Turks seeking out flavors from their youth. On many days, young university students pile into Avam Café, also in İstanbul, to grab a few bottles out of coolers. They enjoy their gazoz surrounded by old posters featuring ecstatic women dancing in miniskirts and drinking bottles of cherry soda.

“Gazoz producers laughed at me when I first ordered crates of their soda to the cafe. They thought no one would buy it,” says Ulas Bahçıvancı, who opened Avam in 2012.

Alongside cafes like Avam and Kapa, a third wave of gazoz producers have emerged with new, creative flavors that reflect the modern tastes of their homes. Erenköy Gazozu, produced in the hip Kadıköy neighborhood on the Asian side of İstanbul, makes small-batch flavors like cardamom-lemon and nutmeg-anise. And Şirince Gazozu, made in the beautiful Şirince village south of İzmir, produces an elderberry-peach soda, as well as a flavor that utilizes a newly revived indigenous strain of white grapes. Others, like Maki, continue making gazoz under the name seltzer.

Bahçıvancı also points out that cafe owners themselves are rediscovering the possibilities of making soda from fresh ingredients. Sevda Gazozcusu, a soda shop with four locations, makes its own in-house gazoz flavors, while Gazvoda Cafe in Çannakle offers handmade, beryl- and azure-colored sodas.

These newcomers still face an uphill battle against international brands, but they make clear there’s plenty of fizz left in gazoz.

Joshua Levkowitz writes about migration and fast-food culture in the Middle East and Mediterranean — by way of Louisiana.
David Lombeida is a photojournalist and filmmaker based in Istanbul, Turkey, most recently working on topics of economy, conflict, and migration.