Trabzon

Greek traders from Sinope founded Trapezus on the tableland above the sea in the 8th century BC, traditionally in 756; the name comes from the Greek word for a table. Xenophon's retreating Ten Thousand reached it in 400 BC and, seeing the Black Sea, are said to have shouted the famous cry of relief. Under Rome and then Byzantium the town was a frontier port, its fortunes tied to the road that carried silk and spices from Persia to the sea.

Its great age began in 1204, when Constantinople fell to the Fourth Crusade and two members of the Komnenos family established the Empire of Trebizond on this coast. For more than two and a half centuries a small state ruled from the walled town, enriched by trade with Genoese and Venetian merchants and by alliances sealed through the marriages of its princesses. The Hagia Sophia and the churches now serving as mosques date from this period. In 1461 Mehmed II took the city, ending the last Byzantine successor state, and Trabzon became an Ottoman provincial capital where the young Süleyman the Magnificent was born.

Trade kept the port alive into the 19th century, when consulates and merchant houses lined the slopes and caravans still left for Tabriz. Russian forces occupied the city during the First World War, and the Greek and Armenian communities that had lived here for centuries were destroyed by massacre, deportation and, in 1923, the population exchange with Greece. The republic rebuilt Trabzon as a provincial centre; the coastal highway, Karadeniz Technical University, founded in 1955 as the first university outside Istanbul and Ankara, and the airport tied it more closely to the rest of the country.

Trabzon carries the strong regional identity of the eastern Black Sea. The kemençe, a small upright fiddle, and the tulum bagpipe drive the horon, a line dance of rapid shivering steps performed at weddings and at the summer festivals in the pastures above the city. Improvised sung verses, often teasing, are part of the same tradition, and Black Sea music has a large audience across Turkey.

Football is close to a civic religion. Trabzonspor, founded in 1967, became the first club from outside Istanbul to win the Turkish league, and match days fill the seaside stadium and the cafés of the centre with claret and blue. The city's other public passion is its landscape: families drive up to the yayla in summer, and tea gardens on Boztepe and at Meydan are full whenever the rain stops.

The city is socially conservative, religious observance is visible, and family networks run deep, but Black Sea directness and humour are just as characteristic; the region supplies the stock character Temel of Turkish jokes. Hospitality is taken seriously, and a visitor asking directions may end up seated with a glass of tea. Older residents in some inland villages still speak Romeyka, a Greek dialect, and Laz communities begin a short way east along the coast.

About 330,000 people live in the central Ortahisar district and roughly 820,000 in Trabzon province. The city climbs in terraces from the shore, and most residents live in apartment blocks on the slopes and along the coastal strip, with the older stone-and-timber houses of the walled town and Akçaabat now a small minority of the housing.

The port handles regional cargo and trade across the Black Sea, and the economy runs on it alongside hazelnut and tea processing, construction, public administration, Karadeniz Technical University and the hospitals. Tourism matters more each year, much of it from the Gulf states, whose visitors come for the greenery and cool summers and have reshaped parts of the hotel and restaurant trade. Many families also depend on money sent home by relatives working in Istanbul or abroad.

Daily rhythm is set by tea, weather and the sea: breakfast is substantial, afternoons run on glasses of tea from the Rize gardens, and evenings mean a walk on the seafront or a drive up to a viewpoint. Rain is constant enough to be unremarkable. Recurring concerns are landslides and flooding after heavy storms, traffic on the single coastal highway, and building pressure on the valleys behind the city.

The anchovy, hamsi, dominates the winter table. It is fried in a coating of cornmeal, baked with rice as hamsili pilav, and even worked into cornbread; in season it is cheap and everywhere, and the fish restaurants near the harbour build their menus around it. Corn is the other staple, as mısır ekmeği, cornbread, and as the base for kuymak, also called muhlama, in which cornmeal is cooked in butter with stretchy local cheese and eaten with a spoon straight from the pan.

Trabzon's own pide is narrower and crisper than most, filled with minced meat, cheese or egg and cut into strips. Akçaabat köfte, from the town just west, are hand-chopped meat patties grilled over charcoal and served with onion and peppers. Karalahana, the dark collard-like cabbage grown on every slope, goes into soup and into stuffed rolls. A Black Sea breakfast can cover a whole table: herbed cheeses, mountain honey, butter, olives, jam from local fruit and hot bread.

Hazelnuts from the coast west of the city turn up in sweets, pastries and chocolate, and the region's sweet speciality is Laz böreği, layers of thin pastry around a set custard. Rize tea, grown an hour east, is drunk strong and without milk in tulip-shaped glasses, refilled repeatedly; the villages above Maçka are known for a rich rice pudding served to travellers on the mountain road.