Rize tea is the staple drink in much of Turkey. The province holds many fields where, thanks to the hot climate and probably soil, tea flourishes on its hills. The humidity can be almost suffocating. Damp is all around, and on occasion it rains that it pours, or even worse. In 2018, when I write this having scanned the slides the pictures were scanned from, there have again been torrential rains, causing mudslides and much damage. It was no different in 2002 when I took the slides I here show. Some of the slides, the ones I do not show, were unsharp, maybe because of that humidity.
I made another sub-gallery about what I called the interior. But the two overlap, tea is grown in areas that I mainly visited for its rough, part-uncultured nature. Essentially, tea is everywhere in this province.
One of some scans I made of slides, made in 1993, maybe some in 2002.