Laz Erotic

The Laz are a Black Sea people, concentrated along the narrow strip of coast where Turkey's Pontic mountains drop into the water and where, on the Georgian side, the same coast continues toward Batumi. That geography is most of the story. The land between mountain and sea is steep, wet, and short on flat ground, so Laz villages climb the slopes in terraces and the economy has long been built around what the climate allows — tea, hazelnuts, corn, anchovies pulled out of the Black Sea in winter. The men have a centuries-old reputation as sailors and shipbuilders, and a more recent one as Turkey's stereotypical truck drivers and bakers; jokes about Laz cunning and Laz directness circulate in Turkish humor the way Newfoundlander jokes do in Canada.

Linguistically the Laz are a surprise. Their language is Kartvelian — the same small, ancient family as Georgian, Mingrelian, and Svan — which means that despite five centuries inside the Ottoman and then Turkish state, the Laz are not a Turkic people at all. Laz is closest to Mingrelian, spoken just across the border, and the two are sometimes treated as branches of a single Zan tongue. It survives mostly at home and in song; it has never been a language of school instruction in Turkey, and a written standard has only emerged informally in the last few decades, pushed by musicians, poets, and a small revivalist press. Most younger Laz are more fluent in Turkish than in their grandparents' tongue.

The community is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, converted gradually after the Ottoman conquest of Trabzon in 1461, with the shift largely complete by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Islam is woven into village life without much of the public religiosity found further inland — Laz religiosity tends to be quiet, the mosque a fixture but not the center of identity. The split between the Turkish Laz, who form the great majority, and the much smaller Georgian Laz around Batumi reflects the 1878 redrawing of the border after the Russo-Turkish War; the latter group is largely Orthodox Christian, having stayed within the Russian and then Soviet sphere. What still binds the two sides is the language, the food — muhlama, a cornmeal-and-cheese dish eaten with a spoon — the polyphonic singing, and a stubborn sense of being neither Turkish nor Georgian but something older that the modern map has cut in half.