Whether you're in a crowded alley in Istanbul or near a beach resort in Antalya, you’ll likely come across a Tekel shop. These roadside stores, mostly with blue-painted exteriors, are remnants of the State Tobacco Monopoly (Tekel). That’s where you go to buy cigarettes. 

Tekel was created in the mid-1920s as the young Turkish state took control of the lucrative tobacco business from foreign companies, which had captured the market in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. 

Türkiye was already a tobacco producer. Even the image of the camel that became synonymous with the Camel brand has Turkish roots. RJR, the American behemoth that made Camels, used a blend of Turkish tobacco in its cigarettes. So someone in the company’s marketing department thought it fit to emboss a camel as a logo — even though Türkiye is not known for these humpy-backed mammals. 

It was a pivotal moment for the Turkish cigarette industry. 

But right around that time in Tazlar, a tiny village in the Sinanpasa district of Türkiye’s western province of Afyonkarahisar, another revolution was taking place.

Led by a village elder, Ahmet Aga, the villagers took a vow not to smoke and set an example for future generations. 

That decision permanently transformed Tazlar Village into a smoke-free sanctuary nearly a century before modern public health legislation existed. 

It has been almost a hundred years, and the village, with its population of roughly 2,000 people, still boasts a reputation as a place where the sight of smokers is almost nonexistent.  

Tazlar’s story is all the more relevant now as the Turkish government is pushing hard to curb smoking. Ankara is considering a law that will impose a lifetime ban on smoking for people born after January 2015. 

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is known for his strong opposition to smoking. He reportedly told the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to quit, which she did earlier this year. 

Multiple studies show Turks rank among the highest consumers of cigarettes. But that’s not a problem in Tazlar. 

How did it all start 

History has mostly forgotten Ahmed Aga, and the Tazlar residents can recall only what they were told by their parents. But as the story goes, Aga was driven by a desire to protect both the physical health and the limited financial resources of his people. In 1928, when the villagers took a collective oath against tobacco, Aga was able to capitalise on a moment when only a handful of villagers smoked, and he successfully persuaded them to quit. 

“We grew up without people smoking around us,” says  66-year-old Mehmet Aydogmus, who serves as village preacher and is also an accountant. “In a sense, not smoking was not a decision we made later in life. It became directly part of our lives and our culture.”

That distinction is central to understanding Tazlar’s experience.

Rather than relying solely on individual decisions, the village appears to have developed a collective culture in which smoking never became normalised. 

Aydogmus says the principle was not presented to children as a rule imposed from above. Instead, it was something they absorbed by watching their parents, grandparents and neighbours.

“When I was a child, seeing someone smoking in the village was not something we were accustomed to,” Aydogmus recalls.

Tazlar is a village of red-bricked houses, surrounded by fields of yellow tomatoes and sugar beets. Villagers here follow a set routine. They wake up early and go to bed after sunset. Here, everyone knows each other. 

The villagers’ opposition to smoking is rooted partly in health concerns, but Aydogmus says the tradition cannot be explained by health alone.

“Our elders would constantly tell us about the damage smoking causes to human health,” he says. “But they would not stop at saying that it was harmful to health.”

They also spoke about the effects of harmful habits on families, communities and individual willpower.

“We gradually learned this,” he says. “Even when we were children and did not fully understand what it meant, we knew from the attitude of our elders that this was an important issue for us.”

The village’s approach combined family responsibility, religious values and communal solidarity, says Aydogmus. 

Families looked after their children. Older people warned younger generations. Neighbours knew one another. And behaviour was understood not only as an individual matter but also as something that could affect the wider family and community.

If a child begins to develop what the family considers a harmful habit, relatives and neighbours do not necessarily remain passive.

“If a young person makes a mistake somewhere, people do not say, ‘It has nothing to do with me,’” Aydogmus says. “People know one another in the village. Everyone knows whose child and whose grandchild someone is.”

But how do you preserve a culture if there are no young people to follow in your footsteps? 

Dispersing like smoke 

Murat Karasogut, 29, who grew up in Tazlar, always gets a cultural shock when he travels to other parts of the country. 

“When we see someone smoking outside, sometimes we think, ‘We do not have something like this in our village.’”

In Tazlar, he says, not smoking became the expected norm. Young people did not necessarily need to be repeatedly told to reject smoking because cigarettes were already outside the village’s everyday culture.

“Not smoking is something that is customary in our village, so young people adopt it more easily,” he says.

That difference, he believes, remains significant even as young people encounter cigarettes more frequently elsewhere.

But more and more young people from Tazlar are moving to cities, raising concerns that the steadfast opposition to smoking might fade over time. 

More than two-thirds of the village’s young people now live in cities such as Istanbul and Bursa, lured by better education and employment prospects. 

For both Aydogmus and Karasogut, the future of Tazlar’s tradition ultimately depends on whether younger generations choose to carry it forward.

Karasogut believes young people have a particular responsibility.

“We do not want to remain in the past,” Aydogmus says. “But we do not want to lose our past either.”