By Nazlan Ertan
Sigara (and its unruly cousin, cigara) comes to Turkish via Italian — a linguistic clue that matches the prevailing historical account: tobacco reached the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century through Genoese trade routes, though some credit goes to the British. Origins aside, the word now points to a habit so entrenched it once traveled abroad as cliché: “smoke like a Turk.”
These days, the Turkish state seems intent on disproving that.
A new tobacco control roadmap, widely reported in Turkish media, sets a striking ambition: to phase out cigarette sales by 2040. It is not law yet, but it signals direction. And in a country where smoking once defined the rhythm of public life (I remember when it was allowed on planes, intercity buses, even in classrooms, and nonsmokers could hardly raise an eyebrow, let alone object) even the suggestion landed with force.
PROHIBITIONS AND FINES
For now, policy works through pressure rather than prohibition. As of 2026, smoking in enclosed public spaces carries fines ranging from 1,764 to 5,000 lira for individuals, while businesses face penalties from 24,440 up to 122,660 lira, with repeat violations risking closure. The result is not disappearance but displacement. Smoke has been pushed out — onto pavements, into doorways, beneath café awnings that stretch the meaning of “open air.” Turkey has not stopped smoking; it has reorganised it. This is not the first attempt. Fires blamed on careless smokers led Murad IV to impose bans, dramatically enforced yet largely ineffective.
By the late empire, tobacco had become less a vice than a revenue stream, industrialised under the French-backed Régie Company and later nationalized under Tekel in the early republic. Liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s opened the market to global brands — Marlboro, Camel, Winston — that are now dominant. Regulation followed in stages: advertising bans with the 1996 law, sweeping indoor prohibitions with the 2008 legislation — which also introduced stark health warnings on packaging — full enforcement by 2009, and plain packaging by 2019. Each step narrowed the cigarette’s social space.
STILL SMOKE
Enforcement, however, remains a peculiarly Turkish balance between rule and improvisation. Airports and malls comply with near-clinical precision; smaller venues, especially in winter, negotiate. The law is visible, the workaround equally so. Still, the direction is unmistakable. Under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, anti-smoking policy has tightened steadily, moving from containment toward something closer to elimination. The 2040 target — tentative though it is — fits neatly into that trajectory.
And yet, the numbers resist. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute 2025 data, 68.1% of people report not using tobacco, down from 70% in 2022. Roughly three in ten Turks still smoke. Daily use has edged up from 27.7% to 29.1% over three years. The increase cuts across income groups, suggesting something economists describe as inelastic demand and everyone else recognises as dependency. Prices have risen — tobacco inflation broadly tracking overall inflation between 2022 and 2025 — while incomes have risen faster, leaving consumption largely intact. The cigarette, it seems, is one of the last expenses to go. Public health advocates warn of early initiation and deepening addiction, yet the cigarette continues to structure small moments of the day: the pause between tasks, the punctuation of conversation, the quiet companion to tea and rakı. As the head of Yeşilay, the Green Crescent anti-addiction charity, has put it, many smokers do not see their habit as a serious problem — they might like to quit, but feel little urgency if they do not.
The state has achieved something notable — it has cleared the air indoors. What it has not yet done is extinguish the habit itself. And so “smoking like a Turk” survives, if slightly displaced: no longer in planes and buses, rarely at the office (except mine - miserable me), but just outside, in that narrow strip of tolerated air where the law ends and the instinct to light up and chat begins.
