Introduction
In recent years, there has been growing focus on rediscovering gastronomic values in socially and economically marginalized regions in Turkey as a strategy for fostering local development. This study addresses how this transformation, which we describe as localization, highlights the significance of traditional local products and practices, often perceived as “untouched” by industrial and capitalist forces. We focus on Kars, a border region in northeastern Turkey, where traditional cheeses and agricultural products are regarded as isolated from the pressures of industrialization and commercialization. Our historical analysis shows that the commercialization of dairy farming began to reshape cheesemaking practices in Kars from the early twentieth century onwards. However, it was during the late twentieth century that these long-term transformations crystallized into a form of systemic marginalization, as Kars was increasingly excluded from dominant dairy commodity chains. We argue that the re-articulation of Kars within niche dairy markets in the twenty-first century, through an emphasis on territorial distinctiveness, emerged both as a response to this marginalization and as a product of these earlier historical processes.
In this article, we build on the articulation/disarticulation framework developed in global commodity-chain studies (Bair and Werner Reference Bair and Werner2011). Bair and Werner suggested “a disarticulations perspective” to analyze the exclusion of certain regions from dominant economic systems, and they argued that “the relationship between inclusion and exclusion as ongoing processes that are constitutive of commodity chains” (Bair and Werner Reference Bair and Werner2011, 992) is crucial in unraveling the reproduction of the uneven geographies of capitalism. The case of Kars illustrates not only historical episodes of articulation and disarticulation but also a distinctive process of re-articulation in the 2010s. In light of our historical analysis, we examine this re-articulation process through focusing on two “local-artisanal” cheeses that have recently obtained place-based labels: (1) a Geographical Indication for a local “national” artisanal cheese (Kars Kaşarı) and (2) a Presidium label for a local-Swiss artisanal cheese (Boğatepe Gravyeri). Our analysis suggests that these place-based labels that rely on community initiatives and negotiations of the quality conventions enabled Kars cheeses to re-enter dairy commodity chains under new conditions. Hence, we argue that the long-standing marginalization can paradoxically generate distinctiveness and a comparative advantage, allowing places to return to markets in transformed ways. In this sense, the conceptualization of “re-articulation” and its application to the trajectory of cheesemaking in Kars constitutes the main theoretical contribution of this paper, demonstrating how re-articulation can emerge from disarticulation under specific historical, socio-economic, and regulatory conditions. We conceptualize re-articulation not as a mere reversal of disarticulation but as a transformative socio-ecological process through which power relations, production systems, and identities are reconfigured.
David Goodman (Reference Goodman2003) defines the “quality turn” as a shift toward emphasizing food quality within local, organic, traditional, and cultural contexts, encompassing not only nutrition but also production, heritage, and authenticity. This focus leads to the commodification of these values in capitalist markets, redefining food quality and authenticity in global contexts. Globalization, with its contradictory effects, has played a crucial role in simultaneously integrating local products into global supply chains while creating new spaces for livelihood strategies rooted in local cultures and identities. De Haan (Reference De Haan2000) argues that globalization fragments and reinvents localities, making place-based resources central to survival strategies. Harvey (Reference Harvey, Panitch and Leys2001) observes that capitalism has learned to generate profit by appropriating and commodifying local traditions and cultural values. In this context, Kars Kaşarı has been revalued as an authentic product precisely because of its cultural and regional distinctiveness. While its economic value has increased, producers now find themselves negotiating between sustaining this sense of tradition and adapting to modern food safety standards imposed by the market and the state.
In a border region where pastoral dairy farming has persisted, cheeses produced from locally sourced milk have gained significant artisanal, ecological, and cultural value in the last decade. Often portrayed as “untouched” terroirs outside capitalist exploitation, these products and their landscape are romanticized as protected from the ills of the global food regime. Scholars have critiqued such narratives of authenticity for ignoring the historical and relational processes that shape terroir (West Reference West2022; West and Domingos Reference West and Domingos2012). Kars has been profoundly shaped by colonial encounters, wars, state planning, political conflict, and depopulation, which systematically marginalized its dairy production, progressively disarticulating both gravyer and kaşar cheeses from dominant industrial value chains over the late twentieth century. Paradoxically, this history of marginalization has created a “comparative advantage of being disadvantaged,” where the factors that once led to the region’s exclusion now contribute to its distinctiveness and appeal within niche markets, particularly as the commodification of quality, authenticity, and locality becomes more prominent (Nizam Reference Nizam2017a). As Fonte (Reference Fonte2008) suggests, such regions possess unique characteristics suitable for place-based labels and product differentiation strategies. Hence, Kars’s comparative advantage lies in its status as a “latecomer to industrial development” or as socially and economically marginalized but now rediscovered and revalued within alternative food movements (Fonte Reference Fonte2008).
Processes of localization have redefined the meanings of traditional agricultural practices, transforming them from signs of backwardness into valued expressions of authenticity within contemporary food networks. As commodity chains lengthen, place becomes a means of reconnecting production and consumption through narratives of authenticity. Localization strategies “displace”Footnote 1 and then “re-localize” local elements by integrating social determinants of production into supply and consumption networks (Cook and Crang Reference Cook and Crang1996). Scholars who analyzed this process of localization as “reinvention” (Grasseni et al. Reference Grasseni, Paxson, Bingen, Cohen, Freidberg and West2014) emphasized the connections between artisanal food production and alternative food networks. While a romanticized authenticity can easily become a terroir strategy for the re-invention of traditional and local food, this strategy also employs semiotic and pragmatic strategies to “address local needs of future-making” (Grasseni Reference Grasseni2023). In Boğatepe, a village that has gained prominence in Kars in recent decades through the revival of gravyer production and eco-tourism, small dairy farmers, through collective action and locally embedded practices, have redefined the territorial meaning of artisanal cheese as a matter of local identity and collective agency.
As Goodman (Reference Goodman2001) famously argues, “ontology matters” in agro-food studies. Scholars have already demonstrated that the industrialization processes in agriculture have been fragmented and partial due to the natural constraints that stem from the biophysical processes of agricultural production (Goodman et al. Reference Goodman, Sorj and Wilkinson1987; Kloppenburg Reference Kloppenburg1988). This, in turn, generates numerous dynamic rent opportunities (based on territory and territorial qualities), shaped by the discontinuous and partial industrialization of agriculture in different regions (Nizam Reference Nizam2017b). Building on studies that problematize how commodity relations involve natural–cultural worlds, the agency of “nature,” and the material properties of non-human entities (Faier Reference Faier2011), we consider the ways in which “ontological” differences between the two cheeses impact their respective supply chains. Our analysis reveals that kaşar and gravyer cheeses are not passive products of human labor but possess a material agency whose specificities shape and transform their own supply chains. We aim to broaden political economy and commodity-chain approaches by incorporating the agency of non-human elements – livestock, pastures, and artisanal tools – in shaping value and quality.
This research is based on data obtained from multiple and diverse field studies conducted by the authors in the Kars region between 2015 and 2024. A large proportion of the data used in this study is based on ethnographic research conducted by Tatari. As part of this research, he carried out preliminary research visits for one month in the summers of 2015 and 2016, followed by eighteen-month ethnographic doctoral dissertation research between September 2017 and March 2019. During this period, Tatari interviewed fifty dairy owners, eighty cheesemakers, twenty public officials, and thirteen dairy scientists. In addition to visiting all the registered dairies producing kaşar and gravyer in Kars and Ardahan, he worked regularly at three different rural dairies for over two months, participating in and observing the production of kaşar and gravyer cheese for long hours. The research also included his annual visits to Boğatepe for at least two weeks between 2021 and 2024. The data collected by the two researchers over the years was reanalyzed through a recent follow-up study, as they conducted a joint field visit in the summer of 2024. Throughout the course of this long-term engagement, both authors contributed to community-building initiatives through a participatory action research approach. This involvement not only facilitated trust and collaboration with local actors but also provided a deeper observation of the community’s internal dynamics and collective practices. This triangulation of methods, sources, and temporal perspectives provides a comprehensive understanding of the region’s socio-economic and cultural dynamics.
This article has four sections. The Introduction outlines the research framework and methodology. The second section examines Kars Kaşarı and Boğatepe Gravyeri cheeses through the disarticulation approach. The third section analyzes Kars’s shifting role in dairy commodity chains, highlighting key turning points of articulation and disarticulation since the early twentieth century until 2004. The fourth section explores Kars’s re-articulation in the 2010s, focusing on community development and the balance between standardization and tradition in defining quality. The article concludes with a synthesis of findings and their broader implications.
Boğatepe Gravyeri and Kars Kaşarı cheeses
Over the last two decades in Turkey, under the pressures of market liberalization and agrarian restructuring, rural communities have strategically leveraged their cultural and traditional attributes to differentiate their products in increasingly competitive markets. As place-based labels gain prominence, there is a growing trend among local initiatives to secure certifications such as “Geographical Indication” or “Presidium” labels to enhance their product differentiation strategies. This study focuses on Boğatepe, a village in northeastern Turkey, which, despite its historical marginalization and sparse population, has seen a rising demand for its artisanal cheeses, driven by consumer preferences for authentic, artisanal, and nutritious products.
The Boğatepe Environment and Life Association (Boğatepe Çevre ve Yaşam Derneği, “Boğatepe Association” hereafter), a small village association composed of the dairy farmers of Boğatepe, has successfully obtained two notable certifications in 2015: a Geographical Indication for Kars Kaşarı, a cheese recognized nationally, and a Presidium label for Boğatepe Gravyeri, a local adaptation of Swiss cheese. While these cheeses are adaptations rather than indigenous varieties, they reflect the region’s ecological conditions, migration stories of the producers, and changing consumer preferences in Turkey. Table 1 illustrates the distinct strategies of product differentiation employed for these two cheeses, highlighting their varying identities, socio-economic consumer bases, historical influences, and the commodification processes shaping their production. While Kars Kaşarı is a cheese primarily consumed by the lower and middle classes and is widely available in national markets, Boğatepe Gravyeri is increasingly gaining prominence as a cheese favored by the upper class and is considered a more elite product. The industrial and market dynamics that reinforced this differentiation are discussed in the following sections.
Table 1. Comparative analysis of production differentiation strategies for Kars Kaşarı and Boğatepe Gravyeri
Kars is one of the northeastern border provinces of Turkey with a complex historical background resulting from its geographical location between South Caucasus and Anatolia, which has been a culturally and linguistically diverse border region between the Ottoman and Russian empires for centuries. Following the war between the two empires in 1877–1878, Kars became part of Tsarist Russia. During the Russian rule until World War I, the Swiss and German artisans, who settled in the rural South Caucasus as part of the modernization efforts by the Ottoman Empire through agricultural colonies, introduced Swiss cheese to a region encompassing today’s northeastern Turkey, southern Georgia and northern Armenia. Following the war and violent clashes between Turkish and Armenian armed forces until 1920, the new nation-state borders were drawn by the Turkish state with the Soviet republics of Georgia and Armenia. While most non-Muslim communities left the Turkish side of the borders, many Turkish and Kurdish families migrated from the other side of the new borders. These demographic changes in the 1920s determined the trajectory of a particular variety of Swiss cheese as gravyer, which was revived by the Terekeme families who immigrated from the other side of the new borders and settled in Kars. The initially cooperative dairy production in common pastures later gave way to privately owned pasturelands and dairy farms by 1960.
Kaşar cheese, on the other hand, began to be produced in Kars as part of new social and economic development policies implemented by the Republic of Turkey after 1923. Two cheese masters from northwestern Turkey, who were immigrants from the western Thrace region with close ties to the new Turkish government, are considered the pioneer kaşar producers in Kars (Üresin Reference Üresin1936) where numerous Bulgarian masters followed them and taught kaşar cheesemaking to the local population (Ünsal Reference Ünsal and Torun2014). Kaşar production that quickly spread across the province became central to the (unsuccessful attempts of) state-directed industrialization of dairy farming in the region especially after the 1960s.
Although the region produces numerous other traditional cheese varieties, its re-articulation within dairy commodity chains after 2010 remained limited to Kars Kaşarı and Boğatepe Gravyeri.Footnote 2 The two trademark cheeses were better suited candidates for the dairy commodity chains not only due to their introduction as commercial cheeses before becoming part of the local diet, but also because they served as reminders of the complicated history of forced migration in different ways. The certification of Kars Kaşarı and Boğatepe Gravyeri as cultural heritage has re-territorialized Kars’s marginal border position into a symbolic and economic resource within national and global circuits. Through the material specificities of local biodiversity, cattle breeds, artisanal know-how, and histories of mobility and depopulation, the cheeses have become sites where social and ecological relations are inscribed and made visible through their material form, producing a distinctive terroir and re-articulating local subjectivities within broader agri-food networks. Before analyzing more closely the re-articulation of Boğatepe Gravyeri and Kars Kaşarı cheeses within the national commodity chains after the first decade of the twenty-first century, we first examine the important turning points in the development of commercial dairy farming and industrial cheesemaking in Kars and Turkey in the twentieth century, which led to their disarticulation.
Articulation and disarticulation of rural Kars within the dairy commodity chains in the twentieth century
This section analyzes the processes of articulation and disarticulation of Kars cheeses within dairy commodity chains, examining these dynamics across four important turning points for the local cheesemaking in Kars: (1) the introduction of Swiss cheese in the early twentieth century and its decline during World War I; (2) the reappropriation of gravyer and the emergence of kaşar in the late 1920s; (3) the decline of gravyer and the industrialization of kaşar in the late 1970s; and (4) the decline of kaşar production in the late 1990s. These phases demonstrate that supply chains are in a state of continuous interaction, deeply intertwined with migration patterns, power relations, dynamics of solidarity and conflict, economic models, as well as the ontologies of kaşar and gravyer cheeses. Our historical analysis challenges the idealization of Kars as an untouched landscape, showing how the material specificities of its cheeses both shape and are shaped by the organization of supply chains and the region’s broader socio-political and spatial dynamics.
Arrival of “Swiss cheese” in Kars
Among the Swiss and German entrepreneurs who had established settlements in the South Caucasus under Tsarist Russian rule in the late nineteenth century, there were important cheesemaker families who brought herds of cows and dairy equipment from Switzerland to the newly founded dairy production centers in the region including Kars. According to the records of the Tsarist Russian state, in 1910, there were thirty-two Swiss cheese dairies within the contemporary borders of Kars and Ardahan provinces (Badem Reference Badem and Torun2014, 56). Most of these dairies (zavots) were owned and operated by German and Swiss entrepreneurs. In the first decades of the twentieth century, these families also established partnerships with local families who learned Swiss cheesemaking in these dairies (Badem Reference Badem and Torun2014; Tatari Reference Tatari, Nizam and Tatari2018; Ünsal Reference Ünsal and Torun2014). The dairy owners chose high-altitude pastures where local communities herded dairy animals and where large quantities of milk could be collected and processed quickly. The materiality of “Swiss cheese,” i.e. requiring high quantities of milk and the end products as aged large wheels that have a relatively long shelf life, underpinned the new dairy arrangements. The cheese was marketed in the growing urban centers of the Russian Empire, facilitated by newly constructed railways. Commercial dairy production, particularly Swiss cheesemaking, became a principal means of linking rural Kars to the commodity chains within the imperial economy of the Russian Empire. This colonial articulation enabled the commercialization of milk production by peasant households.
The production of Swiss cheese in the South Caucasus was interrupted during World War I that was followed by the Bolshevik Revolution and the Turkish War of Independence. During this period, most German, Swiss, and Russian settler families left the region, along with other non-Muslim communities such as Armenians, Greeks, Molokans, and Dukhobors, who forcefully or voluntarily abandoned the villages and pastures of the contemporary provinces of Kars and Ardahan.
From Swiss cheese to gravyer cheese in the 1920s
After 1920, when the borders between the Turkish Republic and the Soviet Union were established by the Ankara Treaty, new inhabitants settled in the abandoned villages and pastures. Some Terekeme families who migrated from what is now southern Georgia and northern Armenia to Kars and Ardahan were already familiar with Swiss cheesemaking. They had either previously partnered with Swiss and German cheesemakers or had been employed by them. As a result, several of the abandoned dairies were revived during the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1931, Ekrem Rüştü Üresin (İzmen), a pioneering dairy scientist of Turkey, identified nine Swiss cheese, i.e. “gravyer,” dairies in Kars (Üresin Reference Üresin1936, 37). According to a detailed study of Kars dairy production conducted in 1951 by zootechnician Ali Aras, there were six gravyer dairies in Kars (Aras Reference Aras1954, 154). Except those in Boğatepe and Harziyan villages, the remaining four gravyer dairies were located on large pasture-farms where common pastures had been privatized by wealthy cheesemaker families. The location of the dairies was related to the need of large quantities of milk – around 1.2 tons for one wheel of cheese – for gravyer cheesemaking, and to the need of capital since the cheese required at least four to five months of ripening before being sold in the market. These private pasture-farm dairies depended on specific dairy arrangements with surrounding villages, allowing only certain groups of peasants to herd their dairy animals in these pastures in exchange for milk. Growing discontent among the peasants who could no longer access the formerly communal pastures eventually led to conflicts in the 1970s.
As Üresin (Reference Üresin1936) highlights, most of the gravyer cheese produced in Kars during the 1930s was exported to the Soviet Union. This trend continued until World War II. Despite interruptions caused by the war and the Cold War period, gravyer cheese exports remained a major source of revenue for the dairy owners, alongside the limited market in İstanbul and the marginal one in Ankara.
Arrival of kaşar cheese in Kars
Kaşar cheesemaking in Kars began for the first time in the 1920s. The pioneers, Fehmi Bey and Halim Bey, were both immigrants from the western Thrace region (the former from Filibe, Bulgaria, and the latter from Thessaloniki, Greece), an area known for its Kashkaval cheese production. Oral history research suggests that Bulgarian cheesemakers employed in the early kaşar dairies of the 1930s played a crucial role in teaching local community members the craft of kaşar cheesemaking (Tatari Reference Tatari, Nizam and Tatari2018; Ünsal Reference Ünsal and Torun2014). The number of kaşar dairies increased rapidly over the following decades (see Aras Reference Aras1954; Kurt Reference Kurt1968; Üresin Reference Üresin1936). Due to the smaller amount of milk required for kaşar cheesemaking and its relatively less complicated process compared to gravyer, small-scale production spread quickly.
While numerous small and seasonal kaşar dairies processing milk from a few households proliferated, a significant proportion of kaşar cheese was produced on private pasture-farms, which were also key gravyer production centers until the late 1970s. In 1968, the Turkey Dairy Industry Institution (Türkiye Süt Endüstrisi Kurumu) established a dairy factory in Kars, of which kaşar cheese has become the principal product (Saltık Reference Saltık2003; Tatari Reference Tatari2023). Rather than being exported, commercially produced kaşar cheese was rapidly articulated into the dairy supply chains within the national boundaries of Turkey. Along with İstanbul and Ankara, Trabzon, the largest port in the eastern Black Sea region and the easiest way to access İstanbul and its trade routes for Kars, emerged as the major markets for Kars Kaşarı cheese.
Industrialization of kaşar cheese and disarticulation of gravyer cheese after the 1970s
During the 1970s, new large-scale privately owned dairy factories were established in western Turkey. Among these, one processed cheese factory became crucial for Kars cheesemaking, as it was founded by a merchant who had previously purchased a significant amount of the kaşar and gravyer cheeses from Kars. As a pioneering industrial cheese factory in the country, it began processing these cheeses into triangle-shaped industrial cheese (üçgen peynir) which carried Kars in its name and became a very popular brand in İstanbul (Tatari Reference Tatari2023, 115–125). The industrial process enabled reductions in the cost of production by buying lower-quality Kars cheeses from the small-scale producers in Kars at a lower price. According to the cheesemakers we interviewed in Kars after 2015, the industrialization that began in the 1970s led to Kars Kaşarı cheese being perceived as a lower-quality product in the national dairy market. This was partly because cheesemakers in Kars could sell not only their less-than-perfect cheeses which were not aged properly, but also cheeses made from skim milk to the industrial processed cheese factories. The latter allowed cheesemakers to separate the fat from the milk before kaşar production, and to produce butter, which could be sold separately. As a result of the connection between industrial cheese-processing technologies and the specific properties of kaşar cheese, Kars Kaşarı increasingly became articulated into industrial commodity chains as an intermediate product within national dairy production after the mid-1970s.
While kaşar cheese was increasingly used as an intermediate product in industrial dairy production, the use of gravyer cheese in this sector remained limited. After the 1970s, Kars Gravyeri cheese lost its popularity not only because of the newly emerging industrial processing technologies but also due to the rising political mobilization in the country. Most gravyer producers were located on large, privately owned dairy farms that had once been common pastures. These farms faced growing discontent from local peasants, who were excluded from pasture use due to the dairy arrangements imposed by the farm owners. In some cases, this conflict manifested along ethnic lines, as Kurdish peasants were excluded from the pastures by Turkish Terekeme farm owners.
By the late 1970s, this discontent intensified and aligned with the political and ethnic mobilizations of the era. With the rise of leftist revolutionary movements and political unrest leading up to the military coup of September 12, 1980, Kars became a focal point of political activity. In the final years of the decade, all gravyer dairies were attacked – either the owners of the dairies or the dairies themselves were attacked by guns, and one pasture-farm was occupied by the peasants from nearby villages. These attacks disrupted gravyer cheesemaking in the province and led to the almost complete disarticulation of gravyer cheese from the dairy commodity chains that had become increasingly industrialized since the 1970s.
The violent military coup of 1980 was soon followed by armed conflict between the Turkish army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan; PKK) in the predominantly Kurdish provinces of eastern and southeastern Turkey. As the northern boundary of this predominantly Kurdish region, Kars was impacted by the clashes and counter-insurgency measures.Footnote 3 This period also marked the end of the state-regulated economy in Turkey, with a shift toward free-market policies in agriculture. The dairy factory in Kars had long operated below capacity and was described as inefficient in official state reports, mainly due to seasonal fluctuations in milk supply and a system of pre-payments from dairy owners to farmers (Saltık Reference Saltık2003; Tatari Reference Tatari2023). It ceased operations in 1986 and was subsequently leased to a private company that continued production at a reduced scale until 1991. Due to political and economic factors, both human and dairy-animal populations declined sharply between 1980 and 2000. During these two decades, Kars was among the provinces with the highest rates of out-migration (Khalaf Reference Khalaf2019; Özyakışır Reference Özyakışır2023).
Although reliable data on dairy production in the decades following 1980 is scarce, studies suggest a significant decline in gravyer cheesemaking (Saltık Reference Saltık2003; Tatari Reference Tatari2023; Ünsal Reference Ünsal and Torun2014). Of the four large pasture-farms producing gravyer by 1975, only one continued production intermittently after 1980. This decline in gravyer production left farmers unable to sell their milk to the large dairies, which in turn led to the proliferation of small-scale kaşar cheese dairies across many villages. Official records stated that there were forty-nine registered dairies in Kars in 2001, but the number of informal and seasonal dairies exceeded 350 (Saltık Reference Saltık2003, 50). The villages relatively closer to high-altitude pastures with large herds of dairy animals had an advantage in producing kaşar cheeses. Boğatepe, along with a few other villages, benefited from this advantage. As one resident put it: at that time “there was almost a dairy at every doorstep” (“neredeyse her kapıda bir mandıra vardı”).
Disarticulation of kaşar cheese in the late 1990s
Against this background, two key factors contributed to the disarticulation of Kars from the dairy commodity chains in the 1990s. The first was the rapid industrialization of the dairy sector in Turkey and the accompanying policies that favored large industrial dairy factories. Rather than supporting the improvement of small rural dairies, new “organized industrial zones” (OIZs) were established for large-scale factories in Kars and Ardahan. While entrepreneurs were incentivized to invest in these new factories, dairies located in the OIZs faced challenges in sourcing milk from distant producers. As a result, pastures and villages more distant from these centers became increasingly de-linked from larger-scale dairy production within the national economy.
The second factor was the food codex introduced during the European Union membership negotiations. In 1997, the Turkish government implemented new food safety reforms and regulations, declaring a transition period until 2004. During these seven years, small dairy producers were required to obtain permits from the Ministry of Health, rather than the Ministry of Agriculture, to ensure food safety in the production process. The new criteria made it very difficult and costly for mobile dairies in pastures and small dairies in villages to obtain official production permits (manufacture license), as dairy production not meeting Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) requirements was officially banned. The new requirements included pasteurization procedures for milk processing, the use of stainless steel and chrome instead of wood or copper materials, and the covering of dairies’ cement or stone walls with easily cleanable tiles, among others (Apaydın Reference Apaydın, Nizam and Tatari2018; Çoksöyler et al. Reference Çoksöyler, Dizdar, Korkut, Ataman and Çepni2005; Müftügil Reference Müftügil, Nizam and Tatari2018; Tatari Reference Tatari2020). This also marked the end of the baskı method, instead requiring all cheesemakers to collect and process raw milk under conditions specified by law (Tatari Reference Tatari2022). Consequently, by the mid-2000s, a significant proportion of commercial dairy farming was excluded from the formal dairy economy in Turkey, as most rural dairies could not meet the industrially oriented HACCP criteria and thus could not continue producing local, traditional, and artisanal cheeses.
In conclusion, the case of Kars illustrates how the relationship between cheese, people, and place has been shaped by political conflicts, migration patterns, and economic restructurings. In this process, cheesemaking practices and the distinctive material specificities of cheeses such as their production processes, maturation period, and durability also co-shaped the region’s articulation and disarticulation with national and global agri-food networks. In the following section, we focus on the re-articulation of Kars within contemporary dairy commodity chains through the introduction of place-based labels after the 2010s. We argue that the material properties of Boğatepe Gravyeri and Kars Kaşarı cheeses carry a form of agency that both shapes and reflects the territorial dynamics of their production. Collective action played a crucial role in defining these qualities and institutionalizing the place-based labels, particularly through the establishment of a village association, the active involvement of women, and the formation of alliances among farmers, cheesemakers, development officials, and consumers. In examining the re-articulation of Kars within the dairy commodity chains, we focus on how notions of “quality” were negotiated between traditional production practices and modern food safety standards.
Re-articulation of Kars within the dairy commodity chains through place-based labels in the 2010s
In this section, we focus on the re-articulation of Kars within dairy commodity chains in the 2010s through the place-based labels of Kars Kaşarı Geographical Indication (“Kaşar GI” hereafter) and Boğatepe Gravyeri Slow Food Presidium (“Gravyer Presidium” hereafter). Place-based labels, as a form of collective ownership, provide an instrument for communities to protect the territorial qualities of their products by reinventing them as rent-generating properties, while simultaneously shaping the future within a collective action. As we explain below, the process of securing place-based labels for local products like Kars Kaşarı and Boğatepe Gravyeri must be understood as part of the ongoing community-building process. This process reveals the collective action of local actors to preserve traditional practices and to resist the homogenizing effects of global food regimes. Food safety regulations that aim to enhance quality control often increase production costs and limit access to market channels, particularly for small-scale producers. They strictly define what constitutes quality and who or what can be included in supply chains. In the early 2000s, due to the regulations introduced in the previous section, traditional methods were perceived as an inability or barrier in accessing supermarket-driven markets. Yet, the local-traditional production of cheeses and the demand outside the supermarkets persisted. As the localization process became manifest in the late 2010s, the preservation of the local values has increasingly come to represent both the protection of surplus value and a rent-generating instrument (Mutersbaugh Reference Mutersbaugh2005).
Hence our analysis in this section examines two crucial tenets of the re-articulation process as reflected in the place-based labels of Kars Kaşarı and Boğatepe Gravyeri: (1) collective action and community development in the process of acquiring the labels; and (2) defining the territorial quality through a new convention of quality, emerging from the negotiation. The focus on these two tenets is driven by the broader neoliberal transformation in Turkey’s agricultural and food sectors, where food standardization, hygiene regulations, and the processes of supermarketization and industrialization work in tandem to reinforce one another.
Collective action, knowledge, and community development
Collective action was key in the re-articulation of Kars cheeses as locally distinctive and economically valued products. Both labels were initiated by the efforts of a small village association: the Boğatepe Association. The Boğatepe Association consists of more than fifty dairy farmer members, the majority of whom are women from the two Boğatepe villages. This association was founded in 2007, a direct result of almost ten years of small farmer organizing in Kars. As the starting point of the story of their association, the members point to a tragic traffic accident that happened in 2001 and killed more than twenty Boğatepe peasants. The accident intensified depopulation in the village; not only were many houses closed but also the only active gravyer dairy at the time had to stop operating due to the death of the gravyer master. In our interviews, this accident was remembered as a starting point for the remaining villagers to work for a better life in their village.
In the period following the accident, collective responses in the village were significantly shaped by the return of a locally rooted actor whose experiences and social networks extended well beyond the region. Acting as a key intermediary, this individual mobilized connections across alternative rural development initiatives, civil society organizations, and emerging food networks, while simultaneously founding the association, organizing villagers around dairy production, solidarity tourism, and collective forms of action. These connections allowed village-based organizing to be reoriented toward cultural heritage and knowledge production, materializing in projects such as collaborative historical research on local cheesemaking in Kars, and the establishment of the cheese ecomuseum in Boğatepe.
Dairy farming and cheesemaking have always been the main source of revenue for Boğatepe farmers. Therefore, it is not surprising that Boğatepe Association farmers aimed to increase and certify the dairy production in the village, as almost all the households rely on selling milk to the dairies. Boğatepe Association members founded the Ekomüze Zavot in 2010 – an ecomuseum of the local-traditional cheeses that gathered many stories, artifacts, and documents that belong to the past of cheesemaking in Kars, specifically in Boğatepe. The central building of the ecomuseum is an old dairy constructed in the early 1900s by Swiss cheesemakers and used by Boğatepe cheesemakers as a cooperative until the 1970s. The renovation was carried out through both United Nations Development Programme funding and collective village labor organized in the spirit of the traditional imece system. The ecomuseum contributed to the increasing fame of Boğatepe for the visitors of Kars, and it provided a new platform for ongoing small farmer organizations, research initiatives, and collaborative networks between farmers, cheesemakers, scientists, public officials, and activists around artisanal cheesemaking.
In 2013, Boğatepe Association members and cheesemakers of the village started two new projects funded by the regional public development agency: one on the oral history of local cheesemaking in Kars; the other on the scientific evaluation of the distinctive properties of Kars Kaşarı cheese. Both projects contributed to the acquirement of the place-based labels of Kaşar GI and Gravyer Presidium in 2015. In 2014–2015, a European Union-funded project led by Ardahan University turned the Boğatepe Association into a key hub for documenting the traditional cheese varieties of Kars and Ardahan. The same year, Slow Food members in Turkey compiled a database of heritage products including gravyer during the international project led by Slow Food International.
These projects have connected the Boğatepe Association to wider networks of artisanal cheesemaking involving various extralocal actors. On the one hand the association members and cheesemakers of the village started to have close contacts with food scientists and microbiologists with whom they collaboratively designed research questions to study dairy farming and artisanal cheesemaking (Tatari Reference Tatari, Kaşdoğan, Kurtiç and Ekinci2025). On the other hand, the emerging networks among farmers, cheesemakers, academics, and public officials on Kars cheesemaking triggered the pathway of acquiring place-based labels for artisanal cheeses to support rural life in Kars. Moreover, this process ensured the participation of small farmers and rural cheesemakers in the designation of the place-based labels.
The founder and president of the association who is a third-generation gravyer master with a history of leftist political organizing and participation in farmers’ movements since the 1970s, has long been involved in alternative food and rural development networks in Turkey and abroad. His engagement in international solidarity platforms such as La Via Campesina and Slow Food, along with the inclusion of Kars cheeses in emerging urban alternative food networks, marked a crucial turning point in the region’s development. As one of the first local initiatives in Turkey to integrate into these networks, dairy production in Boğatepe and Kars rapidly gained recognition and reputation. Boğatepe’s cheeses reach consumers through multiple channels: they are sold directly to visitors through rural tourism, circulate within solidarity-based food networks, and appear in urban fine-dining restaurants as well as on supermarket shelves. This wide circulation has led some scholars to question how “alternative” such practices truly are (Soysal Al and Küçük Reference Soysal Al and Küçük2019). Research on agri-food supply chains shows that producers often market their own branded products in local niche markets while also supplying raw materials to large companies. This dual engagement illustrates that commodity chains are not linear but complex and multi-layered, as producers continually negotiate different conventions of quality across distinct market channels (Nizam Reference Nizam2017c). In Boğatepe, a similar dual strategy emerged as producers supplied both large retail chains and alternative food networks such as consumer cooperatives or community-supported agricultural groups grounded in solidarity and moral economies.Footnote 4 Navigating the tension between community goals and market demands, participation in these networks strengthened local solidarity while also turning locality into an economic asset, paving the way for the region’s re-articulation in the 2010s.
Cheese-related festive events and tourism activities in the village – such as home-based accommodation and breakfast services for visitors, handicraft workshops, and several training programs – have been central to community-building in Boğatepe village. Women’s active participation in these initiatives has not only expanded their economic resources but also considerably enhanced their social capital, particularly in the form of bridging ties that connect them to wider networks beyond the village. In this sense, the recognition the village enjoys today owes much to the role played by women, for whom community-building has functioned as a process of significant empowerment.
Rural tourism has strengthened Boğatepe’s external linkages but weakened its internal solidarity. Community-building in the village has been shaped by meritocratic dynamics: as some women have invested more time, resources, and entrepreneurial effort than others, economic gains have become uneven, giving rise to new hierarchies and weakening the sense of community. This tension peaked in 2018, when the Ministry of Trade’s “Woman Entrepreneur of the Year” award was granted to a single woman, turning collective achievement into individual recognition and overshadowing the shared effort behind it. The lack of cooperative organization has left women’s achievements largely individualized, reinforcing the social divisions emerging within the community. At present, community participation appears weakened; as capital has accumulated, many women have relocated to the city center, seeking more independent lives and easier access to public services. Cheesemaking in Boğatepe is characterized by gendered divisions of labor: men dominate the commercial production of gravyer and kaşar, while women’s household-based cheesemaking remains largely excluded from market circuits. Confronting these gendered inequalities through cooperative structures can be key to fostering more inclusive forms of community development.
Standardization, tradition, and terroir
In this section, we examine the production practices that reveal how local communities navigate the tensions and trade-offs between standardization and tradition. This analysis illustrates how evolving definitions of quality shape and are simultaneously shaped not only by community-building processes but also by the material dimensions of production, i.e. the ontology of cheeses from dairy farming in pastures to artisanal methods of cheesemaking and ripening.
Pastoralism and pasture milk
During the meetings among the farmers and cheesemakers, which contributed significantly to the design of the place-based labels linking the kaşar and gravyer cheeses to the national food markets, the most important starting point of the production has been identified as “pasture milk” (mera sütü). Both labels emphasize the special properties of the milk coming from the pastures. While the Kaşar GI indicates all the pastures within the administrative borders of Kars and Ardahan provinces as the source of milk, the Gravyer Presidium refers to the pastures of the Large and Small Boğatepe villages. Furthermore, both implement a seasonal restriction to the certified production. In other words, both cheeses must be made from pasture milk between May and September when cows graze in the open-air pastures of the designated area.
Pastures play a central role in local cheesemaking, shaping both the distinctive taste of the cheese and the production relations that organize dairy production. The quality and flavor of milk – and consequently of cheese – are directly linked to what and how cows graze in these highland pastures, making pastoralism (mera hayvancılığı) an integral and constitutive component of the dairy commodity chains. In Kars, as in most of Anatolia, dairy production relies on small family farming units. In practice, small farmers with a handful of dairy cows bring their animals together to form a collective herd and hire a shepherd who pastures them between May and September. As this pasture season is the only period when certified cheese production takes place, the local system of shepherding, the use of commons, and traditional patterns of rotational grazing remain crucial to the value and distinctiveness of local cheeses. Through this enduring practice of pastoralism, the local community conveys the meaning of its dairy production and the authenticity of its taste to urban consumers. While these ongoing practices sustain the ecological and social basis of artisanal cheesemaking, they are only marginally acknowledged in the official documents prepared for the place-based labels.Footnote 5
Artisanal techniques
The terroir of Kars cheeses reflects traditional techniques used by skilled artisans, which are detailed in certifications that highlight the cheesemakers’ mastery. When integrated into artisanal cheesemaking, the food safety regulations that were introduced in 2004 as part of the European Union membership negotiations aimed to standardize cheeses, and they often conflict with traditional methods. Standardization reduces variability but also diminishes the unique, place-based characteristics of artisanal products. Cheesemakers face pressure to balance tradition with food safety, ensuring a consistent product while maintaining the distinct flavors of local milk, which inevitably changes daily and seasonally. Hence, they seek a compromise between standardization and tradition to define and enact the terroir of Kars cheeses.
Kars Kaşarı and Boğatepe Gravyeri cheeses are both certified with place-based labels, though their certification processes differ significantly. The Turkish GI legislation, recognized by the state, ensures compliance with the national food safety legislations, while the Gravyer Presidium, managed by Slow Food, does not. The use of copper vats, wooden equipment, and stone aging rooms which are essential in gravyer production is explicitly described in the Gravyer Presidium guidelines as key to reflecting the terroir. However, the Kaşar GI legislation had to address traditional methods more cautiously to avoid contradicting food safety regulations. This led to vague descriptions in the GI legislation, especially regarding traditional techniques and the materials used in the process.
Kaşar GI legislation explicitly challenges standardization by the cheese-processing machinery that has been replacing skillful artisan practice. It rejects the use of dry-boiling machines, which have replaced traditional wet-boiling and kneading methods in larger dairies. Dry-boiling machines standardize the cheesemaking process, eliminating the need for human touch and creating uniform batches. In contrast, the GI legislation highlights wet-boiling and kneading as essential for preserving the flavor of pasture milk. Cheesemakers emphasize these traditional techniques as crucial for achieving the proper texture and taste.
Gravyer, on the other hand, involves more labor-intensive methods. The Presidium certification emphasizes the use of copper vats, which hold up to one ton of milk. While industrial methods prioritize pasteurization and the use of stainless-steel vats, according to the cheesemakers the use of raw milk and copper vats in crafting gravyer preserves the local terroir, helps achieve the correct pH level for fermentation, and promotes the development of beneficial micro-organisms. This traditional approach contrasts with industrial methods that prioritize standardization and food safety.
Making gravyer cheese requires more manual labor than kaşar, with multiple artisans needed to manage the curd and ensure it reaches the desired texture. The process involves stirring and cutting the curd in large vats, a task that can take more than two hours. Apprentices assist the master cheesemaker, following precise techniques to remove the curd and press it into molds. The use of wooden tools to exert pressure on the cheese wheels is conceived as necessary, as they help carry the taste from the previous batches or incorporate the desired micro-organisms into the cheese, explained the cheesemakers. These artisanal methods, though not all aligned with food safety regulations, are integral to the terroir of gravyer cheese.
Aging
Another component that complicates the compromise between terroir and standardization concerns the aging process. Kaşar GI specifies that the wheels of kaşar cheeses should be aged for at least ninety days to be called “old Kars Kaşarı.” However, before the wheels are taken to cold storage rooms or facilities to be aged, they must stay in special aging rooms called çardaks for at least forty-five days. Çardaks must be open to the winds coming from the North. This process ensures the desired level of drying of the cheeses, forming a harder crust around the wheel, and allowing a perfect affinage later. This process described in the legislation implies that the aging period depends heavily on the local climate conditions rather than controlled environments with automated air-condition technologies. It also represents one of the difficult criteria for the small-scale cheesemakers who need to sell their cheeses quickly after production since they need cash, or they do not have enough space in the çardak of their small dairy facility.
The aging process is more complicated for the wheels of gravyer that stay under pressure for twenty-four hours after being molded. During this time, apprentices change the cloth that covers the cheese at least four times. Gravyer Presidium narrates the stages in detail: then the wheel rests for about thirty-six to forty-eight hours before being put into brine. After four to five days in the brine, the wheels are taken in aging rooms (badval). First, they stay in a sıcak badval (hot aging room) for about four weeks at 80 percent humidity and 25–30°C. In the old dairy buildings, the sıcak badval is equipped with a stove that burns coal or wood, and a large pot full of water. This system requires frequent visits by the master who needs to check the temperature and humidity levels, ripe the wheels, add salt on top, and inspect the aging process of the cheeses. The wheels of cheeses have to be rotated almost every day. The cheeses that are on the shelves close to the stove are relocated to the further away shelves a few days later. The master listens to the wheels and looks at their shape – cheeses swell as propionic bacteria activated at this stage create the holes by releasing carbon dioxide – and decides the movement within the room. Hence there is constant movement, that asks for at least two people’s labor to move the wheels that weigh at least 60 kg. After the sıcak badval, the wheels are taken to a soğuk badval (cold aging room) where they stay for at least five more months. Both badvals are located partly under the soil, in stone buildings with traditional roofs that have soil on top. These aging conditions are far from meeting the industrial standardized conditions where the cheese is kept in cement buildings, tiled walls, under automatic air conditioning.
Both Kaşar GI and Gravyer Presidium labels as the effective instruments in the re-articulation of Kars cheesemaking within the dairy commodity chains highlight the traditional and artisanal methods of cheesemaking in the making of the terroir of Kars pasture-cheesemaking. Rather than the standardization methods that aim to introduce uniformity, these place-based labels highlight product-specific requirements, which are not always in line with food safety regulations, and which leave room for pasture-, climate-, and master-related differences. This variation ensures the authenticity of the products and points to a compromise between tradition and standardization that encapsulates the terroir in the cheese.
Conclusion
As a borderland region, Kars remained peripheral to the national development policies that promoted monocultural and industrial agriculture in Turkey during the second half of the twentieth century. State efforts to promote kaşar cheese as a strategic vehicle for scaling and efficiency resulted in only partial standardization, and localized, pasture-based dairying continued to define the region’s production system. In the early 2000s, when hygiene regulations reshaped dairy industries across Turkey, Kars followed a distinct trajectory: local cheesemakers resisted full compliance, claiming that such measures would erode the distinctive characteristics and taste of their cheeses. As inspections intensified, many small dairies were forced to close, paving the way for both the consolidation of production and the loss of sensory diversity. Yet this transformation also generated new forms of collective action to protect the territorial quality of Kars cheeses through place-based labels.
This article has traced the historical articulation, disarticulation, and re-articulation of Kars Kaşarı and Boğatepe Gravyeri within dairy commodity chains. We argue that their recent re-articulation through place-based labels reflects a long-standing negotiation between local practices and broader political–economic transformations. Rather than the market incorporation of an authentic locality, Kars represents a relational process in which cheesemaking traditions, and the material specificities of cheeses, have continually shaped, and been shaped by, the region’s shifting position within agri-food networks. This article advances the articulation–disarticulation debate by conceptualizing re-articulation as a distinct and analytically significant process. We argue that re-articulation is not merely a reversal of disarticulation but a transformative socio-economic process that reshapes power relations, community identities, and market positions. The case of Kars illustrates how a long history of marginalization from national dairy commodity chains created the conditions for re-entry into markets through locally negotiated strategies that operated between competing forces, such as tradition and standardization, solidarity and market rationalization, and local authenticity and global food networks, ultimately giving rise to new conventions of quality. Thus, the case of Kars illustrates how marginalized regions can reconfigure historical disadvantages into comparative advantages, offering broader insights into uneven development, commodity chains, and politics of place-based food economies.
By foregrounding material and ecological relations, this study contributes to commodity-chain analysis that extends its scope beyond human-centered production networks. It demonstrates how ontology matters in re-articulation processes: changes in technologies, regulations, and market standards reconfigure both the material foundations of production and the ecological relations sustaining local livelihoods. This dynamic is clearly reflected in producers’ narratives: dairy farmers and cheesemakers described how imposed hygiene standards and the replacement of wooden tools with chrome-based equipment altered the sensory qualities of their cheeses and disrupted the embodied connections between production, local environments, and shared artisanal knowledge. In Boğatepe, the making of kaşar and gravyer relies as much on artisanal know-how as on the vegetation of pastures and the interaction between livestock and their grazing landscape, showing that nature is not a passive background but an active participant shaping quality, value, and the evolving ontology of the product itself. These ontological specificities also acquire a social dimension. The material and temporal differences between kaşar and gravyer – such as the quantity of milk required, the length of maturation, and the dependence on artisanal expertise – have historically inscribed class distinctions within production and consumption. While kaşar aligns with small family producers and middle-class accessibility, gravyer has remained associated with more organized, capital-labor intensive production, and elite taste.
This article situated the case of Kars within broader historical trajectories from a short period of settler colonialism before World War I to the Turkish state’s developmental policies in the second half of the twentieth century, yet it did not examine in depth how these processes transformed production relations through the shift from mobile and predominantly transhumant pastoralism to a more settled and structured dairy economy. Historically, local cheesemaking was embedded in the mobility patterns and subsistence strategies of pastoralist communities, favoring cheeses adapted to transhumant life. As the economy became more sedentary and scale-oriented, varieties such as kaşar and gravyer, requiring significant infrastructural investment, emerged as commercial priorities, while other locally consumed cheeses tied to mobile pastoral traditions remained outside the market sphere. Although these dynamics fall beyond the scope of this paper, they raise important questions for future research, particularly about how processes of standardization not only regulate production techniques but also reorganize the socio-spatial relations that sustain culinary traditions, privileging products aligned with market rationalities over those rooted in historically situated foodways.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and their editor Zafer Yenal for their valuable comments. The authors would also like to thank İlhan Koçulu, Kurban Olt, Güler Zerger, Mehmet Rüstemoğlu, Ebru Rüstemoğlu, Çağdaş Koçulu, Niyazi Özşahin, and Tukezban Haskarabağ for their hospitality and contributions. The fieldwork underpinning this article was supported at different times by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Research Institute in Turkey, Serhat Development Agency (SERKA), and the British Academy. Their invaluable contributions are gratefully acknowledged.
Competing interests
There are no competing interests.
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