You have to be part of the brave to live in the impressively steep hills overlooking the Black Sea, where Turkey grows its tea.
To get home, 90-year-old Kasim Karaosman has to be hoisted onto a rickety cable car that shoots him 300 meters into a deep mountain valley on his back.
Only a few planks separate it from the gorge and tea gardens far below.
“You shouldn’t look down,” warned Karaosman, who built the rough-and-ready mechanism himself more than 50 years ago.
Many of his neighbors in tea-growing villages above the coastal city of Rize in northeastern Turkey make similarly perilous journeys to and from their steep fields every day in thousands of primitive gondolas.
But a series of hair-raising deaths and accidents has sent a shiver of fear through the verdant hillsides where every inch of arable land, no matter how steep, has been given over to tea.
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“I don’t drive it myself anymore. I’ve had too many accidents,” Sevilai Sen told AFP as she unloaded bales of freshly cut tea from a swaying gondola near the village of Daginiksu.
In April two of her neighbors fell 20 meters (65 feet) after being caught in a gust of wind, cheating death by a whisker.
Despite the difficult climb, Sen and her husband now prefer to climb from their fields to the road.
‘I’m afraid’
“By the grace of Allah they will walk again one day,” said Hasan Uzun, the husband of one of the victims, the anger in his voice clear.
“I only use them when I have no other choice,” said Ercan ΓalΔ±k, perched on a ridge, with tea plantations stretching as far as the eye can see.
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“Without the cable cars, there would be no life here,” said the 50-year-old farmer, clutching his rosaries as he surveyed a hillside that yields hundreds of tons of tea each year.
The improvised machinery is essential for the locals who harvest fields in steep valleys inaccessible by car or tractor.
But rides in the gondolas — made of planks nailed to a metal frame suspended by a steel cable — are dangerous, with no barriers or railings to keep people from falling.
The accident in April has panicked many locals in Daginiksu, where nearly every household lives off tea, selling its crop to behemoths like Turkey’s state-owned Caykur company.
“I don’t ride my cable car anymore after the accident. I’m scared,” said Hurmet Yildirim, 64, her hair covered with a black veil.
“Our lives are at stake,” added the farmer.
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The Chamber of Mechanical Engineers of Rize estimates that there are about 15,000 such cable cars in the Black Sea mountainous region.
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It said 18 people were killed on cable cars and several hundred injured between 2008 and 2021.
Since then, at least two people from Rize and the neighboring province of Trabzon have died in similar accidents, including a 25-year-old man who was electrocuted in July last year after boarding a gondola loaded with tea.
Two local coroners, who published a study in 2021 of eight fatal cable car accidents, found that “because there is no license for primitive cable cars, there are no official tests” to ensure they are well maintained.
Back in the nearby village of Selamet, Kasim Karaosman slowly climbed into his gondola with his shopping.
With no road to his home high on a ridge, he has no choice but to take his life into his own hands with his homemade concoction.
However, despite the danger, Karaosman has no plans to leave his home on the rock. “From here I can see the snow-capped mountain peaks” of the Pontic Alps, he smiled.
Source: AFP