Egyptian Cigarettes

Egyptian cigarettes made by Gianaclis and others became so popular in Europe and the United States that they inspired a large number of what were in effect locally-produced counterfeits. Tastes in Europe and the United States shifted away from Turkish tobacco and Egyptian cigarettes towards Virginia tobacco during and after the First World War. Morris Schinasi of the Schinassi Brothers began to work for a Greek tobacco merchant named Garofollo in Alexandria. Garofollo traded in tobacco as well as in the manufacture of cigarettes. He liked this intelligent, diligent, ambitious and driven young man and took him under his wing.
The year was 1890. Morris was 35 and his big dreams carried him far. Borrowing US$25,000 from his beloved boss Garofollo, he immigrated to the USA in 1892 and exhibited the cigarette-rolling machine he had designed himself at the Chicago Fair. Until then, every single cigarette had been hand-rolled, paper and tobacco being purchased separately; this new machine created a good deal of interest. He repaid the US$25,000 loan and sent out for his brother Solomon (Shlomo.) Once Shlomo had arrived in New York, they established the “Schinasi Brothers Company” on Broadway and 120th Street.

Mavi Boncuk | Egyptian cigarette industry.

The development of a major cigarette industry in Egypt in the late nineteenth century was unexpected, given that Egypt generally exported raw materials and imported manufactured goods, that Egyptian-grown tobacco was always of poor quality, and that the cultivation of tobacco in Egypt was anyhow banned in 1890 (a measure intended to facilitate the collection of taxes on tobacco).
One reason for the development of the industry was the imposition of a state tobacco monopoly in the Ottoman Empire, a measure designed to increase Ottoman government revenue. This resulted in the movement of many Ottoman tobacco merchants, usually ethnic Greeks, to Egypt, a country which was culturally similar to the Ottoman Empire but outside the tobacco monopoly as a result of its occupation by Great Britain.

The founder of the industry was Nestor Gianaclis, a Greek who arrived in Egypt in 1864 and in 1871 established a factory in the Khairy Pasha palace in Cairo which, after Gianaclis moved to larger premises in 1907, became the home first of Cairo University and then of the American University in Cairo. Gianaclis and other Greek industrialists such as Ioannis Kyriazis of Kyriazi frères successfully produced and exported cigarettes using imported Turkish tobacco to meet the growing world demand for cigarettes in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.