Tobacco | Herzog Company in Kavala

Mavi Boncuk | 

In the mid-nineteenth century, Kavala developed into one of the most important tobacco-processing centers in the Balkans, attracting the commercial interest of the Habsburg Empire, England, France, Egypt, and even the United States. [1] 

Austro-Hungarian company Herzog et Cie . The company was founded by the Jewish Baron Pierre Herzog in 1889 and managed by Adolph Wix von Zsolnay (1866-1932), a German Jew who served as the German and Austrian consul in the city. In 1905, Herzog et Cie became the main supplier of the Sultan in Istanbul.[*] 

A crucial reason for the cultivation of the tobacco crop in this area, then under Ottoman occupation, was that the sultan had forbid-den Turks from growing it. Because of this restriction, both tobacco culti-vation and the tobacco trade passed into the hands of Greek merchants.Smoking soon became a popular habit among the Greeks, and the tobacco trade boomed. Facilitated by ideal climate and soil conditions, the area around Kavala developed into one of the main tobacco-producing centers in the country, and the city became a major export harbor. By 1913,there were sixty-one tobacco companies registered in the city and close to 6,000 workers in the industry. Warehouses of a distinct architectural style were built at that time and still stand as important landmarks, testaments to the close bond between the tobacco trade and the city’s political and social history. 

"During the early 20 th century the economies of a number of Greek cities—most notably Kavala, Xanthi, Drama, Volos, Thessaloniki and Agrinio—relied almost exclusively on the growing,processing, and sale of tobacco leaves. Especially in coastal cities such as Kavala everyday life slavishly mirrored the tobacco production cycle—picking,drying, processing and baling the tobacco, then transporting it to the port,loading it onto the barges lined up at the quays in front of the city’s enormous tobacco warehouses, and ferrying them out to the foreign companies’ steamers anchored out to sea. The kapnomagaza —the familiar, usually two-storey stone and timber tobacco warehouses—were important city landmarks. These early types of factories, testaments to the close bond between tobacco and the cities where it was processed, shed light one very aspect of this complex relationship.In Kavala a considerable number of those tobacco warehouses were built by powerful merchants mainly from Hapsburg and Ottoman empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century for both storing and processing of tobacco. These factory buildings took into account the actual work process,arrangements for shipping and receiving, 65 and requirements for natural light where work was done or complete darkness in tobacco storage areas. The architecturaL plans reveal the everyday work habits,the gender-based division of labor, and even the hierarchical power structures that linked the tobacco merchants to the tobacco workers." SOURCE

In the late nineteenth century the city of Kavala, a town by the sea in northern Greece,was developed to one of the most important tobacco processing centers in the Balkan area. Powerful tobacco merchants mainly from the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires built a considerable number of tobacco warehouses thus redefining the center of the city, its character, as well as its borders. I argue that the architecture of those warehouses deeply configured the identities of tobacco workers and provided the means to tobacco merchants to publicly present themselves and their achievements. At the same time those early industrial buildings subverted the boundaries between the city and the factory, shedding light on the work culture and every day lives of Greece’s tobacco workers. 

[*] Unfortunately, we know nothing about the architects who designed those early buildings since the city’s urban archives were destroyed during theBulgarian occupation. The sources that have been used for this study include mainly published accounts of foreign travelers and local historians and a published biographical account by Georgios Pegios who wasa member of the Greek Communist Party and of the tobacco trade union.I also consulted documents from the General State Archives that have been published in several of the local histories. Instrumental to the study have been several photographs from the archive of the Municipal Museum of Kavala and a few from Paul Collart’s collection. The paper could not have been written, nonetheless, had I not experienced the life in the city as an inhabitant during my childhood and adolescence." Maria Rentetzi

Maria Rentetzi | Technische Universität Berlin Faculty Member Maria Rentetzi is assistant professor at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. She teaches the sociology of science and technology, with a special focus on gender. 


SEE ALSO: Configuring Identities Through Industrial Architecture and Urban Planning: Greek Tobacco Warehouses in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

The first offices of M. L. Herzog et Cie, built after 1891. Today stands empty

The HERZOG tobacco company used a large number of tobacco warehouses along Damianou, Ethnarchi Makariou and Nikis Streets. Of interest is the building at the spot where Damianou, Ethnarchi Makariou and Nikis Streets intersect. This was the company’s first administrative building, which was built in 1891 and has turrets at the corners of its roof, like a castle (the architectural term for this is castellated). The administration moved between 1899 and 1900 to a privately-owned building on Kyprou St, which today houses the Town Hall of Kavala.



SOURCE

IMAGE SOURCE: 

Labor and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire: Tobacco Workers, Managers, and the State, 1872–1912 By Can Nacar Assistant Professor of History at Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey. Publisher Springer Nature, 2019 | ISBN 3030315592, 202 pages.

Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria
By Mary C. Neuburger

Villa Herzog, now the Town hall of Kavala.(1890), the former residence of the Hungarian tobacco trader Pierre Herzog. It is a miniature of a Hungarian castle.

Ad from United States Tobacco Journal, Volume 93 BMT Publications, 1920 

Han­dling of to­bacco was the big in­dus­try of North­ern Greece in the 1920s and 1930s, and the city of Kavala was in many ways its hub. At its height the in­dus­try em­ployed more than 15.000 work­ers, and more than 60 trad­ing com­pa­nies, many of them for­eign, were es­tab­lished in the city. The port of Kavala was busier than the one in Thes­sa­loniki at this time. Many of the for­eign com­pa­nies built fa­cil­i­ties in the city such as ware­houses, of­fices, and res­i­dences for their em­ploy­ees, of­ten in ar­chi­tec­tural styles which were pop­u­lar in their home coun­tries. One ex­am­ple of this is the Aus­tro-Hun­gar­ian com­pany Her­zog’s build­ing that is now the town hall of Kavala.

During the early 20th century the economies of a number of Greek cities relied almost exclusively on the cultivation, processing, and sale of tobacco leaves. Especially in coastal cities such as Kavala, a town by the sea in northern Greece, everyday life mirrored the incessant tobacco production cycle—picking, drying, processing and baling tobacco. This was then transported to the port, loaded onto barges lined up at the quays in front of the city’s enormous tobacco warehouses and ferried out to foreign company steamers anchored out to sea. Since the 1840s, Lloyd, the major Austrian steamship company, had established a fortnightly service between Trieste and Kavala. Tobacco exports were directed mainly at the Hapsburg Empire, but also Russia, England, Egypt, France, and even the United States. The city attracted both the Greek bourgeoisie—retailers who traded tobacco as independent exporters in mainly the Balkans, Russia, Egypt, and Turkey—and European corporations. These were powerful investors who built their own tobacco warehouses and often had the double role of foreign consul in the city and tobacco merchant. It is indicative that by 1880 all the major European countries had established consulates in the city of Kavala. By the end of the nineteenth century, around 4,000 tons of tobacco were being sent abroad annually from the city’s port mostly by the Austrian Herzog et Cie. By 1913 there were 61 tobacco trading houses in the city.

Austro-Hungarian Jewish industrialist Pierre Herzog who monopolized trade of Balkan and Turkish tobacco in Central Europe by the end of the nineteenth century and his company’s representative in the city, Adolf Wix von Zsolnay; the tobacco trade and economic relations and technology transfer between Kavala and Vienna; the traditional tobacco processing methods and their mechanization; the work culture and the political upheavals that were resulted from the introduction of new technologies in tobacco warehouses; the transfer of architectural styles and forms from Austria to the wider area of Kavala and neighboring cities.

1902 commercial catalogue published by the M.L. Herzog & Co, the biggest tobacco monopoly in Europe at the time. Founded by Baron Pierre Herzog in 1889, the Austro-Hungarian monopoly was the Sultan’s main supplier of tobacco. Advertising the trade connections to the Ottomans, the company’s catalogue was used to boost tobacco sales worldwide and impressed with the extended network of its tobacco trade. The company’s headquarters were in Budapest and their main site for processing tobacco was Cavalla, a town by the sea in northern Greece that was still under Ottoman rule. On the catalogue’s cover also appeared several other Greek cities―Xanthi, Drama, Pravista, and Thessaloniki―all still part of the Ottoman Empire and locations where the company maintained tobacco warehouses and processing centers. In addition to Greece and the Ottoman Empire, the 1902 catalogue signaled the transnational reach of the tobacco and the Herzog Company as it referenced Haskovo in southern Bulgaria; Smyrna and Samsun in Asia Minor, and New York City where Herzog’s 61 Broadway headquarters loomed as one of the biggest leaf tobacco importers in this North American city.

SEE ALSO: Tobacco Roads: Histories of Technologies and a Transnational Economy Melinda Plastas1,2, Maria Rentetzi1,2
1Department of Women and Gender Studies, Bates Colleges, Bates, IA, USA2 Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece.

[1] EXCERPT | RECHERCHES SUR L’HISTOIRE SOCIALE DE LA GRÈCE DU NORD: LE MOUVEMENT DES OUVRIERS DU TABAC, 1918-1928 

Alexandros DAGKAS 
RECHERCHES SURL’HISTOIRE SOCIALE DE LA GRÈCE DU NORD:LE MOUVEMENT DES OUVRIERS DU TABAC,1918-1928 

"In the Rhodope region, the cradle of high-quality oriental tobacco, the first house to come to Xanthi was that of Portocaloglou, of Samsoun, after the Greek Revolution of 1821; followed the Allatini houses, Mouratoglou (Mouratis), Issaakidis, Enfiedjoglou, with exports in Europe, especially in Russia. After fluctuations (the crisis, which declared, in 1880, because of competition from Russian tobacco, was the worst obstacle), a second phase began, at the beginning of the 20th century, after the rise of the German market. The stormy development in this state of industryespecially the tobacco industry (1,500 tobacco factories operated before the First World War) and the creation of the tobacco center of Dresden opened the doors to the development of the tobacco trade oriental. New firms (Herzog, Mayer, Zyrinis, Pervanas, Koudoglou) were established locally331. The extension of the activity of businesses, with the construction of warehouses in the remaining tobacco centers, was later a matter of time.

The firms, including those above, which had an activity in the tobacco centers and contributed to the spread of oriental tobacco, were, in Xanthi, the houses:

A. Chardjidis A. & P. Portokaloglou T. Triantafyllidis K. Enfiedjoglou S. Hekimoglou K. Pétridis D. Kougioumdjoglou P. Kougioumdjoglou Aladjoglou Frères P. Pantaki Frères P. Stalios L. Stalios V. & P. Matsinis P. Pervanas Zyrini Frères D. P. Koudoglou Deïrmendjoglou A. Christidis Th. Zalahas K. Kontopoulos V. Mouratis & Fils A. Valouxoglou Seïh Mola Memet Passa; 

à Cavala, les maisons: 

N. G. Grigoriadis E. G. Grigoriadis I. Nalbantis P. Vardas N. G. S. Djimourtou Frères Ch. Riganezis D. Tokos Ch. Ioannou (Alatas) N. Kakanis I. Konstantinidis P. Foskolos M. Foskolos Fessa Frères I. N. & D. Sossidi Frères Issaakidis & Filippidis Rodokanaki Frères V. Théofilidis K. Théofilidis M. Kolokythas M. D. Grigoriadis H. Papaïlias Natan Nahmias Haïm Benvéniste Kyriakos Pyrloglou Iak. Gavriilidis K. Balabanoglou G. Iordanou Kouzis & Lévidis D. Argyropoulos; 

dans le Pont-Euxin, les maisons: 

Hadji Housseïn oglou K. Enfiedjoglou L. Is. Pialoglou Deirmendjoglou Fils Mavridis Matossian Kountoukian Missirian Kelkendjoglou Soundjouktsoglou Ordouloglou Alexiadis Triantafyllidis. 

We note that, as regards the nationality of the above traders, they were Greeks, Armenians, Jews and few Muslims. Most of them were not limited to the outskirts of the centers where they had their seats, but extended their activities further into the others regions.
Other renowned businessmen who hold capital much larger scale, whose activity related to installation, from of 1850, large companies, having chains of warehouses in all tobacco centers, were Hassan Akif Zadé (owner of the Hassan Akif Zadé & Cie), N. Mayer, Hermann Spierer, Herzog, as well as Adolf Wix from Zsolnay, founder of companies - such as the Société Anonyme des Tabacs East and Overseas, and the Recolta - which exhibited serious figures.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the American capital in tobacco, having discovered for about twenty years (around 1880) oriental tobacco, has realized its own dynamic opening to local markets. The acquisition by the American Tobacco Co. of major American companies in the industry and the arrival of the new giant in Macedonia-Thrace has provided trade a new strong push.

...

The town of Cavala, port of embarkation for Macedonian tobacco, "the Transvaal de Macédoine ", was famous in the commercial world, because that it was the center of the concentration of tobacco, "... the meeting of commissions from various state monopolies, cigarette manufacturers and all merchants in general ... 336 "Commercial transactions are calculated annually by several million francs. Several branches major banks and representatives of insurance companies against the fire constituted a remarkable infrastructure. Nevertheless, the difficulties faced by traders and growers were enormous. The region was completely lacking in fast communication routes. Despite all the precautions taken by those concerned, the tobacco bullets coming from villages were always exposed to the vagaries of natural elements. The city, at a distance of 38 kilometers from Drama - town of the Jonica Salonica Constantinople network -, needed to be connected to it by a railroad.

In Salonika, around half of the industrial capital was invested in tobacco factories - around 100 in 1903 -. The twelve most important were:
an American,
two French women,
an Austrian,
a Belgian,
a Turkish woman,
an Israelite,
two belonging to donmèdes,
three belonging to Ottoman Greeks.

In 1910, among the main tobacco trade companies in the city, included companies:
The Commercial Company of Salonica Ltd.,
The Oriental Tobacco Trading Company Ltd., 
The Alston Tobacco Company Incorporated, 
The Export Tobacco Leaf Company, AND
 Sebastiano Tani"