The Sanjak of Lazistan: An Ottoman Province Named After the Laz
3 min read
For centuries the homeland of the Laz had its own place on the Ottoman map: the Sanjak of Lazistan, an administrative province that carried the name of its people.
From conquest to province
After the Ottomans absorbed the Empire of Trebizond and pushed east in the 16th century, they organised the eastern Black Sea coast into the Sanjak of Lazistan, part of the larger province of Trabzon. It stretched along the coast between Trabzon and Batum, covering roughly today’s Rize Province and the coast of Artvin, and was divided into the districts (kazas) of Of, Rize, Atina (Pazar) and Hopa.
A shifting capital
The sanjak was first governed from the coastal fortress of Gonia, then from Batum, the great port of the region. When Batum was lost to the Russian Empire after the war of 1877-78, Rize became the capital, the role it still holds as the regional centre of Lazistan today.
A name erased
The Sanjak of Lazistan survived until the fall of the empire in 1923. A few years later, in 1926, the new republic officially banned the very name “Lazistan,” and the territory was split between the provinces of Rize and Artvin. The administrative name disappeared, but the identity it described did not.
How the sanjak worked
A sanjak was a middle tier of Ottoman administration: a district governed by a sancakbeyi, grouped with others into a province (eyalet, later vilayet). Lazistan sat within the province of Trabzon, and its kazas — Of, Rize, Atina and Hopa — corresponded closely to the coastal valleys where the Laz lived. Administrative geography followed settlement: each valley ran from the shore up into the mountains, and the districts were drawn the same way.
The valley lords
Ottoman authority on this coast was never absolute. Real power long rested with local dynasties, the derebeys or “valley lords,” who held their valleys as hereditary domains and treated the sultan’s appointees as negotiating partners. The most powerful of them, the Tuzcuoğlu of Rize, mounted repeated revolts until the imperial centre broke their power in the 1830s.
What the name recorded
The sanjak matters beyond administrative history because of what it acknowledged: for roughly four centuries an Ottoman map carried the name of the Laz as the name of a place. When the republic removed the term in 1926 and divided the territory between Rize and Artvin, it removed the last official trace of that recognition. The flag and arms associated with the sanjak remain a reference point for Laz cultural identity today.
Sources
Map (header): the eastern Black Sea and Transcaucasia, A. K. Johnston, 1861, public domain.
Map (in text): Squeaks 41 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
