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After a claim, we confirm by emailEverything here comes from public sources — award lists, certification registers, the territory inventories. The rest of the story — the family, the grove, the real age of the trees, this year's lab sheet — only the mill can tell, and it is the part buyers bid on.
Kürşat is a family business in Ayvalık, in Balıkesir province on the Edremit Gulf, working olive growing, table olives and olive oil. Its account puts the family's origins on Crete. The Hakkımızda page has forebears farming olives in the village of Ayorya and exporting their oil to a number of European countries; a longer account on the company's news page names Mehmet Tevfik Bey and Mustafa Rahmi Bey and their families, sets their life on the island across the 1800s, and records exports to Russia and to several European countries at a period when Cretan oil stood out in Europe for its quality. Both pages date the family's arrival in Ayvalık to 1923 and attribute it to the population exchange that followed the Lausanne agreement.
The news page records that the family built olive oil workshops in Ayvalık and carried its production on there, and that Mehmet Tevfik Bey's son, Mehmet Emin Süner, took over his father's knowledge of the trade and became known in the district for the oils he made. Those workshops now stand as the Kürşat Ayvalık Olive Oil Industry Museum: the museum's own site records that the family has put its elders' historic working rooms back into running order and exhibits them, and describes the museum as built on four generations of Kürşat family olive farming, at Tellikavak Mevkii in Ayvalık. The same news page records that the family's story appeared in "La Route des Oliviers", a documentary made by Carol Drinkwater and her team and broadcast by the French channel TV5.
The Kürşat name went on the family's oils and olives from 1996. The first Kürşat shop opened in Ayvalık in 1998, which the company records as the start of specialist shops for olives and olive oil in Turkey, and two more followed in Istanbul and İzmir in 2004. The About page states that the groves lie inside the Ayvalık geographical boundary and are worked as an Ayvalık-variety monoculture by methods it describes as respectful of the ecosystem, that the whole of production comes from trees given rejuvenation pruning, that harvest begins at the moment judged best for early picking with the olives taken by hand one at a time, and that table olives are cured in sea salt over six to seven months. Ayvalık Zeytinyağı is itself a registered Turkish designation of origin, entered by the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office as a menşe adı under number 88 on 11 June 2007 at the application of the Ayvalık Chamber of Commerce.
From the public record: kursat.com.tr · kursatzeytinyagimuzesi.com.tr · ci.turkpatent.gov.tr
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