Dolphin Hunting in the Southeastern Black Sea: Notes from Fieldwork in Trabzon

A rare and unusually vivid passage in the 1892 Trabzon Provincial Yearbook (Trabzon Vilayeti Salnamesi) offers one of the most detailed late Ottoman descriptions of dolphin hunting on the coast of Sürmene, along the empire’s northeastern Black Sea littoral. Unlike the generally administrative and matter-of-fact style of provincial yearbooks, this passage dwells carefully on a coastal practice that linked shoreline households to export markets. According to the yearbook, dolphins were hunted “in great quantities”; their oil was rendered and shipped to Europe, and many families made their living from this trade.¹ The account stands out not only for its attention to dolphin-hunting techniques and their effects, but also for the language it uses to frame the practice as both strange and heartbreaking. “Neither the birds that fly in the air,” it declares, “nor the fish that swim in the depths of the sea can escape from the hands of humankind.”²

According to the editor, dolphin hunting in the region relied on a small boat and a thick, durable ığrıp net (a type of purse seine). Pulled by the strong arms of two or three hunters and cast “where the fish were thought to have gathered,” the net ensured that “whatever fish [the dolphins] it enclosed, there remained no possibility for them to slip away from that deadly net and escape again.”³ To prevent the animals from breaking free, one hunter stood watch with a Martini rifle, shooting any dolphin that leaped toward open waters. “Thus,” the text continues, “these poor fish, caught alive and then killed while still alive, writhe with cries and moans that rend the human heart.” Usually said to weigh fifty or sixty kıyye (approximately sixty-four to seventy-seven kilograms in total), the dolphin is presented as especially vulnerable because of its size: “The larger its body, the more careless and innocent its nature.”⁴

This essay takes the 1892 yearbook account as its point of departure to record the first notes of a field trip conducted between March 1 and 5, 2026. The central question is straightforward: how was dolphin hunting carried out, and how is it remembered today? These notes, while drawing on earlier studies of dolphin hunting written mostly in Turkish, are based primarily on field interviews conducted at the fish market in Faroz (Trabzon) and in two coastal villages: Çarşıbaşı-Keremköy and Sürmene-Balıklı/Civra.

Historical and Regional Context

Dolphin hunting had long existed along the Black Sea coast, but its scale and organization changed substantially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries⁵. To understand what my interviewees remembered, it is necessary to briefly trace that transformation.

The southeastern Black Sea’s cetacean hunt belongs to a wider history of shifting maritime extraction. As whale populations declined in the Pacific and Atlantic from the mid-nineteenth century onward, hunting grounds migrated: American whalers turned to Arctic bowhead whales,⁶ and later Soviet⁷ and Japanese operations to the Pacific.⁸ A comparable, though far less studied, process unfolded along the Black Sea coast, where the Ottoman littoral increasingly supplied European and domestic markets with marine oil and the scale of dolphin hunting grew accordingly.⁹

Figure 1: Sea-facing front view of the new fish oil and fishmeal factory of the Meat and Fish Institution in Trabzon. Source: Balık ve Balıkçılık 12, no. 9 (September 1964).

The Republican period brought a new phase of institutional transformation.¹⁰ In 1947, a law was enacted to support dolphin hunting, and that same year, a delegation of leading dolphin hunters traveled to the capital city, Ankara, to present their demands. Following this meeting, the government started distributing weapons and ammunition to hunters and providing low-interest credit for boats and equipment.¹¹

A pivotal moment came with Marshall Plan aid for the postwar reconstruction of Turkey’s fisheries sector. Support received between 1948 and 1952 for the development of fisheries funded investments in cold storage and ice facilities, fishing nets, motorized fishing boats, and canning factories.¹² More significantly for the region, it contributed to the establishment of the Meat and Fish Institution (Et ve Balık Kurumu, EBK), the state body that regulated and purchased fishery products from the 1950s onward, and to the construction of the EBK’s fish meal and oil factory in Trabzon in 1952, a facility with a daily processing capacity of 100 tons of dolphin.¹³ Before 1952, the only processing facility in Trabzon had been a factory called “Delphin.”¹⁴ As a result of these developments, hunting expanded significantly, particularly between the 1950s and 1970s.¹⁵ Juridically-permitted cetacean killing ended in the former USSR, Bulgaria, and Romania in 1966, but continued in Turkey until 1983,¹⁶ interrupted only by temporary bans timed to the dolphins’ breeding season, roughly from early June to the end of September.¹⁷

Figure 2: Typical dolphin-hunting boats docked at the pier of the fish oil and fishmeal factory of the Meat and Fish Institution in Trabzon. Dolphins being transported are visible on the left. Source: Balık ve Balıkçılık 12, no.12 ( December 1964).

Nevertheless, the EBK factory transformed the industry by standardizing purchasing. Membership in specific fishermen’s cooperatives was required to receive state-distributed weapons and ammunition, a system that was formally recorded, although the records themselves no longer survive, at least not in Faroz.¹⁸ The fish cooperative in Sürmene-Balıklı where I conducted the interviews opened for that exact purpose.

By the mid-twentieth century, however, hunting pressure had already produced ecological effects. Wilhelm Nümann, a fisheries biologist working in Istanbul at the time, observed that dolphins had begun moving farther from the shore, possibly because the use of firearms had made them more cautious of coastal areas.¹⁹ On the opposite coast, Soviet cetacean fisheries expanded dramatically after the introduction of aerial reconnaissance in 1936, peaking in 1938.²⁰ Over-exploitation was later identified as the principal cause of the sharp decline before the Soviet ban of 1966.²¹ During the last five years before the Turkish ban (1979–1983), annual catches probably did not exceed six to seven thousand individuals—a figure that, compared to the peak decades of the 1950s and 1960s, reflects the scale of ecological crisis that had already occurred.²² It is this final phase that most of my interviewees remembered.

Figure 3: Advertisement issued by the EBK Trabzon Factory: “Natural dolphin oil, produced in our Trabzon factory using the newest technical methods, is continuously sold in domestic and foreign markets.” Source: Balık ve Balıkçılık 13, no.9 (September 1965).

Fieldwork

The interviews were developed around a set of interconnected questions. I entered both the fish market in Faroz and the coastal villages of Çarşıbaşı-Keremköy and Sürmene-Balıklı/Civra as an outsider. That position shaped the conversations in important ways. It made possible the generosity of many fishers, too many to name individually, whose assistance formed the backbone of this research.²³ It also meant that the conversations rarely unfolded as formal interviews. Instead, they took the form of collective exchanges: one question leading to another, answers provoking arguments, and recollections surfacing through interruption and digression.

If one asks in Trabzon today what people remember about dolphin hunting, the usual reaction is surprise. Even many fish sellers are astonished to learn that fishermen once hunted dolphins here. That surprise points not only to the disappearance of the practice itself, but also to the fading of the knowledge, forms of labor, and moral vocabulary that once surrounded it, and to the specificity of the work, which was not practiced everywhere along the coast but concentrated in particular villages and families, something I had not been aware of before.

Figure 4: Former cetacean fishery sites on the southern Black Sea coast identified by my interviewees. Map created by Emre Doğandor.

Most of the people I interviewed remembered the final phase of dolphin hunting before the 1983 ban, when the EBK was systematically purchasing dolphin oil. The Ottoman period survives only in the memories of the elderly. Hunting was said to continue in Sürmene, Salacık, Mersin, Faroz, Çayeli, Çarşıbaşı, Perşembe, and more broadly along the coastal line stretching from Sinop to Hopa (Figure 4), yet, as my interviewees repeatedly emphasized, not everyone did this work because it required specialized skills.

During my first days in Trabzon, the accounts I encountered at the Fish Market in Faroz seemed to provide a Republican-era counterpart to the yearbook description: hunters used Mauser rifles brought from Kırıkkale, and the dolphin oil they obtained was sold to the EBK. When I asked specifically about net fishing and about Sürmene, however, the fishermen in Faroz did not recall the details and directed me to Keremköy.²⁴

More striking still was the degree of overlap between the accounts of a former marksman (“kurşuncu”) and a former helmsman (“dümenci”) in Çarşıbaşı/Keremköy and the narratives from another former marksman, a former helmsman, and a third former fisherman in Sürmene/Balıklı. These intersecting testimonies enable a reconstruction of the broad contours of the hunting process. At the same time, the conspicuous absence in Çarşıbaşı of any memory of dolphin hunting with nets raised a separate question: had this village been involved in hunting during the Ottoman period, or was its activity primarily confined to the late, EBK phase of the Republican era? I suspect that Keremköy was incorporated into the dolphin-hunting network only in the later EBK-supported phase. This question remains a topic for further research: in Balıklı, I was able to speak with more people, whose accounts drew on a wider range of family histories, while no comparable depth was possible in Keremköy.

The Hunt

The memories of hunting suggest that methods varied significantly across localities and perhaps over time. In Sürmene, elderly fishermen remembered that dolphins had once been caught with large nets, specifically the ığrıp (a type of purse seine), and above all from the alamana boats (Figure 5). Although they themselves did not use these methods, they associated them with their grandparents’ generation. In Keremköy, by contrast, hunting was remembered exclusively as a gun-based practice conducted from small wooden vessels called taka, roughly fifteen to twenty meters in length, with crews of four or five men. Sometimes three or four boats went out together, and the pursuit of a dolphin pod could last ten to fifteen hours.

Figure 5: Alamana boats encircling a school of fish and casting the net (drawing by Karekin Deveciyan). Source: İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, vol. 2, 579.

Dolphins were classified based on visual familiarity and accumulated experience rather than on formal zoological knowledge. Fishermen distinguished several kinds according to the shape of the snout, overall size, and patterns of movement. A term I had not previously encountered, imam (literally a leader who stands before a congregation to lead prayers), denotes the dolphin that swam ahead of the pod, which was described as the smallest and youngest dolphin. Musır was understood as a larger form, identified by its short snout and said to yield considerable oil. Tırtak was another recognized type, said to produce around eighteen kilograms of oil. Afala was described as the largest and hardest to catch, yet yielding the greatest amount of oil, weighing ninety or even one hundred kilograms. Apart from the imam, these names correspond to species identified in the scientific literature: musır or musur (Phocoena phocoena, harbor porpoise), tırtak (Delphinus delphis, common dolphin), and afalina (Tursiops truncatus, bottlenose dolphin).

The hunt required a clear division of labor. The two most basic roles were the helmsman (dümenci) and the marksman (kurşuncu); in practice, the number of shooters could rise to three or four depending on the size of the crew. Because accurate shooting from a moving boat at dolphins that were themselves in motion was not a skill everyone possessed, the marksman was remembered as the most capable and respected figure in the hunt. Among those I interviewed, in both Keremköy and Balıklı, were men who had served in each of these roles.

Once hunters located a dolphin pod, they waited for the animals to surface and then fired. The shot was not always successful. The struggles surrounding wounded dolphins, together with the moral ruptures these moments provoked, were among the themes that surfaced frequently in the interviews. Once a dolphin was shot, it was hauled into the taka with a hook. Whether it remained afloat depended on its fat content: if the layer of blubber was thick enough, often described as four or five fingers deep, the carcass would float; otherwise, it sank. Once full, the boats returned to shore.

Figure 6: Dolphins filling the Sürmene coast. Source: Balık ve Balıkçılık (February–March 1954).

On Shore

After the dolphin was brought out of the sea, work continued on land or, when necessary, partly on the boat. Salacık emerges from these recollections as an important processing center, especially in connection with the Akçaabat area; interlocutors also remembered cauldrons set up in more distant places, as far as the Bartın River, though the exact logistics were sometimes unclear.

Figure 7: Mersin, a fishing village in Trabzon Province. Source: Balık ve Balıkçılık 13, no. 1, January 1965.

In Sürmene/Balıklı, the family compound was the basic unit of production. Families engaged in dolphin hunting recalled setting up cauldrons in their seaside shelters in front of their houses, where they also moored their boats. It was here that women’s labor entered the process. The dolphins were skinned; the skin and fatty tissue were cut in a diamond pattern into small pieces and stacked.²⁵ The cauldron boiled continuously during this lengthy process, while the men returned to sea. Many of those I spoke with remembered, as children, dipping corn into the cooling oil and eating it, as well as the sharp smell of rendered fat drifting uphill into the village. The meat, by contrast, was never consumed. It was treated as waste and mostly sold as fertilizer, especially in hazelnut orchards.

Figure 8: One of the cauldrons used for boiling dolphin oil in Balıklı/Civra, March 4, 2026. Photograph taken by the author.

The oil was poured into barrels and tins for sale. A former marksman in Keremköy recalled that they distinguished between higher- and lower-quality varieties according to the dolphin species and called the oil kön. A darker variety known as vındo was remembered for its usefulness inrepelling flies.²⁶ More generally, dolphin oil was used in lamps, for certain pharmaceutical purposes, and sold abroad through intermediaries whose names are no longer clearly recalled. Among the important buyers were the oil factory established in Değirmendere, Trabzon, and, above all, the EBK in the later Republican period (Figure 1).

Dolphin hunting was thus not a single moment of firing at sea, but a chain of labor: pursuit, killing, hauling, skinning, boiling, storing, selling, and the reuse of remains. It was a specialized activity based on a distinct division of labor, skill, and coordination, intensifying within a broader maritime context shaped by the depletion of whale populations elsewhere—and, if Nümann’s observation holds, producing its own ecological resistance as dolphins retreated from the coast.

What Remains

Interviewees frequently emphasized that no good had come of the money they earned from dolphin hunting, a trade they had reportedly undertaken because there was no other work. The moral boundary between hunters and dolphins was frequently tested and articulated through the dolphin’s perceived similarity to human beings and, in some recollections, its moral superiority to them. Interviewees described dolphins as creatures that protected their young, traveled in family groups, and cried when they separated. One interviewee, recalling his first hunt, described the violence of the scene and said he came home that night with a nosebleed and never returned to the work.²⁷ Other interviewees extended this moral accounting further. One well-respected marksman said he would never hunt again, not because of the legal prohibition, but because of what he remembered: the cries. Yet he also acknowledged that, had the same financial pressures returned, he might have had no choice because the profit was far better than what small-scale fishing could bring. Recalling the moment of the hunt, he said: “the fish would turn their eyes toward us, they would cry like children and moan. They too had mothers, fathers, and young.”²⁸ Mustafa Aça recorded further conversations and local memories from some of the last dolphin hunters, and he likewise underlines that some quit in the shock of the moment and that certain villages did not engage in the hunt at all.²⁹ In one account recorded by Aça, a hunter stated that “this animal is intelligent, like a human being. When you take it aboard, it cries like a child. After you shoot it and bring it into the boat, if its calf is in the sea, the calf circles around the boat, unable to leave, crying out in grief. They (dolphin hunters) would receive the curses of these young. Their children were born with defects. The money they earned brought them no blessing.”³⁰

The hunters’ retrospective framing of this labor as something that “brought no good” suggests more than regret: it is a form of moral accounting, told long after the fact, in which the ethical cost of the hunt against this social mammal is tallied against the economic necessity that drove it, a subject not always spoken of openly and one that I, too, found difficult to ask about. Though rarely stated outright, that sense was arguably sharpened by the hunt’s economic structure: the hunters and their families earned well, yet the money, they felt, never settled into lasting prosperity, while the far greater share of the profit flowed to the factories and intermediaries.

I argue that this moral economy did not merely register the costs of the hunt; it also shaped how the hunt was conducted. In certain localities, hunters continued the work according to ethical codes of their own making. They consistently emphasized that they did not kill young dolphins, relying on visual familiarity with the animals’ size: a large dolphin was a permissible target, a small one was not, and a larger body yielded more oil, while smaller carcasses, with thinner blubber, tended to sink after being shot. Yet they also acknowledged that a large dolphin might be pregnant, or that its calf might be left without its family—an unavoidable part, they admitted, of the work itself.

Conclusion

These notes are my first attempts to record this accounting before it disappears entirely and to map what I call the dolphin-hunting ecosystem of the southeastern Black Sea. They do not constitute a completed argument; the work will continue as part of my dissertation project. What they offer instead is a set of findings and a provisional framework for local knowledge of dolphin hunting in the southeastern Black Sea—one that makes possible a history attentive to the labor process, to the institutions that shaped it, to the ecological consequences of its scale, and to the moral vocabulary that hunters and their families carried across generations.

Several questions remain open. How did dolphin hunting in the Ottoman Black Sea relate to broader patterns of marine extraction across the empire? What can a closer reading of official archives add to what oral testimony supplies? And what would a comparative history of cetacean hunting across the Black Sea region look like? These notes have gestured toward those questions. Answering them will require more time in the archives and more conversations in the villages—even as Black Sea dolphins continue to surface with their young in the Bosporus.