Weaving, Coppersmithing and Blacksmithing in 19th-Century Çorum

Besides leatherworking, the three other leading manufactured-goods trades in 19th- and early 20th-century Çorum were weaving, coppersmithing and blacksmithing. According to the chapter written by Sevgi Aktüre in Çorum Tarihi (History of Çorum), these crafts developed alongside the city’s role as a regional market town and were affected in different ways by the economic changes of the late 19th century.

Weaving

Weaving in Çorum was not carried out in workshops but as a household, family-based activity. According to the 1907 Ankara Province Yearbook (Salname), the city had about 2,000 weaving looms at the time. The main products included good-quality cotton cloth for underclothes, shawl-sashes imitating Iranian and Tosya styles, woollen aba cloth, black shalwar fabric, kilims and prayer rugs (seccade). The same source records that an “alaca master” brought in from the Burdur district taught alaca weaving (a striped cotton-and-silk fabric) to any man or woman who wished to learn it at the Girls’ Rüştiye School, and praised the quality and colourfastness of the alaca woven by the schoolgirls (Çorum Tarihi, p. 157).

Wool, the raw material of weaving, was a by-product of the region’s livestock farming; cotton was grown in the irrigable lands of the Kızılırmak valley around Osmancık, the lowest-lying part of the region. The presence of cloth merchants (bezzez) in the city-centre bazaars shows that this household production had, in fact, reached the scale of a market economy — once local demand was met, goods were sold through merchants to neighbouring towns as well; it is thought likely that some of the cotton yarn imported via the port of Samsun in the late 19th century was used by weavers in the region. Weaving continued at a household scale with traditional methods until the mid-20th century; as late as 1940 the city still had 486 looms (Çorum Tarihi, p. 157-158).

Coppersmithing and Blacksmithing

Coppersmithing and blacksmithing occupied separate but closely neighbouring streets in the bazaar. Since neither trade’s raw material was available within the boundaries of Çorum Sancak (district), the material had to be transported from quite far away; even so, the two crafts followed very different paths by the end of the 19th century.

Coppersmithing was one of the city’s traditional trades; the pots, cauldrons and pans it produced met the needs of both the urban population and the rural population that used the city as its market. The raw copper came from the deposits at Ergani; but turning raw copper into ready-to-use “pure copper” was usually done at rolling mills (haddehane), and according to the book there is no record of a rolling mill in Çorum — so it is assumed coppersmiths sourced their pure copper from Tokat, a copper-working centre at the time. The decline of copper production in Tokat in the second half of the 19th century — especially the closure of its largest foundries in 1887 — also dragged down coppersmithing in Çorum; that coppersmithing no longer appears on lists of Çorum’s manufactured-goods production in sources from the late 19th and early 20th centuries shows the traditional trade had lost its former importance (Çorum Tarihi, p. 158-159).

As coppersmithing declined, blacksmithing became an important production trade in the early 20th century. Sources dated 1895, 1900 and 1907 mention every kind of iron farm implement being made in the city while never mentioning coppersmithing, confirming this shift. The main driver of blacksmithing’s growth was the export, via the port of Samsun, of fresh and dried vegetables, fruit and grain from the region; the growth of agricultural activity aimed at boosting orchards and grain production, and the adoption of new tools, was the chief factor accelerating the production of iron farm implements. The book also notes, based on Çorum Chamber of Commerce records, that coppersmithing revived again toward the mid-20th century, with new workshops opening from that point on (Çorum Tarihi, p. 159).

For today’s last representatives of coppersmithing, see Çorum Tinsmiths (Kalaycılar) and the Copper Craft; for the city’s other traditional handicrafts, see Çorum Handicrafts. For more on the leatherworking tradition, see Tanning and Leatherworking in Çorum.

Sources

• Çorum Tarihi (History of Çorum), 5th Hittite Festival Committee; ed. Çorum Municipality City Archive, 3rd ed., Çorum Municipality Cultural Publications, Çorum 2020 (Chapter 3: “Çorum in the 19th and Early 20th Century,” by Sevgi Aktüre), p. 157-159. https://www.corum.bel.tr/public/uploads/2026/01/corumtarihi.pdf