Isparta Gülü (The Isparta Rose)

The Rose That Gave Only Water

In the spring of 1889, İsmail Efendi filled his stills with roses and waited for oil. What came out was rose water. The next spring, the same.

He was a weaver from Yalvaç, born in 1840 and educated in a medrese. In 1888 he had heard about rose oil and decided to make it in Isparta. A man from Kazanlık, working as a land registry clerk in Çal, in Denizli, knew the craft. İsmail Efendi wrote to offer him the post of master distiller at a gülhane, a rose house, he meant to build. The clerk accepted and never came: he was put on trial over his official duties.

So İsmail Efendi went ahead alone. He brought rose bushes from around Isparta, planted a garden of about thirty dönüm, and built the rose house. People said he was spending hundreds of gold coins on nothing. His own family called him mad.

In the fourth harvest year, with the help of a master distiller from Kazanlık known as Pehlivan Ahmet, the oil came.

This is the account the Governorship of Isparta gives. A shorter story is also told in the city, of a single cutting carried home from Kazanlık inside a walking stick. No record confirms it.

The official registration of the Isparta rose adds a wider background. Oil roses came into Anatolia after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, carried by Turkish families leaving Kazanlık.

What the Flower Looks Like

The Isparta rose is Rosa damascena Mill., the damask rose.

It grows as a thorny, long-lived shrub between one and a half and three meters tall, and it handles hard winters well. The flowers are pink and semi-double, with fewer petals than the full, tightly packed roses of a florist's window.

It blooms once a year, for a few weeks between late May and June. Every bottle of Isparta rose oil comes out of that short window.

A Personal Connection to the Rose

I have been interested in plants and traditional botanical preparations for years. I make my own infused oils, tinctures, salves and floral waters, and I also make paper from plants. So I came to the Isparta rose from that side first.

Through Nazım Tanrıkulu’s classes, I discovered the work of Prof. Dr. Ayten Altıntaş, whose research on the rose and its place in Ottoman medicine stayed with me.

Rose oil distillation was the part that fascinated me most while writing this piece. Roses picked by hand in the early morning, during just a few weeks of the year, yield only a very small amount of oil. It brought me back to İsmail Efendi’s first attempts at distillation and the rose water that came before he finally succeeded in producing rose oil.

Where It Grows

Isparta lies in southwest Anatolia, in the inland stretch Turks call Göller Bölgesi, the Lakes Region. Eğirdir Lake sits inside the province. Antalya and the coast are about 130 kilometers to the south by road.

The rose fields spread across the province and over into neighboring Burdur.

Producers here credit the region's climate and soil for the quality of the oil. The protected origin name Isparta Gülü applies only to damask roses grown inside the province's borders.

Picked Before the Sun

The harvest starts in the dark.

Pickers work the rows by hand in the early morning, because the scent sits in volatile oil that the day's heat draws out of the petals. The flowers go to the distilleries the same morning. There they are boiled with water in copper stills and the steam is condensed, drop by drop, into two things at once: a thin layer of oil and a much larger volume of fragrant water.

That water is gül suyu, rose water. It is the same distillation, the part that does not float.

The arithmetic explains the price. Producers in Isparta put the yield at roughly three and a half to four metric tons of flowers for one kilogram of oil.

The growers' cooperative union, Gülbirlik, sells Isparta rose water and oil under its own brand, Rosense.

When Isparta Celebrates the Rose

The harvest has its own celebration. The Isparta International Rose Festival, organized by the Governorship and the municipality, is held each year in late May or early June, while the fields are still in bloom.

It begins at a grave. Each year the festival opens with a commemoration of Gülcüzade İsmail Efendi at his tomb in the Gülcü neighborhood. Then the rose moves into the city. In the opening procession, rose petals and gül suyu have been scattered over the crowds lining the street, and during the harvest the program takes visitors out to the rose gardens.

If you are planning a trip around the harvest, check the official Isparta Rose Festival page for the current year's dates and program.

Day trips from Antalya also run to the fields. This tour of Isparta's rose fields and Lake Salda stops at the rose plantations of Güneykent and a rose-processing workshop, then continues in the afternoon to Salda Gölü. The roses bloom for only a few weeks a year, so the fields are worth seeing during the harvest season.

The Words Inside the Rose

Start with gül, rose. The word came into Turkish from Persian. It happens to sound exactly like the stem of gülmek, to laugh, an old Turkic verb with no family tie to the flower. So Gül! written on its own can be a rose or an order to laugh, and only the sentence around it decides.

The name of the flower is a compound. Isparta Gülü is built as a belirtisiz isim tamlaması, an indefinite noun compound: the first noun names the kind, and the second noun carries the third-person possessive suffix as a compound marker. Gül becomes gülü, with the vowel following the ü of the stem. It is the same pattern as Salda Gölü.

Gül suyu, rose water, follows the same rule, with one irregular word inside it. Su, water, takes -yu where you would expect -su: suyu. You meet the same form in limon suyu, lemon juice, and elma suyu, apple juice. Be careful here, because suyu is also the accusative form of su, as in suyu iç, drink the water. In gül suyu it is the compound marker, and it carries no sense of a definite object.

The order is worth watching here. Gülyağı and yağ gülü contain the same two nouns, and they name different things.

Gülyağı is rose oil: the oil of the rose, yağ with the marker -ı. The official protected name writes it as one word, Isparta Gülyağı.

Yağ gülü is the oil rose: the rose grown for its oil. Same two nouns, reversed. Growers use it to separate the damask rose from roses kept for their looks.

The trade gave a man his name. İsmail Efendi is remembered as Gülcü İsmail Efendi. The suffix -cı names a person by what they work with. It follows vowel harmony, so it can be -cı, -ci, -cu or -cü, and after a voiceless consonant the c hardens to ç. Gül has a front rounded vowel and ends in l, so it takes -cü. Learn the pattern once and you will hear it everywhere: çiçekçi, florist, sütçü, milkman.

The rose house he wrote about in his letters was a gülhane, from gül and the Persian hane, house. The same word names Gülhane Park in Istanbul.

And there is a proverb that fits this plant literally: Gülü seven dikenine katlanır. Whoever loves the rose puts up with its thorns. Dikenine is diken, thorn, plus the possessive -i, a buffer -n-, and the dative -e, because katlanmak, to endure, takes its object in the dative. 

Look also at the first word. Gülü here is the accusative, the definite object of seven, the one who loves. It is spelled exactly like the gülü in Isparta Gülü, where the same letters work as the compound marker. Same letters, two different jobs. The damask rose is a thorny shrub, and every petal in a bottle of Isparta oil was picked past them.

The Scent of the Rose

In Turkish-Islamic culture, the scent of the rose has long carried more than fragrance. In Sufi writing and classical Turkish poetry the rose became one of the best-known symbols of the Prophet Muhammad. Its beauty could stand for divine beauty, and its scent for the Prophet himself.

Yunus Emre put the association into a single line: Çiçek eydür ey derviş, gül Muhammed teridir. The flower says, O dervish, the rose is Muhammad's sweat. Teri is ter, sweat, carrying the same compound marker as Isparta Gülü. From this image grew the belief that the rose took its scent from the Prophet's perspiration, and the folk saying gül koklamak sevaptır, smelling a rose is a good deed. When a rose was smelled or rose water offered, a blessing on the Prophet would follow. At mevlid gatherings rose water was sprinkled over the guests, and craftsmen made special vessels for it, the gülâbdan.

That belief belongs to devotional tradition. Hadith scholars classify every report linking the rose to the Prophet as fabricated, and such reports are absent from early Sufi literature. The image took root later, in Sufi and literary works, and from there it reached everyday religious life.

The rose of classical poetry also has a lover. The nightingale, bülbül, is the lover and the rose the beloved, and in Sufi writing the gülşen, the rose garden, can stand for a heart cleansed and ready to reflect divine beauty. The rose seldom returns the nightingale's love, and its thorns wound him. His consolation is the proverb from earlier: Gülü seven dikenine katlanır.

Bringing the Scent Home

If you want to keep a little of Isparta on a shelf, start with the rose water. Rosense Turkish Rose Water, 300 ml comes from Gülbirlik's own brand, distilled from damask roses grown in the Isparta region. On the label you are looking for two things: Rosa damascena and nothing added.

If you use rose water in the kitchen or go through it quickly, there is also a one-liter bottle of Isparta rose water, sold as distilled in traditional copper stills. A liter goes a long way in muhallebi or güllaç, where a spoonful of gül suyu is the whole point. If you plan to cook with it, check that the label marks it as food grade.

For tea, there are dried rose buds, sold as culinary grade under the name Isparta Pink. Steeped in hot water they make gül çayı, rose tea, a compound built the same way as gül suyu: çay with the marker -ı.

The oil is a different matter. Rosense Turkish Rose Oil, 1 g is the same cooperative's petal oil, and the size of the bottle is the four-ton arithmetic made visible. It is pure essential oil, so it is meant to be used a drop at a time and diluted before it touches skin.

Eyüp Sabri Tuncer is best known in Türkiye for kolonya, the cologne poured into a guest's hands at the door. Its Mystic Rose cleansing wipes use the brand's Mystic rose water, which it describes as distilled from roses grown in Isparta. They come individually wrapped, small enough to carry in a bag.

For the taste of rose, there is lokum. This rose lokum is easy to find outside Türkiye. Its label lists rose flavoring rather than Isparta petals, so think of it as a relative. Isparta's own gül lokumu was submitted to TÜRKPATENT for geographical indication registration by the Isparta Chamber of Commerce and Industry in March 2026.

Keeping the Name

The name Isparta Gülü is protected as a menşe adı, a Turkish designation of origin: the roses must be grown and processed inside the defined area. Isparta rose water and Isparta rose oil carry geographical indication registrations of their own.

The industry was built over decades. By 1919, thirty years after İsmail Efendi's first failed harvest, the Governorship counts rose oil among the district's main trades, sharing the local economy with carpet weaving and the opium poppy. The foundation of a rose oil factory was laid in Isparta in 1935, and in 1954 nine local cooperatives joined to form Gülbirlik, a name that combines gül, rose, and birlik, union.

In 1889 İsmail Efendi's stills gave him nothing but rose water. That water is now sold in bottles of its own, and the oil he waited four years for is sold by the gram.