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Half the World's Sultanas Leave Through One Turkish City

Türkiye is the world's largest producer and exporter of seedless sultanas, dried figs and dried apricots. In one recent season it declared a crop of 246,346 tonnes of sultanas against a world total of 1,090,000 — about 22% of everything grown on the planet — and set out to take 48% of world sultana exports.

Nearly all of it moves through the Aegean, and the Aegean's export hub is İzmir.

95% of Türkiye's sultana exports come from the region. Across all dried fruit, 62% of the national export total is handled by Aegean exporters — $465 million out of $752 million in the first half of 2026 alone. The Aegean Dried Fruit Exporters' Association, based in İzmir, crossed $1 billion in annual exports for the first time in the 2023/24 season, sending to more than a hundred countries.

The growth over thirty years is the part worth pausing on. Regional sultana production went from around 100,000 tonnes to 300,000. Dried figs went from 30,000 tonnes to 90,000 — tripled.

All of it is dried in the sun.

The clock: which is where İzmir turns out to have a distinction nobody has claimed for it.

Türkiye abolished daylight saving in 2016 and fixed the whole country permanently at UTC+3 — a zone calculated for the 45th meridian east.

İzmir sits at about 27° east.

That leaves the city running roughly 71 minutes ahead of its own solar noon — the widest gap of any major Turkish city. Istanbul is at 64 minutes, Bursa 64, Ankara 49. İzmir is further west than all of them, so the arithmetic puts it furthest from its own sun.

On this site's ranking it enters fourth in the world, behind only Reykjavík, Madrid and Kuala Lumpur, and ahead of Singapore.

An industry that depends entirely on real sunlight — figs and grapes laid out on trays until the water leaves them — operating in the Turkish city whose clock disagrees most with where the sun actually is.

The fruit has never once been told what time it is.

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