A Tale of Two Latakias

"A Tale of Two Latakias" is an essay written by American blender G.L. Pease and, according to the records, first published in Volume 5, Issue 2 of Pipe Friendly Magazine. The text sets side by side two different types of Latakia that share a name and a similar smoke-curing tradition — the Syrian type and the type processed in Cyprus.

The reason the essay is cited so often in the pipe community is that it makes explicit the fact that the word "Latakia" does not refer to a single tobacco but covers two dissimilar products.

The Circumstances of Its Writing

The essay was written during a period when Syrian Latakia had long been unavailable on the market and had only just begun reappearing in limited quantities. Sources do not agree on when production stopped: one account points to a ban on cutting the wood needed for smoke-curing, dating the shutdown to the late 1970s; another describes a decline dragged out until around 2010 through the compounding effects of deforestation, blue mold disease, and civil war. According to the records, Cyprus is today the only place still processing Latakia. For this reason the essay is regarded less as a tasting guide than as a record of a production tradition in the process of vanishing.