Kutahya

Kutahya is not just Turkiye's tile city; it is trying to turn centuries of ceramic know-how into a modern materials cluster. The interesting question is not whether the city still makes cini. It is whether that craft base can be pushed up the value chain before the wider Kutahya economy loses more momentum.

The provincial capital sits 947 metres above sea level in inland western Turkiye, and recent reporting that cites TUIK data puts the city centre's population at 275,111, far above the older GeoNames figure still attached to the stub. UNESCO's Creative Cities profile helps explain why the place matters: Kutahya has long been the country's symbolic centre of cini production, and UNESCO's 2016 baseline counted nearly 435 craft workshops employing 15,000 craftsmen, with 95% tied to tile and ceramic work.

That would be enough for a heritage story. Kutahya's business story is more ambitious. In 2025, the Kutahya Chamber of Commerce and Industry argued that the city's growth path now depends on moving beyond decorative ceramics and using the same accumulated skills for higher-margin products. Its strategic report explicitly calls for carrying traditional expertise into battery coatings, medical ceramics, and armour ceramics, while converting the province's bor wealth into higher-value chemicals such as lithium borate and boron nitride. The same report treats electric-vehicle supply chains as the next adjacent niche, tying Kutahya to the Bursa-Eskisehir-Manisa manufacturing corridor instead of leaving it as a stand-alone craft city.

That is a harder story than tourism brochures tell. KUTSO says the wider Kutahya economy has lost momentum since 2017, so the city is not diversifying from a position of comfort. It is reallocating capital and institutional attention toward products that can pay more than tableware and souvenir tiles. If that upgrade stalls, Kutahya risks remaining famous for low-margin ceramics while richer industrial corridors capture the next wave of materials value. The ceramic tradition matters here not as nostalgia but as process knowledge: firing, glazing, mineral chemistry, quality control, and exportable reputation.

Biologically, Kutahya behaves like an abalone. Abalone shells are strong because they stack mineral layers with extraordinary control, turning brittle material into something resilient and valuable. Kutahya is attempting the same kind of upgrade. The city follows path dependence because its future still runs through ceramics, but it is also pursuing adaptive radiation by sending that craft DNA into new industrial niches and using niche construction to build a higher-value habitat around old skills.