Abstract
Before and after Christ, the transit route connecting Asia with European trade centers was passing through Istanbul by crossing the whole of Anatolia. Subsequently, an important part of this transportation was transferred to sea routes. The Black Sea, which was closed to foreign ships until the Küçük Kaynarca Treaty during the Ottoman Empire, was opened to international trade with the Russians entering the Black Sea with this treaty. The fact that Britain and Iran started to trade through Trabzon enabled the Black Sea trade to revive from the beginning of the 19th century and the routes from the Eastern Black Sea to Iran gained strategic importance. Thus, the transit trade routes from the Eastern Black Sea ports to Iran began to work. These roads were Trabzon-Erzurum-Tabriz road, Sukhum-Poti or Batum-Tbilisi-Tabriz road, which transported the manufactured goods of Europe to the East and the raw materials of the East to Europe. The road to be discussed in this study is the Trabzon-Erzurum-Tabriz road, which was active in the same period. Iran transit trade, which was once done with caravans on this road, has started to be done by trucks since the beginning of the 20th century. This historical Iran transit trade route, which saw the rivalry of caravans and trucks, was in good working condition before the First World War. With the war, this situation changed. The Iranian transit trade route passing through Turkey began to lose its vitality and the trade from here began to shift towards the ports of Beirut and Basra. Thus, the Trabzon-Erzurum-Tabriz road lost its commercial vitality. A number of studies and projects were developed by the Republic of Turkey in the 1930s in order to restore this road, which lost its vitality, to its former commercial vitality. In this study, the activities carried out to restore the Trabzon-Erzurum-Tabriz road to its former functionality in the first years of the Republic, and especially the situation of the Iranian transit trade route passing through Turkey, from the proclamation of the Republic to the 1950s, the phases of the road in the Republican period and its competition with rival roads, will be presented in a comparative way. In the study, which is based on the information and documents obtained from the archive, national and local press, research works were also used.