The cigars enters my life, at the time, when there was no indoor smoking ban, nor cigar smoking was in the movies were doomed, when smokers and non-smokers could co-exist in a certain way.
The journey started for me as I have seen my farther smoking cigars in special occasions. Then I started to seize those special occasions for myself, when I was old enough, by smoking an appropriate cigar, which I was obviously able to purchase only for that special occasion and not for storing for future events.
As I smoked, I started to questions the differences between cigars, between tobacco types and ultimately anything and everything about cigars. The more I learned, the more pleasure I started to get from cigar smoking.
Then a time came, when I realized that unfortunately, there was less then few trustworthy sources in Turkish. Everything I was reading and learning from was in various languages but Turkish. Hence, I decided the share the knowledge I started to build up on cigars and cigar culture... of course in Turkish. By doing so I aim to share, what I see, hear and read on and around cigars and cigar smoking in Turkish, by allowing fellow Turkish cigar smokers to enjoy and increase their pleasure by learning what I learned.
This journey around cigars also allowed me to become a tasting panelist for one of mostly admired cigar magazines Cigar Journal and also internet site Cigar Sense . I started to travel in relation to cigars and started to compete in the Cigar Smoking World Championship, was the winner in 2016 and 2018 Swiss leg of CSWC and also the local winner in UK leg of CSWC again in 2018.
I have chosen el Lector as the site's name because the reader - el Lector - is the one, who is one of the factory workers, someone among them, that informs and shares with the other fellow workers as he reads and creates the community feeling. That is why I thought, friendship and sharing both being the aim of this site, fits perfectly to what an el Lector stands for.
Hope you enjoy your read.
Long ashes...