The town contains many inhabitants of Georgian and Laz ancestries as well as other peoples. Pazar is a strip of Black Sea coast with high mountains running parallel to the coast inland. The wind off the Black Sea is cold in autumn, warm and wet in summer. With all this rainfall the area is very green, and even more water is brought to the area by the many streams bringing rainwater and snowmelt down from the Black Sea mountains, including the Pazar River itself.
This is a hilly district and the main economic activity is tea growing, plus some fishing, trade and light industry tea processing in the town of Pazar. Tea was first planted here in and there are now three factories in Pazar for processing the crop. Before tea was planted, citrus fruits and apples were grown here but this has mostly ceased now, apart from trees in family gardens, where people grow vegetables and keep poultry.
There are small areas of tobacco, corn, potatoes and beans. At even higher altitudes efforts are being made to plant trees but it is hard to put roads through and manage a forest in these steep, high mountains. Today Pazar is a market town, and the centre of the local tea trade.
Fishing was once a major activity and Pazar still has a fleet of small fishing boats although this is in decline as the Black Sea becomes polluted and the traditional anchovies , flathead mullet , red mullet and other species are all in decline.
Until tea was planted these districts at the far end of Turkey were all impoverished, losing generation after generation as migrant workers in Europe or Istanbul. Life is still a struggle and people still leave although now many return for the tea harvest in summer. Local handicrafts include basket-weaving and the hand-woven linen Rize bezi. As in much of rural Turkey, women traditionally cover their heads, partly out tradition, partly from practical necessity as they are outside in the wind and rain.
