01 Three animals, one name
It is worth keeping them apart, because labels confuse them constantly. "Angora wool" is rabbit hair. Mohair is goat hair. They are different fibres, from different animals, sharing only the name of the place they came from.
For centuries the city exported substantial amounts of goat and cat skins alongside its wool products. The long-hair trade was what put it on European commercial maps long before it was anything else.
02 What mohair actually is
The word is neither Turkish nor Greek: it entered English before 1570 from the Arabic mukhayyar, "choice", which denoted a kind of haircloth. And what it denotes today is a fibre between 25 and 45 micrometres in diameter, one that thickens with the animal's age: the older the goat, the coarser the fibre.
A single goat yields between 5 and 7.5 kilos of mohair a year. It is sheared twice, in spring and autumn, though the traditional Turkish practice is a single annual shearing, which gives a longer fibre. Compared with cashmere, mohair is less fine but yields far more: cashmere has to be combed, not shorn.
Mohair's sheen is not an industrial finish: it is the shape of the fibre, which has almost no protruding scales.
That structure explains its properties: high lustre, an exceptional affinity for dyes — hence the saturated colours you see in any skein — thermal insulation, natural elasticity and crease resistance. Ordinary wool, with its prominent scales, does none of that as well.
03 1849: the year the monopoly broke
Mohair production was exclusively Turkish until the mid-nineteenth century. Until 1849, the province of Ankara was the world's sole producer of Angora goats. I found no documentary evidence of a formal ban on exporting the animals, so I do not claim one; what is documented is the fact of the monopoly.
The dismantling was fast. South Africa received animals in 1838; the United States in 1849, as a Turkish gift; Australia between 1856 and 1875; New Zealand somewhat later, with no clear date. In four decades, a product that existed only on one Anatolian plateau was on three continents.
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04 Where it is today
The reversal is complete. In 2024, South Africa produced 56% of the world's mohair, and Lesotho 16% according to 2022 figures. Türkiye remains on the list of producers, but far behind.
The herd figures say the same. In 1960 Türkiye had more than six million Angora goats. Then the population fell sharply: by 2004, of the country's 7.2 million goats, only 5% were Angora stock. In 2003 a breed conservation programme was set up.
A note of honesty about the animal's origin: the specialist literature itself concedes that "the origin of the Angora is currently not known". We know it is a Turkish breed carrying this city's name, and that the earliest Western description was written by Pierre Belon in 1555, noting hair "so delicate that one would judge it finer than silk". Where the breed came from before that is not on record.
It is worth having in mind when you pass a market in Ankara and see a tiftik blanket among the piles of ordinary goods. You are looking at what remains of a world monopoly: not a souvenir, but the residue of an industry that was taken away.
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