Notes from the Long Coast
About the notebook
My name is Ergin. I grew up between two places that both, in different ways, faced the sea: my grandmother Hatice's house above a quiet cove near Foça, and an apartment in Kadıköy where the İstanbul ferries were, for many of us, the first measure of the day. I studied literature at Boğaziçi, worked for some years as an editor of other people's writing at a small press in Cihangir, and eventually drifted — the word is exact — into the long essays and translations you will find here.
This notebook is not a magazine, though it borrows some of the furniture of one. It has no schedule I would trust you to hold me to. It has no masthead beyond my own name, no advertising, no syndication. I publish when a piece is ready, and I take a piece down if I later decide I was wrong about it. Both of these have happened; one of them, concerning an essay about a boat-builder in 2019, still embarrasses me.
Small-boat fishing culture, mostly. The lives of the people who work the quays — menders, auctioneers, retired reis, the women who run the chandleries and remember everyone's credit. Translations from the Turkish of letters, logbooks, and oral histories, always with the permission of the speaker or family. Occasional essays on reading, on weather, and on the particular ethics of writing about working people whose names I use.
I do not review restaurants. I do not write travel pieces in the commercial sense. I do not accept sponsored work, affiliate arrangements, or tourism board commissions of any kind, and I do not carry advertising on these pages. If you are here because a piece was shared with you, welcome; if you would like to share a piece with someone else, welcome too — that is how this notebook travels.
The site is written by hand, in a plain text editor, by me, usually at the small table above Hacı Recep's chandlery in Foça or at the kitchen table in Kadıköy. The typefaces are set in Libre Baskerville and Work Sans. There are no trackers, no analytics, no cookies. I do not know who reads this, and I have found, after years of wondering whether I should, that I prefer it that way.
Most of what is published here was first thought or first spoken in Turkish. I translate with the assumption that a sentence has a grain, and that the translator's task is to follow the grain without pretending the wood is English. I leave a handful of Turkish words in place — reis, poyraz, meltem, kalafatçı, others — because the English equivalents are either longer or less true. A short glossary accompanies the notebook for readers who want one.
The people in these pieces are named with their permission, or their family's. In three cases across fourteen issues, a speaker has asked me to use a different first name, and I have — marked, each time, with a small footnote. Boats are named as their owners named them. I do not invent people; I do sometimes compress two conversations into one, and when I do I say so.
Thank you for reading.
— E.A.