2024 · 3,400 words · Kumkapı, İstanbul
The Quiet Hour Before the Market Opens
On the dark courtesy of the mezat shed at four in the morning, where the ice arrives before the fish, where Memiş the weigher and Cengiz who buys for the Karaköy lokantas have been arguing about the same October bonito for a decade, and where the tiled floor still carries the faint smell of the bleach they use at midnight. I went expecting a piece on commerce. I came away with a piece on attention, and on the way older men teach each other patience by pretending to argue about prices.
"The lamps over the sorting tables throw a light that is neither kind nor unkind. It is the light of a place where decisions are made quickly by people who have known each other a long time, and who have nothing more to prove to one another than the weight of one crate of fish."
2024 · 2,100 words · Bozcaada
What the Nets Remember
A week in İbrahim Usta's mending shed on the western cove of Bozcaada. The vocabulary of knots in three coastal dialects — the Ayvalık kaytan düğüm, the Karadeniz sarma, and the one the old man simply calls benim düğümüm, "my own" — the weight of a boxwood ağ iğnesi against a plastic one, and the question of whether a fanya net, after enough repairs, becomes something other than what it began as. The shed has a cat named Kömür who sleeps in a coil of discarded line and is, by common agreement, in charge.
"İbrahim Usta held the net up to the door so the light came through it, and he read it the way a doctor reads an old X-ray — with sympathy, and without surprise."
2023 · 4,800 words · Above Urla
Olive Trees That Lean Toward the Sea
A walking piece, inland from the small harbor at Özbek, through the Kırkağaç grove that the Karaman family has kept for five generations. On inheritance, on the strange botany of trees that have grown up in steady imbat, and on the question of what a place owes to the people who keep returning to it. I walked the lower terraces with Selma Karaman, who is seventy-three and who has pruned every tree on the property at least twice in her life.
2023 · 1,700 words · The lower Bosphorus
On Fog, and the Courtesy of Engines
The unwritten rules by which small boats move through a crowded channel when the visibility collapses — the long horn for a loaded vessel, the short doubled horn for a boat coming about, the old Rumelikavağı habit of tapping a wrench on the cleat three times when passing astern of another hull. How captains signal without speaking. What the newer GRP boats lose by being too quiet. A short essay, written in a single afternoon, after a passage between Tarabya and Beykoz I will not soon forget.
2022 · 2,600 words · Ereğli breakwater
The Man Who Counted Gulls
For forty-one years, a retired schoolteacher named Fethi Bey walked the same stretch of the Karadeniz Ereğli breakwater each morning and wrote down the number of gulls he could see, in a series of squared notebooks he kept in a biscuit tin. I spent three days with him in his last summer. His daughter, with great generosity, has allowed me to photograph a single page of the 1987 book. This is not, in the end, a piece about birds.
2021 · 3,000 words · The small room
A Shelf for the Slow Winter
Seven books I keep within reach when the boats come in early and the shed doors stay shut. Hasan Refik's 1934 Marmara Balıkçılığı Raporu; Rıza Bey's pocket book of Karadeniz weather lore; a 1971 novel by Orhan Kemalettin about a Haliç ferry pilot whose route was cancelled in the middle of his shift; a bilingual edition of Seferis; a ministry pamphlet on harbor hygiene that I love for the wrong reasons; and two others — with notes on why each has earned its place near the kettle.
2021 · 2,400 words · Kandilli, İstanbul
The Observatory and the Fishermen
On the odd, century-long friendship between the Kandilli meteorologists and the small-boat captains working the currents below them. How the 6 a.m. telephone call came to be made, who makes it now that the old switchboard is gone, and why the reis at Çengelköy still writes down the barometer reading on the back of the same kind of grocery receipt his grandfather used.