A small glossary Words the notebook keeps using

Ergin Altınel

Notes from the Long Coast

For the patient reader

A short reference for the words I keep reaching for.

Most of these are Turkish; a few are regional. I have footnoted them where they appear, but many readers have asked me to collect them in one place. I will add and correct as I go. Where a word has a spelling that varies along the coast, I have given the form most common in the place I most recently heard it.

Winds and weather

poyraz
The north-east wind, dry and clarifying. In winter it can be punishing; in summer it is what the older captains wait for after a week of south wind. The shorthand p.ş. ("poyraz, şiddetli") appears in the Şenol ferry logbook to mean a day on which the small ferries ran but not happily.
lodos
The south-westerly. Warm, wet, and untrustworthy. On the Bosphorus it can reverse the surface current. A lodos morning is one you plan around rather than through.
meltem / imbat
The summer northerly on the Aegean coast is called meltem in general; imbat is the specific afternoon sea-breeze of the İzmir gulf, arriving, if the day has been hot, at around two in the afternoon and departing again near sunset.
karayel
The north-westerly of the Marmara and the western Karadeniz. The wind that closes the Kumkapı quay when it is serious.
Hıdrellez
The spring festival, 5–6 May; for fishing communities it marks, roughly, the beginning of the warm-water season. "Hıdrellez'den sonra" ("after Hıdrellez") is a common dating phrase in the oral histories.

Boats and building

tirhandil
A double-ended wooden boat, sharp at both ends, traditional to the Aegean. Usually five to eight metres. The form of Captain Demirkol's Seyfi Kaptan.
piyade
A larger, transom-sterned working boat of the Ayvalık–Çandarlı region, often used for lamparo fishing in early autumn.
alamana
A seiner or small purse-netter; also, by extension, the style of working at night with a light.
kalafatçı
A boat-builder and caulker. The trade that Mehmet Arıkan keeps, and that Hakan is now learning.
karaağaç / çam
Elm and pine; traditionally keel and planking, respectively, in the Çandarlı slip.

Nets, knots, and gear

fanya
A trammel net, three-walled: a fine inner net between two coarser outer walls. The kind most often mended in İbrahim Usta's shed.
ağ iğnesi
The mending needle, traditionally cut from boxwood and pre-loaded with twine. A plastic one is lighter but, İbrahim Usta insists, "does not know the net."
kaytan düğüm
A cord-knot of the Ayvalık mending tradition; tight, symmetrical, slightly slower to tie than the Karadeniz sarma but, in his view, kinder to old twine.
parima
The forward mooring line. The word that a harbormaster will shout first when a boat is coming in awkwardly.

Fish and market

palamut
Bonito. The October argument at the Kumkapı shed is, essentially, always about palamut.
lüfer
Bluefish; the fish most closely associated with the Bosphorus autumn. Smaller specimens have their own names (çinekop, sarıkanat, kofana as they grow), which are taken seriously.
çipura
Gilthead sea bream, worked by the lines of the Rumelikavağı boats.
mezat
The fish auction. Also the shed in which it takes place, by metonymy.
reis
Captain — usually of a small working boat, and usually as a form of address. Using someone's name before reis ("Nuri Reis") is the standard polite form.

† I have been gently corrected on kaytan düğüm by a mender in Cunda who uses the term for a quite different knot. I am leaving both explanations in my files and will update this entry once I have visited her shed again. — E.A.