Notes from the Long Coast
A short gazetteer
These are the places a piece tends to come from. Some I return to every year; a few I have only been able to visit once. None are recommendations in the travel sense — they are working harbors, most of them small, and they are busy with their own lives. I list them here so that a reader following a piece has a rough sense of where it was standing.
The old inner basin holds perhaps forty small boats, most of them tirhandils rigged for line fishing, with four or five larger piyade types kept for lamparo nights in September. The chandlery belongs to the third generation of the Sönmez family; the kıyı kahvesi on the corner is where Captain Demirkol's letters were eventually composed. Best mornings: late October, before the lodos turns.
The lamp Halide Hanım tended for thirty-one years still stands; the keeper's cottage, a two-room building of coursed limestone, is locked now and kept by the municipality for occasional inspection. The approach road is bad and honest. Shearwaters in February, as she said.
Twelve boats in the inner cove, seven pulled up on the hard through winter. The shed where What the Nets Remember was written has a blue door that is rarely closed during the day and rarely open after sunset. Kömür the cat is in residence. Good light in the shed on north-wind mornings.
The auction shed is a long corrugated building with a tiled floor and a bleach cycle at midnight. Four wholesalers hold pitches; perhaps fifteen regular buyers, most of them sourcing for the Karaköy and Beyoğlu lokantas. The kahvehane across the way opens at 03:30 and closes when the last buyer leaves, which is a different hour each day.
The working slip where the Arıkan family has shaped piyades, tirhandils, and the four smaller variants no one outside the bay uses any more. The workshop smells of pine shavings and the particular linseed mixture Mehmet Usta will not discuss. Hakan, the first apprentice from outside the family, has now been there for just over three years.
The outer arm of the Ereğli breakwater runs roughly 340 metres and turns sharply toward the east at the far end. Fethi Bey walked it every morning for forty-one years and counted the gulls he could see from the second bollard. The biscuit tin of notebooks is now with his daughter in Zonguldak.