Issue XIV · Late Autumn, Rumeli Feneri A quarterly notebook · lodos weather

Ergin Altınel

Notes from the Long Coast — essays, translations, and harbor conversations

From the editor · 14 Kasım

On the morning a harbor wakes, there is a brief courtesy among the boats — lanterns dimmed together, engines unhurried, the older captains going first. The lüfer boats of Sarıyer leave before the çipura boats of Rumelikavağı; this has been true for longer than anyone has bothered to write down.

This notebook began as a folder of marginalia — things overheard on the quays between Ayvalık and Poyrazköy, phrases I could not bring myself to discard. It has grown, slowly, into something closer to a practice. What you will find here is never breaking news. It is meant for long evenings, and for the kind of reading that does not mind being interrupted by a kettle.

— Ergin Altınel, from the small room above Hacı Recep's chandlery

The poyraz has been honest this year, which is to say: cold. Letters will be answered after the Şenol logbook chapter closes — I have promised the Demirkol family the first reading by Kandil.

In this issue

Essay · 3,400 words · Kumkapı auction shed

The Quiet Hour Before the Market Opens

At four-thirty the mezat shed is still dark, but the ice truck has already backed in, and two men I have known for a decade — Memiş the weigher and Cengiz who buys for the Karaköy lokantas — are arguing about the same thing they argue about every October: whether the palamut are running shallow this year, or whether it only seems that way because the poyraz has been wrong since the feast of Hıdrellez. I sat with them until the buyers came, and until the light under the corrugated roof went from lamp-light to morning.

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Translation · from the Turkish

Three Letters from Captain Nuri Demirkol

A correspondence, previously unpublished, from a small-boat captain in Foça writing to his niece Zeynep at university in Eskişehir. Rendered with the Demirkol family's permission. On the meltem, on patience, on the particular loneliness of a six-metre tirhandil left in dry dock from June through September.

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Field notes · Bozcaada mending shed

What the Nets Remember

A short piece on mending — the vocabulary of knots in three coastal dialects, the way a fanya net accumulates the history of the water it has passed through, and why the oldest menders on the island still prefer a wooden ağ iğnesi cut from boxwood by hand. Written during a week spent in İbrahim Usta's shed, which smelled of tar and rain and yesterday's tea.

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Oral history · Sarpıncık headland

Halide Hanım, Who Kept the Lamp

Halide Yılmaz tended the small navigation lamp at Sarpıncık Burnu for thirty-one years, in a stone building no larger than a pantry. She is ninety-one now, and spoke to me across two afternoons in her daughter Nebahat's garden in Karaburun. This is a first excerpt, lightly edited, with her blessing and her tea.

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Reading · a shelf note

A Shelf for the Slow Winter

Seven books I return to when the water turns grey and the boats come in early — a 1934 Marmara fisheries report by the ministry of the day, a pocket book of Karadeniz weather lore by a schoolteacher named Rıza Bey, a slim novel about a Haliç ferry pilot, and four others. Short notes on each, and why I keep them within reach of the kettle.

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"A harbor is not a place. It is an agreement among people who have decided, for the time being, to trust the same piece of water."

— from The Quiet Hour Before the Market Opens

From the archive

The volumes so far

XIV

Late Autumn · current

Markets, mending, and the lamps of the Karaburun peninsula.

XIII

Summer

Inland groves, inherited weather, and one very slow walk above İzmir.

XII

Spring

Boat-builders, apprentices, and the end of a family workshop in Çandarlı.

XI

Winter

Fog, horns, and the unwritten manners of the lower Bosphorus.

X

Autumn

Ferries, almanacs, the strange hospitality of a municipal waiting room.

IX

Summer

Breakwaters, bird-counters, and a schoolteacher's last clear morning.