Letters · from the Turkish · Foça, autumn 2019
Three Letters from Captain Nuri Demirkol
Correspondence between a former small-boat captain, now living inland above Bergama, and his niece Zeynep at university in Eskişehir. Written over the course of a single autumn on thin blue airmail paper, folded twice and sent with a five-lira stamp he had saved since the 1990s. Subjects include: the weather of his childhood in Foça, the difficulty of being useful in retirement, the particular loneliness of a six-metre tirhandil (the Seyfi Kaptan, bought from a widow in 1978) left in dry dock from June through September, and a long paragraph on the proper way to drink tea on a boat that is being tossed. Published with the blessing of Mrs. Zeynep Demirkol-Aras and with a short afterword from her.
"You ask me what I miss. I miss being needed by weather. A man in a city is needed by other men, which is flattering but not the same thing."
Oral history · two afternoons · Karaburun
Halide Hanım, Who Kept the Lamp
Halide Yılmaz tended the small navigation lamp at Sarpıncık Burnu for thirty-one years, from 1958 until the lamp was automated in the winter of 1989. She is ninety-one now. We spoke across two afternoons in her daughter Nebahat's garden in Mordoğan, under a fig tree that, she told me firmly, had been planted in the wrong place by her late son-in-law. The published excerpt covers her first winter at the lamp, the freighter Ayşegül that did not come back in February 1963, and a long, surprising digression on the shearwaters that arrived with the wind each February and that she came, over the decades, to consider her only reliable colleagues.
"A lamp does not need a person. It needs a person who has decided it does. This is different, and it took me a winter to understand it."
Logbook · from the Ahmet Şenol family archive
A Ferryman's Almanac, 1964–1979
A Haliç ferry pilot's personal logbook, not the official one — kept for fifteen years in a series of forty-kuruş school notebooks with green marbled covers. He recorded the weather in his own shorthand (p.ş. for poyraz, şiddetli; l.h. for lodos, hafif), the unusual passengers, and, toward the end, the names of regulars who had stopped appearing. I worked on this with his son Ahmet over the course of a year, at a kitchen table in Kasımpaşa. What appears here is a small selection, about one entry for every fifty in the original.
Interview · from the Turkish · Çandarlı Bay
The Boat Builder of Çandarlı Bay
A conversation, in two sittings at the kıyı kahvesi overlooking the Çandarlı slip, with master kalafatçı Mehmet Arıkan, whose family has shaped the same six hull forms — the Ayvalık piyade, the double-ended tirhandil, and four smaller variants — for four generations. On karaağaç for the keel and çam for the planking, on the economics of stubbornness, and on the decision — finally taken in the winter of 2022, not without grief — to teach the trade to Hakan, a young apprentice from Denizli who had arrived asking the right questions.
Folk almanac · in progress · Rıza Bey's notebook
A Pocket Book of Coastal Weather Lore
A long-term project: translating, annotating, and cross-referencing a small bound volume of weather sayings collected between 1949 and 1956 by a schoolteacher named Rıza Nuri Bey, who spent every August on the Karadeniz coast between İnebolu and Sinop. Many of the sayings have fallen out of use; a few are still heard every morning on the quay at Cide. A representative entry: "Eğer sabah martı susmuşsa, akşam balık da susacaktır" — "If the morning gull has fallen silent, the evening fish will also." I have so far rendered 214 of the 611 entries, and expect this to take several more years. I am in no hurry.
Logbook · from the Yıldız archive · Ayvalık
The Weights Book of Uncle Sabri
A single small notebook kept by the auctioneer Sabri Yıldız between 1971 and 1984, recording not the prices of fish but their weights and the names of the boats that brought them. Unsentimental on the page, and, in aggregate, quietly devastating — one can watch individual boats grow smaller over the decade, and one can see, in 1978, the season the Deniz Kızı stops appearing. Translated and annotated with the permission of his grandson Okan, who is a dentist in Balıkesir and who read every draft.