Mosaic Moments

…..coming back to Nusret Bey … he worked for 30 years as a security guard at the archeological site of Zeugma. So he saw a lot of the mosaics being lifted. He actually was involved in lifting mosaics himself which means he really knows the structure of ancient mosaics very well. Through this he came to make mosaics himself.

Mosaic by Nusret Özdemir

And this most experienced master agreed over the phone to work with me on the Ayvalik mosaic!!!

Our first meeting was quit daring for the two of us. Thankfully Prof Görkay came along to translate. But still it was difficult to talk about the idea, the techniques –  that Nusret Bey uses and the techniques I thought of using.

But I liked Nusret and his workshop in one of the less affluent areas of Gaziantep and left the meeting with the vague feeling that it will work out somehow … the most difficult part for me was to talk about payment. I had never before payed somebody to work with me and in this case it was especially tricky as Nusret had two roles – being an usta – the Turkish word for “master” and at the same time a worker carrying out the work that I conceived, designed and planned.

But we immediately set to work after Nusret’s technique, which I hardly understood in the conversation – and I came along and watched and it slowly made sense:

First we bought wooden slats and MDF board and had it sawn to certain measures in the neighborhoods carpentry

… then we went to buy white cotton material in an interesting workshop where two men made beautifully quilted duvet covers

…. then Nusret set to work in his own workshop. He reinforced the MDF boards with the slats,

…. painted the fabric with white glue and let it dry to be quite stiff

… fitted the fabric onto the MDF boards like a canvas

… and glued the printout of the the fishes onto the canvas with a special shoemakers glue

And the gipsy girl always watched us.

After this preparatory work I went back to Ankara – and the neighborhood kids where posing with dog –

to pack up my own atelier during the Seker Bayram (this big islamic holiday at the end of the fasting period Ramadan).

I had to pack up because my husband got posted to Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, and we have to leave Turkey! What a development!

During the three days I was often sighing how crazy it is to ship a mosaic atelier around the world!

… and off went the marble from Ankara University to Gaziantep in the truck of the Zeugma Archeological Project.
(click on the pic and they open in a new link)

Zeugma Archeological Project

Here I would like to extend my special  thanks to Prof Dr Kutalmis Görkay from Ankara University Archeological Faculty and director of the Zeugma Excavation Project for being my sponsor in my mosaic endeavor in the past year. Sponsor not in a monetary way. But he was always there with his knowledge, advice and ideas how this project could be put into practice in the context of Turkey, which I as a foreigner often would have misjudged. He kept my idealism going and not let it drown in practical problems.

Prof Görkay was the one who connected me with Nusret Özdemir, who comes from the village of Belkis, which was flooded due to building the Belkis dam on the Euphrates river. Up to the year  2000 together with many other villages the two archeological  sites of the ancient cities – Seleuceia (today Zeugma) and Apamea got flooded.

The fishes of my mosaic decorated once also the floor of a house in Zeugma owned by a wealthy Roman family. I can imagine the owner and their guests contemplating over which fish could have been the one that just came up from the fisherman from the river Euphrates and is now being prepared in the kitchen for a fine meal.

And I imagine the same conversation in our house when we sit with guests looking at those fishes again.

When the waters of the Euphrates almost reached the mosaics at the archeological site of Zeugma a rescue operation by more than 200 specialists lifted the mosaics and other archeological finds out of the grounds and brought them to the archeological museum in Gaziantep. Later in 2011 the Zeugma Mosaic Museum was opened with the mosaics beautifully presented.

…. it is overwhelming what support and interest I find in my quest to get THE MATERIAL..

First I have to thank my friend Kay, her daughters Nora and Phoebe and my splendid daughter Hillary for helping to roughly count the tesserae by color to get an idea how much STONE I need of each color.

For this I made a color scheme and then these darlings spent several hours of their precious holiday crouching over the full size print out which was spread on the floor in our holiday house….

The color scheme with 13 primary color,but each stone of one color comes in different shades

In mosaic restoration class which I attended last year at the Conservation- and Restoration school of Ankara University we learned to take an average weight for 1 tesserae, to get somewhat of an idea about how much of each color we would need. I took 4g per tesserae and it will be 56 kg for the total mosaic!

Then, one morning, I set off early to Balikesir, 100 km east of Ayvalik to 3 marble dealers. I was tipped off to one of  them by Evren Bey from Turanbekisoglu marble quarry  in Sivrihisar, which I visited on the way to Ayvalik with Hillary.

poor sick Hillary was dragged around the marble factory by her crazy mum

Turanbesikoglu Marble Dealer

After getting carried away in the beautiful curves through the hills on the phantastic road between Edremit and Balikesir I went to Assos Marble, where I was met and led around their vast field of marble stock by Baris Bey a young man who speaks fluent English, further I went to Verona Marble which had just done a mosaic of the largest carpet in the world

There I was helped by Ali Isan Basöz, an extremely well English spoken sales man, who is part of the sales team that speaks Russian, German, French, Italian and English as foreign languages – impressive to find this in such a small town like Balikesir!

In both places I found most of the colors in marble and got them basically for free after showing my design and enthusiasm for THE MOSAIC.

2 days later I had them cut into 5cm sticks ready to be transported to Gaziantep in a crate

at Ayvalik Marble Atelier

look at these beautiful colors

Just  a light green was missing – so on the way back to Ankara, my friend Miriam had to be dragged too through marble dealers in Bursa and Gemlik ( on the Marmara Sea) – where we finally found IT – the light green – “Usak Yesil”