…..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.   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 …

… 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) 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 …

…. 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…. 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 …