Okapi in a lotus forest pre-kiln process photos.

Okapi are an animal discovered to the Western World during the early twentieth century, closely related to the giraffe. Living only in the remote rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, they were nearly mythological creatures, known only to locals who were occasionally skillful in successfully capturing them. Okapi are shy creatures with an extraordinary sense of hearing who flee at any sign of an approaching creatures, hence their incredible ability to escape detection.

The okapi in a lotus forest represents the unseen reality.

Floral motif of my own design based on historical references from Selimiye Mosque. Somewhat reflecting an interaction between two flowers, a conversation, of sorts.

Below are pre-firing production photos (sketching, drawing, then painting) of two of my designs using historical rûmî motifs.

We wander down the narrow streets in a Balkan border city, shuffling through forgotten histories down the lanes of locked memories. We pass burned buildings among new development, old houses sitting on faultlines nearly sideways from some surprise of an earthquake with lace curtains in the windows. İ see the shadow of a woman dressed in a high-necked gown in the window and wonder if she is there. Borders are like faultlines.

A rainbow of light comes through the broken windows around the green door. An inner foyer reveals a second entranceway wih squares of colored glass, blue, green, red, yellow. A cat is waiting on the porch. The door is locked. The door is not simply locked by the familiar key misplaced on the table, hidden at the bottom of the pocket. The door is locked by a key that is never lost.

A man rides by on his bicycle not knowing that the rainbow of colored light and the cat on the porch is what has attracted my gaze. The cat seems to be waiting for someone to return. İ am standing in contemplation of how the colored glass must look from the inside. What it must be like to have such a rainbow of colored glass in the foyer. When she wakes, morning light is bringing a shifting symphony of light to the breakfast table. The surface of the water pitcher sparkles in infinite reflection of color and light. The man riding by on his bicycle tells me the house probably belongs to a Greek family who left during a period of unrest. The earth quakes at the borderline.

İ remember the man named İsa who sold me a golden locket in America. He had been there for twenty years; İ do not know what keys he holds. He told me of these locked homes. İ see the door is closed with a chain and a thick padlock, just as he had described. The owners of the houses, he told me, leave the houses locked in hopes of returning someday. They keep the key safe and wait for the day when they will again return, unlock the door, and move into the shifting rainbow of light that is home. As they wait, the key never rusts. The home falls to ruins, the colored glass, the rainbow of light shifting crumbles to the floor, through the broken floorboards, down to the quaking earth. But the key is never lost.

İ wonder at what things we leave locked in the homeland, holding tightly to a precious key. Our memories. Our homes. Our selves.

İ think of the buried treasures of the Appalachians and the secrets we hold. With no trust in banks in my mountain homeland, they bury their treasues in jars in the expansive backyard leading into wilderness. How many treasures, pennies carefully saved, must live locked in their secret places underground at the borderline of home and the world. How many secrets live locked deep within, within the safe soil of home.

We lose our memories, our minds. We lose heart. We forget what the keys we hold unlock as our minds unravel toward the infinite. We pass from this place in what feels barely more than a day, a moment in which we are turning our eyes from the grass toward the bright light of the sun, and find it is too bright to see. Our memories are the spots that remain as we move our eyes back toward the earth, see the black spots flashing like the core of the sun, like a distant understanding of what we just turned our face toward. Then they fade as we pass on. And all we locked, all we buried, remains secret in the depths of home.

For a moment my thoughts rest on the woman with her colored glass and her golden key.

Perhaps those of us who can believe in our destiny find it in every passing moment, in every heartbeat. Perhaps it is easier to see when a foreigner, like the stranger sitting beside a distant sea and marveling at the waves drawing nearer as the tide comes in at twilight, like the grandfather’s apple peel in one long spiral still attached to the fruit but moving into space like some ancient hymn.

The word for luck, for chance, is common in everyday conversations. İ do not know so many words here. Simple descriptions and metaphors are important to my communication skills. İ know how to say something is sweet, in a crazy kind of way, or that something is vast, or mixed in the way you can get a box of mixed varieties of baklava at the pastry shop. İ stopped studying and İ learn from life, remembering words that people use and trying them in new situations. Some metaphors cannot translate. İ learned the word for a sunflower seed we were eating. İ asked if the heart is a seed. Or if women has seeds. Or if birds eat seeds and if plants grow from them. The dictionaries never can describe true meanings, only life can give you the understanding necessary to communicate, to understand the intricate and delicate patterns of our minds shaped by language.

People called me lucky often, for traveling, having a handsome husband, being free on weekends, not spilling the glass of paint on my tile, finding a life here. The word for lucky is şanslı, which comes from French, the same as the English word “chance”. Every time someone used that word for me, it was as if my life were a roll of dice in the atmosphere of the abyss.

İ finally explained that İ do not believe in chance, but rather the thing that is like chance, but that which comes from God and is more like a gift. İ learned the new word for how İ understand life, mukadderat, which because of the mixture of soft and hard vowels, İ immediately understood to be from Arabic. Turkish is interesting because in the first quarter of the twentieth century the language underwent a reform which changed the script from the Arabic alphabet to the Latin one. At this time, many words were extracted from the language, in particular ones that were derived from Arabic and Persian, and new ones were added. Some survived, though, particularly ones that describe spiritual truths and are derived directly from the reading of the Koran, which every Muslim does in Arabic whether or not they understand what they are reading. This is where the Turkish words for perfection and for destiny come from. Generally, words derived from Arabic, easily noticed by the lack of vowel harmony (which is the trait that distinguishes Turkish words and makes the ones with many vowels like tongue-twisters or brain freeze for an English speaker), are the best words in Turkish to use to describe spiritual experiences, like destiny.

İ learned the word for destiny, mukadderat, in Turkish and İ was reminded of how strongly this previously unnamed phenomenon has been part of my life here for the past five months and before. İ want to tell a story about destiny, which has nothing to do with chance. This is the story of what brought me here.

Three years ago, a man called Golden-Tongued invited my now-husband to dinner. He was a married man from Turkey whose wife had recently come to America. Her name is Light. My now-husband mentioned me and the invitation was extended. When the day of our dinner arrived, we all expected different people as we stood on opposite sides of their door from each other, the women nervous and the men dutiful. But we soon learned we were near matches in personalities grown on opposite sides of the world from each other. We told them that night that we were interested in learning Turkish and this cemented our long friendships as we immediately began going to their home weekly for language lessons, and tea.

One of the most beautiful aspects of Turkish culture and world view is their understanding of knowledge and its purpose. They do not copyright their minds the way to which I have grown accustomed. Like the apple cut into same the number of slices as people in the room, they divide and share their knowledge equally without storing extra for themselves. I have never encountered a Turkish person who would refuse to teach whatever it is you would like to know. There seem to be no secrets, no holding back of techniques. My teacher tells me she will borrow one of my recent designs later and remake it. It is not mine. It is ours. Everything. The apple. The idea. The work. The knowledge.

Two years ago, İ was browsing the library for books about çini, aware of my hopes to come to Turkey to learn the form following graduate school. I had found some books called “Iznik” highlighting the Ottoman art with little information about what had become of the form. As I wondered the sixth floor of the colossal seven-story research library that is always thick with the smell of binding and endless pages, I came across a substantial book called “Turkish Traditional Arts Today”. When I opened the book, it smelled of the library and the pages beamed as if made of light. I looked at the pictures of rugs and calligraphy, woodworking and vases, and çini, arranged beautifully by region, by form and by city.

Turkish cities are amazing. No city slips through the cracks. Each one has a specialty, a history and a food. Edirne has amazing tiny fruit-shaped soaps and Mimar Sinan’s masterpiece mosque. Eskisehir has pipes carved with the faces of sultans and scholars from a local white stone and golden statues left from King Midas who lived there centuries earlier. Bursa has silk and Iskender kebab. Çanakkale has delightful eccentric ceramic vessels and a giant graveyard for military heros. Kütahya has fermented yogurt soup and çini.

My husband always reads my books before I do. I sat “Turkish Traditional Art Today” on the footstool beside me with intention of enjoying it after finishing some work and started painting. I was in the midst of some fog of imagination when my husband caught the scent of library on the footstool and snatched it away. I likely did not notice he had thieved the book until he spoke the word “Kütahya.”

The book gave the key to my searching: the history of çini in the little-known city of Kütahya as opposed to the brief-lived but glorious few hundred years in which Iznik was the Ottoman çini capital that then declined in the seventeenth century. Kütahya had been a secret ceramics center for hundreds of years and had an unblemished çini tradition that had continued since Ottoman times. Perhaps they had not forgotten the secrets of the art. I read of the city and looked at the pictures of the places I had never been, the people I had never met. The narrative of the story began the year before I was born and continued into the early nineties during which time the author, Henry Glassie, was traveling and researching in Turkey.

The people in Kütahya speak Henry’s name like he is a beloved uncle who lives his mysterious life in another world. His name from their tongues reminds me the names of men, the ones in the great old novels, who traveled abroad by ship and come back to their home with stories of music-making machines and magic carpets. They know one other American and it is Henry. I can see he has a warm home in the hearts of the people here.

One year ago I wrote a proposal to come to Kütahya. My introduction mentioned my dream of coming back to the land of singing ferryboats. When I had visited Istanbul in 2008, during which time I saw çini for the first time and felt compelled to return again to study it, I had witnessed something I found astonishing. On a ferryboat, some young boys spontaneously began playing their guitars and singing songs. Everyone on the boat began singing along with them, except for the two foreigners. I longed to know what they were singing, feeling I may never witness a moment like that again. Several weeks ago in Istanbul, I again boarded a singing ferryboat. I nearly cried.

Ten months ago, my husband and I visited the home of our friends Light and Golden-Tongued again. We had visited nearly every week for over two years, exchanging languages, sharing stories, telling of our research, our hometowns, our ideas about humanity, our hopes for the future. My husband and I were on our way back to our homes in the mountains for our wedding before moving to Turkey and our friends had just brought their newborn son home from the hospital. The moment of the return to the door through which we had met for a goodbye (or more like a Turkish görüşürüz, “I’ll be seeing you”) felt monumental, as if it were just a dream, some amazing moment from the torn pages of a book you find in your grandmother’s old things from before the war. I could hardly believe that moment was real; it exists beyond the bounds of the everyday. We have not been back there since then. We live in their homeland now, and they live in ours. My husband and I even ate an incredible dinner with both sets of their parents in Istanbul two months ago, tasting the hazelnuts from Golden-Tongued’s hometown in the mountains of the Black Sea region.

I read a book about the Black Sea once that wrenched my heart like no other book of history. It rewrote the history of the Black Sea region by erasing the invisible lines that bind countries together and instead proposing that people are connected by bodies of water and that the Black Sea, with its thriving upper crust and its breathless depths, binds the people around it to its shores in a unified culture. I have been told the sense of humor in the Black Sea region is astonishing and delightful, unexpected and regarded quite jokingly by all other Turkish people, but perhaps that is a story for another day.

Six months ago, I did not know where I would live when I arrived in Turkey. I had a passport with a new name and a visa that calls me a scientific researcher but all else fell in the great expanse of mystery. My friend named Light and one of the men who married my husband and I each knew someone to help us. The friend of the man was a lady named Daydream who is living in Kütahya now, teaching school, who had lived with her husband for several years in the United States while studying. The friend of my friend named Light is named the Greatest.

Turkish people keep friends like no other people in the world. It is easy to marvel at their ability to extend love.

Five months ago, I learned my husband would not be accompanying me on my initial travel to Turkey. He would wait in America for a visa due to a retroactive new law. Four days later, I boarded the airplane to Turkey alone, where I had no home and enough language skills to drink tea, ask directions and listen to a weather report. Like some angel of comforted heart, the cousin of my friend Golden-Tongued picked me up in the airport in Istanbul. The next day I took the bus to Kütahya across the stunning plains in September with mountains rising like great rainbows of earth. I was amazed at the beauty of the desert-like expanses, the brightly painted and tightly-developed cities along small lakes and the rocky cliffs where shadows of wolves kept watch. Each beautiful city I passed I wondered if it would be mine.

My friend the Greatest greeted me as I stepped off the bus. Her face was the same glowing moon with rosy cheeks as our mutual friend named Light and I immediately recognized their kindred hearts. The Greatest lives in the United States with her son and her husband where she taught for some time at an inner city school before temporarily coming back to Kütahya to live with her parents. She had fallen ill soon after conceiving twin girls. Needing extra assistance, she came home to Kütahya. Before I arrived, she was just three months pregnant and bed-ridden on an IV under the care of her mother. The day I arrived was the first day she was disconnected from the IV. She was eating an ice cream cone that her father had bought for her, happy to be out of the house. I stayed with their family for two weeks.

İ arrived in Kütahya on Thursday and on Friday there was a meeting scheduled to talk with someone at a çini workshop where a friend of Daydream worked. When I arrived at the çini workshop, I met a man named Gentle who is kind beyond what his name implies; he is the brother of one of the greatest contemporary çini masters. My two new Turkish friends and the man named Gentle spoke in Turkish and I struggled to keep up. A women passed by the window outside the office and I smiled at her. Months later, she told me that at that exact moment she had just finished a prayer for a new friend to come work in the workshop with her. When she passed by the window, she thought I must be the answer. Her name is Smiling Moon and she is my teacher.

Two months ago, one of men in the upstairs room of the workshops lent me the Henry Glassie book which I was so fond of with its library scent before moving to Turkey. Sitting at my beloved table in the çini workshop, I opened it again to the beautiful chapter on Kütahya and began reading. It told the story of Henry’s discovery of Kütahya. He was browsing shops of hand-crafted goods in Istanbul the year before my birth trying to find a trail to the most spectacular of the Turkish traditional arts. He was not particularly interested in the çini he saw until he came across a plate of particular beauty with the name Ibrahim Erdeyer signed on the back. Henry followed the trail to this twenty-four year old artist living in Kütahya in 1985.

İ was surprised at the name I found on this page, which I had so easily passed over in the year before. I walked outside the workshop door and gazed at the orange cursive writing on the door beside ours which reads, “Ibrahim Erdeyer”. I had knocked on the door two months earlier with my friend who was visiting me in Kütahya. We met in Turkey in October. We are both here studying ceramics. Amazingly, she spent her youth in a city in the Appalachian Mountains just a three-hour drive from my hometown; we are both from sparsely populated southwest Virginia but we met halfway across the world from our hometowns. She had seen a panel painting she loved of a tree of grapes through a window outside my çini workshop with the name “Ibrahim Erdeyer”. I wanted to help her find the artist, so we knocked on his door, but no answer. I tried to locate him with such fervor that my desire to meet him, and my failure to do so, became a joke among the women in our workshop.

İ suppose it makes sense that I had searched for him with such fervor. Ibrahim Erdeyer is the trail that led Henry here. And it is because of that precious moment the year before I was born upon which Henry found the plate by the Kütahya artist Ibrahim among the thousands of plates in the markets of Istanbul, that I am here.

One week ago, a man knocked on the glass door to the outside of the workshop, through which I often see big yellow wild dogs running in the snow, and I somehow knew the moment had come. The man seemed in some frenzy, with his car from 1972 full of unpainted plates. He brought them in, the sub-zero air pouring into our workshop as he ran back and forth with the stacks of scalloped-edged plate and then drove away. I asked my teaching why the plates were there, although I already knew the answer. They were the plates for Ibrahim Erdeyer’s destiny paintings. I smiled when I saw the artist (who I often had seen pace by the window, like the yellow dogs in the snow) was knocking.

İ am afraid to speak to Turkish men. Turkish men have different accents than Turkish women making them difficult to understand and the standards of behavior between men and women in this traditional Anatolian city are so different than in America that I find it easier to simply remain silent rather than appearing too forward. I read that Turkish women are more formal than American women, and that I should not smile at men who are working as cashiers and waiters, that Turkish women do not smile so readily at such sorts of strangers. Sometimes I find my smile uncontainable, though, so I shudder to speak. My Appalachian friend from Turkey tells me I giggle in the most peculiar way whenever I speak Turkish.

İ thought to speak to him. I somehow wanted to tell him how he fulfilled my destiny, but surely that would sound forward from a strange young women from the land of dreams. He needed to make ten trips to carry those stacks of unpainted destiny plates to his studio next door. When he left with the first stack, Smiling Moon offered to introduce us. She asked if I wanted to meet him. She knew I had been searching for him. Yes.

He was as kind as Henry’s stories make him out to be, and I thought to cry, since this is a new behavior I am learning from my kind-hearted Turkish friends, but I didn’t. He wrote his email address on my crumpled vellum sketches, marveling at my recent works with such kind eyes. He told Smiling Moon how warm Americans are, how he has visited there several times, most recently going to Oklahoma. He spoke kindly of his dear friend Henry who I have never met but who gave me this most amazing gift. He told me he had met Henry before I was born. He was the same age as I am when he met Henry here in Kütahya. I told him I was very happy to meet him.

That is how I learned the word for destiny in Turkish. I told my teacher that it is not luck that brought him into the room, the painter of destiny plates, but that it was destiny, mukadderat.

Freedom is only as good as the person practicing it. Freedom leaves us like a lonely orphan caught up in a hurricane. Freedom is the giant abyss that we stand at the edge of, calling its name eagerly and waiting an eternity for the echo. I stare into the abyss, or I stare into the memory of staring into the abyss. The skin peels off my lip from the cold winter and I taste the blood in my mouth. I have met some refugees here.

The foreigner exercises infinite groundless freedom. I do not understand the question. I have no history. No first loves live down the lane. No grade school teachers shop at the market. No ghosts have ever seen me passing through this place before. I have never tasted this fruit called Heaven’s date until now.

Freedom is only as good as the artist practicing it. I second guess my intuition. Wonder if my artistic license is valid outside my homeland. Try to hold in balance all I have learned from the two worlds I have known. Reevaluate things people have tried to teach me. Reject some. Cringe when I do not accept more.

My heart changed on a day of synchronization. The fever of foreignness passed. The day came in the form of a series of unfortunate events at the exact moment when I thought I could not bear to attempt to incorrectly draw another tulip. We ruined everything in sight that day. Spilled paint everywhere, broke tiles, filled in colors where emptiness was necessary, ran into doors, generally made ruckus. Together. Then I was healed.

I have been making my own designs. I am copying flowers from books and redesigning the gardens. It feels like moments during my childhood when I visited my grandmother’s house in Virginia. Sometimes I would see a family in their horse and buggy riding down the highway. Her basement was cool and smelled of wood stoves much like the city I am living in now. It was there where I would draw the handmade flower press from the shelf and carefully remove the blotter pages. Sometimes I would uncover someone else’s petals and she would give them to me. I would put them into my compositions without ever feeling I was renouncing my freedom. I never even knew then that the world or a law or a gift or a hostility could limit my freedom.

The imagination is the kite that escapes the hand of the world and goes floating toward the membrane that separates our inner spaces from our outer spaces with the white string unraveling for miles behind; it appears to be reaching for the earth, but truly it is moving toward the heavens.

The top tile is the outer world. The world I copied from a book of 15th century plates. The bottom tile is the inner world. The reinterpreted garden, immersed.

After the kiln. My first tiles to experience no problems in the fire.

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One tulips lays contemplative under a vast sky where chaos grows toward unity.

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The flowers have glowing hearts.

-From “Foreign Lands” by Robert Louis Stevenson

İ began again slowly upon my return with a tree of complexity, discreetly mimicing one İ had seen in a book picturing the gardens of Paradise. My hand thought he had forgotten, but İ was told my brush was broken. İ spent some silent moments with the razor trying to diminish the brokenness of my early brushstrokes.

While İ was gone from the workshop for three weeks for holiday and for research, a Turkish artist who lives on the hippest street in the hippest city in Turkey and who knows çini, Arabic calligraphy and miniature painting came and sat in my seat for a week. The painter, who shares the room with my teacher and İ, told me the artist had humorously called herself by my name since she was filling my empty chair. The place felt warmer upon my return, knowing it had not been left empty. She made a beautiful plate which had just come from the kiln when İ returned depicting the famous love between Leyla and Mecnun, with the couple’s heads bound together in some spirit-like trail of fire. My heart pounded at the empty space between the forms. İt reminded me of the works, the dozens of works, İ made seemingly centuries earlier with heads bound together in endless trails of hair. İ wondered at my tight floral compositions, how much furthur they could carry me.

Coming from a humanist West where there was never a ban on faces, where our dogs sleep with us in our beds, and where we trample the mud of our shoes all through our homes, i guess something in me missed those flame-like moments out in the wilderness, like Leyla and Mecnun. İ reflect upon days of youth spent in the solitary wood with friend, laying in the mud-strewn bed of leaves sorting out how the branches intermingle above, the smell of earth heavy on the back of my throat, thoughts like threads connecting and wandering through all parts of the landscape. İ wonder what blend of mud-stewn Appalachia and dust-covered ancient flower arrangements İ will find when İ have freedom again.

My teacher told me that İ have looked at enough çini now to start making my own compositions, but İ know İ have looked at enough to know İ am not ready for such responsibility. İ still gaze in marvel and awe at walls covered in çini, in the way İ have heard people speak of oil paintings but which İ have rarely myself experienced. When İ visit historical çini sights, İ crouch down to the floor to try to find the panel that was put in the less prominent place so İ can find the humanity of the artist in the simple slip of a brush, misplacement of the color, or forgotten dash of blue. The moments of bleeding color, slightly misshapen circles, and seven-petaled flowers in a field of six-petaled penç flowers are like four-leafed gems in a field of clover for my understanding.

İ was left alone recently and my teacher called me to explain to me how to fill my time after completing the painting on the two-panel tree design we had made together. She told me to start a new composition with two tiles to my liking. İ considered making an interpretation of a classical Ottoman design of two mythical lion-like animals beneath a lotus tree by instead replacing the lions with the nearly mythical Okapi drowning in a field of lotus and sticking out its purple tongue to reach for the plant. İ thought that might make a nice interpretation of the unseen, which is real, and of the mythical, turned reality.

Upon second thought, İ decided to save my Okapi for a few weeks since it would probably require explaining in Turkish and to instead tackle a floral design without the help of the floral motif virtuoso, my teacher. i was thankful a book of İznik çini was left in our room and İ leafed through the pages to find a floral motif İ had not learned yet. Postponing my own idiosyncratic ideas in favor of learning more motifs, İ was pleased to discover the pomegranate flower, in shades of blue, turquoise and white, much like the ones İ have drooled over on multiple occasions. İ thought the smaller flower or grainlike forms in the composition looked exactly like rattlesnake tails and İ found my imagination wandering back to my mud-strewn life before. There were several styles to choose from, including symmetrical and swirling. İ choose the symmetrical one painted on a plated from the sixteenth century, finding out happily that it was, in fact, not perfectly symmetrical.

İ took to discovering the secrets of the forms while translating the circular plate to a square flat tile, giving it the painter’s love of the limitless symbolic potential of a window. İ fell deeply in love with the çini forms, which did not give me the same discomfort in the markmaking as the tulip once had. İ found myself thinking of Applachian folk art, as the floral forms in the plate seem to share with folk art the same emotion of the first glance at the mysteries of wilderness, with rattlesnake tails.

As I come back to the great land of difficulty and adventure, I am touched by an overwhelming sense of both familiarity and continued fascination. I spend two days searching for sleep and confronting my rusty sense of understanding of the way things work here. I am amazed how two weeks can feel both expansive and invisible. As I pass between worlds, I wonder if the other was just a dream, reflecting on how this might help cast light on the puzzle of what happens when we die, passing so softly from this place as if we were never here at all.

I am pausing in a city where two languages are spoken and I find myself understanding some of each of them, passing between them just as I have passed between these two separate worlds as if walking in a dream. I feel nearly not a foreigner at all here. Foreigners are noticeable, concerned about the states of their sandwiches and bus tickets. Perhaps this sense of concern is what marks foreigners more than the heavy accents or plunge necklines accompanying comfortable shoes. I wonder how many more months until belonging.

The weather is comfortable , the streets are crowded and I am surprised again by the quantity of feral animals filling the streets. I am drinking American coffee in a chic American chain shop which looks exactly the same as it looks at home, surprised at how much better they make the chain coffee here than back home. Rarely does the imitation or multiplication match or surpass the original, but here I find it to be true.

I spent my first waking day back in the country in the harem of the Sultan, now inhabited only by ghosts and tourists. Some of the most spectacular examples of çini panels are within those secret walls. Reflecting on the history with my curious imagination, I wonder what fabulous tales sit silently in the ears of the voiceless walls, how she might have felt walking that long, cool hallway between the rooms of the females and the rooms of the princes and sultans, and what he might have imagined while making his portion of the commission of çini tiles for the most private interior spaces of the castle overlooking the Bosphorus.

As we strolled through the park beneath the castle walls, gazed through glass boxes at vases made in a small city along the Mediterranean during the sixteenth century, followed the paths leading to the sea, as we wondered through a massive building containing Roman sarcophagi and forks used in Troy, tombs of robbed Egyptian noblemen, and the tiny vase a mother used to wash the head of her newborn baby in Aesop’s homeland of Phrygia before Midas turned his beloved wife to gold, as we moved from dirt to cobblestone to pavement, I listened for the ghosts who were speaking a language I could not comprehend. A rose grew along a rusted gate despite the frigid air. Two young girls sang songs on the ferryboat in exchange for a few kuruş in a paper cup. An old man tossed a wild dog a loaf of stale bread. All the while, the waves never ceased in the ancient sea.

As I left the people at the çini atelier today with the knowlege that I would not be seeing them again for three weeks, a profound sense of longing came over me. Today marks exactly one-third of my project time completed. Perhaps for the first time, today I truly realized the length of time I have spent here with these people and how incredibly close I have become to them.

I am going traveling and I could sense their apprehension at my leaving. They worry about my safety and well-being and, moreover, I think we all sensed today the passage of time that is leading toward my true departure from them in six months. They suggest regularly that I simply move here with my family and take up a permanant job as a Turkish traditional painter, which is perhaps only humorous to me, being so accustomed to beng a rootless sort, as we Americans often feel ourselves when walking on the soil of ancient civilizations. Several weeks ago I met a man who claimed to be a direct descendant of the Muslim people’s most important prophet, Muhammad. Today I learned (so long as my Turkish comprehension could understand) that the atelier I am learning in will be producing a tile panel for a female descendant of the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

Despite a long history and deep connection to traditions, Turkish people are eager to adopt the people they care for as Turks. They tell me often I seem like a Turkish girl, or a Muslim girl, depending on who is adopting me. Several people have agreed to serve as a surrogate mother while I am here, and for them, it makes perfect sense that I could live out my life here as a Turkish traditional tile painter. Although this is an idyllic image of a quiet life with a job where I actually make a living painting for fifty hours a week, I know the foreigner within me that sets me apart from this world while simultaneously drawing me into it.

The foreigner within me continues to feel the strong pull of the symbolic, the individual, the laxity of law that comes standard with the condensed version of history. İ imagine the underside of a leaf not as a contrasting color to add energy but rather in a subtle shift of shade that designates the shift between the soft upper part and the smooth underbelly. Twilight has no red. My foreign parts come forth to refuse and then retreat in shame at the ways in which they risk my opportunity to learn.

The word the Turkish traditional artists use to describe my work often is “Farklı,” which makes me a great deal more uncomfortable in Turkish than it would in English. Farklı comes from Arabic and means exactly as it sounds when it wells up from the back of your throat: different, or divergent. Whenever they call it farklı, İ know that farklı runs the heavy risk of simply being wrong in a collectivist society where there seems to be a much stronger consensus on what is right and wrong. They walk by my table and exclaim to each other that İ have invented another solution using my own tarz (style, form, genre). Despite the fact they are kind and care for me, İ often notice this seems to make them slightly unnerved, or at least a bit amused. Strangely bewildering to them is that İ have never once noticed the shading of a Turkish rose which İ shaded rather backwards based on Western ideas of perspective, highlight and shadow on a form. My accent is heavy of individualism and English even when İ strive to be as they are for the purposes of learning.

İ am learning to occasionally cringe at the blatancy of my accent and at my tarz, remembering the words in Orhan Pamuk’s novel about Ottoman miniature painters, which has given me strangely fitting advice for understanding the workings of the contemporary world of traditional tile painting. İn “My Name is Red” he writes, “What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.”. İ understand the guilty hand is the foreign hand that misunderstands the form in favor of the foreign form. İ continue to strive to maintain a balance between fearless experimentation and invention, so exalted in my homeland, and the shameful feeling of stepping outside the bounds of the collective understanding of form and reality.

Following the reemergence of my voice, the situation changed. İ asked to begin painting on non-broken tiles, marking the long-awaited and much-needed beginning of the next process of learning which has included making designs–using combinations of traditional motifs, with the the help of my teacher and her strict training yet newfound flexible willingness to let me try my ideas–drawing the designs by hand with graphite onto the tile, inking the drawings on the plate, choosing my own color palette– with some feedback from the others–painting the designs, and waiting for the great surprise, or shock, that comes when the tile returns from the kiln.

For the past ten days, I have been going along like this quite happily, completing three tiles, watching another demonstration on how the glass-like clear glaze is laid over the painted designs, and painting my previously most-loved drawing of the lotus design on a two-tile panel colored entirely in the more challenging technique of tonal painting with only blue and turquoise.

Although these days of working more freely and purposefully have been blissful, they also heralded a new reality for me: the reality of the kiln. My first unbroken, hand-drawn tile, which I had stubbornly excluded red from, came to me from the kiln with unsightly chunks of the green glaze peeled from it, revealing the white, unglazed tile surface. I added a bit more green glaze to the craters and sent it to the kiln again; an action that may or may not prove fruitful. A worthy try nevertheless on the parts of people helping me, who care so much about my happiness, and who have brought me so much.

My first tile from the kiln with inperfections in the green.

The lotus that gave my voice back to me.

Karagöz shadow puppets in Bursa, Turkey. I am interested in how these forms could translate into çini. The two Ottoman arts have nearly the same aesthetic of flattened reality, white surfaces and jewel-like color captured between black outlines, and uneven yet solid color. I am especially interested in how the white hatchmarks operate within the figures.

The Ottomans did not fear reinventing traditional form, as demonstrated by the Roman ruins reinterpreted into this old city wall of Bursa.

Another reinterpretation of the old; traditional Turkish tea with a strange variation called “kiwi” tea tasting a bit like the concentrated Koolaid, pre-refridgeration.

Interesting decorative elements inside Ottoman mosques in Bursa.