Sometimes larger factories will send out a car to pick up potential customers, even if those potential customers are so unknown they come with absolutely no references. When you’re dealing with smaller workshops though, especially if they don’t know you, transportation is up to you. For someone like me coming from a professional background where someone else always scheduled the tours and I just hopped into a car’s back seat when my guide told me to, this self-propelled method was novel. It was also a great way to get to know the city really fast.
Istanbul has a subway and that subway does an excellent job of serving a very busy corridor, but even in its expanded version it only has about 10 stops. The bulk of the city’s public transportation is actually carried out by a patchwork of buses, minivans, trains, trolleys, and ferries. The system, like the city itself, is messy and chaotic, but most American visitors find it a miracle that in a city larger than Los Angeles, cheap public transportation can put them within a 10-minute walk of even the remotest destinations.
Plus, when they are late or lost, taxis are plentiful and relatively cheap, even though at $12 per gallon Turkey’s gasoline is some of the most expensive in the world. And there’s no better way for a newcomer to practice his Turkish than to chat up a taxi driver.
Turkey makes some of the most amazing chiseled copper decorative items I’ve ever seen, things like vases, serving dishes, and tea kettles. Copper poisons food though, so serveware like rice platters and drinking cups is usually covered in tin, which makes the pieces functional but, in my opinion, far less beautiful. Fortunately, on request almost any workshop will respin the item to buff off the tin plating and reveal the shiny copper underneath.
These days most of the copper workshops are on the western edge of the city. They used to be closer towards the city center, but as Istanbul grew and land at the city center became more expensive, the copper workshops moved to the outskirts.
The decorative copper items for sale in a retail store are incredibly shiny and beautiful, but as anyone who has visited a metal workshop will tell you, the work of actually making metal items is filthy, noisy, and dangerous. Copper work involves taking flat sheets of copper and hammering them against a mold. The mold is an even heavier piece of steel with a shape opposite of whatever is being made, serving a purpose similar to that of a negative in film photography.
Sometimes the hammering is done by hand, literally with a hammer. Other times the hammering is done by a giant machine so powerful it could crush your skull and not even realize you had gotten in the way.
After it’s hammered into shape the copper piece is taken to a polishing room. In the polishing room a worker holds the piece tight against a rapidly spinning buffing wheel to remove not only the grime and fingerprints, but the surface layer of the metal too.
No matter how good the polishing room’s ventilation system, metal dust and polishing compound fill the air. Imagine a room at a health spa where dozens of people are having their skin exfoliated, except instead of their dead skin cells washing away in a shower, they get thrown into the air where everyone can breath them. That’s what it’s like in a polishing room.
From years of touring metal workshops in China and India, I was familiar with the grimy nature of the work. What I had never seen though was the hand-chiseling Turkey is famous for. After a piece is hammered but before it is polished, it stops off at an intermediate station where a craftsman chisels intricate patterns into the metal.
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[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Fundamentalist lamp store” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]