And there they came…. ready for the magic moment of uncovering the floor pieces! these figures were produced in August in Gaziantep and had been stuck on canvas since then. It was much harder to get the glue off then on the wall pieces. But with the enthusiasm and strength of 3 teenagers and a lot of very hot water and hard brushes we managed to remove all the glue within 2 hours. I was absolutely stunned how beautiful these figures came out. Almost all tesserae stuck in the cement. There were only a few single stones that were loose. As you can see in the following pictures in the area of the figures where tesserae have been joined tightly together the cement did not get up to the surface. Whilst in the background area, where the spaces between the tesserae was left deliberately larger it mattered how much sand I applied for the cement to squeeze all the way up or to stay down and keep a grout line open. I was afraid the …

Hello – be prepared for the unveiling! With more  hot water, a scrub and the energy and enthusiasm of  Rifat Usta the remaining glue was removed. The unveiling and cleaning of the wall took half a day of 3 people. The difficulty was to keep the surfaces wet and warm so the softened glue would not get cold  and dry and then stick to the tesserae again. I am very satisfied by the result. Of course some tesserae came off. I also left some deliberate gaps at the joints of the tiles for easy fitting. These we put back in one days work with liquidish tile cement which we squeezed into the cleaned holes and then stuck the prepared tesserae back.. Two days later, the figures for the floor were installed. (Be prepared for more technical description.) At this point I want to thank tiling master Yusuf and our foreman Rifat again for their patience to understand what I could only communicate in very limited vocabulary. They really took to the project and used their …

I did it – the wall parts of the mosaic were installed on Thursday. I find help in a very experienced tiling master. Please see it step by step: for the tiles cement we mixed 2 parts of white and 1 part of grey BASF Mastertile 15  tile cement with about 1 cup of terra-cotta pigments dissolved in water, applying cement to the wall of the hamam bench the mosaic tiles laid our near the place that they gonna be installed sieving a little bit of dry sand with a fine sieve over the mosaic in order to close the grout lines a little bit so that the cement can not fill them completely.   applying tile cement to the part with the dolphins head Yusuf is a great tiler with a lot of patience. Without ever having worked with this technique he did an excellent job in putting all the tiles exactly fitting into each other in place. And he was not disturbed by my nervousness… putting the tiles exactly next to one another …