This week its cutting, cutting, cutting stone. Now Mustafa has his pride and I am not allowed to join in. So I start making the first wall piece inside the adjacent room as the wind is so strong on the open roof that I am afraid that the small tesserae are being blown away. In the mean time Mustafa and I have an ongoing discussion how to know when there will be enough tesserae for the background and how we could measure it. Finally we have the idea to put the printed design on the floor and spread the tesserae slightly heaped on it to see if it fills the background. It is not so easy to do this in the strong sea breeze and incredibly hot sun on a roof top! So we wait until sunset one less windy day. This proofed to be a good method and by Wednesday we have enough tesserae. Thursday is packing up time again because Mustafa has to leave back to Ankara. He offers to leave me a …

So – I arrived in Ayvalik on Saturday Aug, 22 and settled for the weekend with my friend Tulya Madra. THE HOUSE that is supposed to host the Ayvalik Mosaic is further under renovation. As it happened – Mustafa Salih – my first mosaic teacher (who already played a part in this story in lending me the hydraulic stone cutting machine), happen to have a holiday apartment in Sarimsakli. Sarimsakli is the longest sandy beach on the aegean coast and is 3km  south from the centre of Ayvalik. Mustafa offered to help with the mosaic. So all the stones and ready fish figures were shipped to his house and when I arrived on Sunday, Aug 23 the Kargo already had been delivered and the workshop set up on his roof top overlooking a tiny bit of the sea. One has to consider that there were about 80kg of goods that came from Gaziantep and that were damped on the street and 60 year old Mustafa carried it all up a tiny flight of stairs to …

This week is my final week in Gaziantep. From Aug 24 onwards I have an internship at the archeological site of Pergamon. The modern city of Bergama with its archeological site of Pergamon is 50 km away from Ayvalik. In order to get there, set the mosaic studio up in Ayvalik and be ready for work on Monday early morning, I have to leave Gaziantep on Thursday Aug 20. It is so absolutely crazy to try and do everything at the same time.  But I really want to work in Pergamon and  so I will try to do the crazy thing to work there and on the mosaic in Ayvalik. Not sure how this will work out. Here in Nusret’s atelier we have finished almost all figures for the floor. It took 4 weeks of two full time workers and one part timer to set up the workshop, build the frames, collect some of the stone material and produce 5 mosaic designs. Only one big fish is not finished yet. He seems to be sad …