In the last week I have learned a lot about suitable material for a floor mosaic. For example: not every marble is suitable for a floor mosaic, which people will walk on. Some marble is so porous that it crumbles when cut into small pieces. That definitely can not be used for floor mosaic tesserae. Lime stone is much more dense and when broken down into small pieces cuts well without crumbling. But it needs a strong arm to be cut initially. So the hydraulic machine comes in handy to cut the material into  of 4-5cm long and 1cm high stripes from which it is easy to cut with hammer and hardy into tesserae. Nusret is mostly very unhappy with the marble I brought. But I cling on to using it after all this effort of finding and bringing it to Gaziantep! In the end we decide to take more of the lime stones that Nusret Usta has in his workshop. He collects them all the time and they are lying around in every corner. …

… I come back to Gaziantep on Monday morning, check into the hotel and go to work immediately. Nusret has already made all frames during the Bayram holiday even. What an enthusiasm! We start to break the marble I have brought, with hammer and hardie. Since Roman times this is the traditional way of breaking stone into small tesserae. It gets you more or less even sided cubes but not with such straight edges like the machine cut tesserae one can buy in the craft shops. The unregular shapes of hand cut tesserae add liveliness to a mosaic which is an important feature in my designs. Tuesday is all day stone cutting too. At our stone cutting area we sit quite close together and work with silent joy. Stone, like fabric, has one direction in which it breaks more even then in the other directions. If we find this side of the stone and manage to let our hammers hit the marble precisely over the blade of the hardie the stone breaks beautifully straight. This …

…..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 …