Filed under: Black eye cafe, photography | Tags: blue, orange, shadow, street lamp
Just some colours and lines that brightened my day.
Filed under: Life in general, Travels and trips | Tags: carpet, Esfahan, Imam mosque, Iran, kilim, perfection, persian carpet, symmetry
In some cultures, it is not only a sign of a blunt mind but can count as blesphemy. Perfection is an attribute of god/God and the builders of the magnificent Imam Mosque in Esfahan were well aware that total symmetry would be too much perfection for humble human beings. So place is full of little imperfections, which unattentive eye, inspired by the overall flamboyance, could barely detect. Luckily, if you are too lazy to read your Lonely Panet, there are always a coupple of eager sellers of (really overpriced) carpets and kilims waiting to tell the story. And yes, of course they know about Slovenia and the obligatory ”Kako si?”.
Persian carpets in Esfehan. Mind you, we prefere kilims.
Speaking of symmetry – carpets (city craft) have symmetrical patterns, kilims (rural/tribal craft) are often perfect without one. Again, it can take you some time to detect the difference in patterns. Another mind puzzler is the vast quantity of the merchandise on sale in a place like Esfahan.
Filed under: photography
As my friend would say, perfect symmetry is a sign of a blunt mind.
Filed under: Black eye cafe, Travels and trips, photography | Tags: Balat, Beyouglu, Bosporus, community, Cornucopia, directions, eatery, Fener, ferry, food, Istanbul, Kanlica, kofte, where to eat, yogurt
“What are you up to these days?” I asked my former officemate while struggling with the best pick from a questionable menu of our faculty cafeteria.
“Not much. Me and S. are going to Istanbul next week.”
“AAAH.” I appeared to be more enthusiastic than they were, but that was understandable. First of all, I did not have to spend two days on some dull project-related meetings. And secondly, this was to be their first time in my favourite city so they were not yet enchanted. Before my tortilla with fried potatoes that you for some reason could not make salty enough disappeared from my plate, I was already walking down the back streets of Beyouglu, headed to the other side of the Golden Horn for the best köfte in Istanbul. Two portions I’ll have, and a salad.
Whenever travelling, we are always after two gastronomies – one of the eye, the other of the stomach. And for some obscure reason, with us both of them, not just the first one, imply walking. And when I say walking, I mean a lot of walking (as you might have noticed, even my imaginary meal does not start simply by ordering food but with walking to the place).
Fetching bread from the store - of course they dropped a loaf before reaching the end of the street.
We first learned of this place in Cornucopia magazine and the fact that the caption to the full page photo did not provide the name nor the address of the place did not seem to bother us. Five minute cab drive from Eminönü? You’ve got to be kidding. We had a more elaborate plan. We took a ferry to Eyüp and climbed the cemetery hill first, had a glass of tea and thought how much the view have changed since the orientalist novelist Pierre Loti allegedly indulged in it. On our way back, we hopped of the ferry at Balat and started our search. We wanted to explore the former Greek and Jewish neighbourhoods anyway and were counting on finding the eatery in the process. Gastronomy of the eye got its feast as Balat and Fener (at least in 2006) were a peculiar site.
The place seems to run at a different pace than the rest of Europe's second largest city.
Sewing, Fener style.
Charming is not the word although they did possess a certain charm, the one you associate with places where through their current decay you can still sense the grandeur of some former era. The thing that struck me most was the community spirit that you could sense just by walking the small streets that had a particularly nasty habit of making sudden, really steep uphill turns. There were children playing in the streets and rattling by on old bicycles, women would work outside or chat with their neighbours and old men would sip their tea sitting on small four-legged stools in front of the local teahouse. The discussions would probably make Habermas slurp in evny. Everything seemed to be happening in public, on the streets and pavements. As we walked under the lines of drying laundry and through hundred year old shades of tall trees of fenced park, the family and community ties seemed to outweigh the rundown buildings, old cars and occasional empty looks of idle men. An hour must have passed before first doubts on the success of our exhibition must have crept in with the stillness of the August noon heat. The thing was, the eatery looked like a typical building from the crossroad at the end of the street. Any street.
Sightseer becomes a sight.
And this applied not only on our overly optimistic duo but to the locals that we eventually turned to and asked for directions. “Asked” is stretching the word a bit for what we did was shove the glossy page of the magazine under their noses and gesture for directions, the English that accompanied the whole thing being little more than background noise to the whole interaction. We were getting really hungry. And tired. And hot. And tired of being pointed to wrong direction. We scrutinised the photo in hope of finding some useful information, some hidden clues, or an overlooked street sign. Nothing was there, just the shy grin of the owner and white of his apron. Than just as our stomachs were going through the final revisions of their complaint to Hague tribunal, we stumbled upon a small barber shop. The short, round fellow turned out to be a proper member of his trade, a true center of neighbourhood information. He looked at the magazine, than at us, and at the magazine again. And smacked it with the back of his hand. He recognised the place. And to our amazement, instead of pointing his finger, he offered to take us there, leaving his shop wide open, attended only by the white towels drying on a stand in front of it.
We walked for what seemed like 10 minutes at a pace I would not assign to him when we first saw him lazily reading the daily news. When we finally arrived, he took us straight to the owner and told him that we were looking for the place and that his picture was in the magazine. This “guided tour” ensured us a special treatment and complementary yogurt, which was simply indescribable. People flock to the other side of the Bosporus to Kanlica to buy the stuff but this was simply beyond comparison. The only pity is that you really can’t order another complementary treat… But I did have another portion of köfte. There is only one word to describe the place and I will leave it at that – it is truly “genuine”.
The best köfte place in Istanbul, as far as we know.
The food is worth the trip,l but you might want to follow these much simples instructions – hop of the ferry(or bus) at Fener (by the cast iron church of Stephen of the Bulgars), cross the busy main road (Balat Vapur Iskelesi), turn right and walk along the road (past some small car mechanic shops) towards Balat for something like 200 meters. You can’t miss it.
Filed under: Life in general | Tags: Brussels, copy, Europe, European Union, Ljubljana, paste, paste up, street art, youth
If we get this EU-funded project that I have been working on over the last quite a few days (and nights), I will ask for a refund. Not in terms of money but time. I want 4 hours of my youth back that were spent on pointless, mind numbing copy-pasting. The folks in Brussels make sure that they slightly change the application forms each year so that you can still use most of the old information but have to distribute it into different tables. In principle, I can understand this, but I was pretty grumpy at 2 A.M.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 15, meter, motorbike, Piran, semiotics, sign, traffic sign
Filed under: photography | Tags: Fotografija, magazine, photography, WLT, World Literature Today
It was a busy week but also one that had some tangible outcomes. In paper form, as usual. The first issue of Fotografija that the new editorial board put together was flipped over some beers (with my piece on press/war photography) and a surprise of World Literature Today ambushed me from my faculty mailbox with a little smiley posted on the cover that my dear friend stuck onto it. Two surprises – one was that they have moved to full colour (I spent quite some time making additional BW versions of the photos I offered). The other was designer’s “intervention”. It can be so refreshing to see your work through other people’s eyes. For once, I never noticed how the tones of the two photos almost match, and I would never place (let alone splice) the two together since one is from up north (Estonia) and the other from south (Croatia). Nice work. If you stumble upon a copy of WLT, Ales’s essay is also worth reading – it expresses his credo in more than one way.
Look what they've done to my pics
Filed under: Life in general | Tags: coffee, routine, Istanbul, shoe cleaning, shoe shine, shoe polish, Doc Martens, Get a grip, army, A je to, Pat & Mat, brush, black
“Shoot me but I can’t remember A je to’s real name” I said to my wife, pitching the brush against the now shining black leather. She had no idea either. Some time ago I realised I have forgotten all the names of guys that I was doing my army time with. What remains is a handful of nick names and a few blurry faces, a couple of which are morphed with those of my high school classmates whom they so resembled at the time.
Doing time in the old barracks which would shiver each day at half past six as the early morning buses would make their rumbling way into my hometown (weekends excluded) had two lasting effects on me. One was the valuable lesion of class relations (seeing who my fellow “citizens” really are), the other was learning the art of shoe shining.
For almost a decade before that, I didn’t have a pair of leather shoes that I’d need to shine, sneakers being my almost exclusive means of transport. With one exception – a pair of Doc Marten’s that I guess had a sort of self cleansing function and the regular weekly treatment of puddles and the sticky black substance that normally covered the floor of student party places (cigarette ash mixed with beer, cheap red wine and human sweat) seems to have done the trick for some three years. Than I got another pair of black boots and a set of brushes that I still use.
For the first few evenings, I just could not get what it was that I was not doing right, as my pair of feet killers always came out mate black while most of other pairs that were inspected during the evening count were shining in the neon lights of the ochre corridor. A bizarre sight that must have been, a line of boys in ill-fitting light blue pajamas (too short, too big, too tight or so loose that they were on the verge of falling down) and disgusting brown flip-flops standing behind a row of black boots.
“You don’t polish them?” A-je-to inquired.
Something like a “no?” must have been a reply that came from my slightly puzzled face. Polish, hmm…
He made a few puffs of smoke and my initiation begun. For the next five months, we had the same routine. After dinner, we would get a cup of coffee from the vending machine and sit on what I would now generously call a bench. We would scrub off mud and paste up the polish. Than A je to would light up and we would drink the coffee, giving the shoe polish enough time to sink in and dry up. Than the polishing with short, strong strokes and another fag for my friend. I can’t really remember exactly what we talked about all those evenings but it often had to do with life, future and girls. A je to was really a nice guy, but also one who would be picked a lot. A bit chubby, with red hair and freckles, he looked more like Jaroslav Hasek’s Švejk than the clumsy animated character he was nicknamed after (a.k.a. Pat & Mat). Though worlds apart, we did get along fine and I guess hanging out with me saved him from being picked at a lot of times. Not that I could really beat the crap of any of those guys but they did have some respect for me as I was among oldest and had the highest level of education in our platoon, including our three commanders (BTW, it worked on them too). A je to came from a depressive nearby mining town where he lived with his mother and brother in an apartment in one of those concrete high rises build in early 1980s. A working class family in stagnating industrial town, they were short on money but not on beer and cigarettes. Unlike his older brother, A je to was also short on girls and at times his primary concern appeared to be where he could find a girl drunk enough to be with him. In those five months before I “quit” my service, his hunt on weekend leaves didn’t bore fruit and I really hope he got through the dry spell in the end. As I said, he was basically a good guy and it would be a shame if he entered into new millennium with his back against a dirty wall, puffing into the low ceiling of some local joint, a bottle of beer slowly getting warm in his hand, indulging in music instead of dancing in the small crowd in front of him.
Of all the things, what I remember the most is the tranquility of our evening routine. The sugar in my coffee, empty corridors of former officer’s building and the gentle yellowish light of spring evenings, murmur on the platform. But most of all, the tranquility, generated in part by the liberating routine of army life and the awareness of the temporariness of our situation, with a real life full of possibilities waiting ahead of us. Many times when I polish shoes on our tiny balcony, I let A je to join me for a smoke and a much too sugary vending machine coffee as I try to attain a bit of that long lost tranquility through the rapid brush strokes and the smell of black shoe polish. The pic is from Istanbul (summer 2006).
