It is all go on the project again after our New Year break. Four stonemasons are currently flying around the main exterior walls and our piles of stone are rapidly going down. The key stones for the corners have been delivered from the quarry in Yaylikoy and the huge wooden lintels for the doors and windows arrived yesterday. This is unusually good progress for Turkey!
The weather is remarkably settled, warm clear sunny days and cold nights, so we are cracking on as quickly as we can while the weather holds. With the coldest and wettest month of February still to come we have organised ourselves a little shelter from the elements.
Next door to our project is a small village house. The old lady who lives here has been unwell and has moved to her daughter’s house for the winter so we have rented her house as a base of operations. We built a toilet because she didn’t have any indoor plumbing and our security man sleeps in her former kitchen watching over the project at night.
I write this entry on my laptop which is set up in what was the old ladies living/sleeping/cooking room. It is a 12 foot square room, with whitewashed walls and an uneven stone floor. The exposed roof timbers are painted a cheerful blue. The ceiling height is just over 5 foot and even I have to bend to get in through the door. The inside of the roof is bamboo chinked with mud. The wide windowsill acts as a sink and a hole drilled in the outside wall lets the dirty water run into the drain outside. There is one electric point and a cobweb of cables and extension leads run power to light bulbs, a kettle, a cassette player (very beaten up), my laptop and whatever power tools are being used outside.
Nails are banged into the wall at various heights and a bizarre collection of items is currently hanging from them – half a loaf of bread in a plastic bag, two frying pans (both donated by us to the security man at the end of various projects), a soap dish, a bag of figs, a bag of tea and a £800 Nikon camera.
On the shelf above the fireplace rests a spicy red sausage (lamb of course), a box of sugar cubes, a set of tea glasses and a silver tray for serving the tea on. In the middle of the room is the new glossy brown soba (sleeping stove) that we bought, which heats the room and eats wood in great big greedy gulps. Currently I am charged with keeping the soba fed and I am not doing a very good job because I keep forgetting about it until it starves to death!
Despite everything it is a sunny and bright space and fun to be here – but then I don’t have to live here and can go home at night.
In the bright sunlight outside Metin and Phil are down to their shirtsleeves building moulds for the window frames and arguing good naturedly over the measurements.
We are such a mix on old and new here. The living conditions are primitive with the most basic toilet (but having a toilet at all is an improvement), no sinks (stone trough outside the door), not much power and the most rudimentary of cooking facilities. But we have laptops running computer design software giving three dimensional walkthroughs of the plan and allowing minute by minute alterations to be made, a webcam currently doing stop motion photography of the site for turning into a short movie, a state of the art digital camera and at least 7 mobile phones on site.
Whilst the builders use ancient techniques to build the stone walls we also use laser levels to achieve that rarest of things in Turkey – a straight line, power tools to build shuttering and frames, the latest chemical and engineering solutions for damp proofing and ready mix cement for the foundations.
It is such an ironic contrast to watch someone wielding a battered lump hammer, whilst balancing on top of a rickety piece of wood acting as scaffolding, stop to answer a mobile phone which plays a polyphonic ring tone of the latest pop hit!
posted 01-02-2007