The Bosphorus Pattern

Home. The word is connected to so many different things for us all. For some it is a geographic place, a street or an address. For some it means a house, an apartment, a farm, maybe a hut, a tent or even a boat. Many of us also connect ‘home’ with our family, parents, siblings and old friends. Maybe also a playground, a school, a special tree, a mountain or a view from a hill, maybe towards the sea. Home is where we feel we belong, where our memories are made.

It feels as if I have always moved in my life. I’m born in one country and spent my childhood and teenage years in two other countries. Since then I have again moved, lived, studied and worked in three more countries and on two continents separated by a vast ocean. So, home to me is connected to new cities, different people, foreign languages, new food and trying to create my personal spot in the midst of it all – again and again.

Many of my father’s childhood memories ‘belong’ in Istanbul. His father was German-Greek, his mother Armenian-Greek. Back in the 1950s and 1960s the city must have been an exciting, multicultural place to grow up.

My father reflects the city and the strait that cuts right through it, The Bosphorus. He is a true world-citizen with one foot in Asia and the Levantine culture, and the other foot in Europe and the Western culture.

On warm summer days with endless blue skies over Istanbul, as a young boy, his grandparents would take him and his friends on trips from The Golden Horn, where they lived and out to the Princes’ Islands in The Sea of Marmara. The islands are situated just off the coast of the city, so you have to travel by ferry to reach them.

Below the white ferries – packed with city-dwellers longing for a cool breeze and a lazy picnic in the shade – run the strong, merciless and sometimes unpredictable currents of the Bosphorus. However, on the surface of the powerful waves, the sun mirrors her loving face as if the water was filled with gold.

These childhood memories of my father inspired me to design a pattern, reflecting the double beauty of the Bosphorus, its strength and danger on one side and the carefree joy on the other.

My father later said: «The pattern makes me think back on how the sun made the waters glitter and sparkle like diamants, or even sometimes how it seemed like the moon had stacked a tower of silver coins across the straight between Europe and Asia».