Above the covered streets of the Grand Bazaar, behind doors the crowds never open, there is a floor of workshops that has not gone quiet in five hundred years. You reach it by a stone stair worn into a shallow curve, and at the top the air changes. Cooler. Metallic. Lit by one window and a row of small blue flames.
This is where Series I is cast.
The men who work here did not so much choose the craft as inherit it. A bench passes from a master to the apprentice who swept beneath it for a decade. The tools are older than anyone can date: files handed down, a hammer whose handle has been replaced a dozen times around the same iron head. Nothing on this floor is new except the gold, and even the gold has usually been something else before.
There are rules, though no one has written them down. You do not rush a pour. You do not speak while the wax is being set. The first piece of a new series is cast by the eldest hand on the floor, and the last is examined by the same. Between those two moments, a collection becomes real.
We came to this work wanting to make objects rooted in place. It turned out the first place was never a ruin or a coastline. It was this floor, these hands, this stair. Everything the guild makes begins by climbing it.
The Grand Bazaar, Istanbul.