DADYBRA

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Before it was Safranbolu it was Zağfiranbolu, and before that Taraklıborlu, and Borglu, and Zalifre — and before all of them, in the Byzantine record, Dadybra. In 1196, after a four-month siege, the Seljuk ruler Muhiddin Mesud Shah took the town and the name was changed. It has been changed five times since. This collection takes the oldest one back.

Safranbolu sits in the province of Karabük, in northern Türkiye, in the region the Romans called Paphlagonia. From the 13th century onward it stood on the caravan routes carrying trade between Europe and the East, and it grew the way waystation settlements grow — around tanneries and weavers, around the movement of goods and animals and people who needed to stop. The routes are gone. The urban form they produced outlived them.

The town's public and residential architecture is its most remarkable feature, and its three historic quarters each speak a different language, shaped by who lived in them: Çarşı, the market quarter at the bottom of the valley; Bağlar, the vineyard quarter where families moved for the summer; and Kıranköy, historically the Greek quarter, emptied by the population exchange of 1923. Timber-frame konak houses, whitewashed, sun-dried brick set between the beams. The proportions change street by street because the people did.

Safranbolu was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1994.

I work by treating a place as a body of data and putting it back together as a single image.

Architecture, local food, the motifs on regional dress, the crafts made in the workshops, the migration histories, what people live on, the plant cover, the historic fabric, the language and its dialects, how people stand near each other, the sound of the town, the celebrations, the folk songs and the instruments that carry them — all of it becomes material. Where a region has an endemic plant or animal, that becomes a reference too.

Underneath the method is a condition. I have never fully belonged anywhere I have lived, and the work is how I convert that placelessness into belonging: by adopting a place completely, gathering everything it consists of, and describing the version of it I want to live inside. The rhythm I feel missing, and the feeling that arrives in excess, both come out as colour and organic form.

That the work is digital is not incidental. It's the medium of someone who cannot stop wanting to move. And underneath that sits the universal anxiety of our moment — that a person can be displaced, by nature or by political force. The apprehension produces an anxious kind of freedom. It drives the collecting. Every journey becomes an unavoidable field of production, a cultural dialogue, a digital memory.

Fifteen editions, SB01.25 to SB15.25, from 45×45 cm to 75×75 cm.

The Greek titles carry the town's Greek layer, and the loss of it — ΜΕΤΑΝΑΣΤΕΥΣΗ (Migration), PAPHLAGONIA, DROMOS, CYBELE, HEPHAISTOS, EKTARIO. The Turkish titles carry the living town — ALATURKA, TECELLİ, SEMADA SALTANAT, MAĞARA, İPEK, GIYMATLIM. CROCUS SATIVUS is the saffron the town is named for. DADYBRA is the name it lost.