Çemberlitaş
Jaagravi x Benedetta Bruzziches
There is a column in the center of Istanbul that has stood for 1,600 years. Constantine had it erected in 330 A.D. to celebrate the founding of the New Rome. It stood at the center of the Forum of Constantine, on the city’s second hill, exactly halfway along the Mese, the great thoroughfare that crossed Constantinople from one end to the other. The very center of it all. It is called Çemberlitaş, “circled stone,” because of the iron rings with which the Ottomans reinforced its porphyry drums. It has witnessed the rise and fall of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. It still stands there, along the road connecting Sultanahmet Square to the Grand Bazaar.
Among the “dolap” of the Grand Bazaar—as the shops that fill it are called—it is said that anyone who opens a shop here can never leave. There is an energy that holds you back. The city around it turns, changes, and renews itself. The bazaar preserves its mystical memory. Legends tell of tunnels running beneath the floors—escape routes for sultans or hidden vaults for gold. It is said that deep within the bazaar lies an ancient well with water possessing healing properties. The Sufi dervishes—Islamic ascetics seeking union with the divine—dance with one hand raised toward the sky to receive grace and the other toward the earth to pass it on to humanity. Those who work here know something similar: receiving and transmitting, every day, through their hands.
This is where Naz Sirmen founded Jaagravii. This is where, every day, she transforms her art into wearable treasures: paintings on canvas, mixed-media works, and drawings cut out of paper become handcrafted jewelry created in one of those dolaps. Brass and silver, a futuristic aesthetic applied to precious materials and time-honored techniques. She began by designing earrings for her grandmother while she was in the hospital. She knows the Turkish word gönül—the heart, understood as the place where traditions take root. She holds a piece of the world together with the strength of her fingers alone.
Benedetta Bruzziches has been working in Tuscia ever since she decided that making bags could become a cultural act—that the craft of the hands was a form of knowledge to be practiced so it could be preserved and passed on. Around this vision, she has built a vibrant community: the collections, the Bottega in Viterbo, and the School of Contemporary Crafts, where students learn that beauty is appreciated with the eyes but understood with the hands. Each bag is born from an ancient craft and a vision that looks toward the future of Italian craftsmanship. Each one bears its own name and carries the unique imprint of its creator.
When Benedetta met Naz, she recognized the same roots that had grown in a different land, the same way of immersing herself fully in her work, and the same conviction that certain gestures, if they cease to be practiced, are lost forever. In Naz’s pieces, she sensed something that words cannot fully capture: the possibility of expanding one’s perception, of inhabiting—for a moment—the soul of a place, of a woman, of a time.
The Çemberlitaş art series stems from encounters between women, between thoughts, between insights, and between questions. In botany, this is called anastomosis: when the roots of different plants merge and begin to exchange sap. It is a real phenomenon, documented primarily in forests. The plants recognize one another, touch one another, and nourish one another. They become more resilient and better able to survive storms.
Çemberlitaş, like the column that has marked the midpoint between worlds for 1,600 years.
