LAUREN – Çemberlitaş

There is a column at the centre of Istanbul that has existed for sixteen hundred years. Constantine had it erected in 330 AD to celebrate the founding of the new Rome. It stood at the centre of the Forum of Constantine, on the city’s second hill, at the exact midpoint of the Mese, the great artery that crossed Constantinople from one end to the other. The midpoint of everything. They call it Çemberlitaş — “banded stone” — for the iron bands with which the Ottomans reinforced its porphyry drums. It has seen the Roman Empire pass, the Byzantine, the Ottoman. It is still there, along the road that connects Sultanahmet Square to the Grand Bazaar.<

Among the dolap of the Grand Bazaar, as the shops that crowd it are called, they say that whoever opens a shop here can never leave. There is an energy that holds you. The city around it turns, changes, renews itself. The bazaar keeps its mystical memory. Legends tell of tunnels running beneath the floors, escape routes for sultans or hidden vaults for gold. It is said that in the depths of the bazaar there is an ancient well with water of healing properties. The Sufi dervishes, Islamic ascetics who seek union with the divine, dance with one hand turned to the sky to receive grace and the other toward the earth to transmit it to mankind. Those who work here know something similar: receiving and transmitting, every day, through their hands.

The Çemberlitaş author series is born from a communion of purpose between two women, between thoughts, between awarenesses and questions. In botany it is called anastomosis: when the roots of different plants fuse and begin to exchange sap. It is a real phenomenon, documented above all in forests. The plants recognise each other, touch, nourish one another. They become more resilient, survive storms better.

Çemberlitaş, like the column that for sixteen hundred years has marked the midpoint between worlds.