The Maker's Journey...

I was born in Bulgaria in 1972. Over the years I have been, in turn, an engineer, a journalist, a child development specialist, a family counsellor. For many years I served as Child Development Specialist and Education Coordinator at the nursery schools I co-founded.

In 2023, I became preoccupied with hands — my own hands, other hands, and the things hands make. This preoccupation led me to the centuries-old craft of handmade jewellery and, inevitably, to the Grand Bazaar. There, I studied under master craftspeople of the Bazaar: the arts of soldering, wax technique, stone-setting, and enamel.

Since 2024, I have been a jewellery designer working entirely by hand, using traditional goldsmithing techniques.

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The older I grow, the more Balkan I feel. Between the Balkans and me there is an ancient bond — one I had thought severed by migration, yet it endures. Like almost everyone my age who has left half a century behind, I carry traces other than my own footprints. Some are sharp: Migration. It scores a notch into the migrant's history, cut with a penknife. Some are deep, like cracks in the earth's crust: our Losses. Once lived, they go on shaking us at unexpected moments, moving along fault lines and fissures. Some are like a brush stroke — artistic and forceful, scattering their colour across every season that follows: our Youth. It is usually what we gather in that season, what we stuff into our pockets, the questions we ask about how and what to do, that accompany us all the way.

And then there are stories. Some we listened to, some we read, some we scrawled ourselves. In my own personal history — at every beginning, every ending, every choice, every experience, every sentence — it is their trace I find most deeply: Books and stories.

My father was an extraordinary storyteller, and he had a powerful bond with hands — both physically and in the world of images. In his stories, hands were either the subject, or they drifted in from the background, or somehow the last word always circled back to hands. Throughout his life, hands were his concern. Well into his eighties, he was still trying to tell his hands something, or persuade them to listen. One day I looked, and realised: hands had become the deepest traces I carry — deeper even than my own footprints.

One day, a new word entered my vocabulary, and a new phrase entered the story of hands: Marifet. Reading Le Guin's Gifts — the last of her books I had saved — something incomplete found its volume, its meaning, its wholeness in that word.

"Come now, is that really new to you? There are more current equivalents." Perhaps. But marifet and talent do not mean the same thing, and that is a conversation worth having. Or we can simply continue:

At fifty, I untied one knot and tied another. I decided to go forward with my hands, and with a craft acquired. I studied under the masters of the Grand Bazaar — the soldering iron, the wax, the stone, the enamel. I watched their hands, listened to the memory and wisdom in their fingers, witnessed their marifet. In the narrow streets and historic hans of the Bazaar, I came to know the elegance of silver, the secret of fire and enamel. I fell in love with the Grand Bazaar — and with the jeweller's bench. And so my designs are made entirely by hand, using traditional goldsmithing techniques.

Nalan Oğuz