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Some websites begin with a commission. This one began with a conversation.

I talked to Ayhan Özer about bringing his writing on the Struma to the internet — the ship that left Romania in December 1941 carrying 781 Jewish refugees bound for Palestine. It never arrived. It sat broken in the Bosphorus for two months, was towed into the Black Sea, and sank. A Soviet torpedo did the final work. All but one person died. Ayhan called it a little known story. He was right.

A few months later, I visited Nedim Yahya in Istanbul — a keeper of stories of his own — and came back carrying something I needed to put somewhere. TurkishJews.com is that somewhere. A site about a community that has been part of Anatolia for five centuries, long before the word Türkiye existed.

Before Google. Before Wikipedia. Before the world could be summarised in a search box.

My father had a library. A real one — shelves of books, encyclopaedias, reference volumes, the kind of collection you could disappear into for an afternoon and come out knowing something. When we needed to know about Türkiye — geography, culture, history, how things worked — that was where we looked. Expedia and Yahoo were live. That was roughly the state of the art.

CountryOfTurkey.com started as a place to put that knowledge somewhere others could find it. There was no obvious home for a curious person who just wanted to know what Türkiye was like. So we made one. It still exists. The country it describes keeps changing. The site tries to keep up.

Elections have always been a serious business in Türkiye. The results matter. The margins matter. The arguments about the margins matter even more.

My father used to send me the numbers by email. Before Anadolu Ajansı was online, before newspapers had websites, before any of the infrastructure that now delivers results in real time, he would compile what he could find and send it across. Results by province. Seat counts. Party percentages. The kind of patience that seems impossible now.

TurkishElections.com began as a place to put those numbers somewhere permanent. It has grown into a proper reference — the electoral system, the constitutional framework, the institutions that run the vote. The data my father assembled by hand is now automatic. But elections in Türkiye still require explanation, and explanation still requires time.

The first Turkish cooking website. Or close enough to it.

My father had a collection — recipe books, newspaper clippings, pages torn from magazines and folded carefully into stacks. They lived in the house, in corners and drawers, gathered over years. My mother knew what was in each pile. Between the two of them, the first content arrived by email: recipes described, ingredients listed, notes on what to add and what to leave out.

TurkishCooking.com has been rebuilt more than once. The recipes are not listed on the site as it stands — but they are not lost either. The clippings are in the archive. They will surface again. Turkish cooking is not complicated — it is patient. It requires good ingredients, time, and the willingness to let things be what they are. The site tries to be the same.

Earthquakes do not respect borders. The data covers the whole world — every tremor, every magnitude, every coordinate logged and surfaced in real time.

JoltLine is an API-driven earthquake monitor — clean interface, no drama except the one the data itself provides. The domain was registered in 2008, long before the world caught up with why something like this matters.

On the sixth of February, 2023, I was in my hometown. The earthquake that struck that morning killed more than fifty thousand people. The numbers still do not make sense. They probably never will. JoltLine did not prevent anything. It cannot. But it means something to me that it exists — a way of watching, of knowing, of being present for what the ground is doing, even from far away.

I registered this for a friend.

She liked roses. She liked mystical things. She had plans — a blog, or a shop, or something in that direction — and asked if I could hold the domain until she was ready. I said yes. She never came for it.

MysticalRose.com sat quiet for longer than it should have. Eventually I gave it a purpose of my own — or rather, let artificial intelligence give it one. The site is now AI-driven: content generated, curated, arranged without a human hand on the keyboard. It is a different kind of experiment. The name still belongs to a friend who never took ownership. The content belongs to no one in particular. Somehow, that feels right.

Rakı. Anise. Ice. A little water that turns it white. Lion's milk, they call it. You don't drink it quickly. You sit with it. You talk. The night gets longer.

My father called one evening to tell me that Mehmet Ali Birand — journalist, anchorman, institution — had shown raki.com on television. He was proud. So was I.

That was a different era. Today, broadcasting regulations quite rightly restrict how alcohol is discussed on air. Birand himself is gone. The television landscape has changed entirely. The domain is raki.com — the standard spelling for international audiences. The drink itself is always Rakı, with the dotless ı of Turkish. Both are correct. One travels better.

If you know the drink, you know what this domain means. If you don't know it yet — don't start until you understand what you are sitting down to. Rakı is not a drink you have quickly at a bar. It is a drink that requires the right table, the right company, and a night you are prepared to lose.

One of the early English-language windows into Turkey for the rest of the world. At its peak, a genuinely busy place — headlines, wire stories, the daily pulse of a country at an interesting moment in history. It ran through wars, elections, earthquakes, and a pandemic.

The Library of Congress thought it was worth keeping. They were right. TurkishPress.com is preserved in the September 11 Web Archive — part of the national archive of the United States. Not many personal projects earn that.

Anatolia. The word itself is a geography and a feeling at once — the ancient plateau, the cradle of civilisations, the land that connects everything to everything else.

This domain was held for a time and has since passed to new hands, and good ones. A Turkish-Canadian family — the Elmaağaclı family — turned it into something solid and beautiful: premium tile and stone, with manufacturing in İzmir. The land in the name, the craftsmanship in the product. It fits.

Some domains find their rightful owner eventually. This one did.

Mersina is what they called Mersin before the maps were redrawn. A port city on the eastern Mediterranean, ancient beyond counting — Hittites, Persians, Romans, Ottomans, all passed through. The longest seafront in Turkey. The smell of citrus and diesel.

This domain carried that name before the city fully forgot it. One day it may carry something again.