Finding solitude between hands

Susanne Fowler tracks Sule Gurbuz’s unique and adventurous journey from being an art historian to an antique clock restorer in Istanbul.

Sule Gurbuz sits in her workshop on the grounds of the stately 19th
century Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul, surrounded by old clocks. Some tick rhythmically. Others are silent. All are in disrepair. Turkish classical music plays in the background, and her calico cat, Ince, or “Fragile,” stretches out a paw in mid-nap, atop a bookshelf.

Inside the workshop, time seems to slow. The bustle of rush hour traffic
outside fades as Sule focuses on her passion: restoring rare clocks from the museum collections of Dolmabahce - home to a succession of six sultans during the late Ottoman Empire - and the older Topkapi Palace.

She has helped repair and return more than 300 clocks to public display over the past decade. “When I started here in 1997, I was an art historian,” Sule said, as she worked on a French bracket clock made in 1855, its assorted gears and other pieces arrayed on the table before her: “I didn’t do this kind of job.”

“The clocks at the palaces were all mostly broken, or at least they seemed to be in very bad shape,” she said. “I thought if I could learn this job, I could be by
myself, listen to music, read books, not be completely hermetic, but maybe 90 percent,” she said smiling. “It seemed wonderful to me.”

A job is born
“I had talked with the director of Dolmabahce Palace and asked if we could find a way to teach me this job,” she said. “They told me that if Recep Gurgen,
considered the best clock master in Turkey, agreed to work with me, to teach me, this job could be created.” Her enthusiasm must have been persuasive. Recep, the master craftsman, agreed to share his skills.

“Every Wednesday he would come to teach me and every weekend for four years I would go to his workshop in Taksim to learn how to use his machines, the drills and tools,” Sule recounted.

Together they would visit churches, mosques and palaces around Istanbul so that she could see some of their remarkable clocks. “We entered a lot of unimaginable places,” she said.

Eventually they gathered their existing tools, made some others themselves and started spending two or three days a week at Topkapi, and two or three days a week at Dolmabahce. By 2012, they had repaired enough timepieces for the director of Topkapi to reopen the clocks exhibit there - first opened in 1977 but closed since 1982.

Sule shares the credit with her teacher Recep, who in turn learned his craft as an apprentice to Wolfgang Meyer, a member of a German clock-making
family in Istanbul, who died in 1981. “We are a team,” she said. “After all these years working together, it is very difficult to say whether it is me, or him, repairing these clocks.”

Challenges aplenty
Early on, they had no shortage of challenges in the task of reviving the
museums’ neglected and damaged collections. As Turkey’s only recognised antique clock restorers, they put in many hours of work - often unpaid - making tiny replacement parts from scratch and avoiding contemporary techniques and materials that might have made the job swifter, but the result less authentic.

The sheer number of clocks needing attention was daunting. Topkapi alone has nearly 400 antique clocks while Dolmabahce - where the father of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, died - had 284, at last count. Many were originally gifts from visiting Europeans courting the favours of the once-powerful Ottoman sultans.

The oldest clocks at Topkapi are late-16th-century English automatons, part of a “very early and unique collection,” Sule said. One of the older Turkish-made timepieces is a silver mechanical table clock signed by the craftsman Mustafa Aksarayi.

The dial is dated 1688, and the delicate 12-sided case is carved with open-weave flowers and leaves. Even older is an egg-shaped brass pocket watch from 1650 by Seyh Dede, a Mevlevi, or whirling, dervish who worked in the city’s Galata district. It has three dials: one for the time, one for the monthly calendar and one for the phases of the moon.

Later clocks, in the Dolmabahce collection, “were poorer,” Sule said. “The empire was in decline, so our clocks and furniture became less unique and less valuable. Nobody wanted to give a gift to the empire by then.”

Lone worker
“We have mostly French clocks here,” she added. “In the 19th century, French
influence was everywhere.” As she talked, Sule worked on a French bracket clock needing a new pendulum and new hands to replace lost originals. Hand-making the missing pieces in metal, she said it would take another 15 or so days to
complete the repair.

“Some clocks can take up to six, seven, or even eight months,” she said, “depending on the extent of the damage.”

Awaiting her attention in the workshop were a pair of battered table clocks, their cases missing pieces of their green malachite veneers; and a towering,
gilt-trimmed French grandfather clock. “I enjoy being a clock restorer, to make a life that is different from that of other people,” Sule said. “But mostly I love my job because it has helped me make this dream of a life, to work alone.”