In 1964, when I was 12 or 13, I spent the summer at a house by the sea, 35 miles from Istanbul. I would leap over the low garden wall and walk towards the beach through the rocks and empty fields that lined the shore, inspecting all the little surprises that nature lay across my path.
One day I came across a small pool of water among the rocks. It wasn’t exactly a pool: the sea kept pouring in through the gaps among the stones. But like an actual pond, it was about one foot deep and six or seven metres wide, and shielded from the sea’s unruly waves. I quickly discovered that below the unruffled, perfectly transparent surface was another world, a whole civilisation, and I began to spend more and more time there, alone in the summer heat, fascinated by the bustling realm submerged in the tepid seawater.
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