Deborah Semel Demirtaş

I just love this sketch!

It is a drawing for a detail of an iron gate from the 1920s for (if I remember correctly) the entrance gate of a government building on Kos (Cos), the island that I see out my window. At the time, Kos belonged to Italy, having been occupied by the Italians in 1912 and then formally ceded by the Ottoman Empire with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 – as punishment for the Turks’ being on the wrong side in World War I. Today Kos belongs to Greece, which means to visit, I need to get my passport stamped on the way in, after a  30-minute ferry from Turgutreis. (Total time from my house to Kos: 45 minutes.)

In fact, on the occasion that I took this photo – at an exhibition highlighting the island’s Italian architectural heritage – I took the long way ’round (bus to Fethiye, ferry  to Rhodes, ferry back up to Kos; Total time: 2 days!), as I had been invited to write about how “Turkish Tourists Help Greek Islands out of Crisis”… but that’s another story.

This image will be one of a number of examples from Kos that I will share in my talk/workshop on architectural decoration at Olana on October 11th.