Turkey
Hello, I'm Hafize
Kaya
I am a yazma master from Tokat. 600 years of wood-block printing — carved linden, natural dye, silk. The technique has not changed because it does not need to.
Hafize Kaya is a third-generation yazma master from Tokat — a city that held a royal monopoly on block-printed textiles during the Ottoman period. She learned to carve linden-wood blocks from her grandmother, who learned from hers. The technique has not changed in six hundred years: carved wood, natural dye, silk. Her hands carry the memory of every pattern she has ever pressed.
People always ask me: why linden wood? Why not something harder, more precise? Because linden breathes. When you cut into it, it gives a little. The grain resists in some places and opens in others. The imperfection that comes from this — that slight trembling at the edge of a line — that is the signature of a hand. Machines do not tremble. My grandmother’s blocks are still in my workroom. I cannot use them — they are too old, too fragile. But I hold them sometimes and feel where her thumb has smoothed the wood. Her body is still in the wood. When I heard about kelaghayi, I went immediately and bought potatoes from the market. Large ones. I carved the Tokat beşlisi pattern into four different potatoes in one evening — just to see if the logic was the same as linden. It was almost the same. The resist was different. The dye behaved differently on silk than on cotton. I am going to Shaki. I want to stand in Narmin Hasanova’s atelier and press a galib into Shaki silk with my own hands, just once, before she presses mine.
— Hafize Kaya, Tokat, Turkey
The motif
Tokat beşlisi — five-point wood block
Tokat, Turkey · 600 years · linden wood stamp
The Anatolia Collection
The Anatolia Collection
Tokat wood-block printing on silk · 20 pieces
20 pieces
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