Turkey was entering its fourth month of weekend lockdowns when we decided it was time to get the heck out of the city. A couple of my friends spotted an AirBNB listing for a huge chalet-type house in the mountains above Sapanca, less than two hours by car from Istanbul, and six of us (plus one cat) jumped at the chance to spend another limited weekend somewhere a little different.
Sapanca, of course, was under the same curfew as Istanbul, so we planned to leave Friday afternoon and return Monday morning, and spend those days in between just hanging out together instead of isolated in our city apartments. It was a solid plan, partially because there isn’t a hell of a lot to do in Sapanca proper– there’s the eponymous lake, which we stopped by one twilight evening after a grocery run, and there’s the rustic nature of the mountain, in which we went on long crisp walks.
Mostly, we stayed home, lit fires, read books, cooked for each other. I taught everyone how to play rummy. We played Pandemic, in a pandemic. We drank a lot of herbal tea and very little alcohol. The weekend was quiet company, a comfort.
I carried my little Olympus Mju around my neck or in my pocket as we went traipsing through the thawing woods around our rented home, loaded with my first roll of Lomochrome Purple in years. Lomography has apparently re-tooled the chemical process of the film, and it’s different than I remember it– the sharp cyans and rich purples have mellowed into something warmer and weirder, and I think I prefer it.
My purple-hued snapshots of our weekend are full of light leaks and unplanned layers, perhaps due to my camera, perhaps due to some quirk of the film. Luckily, those flaws are my favorites. Memories blur, and revisiting this trip in my mind many months later feels the way these images look: layered with something that came before, or after.
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