Music
I was introduced to the world of making music when I received a beautiful Spanish-made classical guitar as a gift at a very young age. Since then, my two cousins have been great mentors and inspired me to play the guitar all my life. When I was in high school, I got my first electric guitar and joined the ranks of Heavy-Metal as required by the laws of being a teenager. That is when I had my first music band, the heavy-metal / hard-rock “Asparagas“. As an undergraduate student, my musical taste progressed towards Blues and Funk (rock/metal never died, still lives within) and I formed the blues-band “Out of Blue” with my friends Ege and Tuna. Together we played for the next 7 years with many people on different venues, festivals and live on the national radio. I carried my guitar with me to Zürich when I began my doctoral studies and kept on playing Funk in a no-name-band (typical) for the next 2 years. Of course, traveling for higher-education and academic career took its toll on my band-membership until I joined the multi-cultural Folk band “The Band Gap” at the Max-Planck Institute (MPI) in Germany. We formed the band to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the MPI for Solid State Research in 2019, and for other social events. After I moved to Munich, my job as a senior manager took away all my (social) life. So I had to wait for 3 years to change jobs and return to music again. I formed the band “Groove Vault“, and we are happily playing 70/80/90’s Rock.
Arts
I was raised in a family that appreciated arts and architecture in all forms and encouraged me to take part in it. Some of them are also artistically talented (just look at my parents’ works; my father, and my mother, incredible…). I believe that I have always benefited from my relationship with art, as it complemented my analytical, computation heavy lifestyle with balance, beauty, geometry, and sensorial stimuli. I have been recently spending some time on producing arts in different mediums. My latest hobby is to produce complex geometrical designs by just using ruler and compass (and old technique practiced through many centuries in different styles, for example, check out these books by Andrew Sutton and Eric Broug). I really wish to get better at architectural drawings with watercolor. Here are some of my attempts that clearly have a lot of room for improvement.
Sailing
I am lucky to be born in Türkiye, a beautiful Mediterranean country with amazing coastal lines, Turquoise waters (the color is named after the country, clearly), and a rich maritime history. It is not surprising that the sea is a big part of my character and life. Even though, my higher education and career have pulled me away from the Mediterranean to colder climates and waters, I’m still bound to it. So, I have taken up sailing more seriously in the recent years and been collecting my skipper licenses from the RYA. I have two other skippers with me and our beautiful Beneteau Oceanis 40.1 anchored at Marmaris, which we sail quite regularly each year. Sailing is very humbling, meditative, and full of lessons that will take a life-time to cover. Maybe one day, I get to spend my days entirely out on the sea, hopefully on my own Tirhandil, somewhere on the blue planet …
