by Drew MartinI was tooling around Europe in in early 1990s and wound up in Istanbul for a week. It was uncommon for me to pay for lodging then but I found myself in a $3-a-night hostel next to the Hagia Sophia. I shared a room with the Australian I traveled there with from Greece, a New Zealander, an American and a Turkish woman who asked to stay with us because she said the women in her room were prostitutes.
The New Zealander intrigued me. He was a young sculptor traveling with his small, curious wood carvings. He had recently met up with Hundertwasser in Vienna, who purchased one of his pieces and invited him back to study with him.
It has been 19 years since that time and fortunately he reached out to me this past week. It is always nice to hear from someone so far removed but it was really special to see his matured sculptures. It was as if he had shown me an acorn in Istanbul, which he then planted and watched grow into a beautiful tree.