The photograph on this edition's cover is from the editor's own archive. A boat out of Bodrum, a flag straightened by the wind of the crossing, the Aegean folding itself back together behind the stern. The man at the rail is younger than the man writing this letter. Between the two of them lie twenty years abroad, five continents of hotel corridors, and a question that took too long to say plainly: what happens when you go back?
Edition II is the return the first Edition promised. It is set in Türkiye, where I was born, where I first learned the work of looking after travellers, and where I had not stood in twenty years. The theme named in Edition I — Return — turned out to be less a theme than an instruction.
The edition carries two essays and two field notes. The first essay, The Yayla Above Ayder, climbs into the Kaçkar range of the eastern Black Sea, where families still move up to the high pastures in June and come down in September, and where a hot spring has been easing walked-out legs since long before anyone thought to measure its fifty degrees. The second essay, The Stone Rooms of Cappadocia, goes inland to the carved tuff country of Nevşehir — to rooms cut into rock that hold their temperature through August afternoons and January nights alike, and to mornings when balloons rise five hundred metres over Göreme in complete silence.
The two field notes are shorter. A Hamam Morning, İstanbul lies down on the heated stone of a sixteenth-century bath and pays attention to a ritual that has never needed improving. Seferihisar, Market Hour stands in the morning crowd of the producers' market in Türkiye's first Cittaslow town, where the tangerine harvest sets the calendar and the sea sets the pace.
Thermal Anatolia deserves its own essay and will get one. Bursa's domed Ottoman baths and the forty-two-to-fifty-three-degree waters of Afyonkarahisar are roads this journal has only begun to walk, and I name them here as a promise rather than a footnote. A reader of Edition I will also notice an absence: the longer Eastern Townships essay announced for August moves to the autumn issue. A return home displaced it. I ask that reader's patience.
The pieces here are written from the same chair as everything else in this journal — a practitioner's chair, not a promoter's. Türkiye is my homeland, and that is precisely why the writing owes it accuracy rather than praise. Where a place restores the people who go there, I say how. Where it merely entertains them, I say that too.
— Ahmet Can Yeşildağ, Editor
Oakville, Ontario · August 2026
Looking ahead. Edition III arrives in October under the theme Descent, when autumn reaches the northern landscapes and the register slows toward winter. It carries the Eastern Townships essay owed from this issue, and the first of the thermal Anatolia essays named above. Until then, the archive holds everything, and the paragraphs stay slow.
— ACY
