Five centuries before my great-grandfather was born, on a hill overlooking his hometown, Divriği, a darüşşifa was built so that water might heal the sick. At the heart of this hospital, designed especially for those whose bodies and minds have drifted apart, a spring spiraled running through narrow grooves carved into the stone floor, reviving the water with every turn. While the renewed water poured into a pool from either side, it murmured without an echo, and the echoes in the minds of those who spiraled around it fell silent. Those who came to the gates of the center were greeted by eagles and falcons, sovereigns of the sky, and brought back to life with water. Raised by the stories of this sanctuary, Nuri Bey was unaware that years later, he would pursue building airplanes on the shore of the Bosphorus.

Nuri Bey arrived in Istanbul a century ago, and soon after, moved to the Cihannüma Quarter, whose name means “the world map” in Turkish. In a house overlooking the Bosphorus where it meets the Sea of Marmara, his eight children would soon be playing in the garden around a pool of eight tiers, each supported by a pair of lions.

When my grandmother spoke of those days playing with her siblings around the pool, the Bosphorus’ warming blue shimmering behind her, she would smile and laugh. The water cascading from tier to tier, bulls chasing them as they played, hens running after their eggs... While I wondered whether she was teasing me, my mother, taking one last sip of her coffee and turning her cup over, would say, “I remember. In fact, the lower the tiers went, the smaller they became, and the lions on each level grew smaller with them.” The stories I had taken for fairy tales were actually memories that unfolded right in Istanbul. One generation’s home is the next generation’s family reunion spot, and for me, a story to rediscover.

I walk down the Serencebey Hill with excitement, looking for where the house was once located. I turn a corner, and there find the Nuri Bey Fountain, a marble façade with carvings of a sphere at its center balancing on top of a doric column, framed by a giant ivy. It reminded me of the rotating globe I played with as a child. I would spin the sphere, adorned with mountains, rivers, seas, and green lands, stop it with my fingertip, and shout “Chilííí!”, imagining I had traveled there. Standing before the globe carved on the marble fountain, the old urge returned to spin the world again. In a blur, continents would melt together, oceans stretch wide, and the sphere would turn into the bluest of blues.

Above the sphere with rays, illuminated by the Earth, the Turkish inscription states:

Kevser, or the Pond of Abundance, is defined in the dictionary as “a sacred river, pool, or fountain believed to exist in paradise.” For someone who climbed the steep hill and drank a mouthful of water, perhaps the stream that once flowed there was indeed kevser. I say “once,” because now the fountain has neither a tap nor flowing water. “Once,” according to the inscription, was 1932, and I find myself wondering about the humankind the inscription speaks of. What lives were people leading on that globe back then? What were they doing? How was the world changing?

Walking in Istanbul, I often find fountains crowned with inscriptions in flowing Arabic script. When I try to translate them on my phone, their meanings shift like water. Unsure how to translate Ottoman Turkish using Google Translate’s Arabic dictionary, the inscriptions reveal notions of water as life or as a womb. That year, 1932, the Turkish Language Association was founded—perhaps that is why this fountain bears an inscription in Turkish, in the new alphabet of the country. The inscription seems to follow the current of a language adapting to modern life, in harmony with the faint Art Deco carvings that carry a silent hope for the future.

That same year, the first People’s Houses were founded. These centers were built so that humanity might claim its own humanity; so that people might protect their surroundings, each other’s rights, and their water. These are rights we still fight for today, against a thousand obstacles. Just as the water that once flowed through this fountain evaporated, the People’s Houses did too. Yet the need for solidarity for the future condensed—becoming droplets, becoming lakes. After all, water molecules are drawn to one another; even when scattered, they are pulled back together.

This pull between molecules lies in the attraction between protons and electrons—the plus seeking the minus, vice versa. The one lacking charge seeks what the other holds; if one carries too much, it gives or shares so as not to be isolated. That year, 1932, the neutron within the atom was discovered. A part of the atom, neither positive nor negative, yet essential to its core. Physicists would later call that year annus mirabilis, a wondrous year, as this discovery led to extraordinary breakthroughs. Its neutrality was not a weakness, but a power to balance everything—a discovery that would later make the atomic bomb possible. A terrifyingly forceful neutrality that evokes water—a substance so easily overlooked in its transparency, yet whose absence yields lifelessness.

If we return to that year, it was also an important one for my great-grandfather, Nuri Demirağ. Selahattin Reşit Alan produced the first training aircraft and began test flights. Four years later, they would develop the Nu.D-36, soaring through the skies, and two years after that, they would start designing passenger airplanes, to be built and crafted by the minds and hands of their own people—planes that would carry them around the world. Perhaps those dreams began right here, at this fountain. Thoughts flow into dreams as water flows; dreams return as thoughts.

Today, almost a century later, I stand once again before the silent tap. Now it is my turn to think about humanity, the future, and life. Like the ivy wrapped around the fountain, I wish the blue sphere it hides always carries light—for me, for you, for them.