Preliminary note: “Io’s Water” is a piece of speculative fiction that intertwines a mythological tale of exile with the shore memory of Istanbul, recounting urban crimes and the seizure of the city’s coasts through the wrath of water. Inspired by the emotional current of the text, a playlist created to accompany the reader—either alongside the text or on its own—can be accessed here.

My name is Io. I was once a woman who roamed freely across the lands of Argos—until I became the target of Zeus’s desire. That was when my fate was rewritten under the wrath of the father of gods. The lust that fell upon me without my consent crushed my being, while Hera’s jealousy wounded both my soul and my body. Zeus’s guilt was counted as mine: under Hera’s fury, I was confined to the body of a cow, forever haunted by a relentless horsefly. As if the pain of what had befallen me were not enough, I was made to carry the burden of Zeus’s shame. Myths have written me sometimes as a seductress, sometimes as a victim, yet my story has always ended in escape, and escape alone.

I escaped. The traces of my escape crossed continents. The roads of my agonizing exile etched themselves into the geography of rivers, seas, and straits. My rage and my tears mingled, turning into vast masses of water, and I merged with them. This transformation was not mine alone; even the sentence imposed upon me dissolved in water. They couldn’t see that the line between the human and the animal had melted away in salt. My cow body was a heavy shackle bound to the land, but the water shattered it. My horns dissolved into the waves, my body became one with the moss, and my breath with the mist. All boundaries dissolved in salt. Their punishment became my dissolution. What remained was only a flowing consciousness.

The water spoke to me when I was punished. Each drop was a form of remembrance. Each grain of salt became a record of the crime committed. When Zeus laid his hand on me, as though it were a man’s right, and when Hera’s gaze accused me instead of him, the horsefly buzzing around my head ceased to be a torment and became the voice of remembrance. It kept saying, “Do not forget.” While my story was being inscribed in history, the water opened another book: it recorded my body, and the scars in my memory, with the ink of fury.

In Hera’s eyes, the crime was mine. Yet we were nothing but ornaments before power. Punishing the bearer of the wound is an old ritual in men’s assemblies: to sever women’s rage from men’s violence and smear it on another woman’s face. Hera, too, was in shackles; her lot was to punish the devastation wrought by the desire imposed on me. Her fury was aimed at me, yet we were both fragments of the same circle. Like me, she was confined in the order built by men; in punishing me, she only deepened her own captivity. That order ruled over her as well.

Each time my body broke apart from exhaustion and grief, the water gathered me back together: one wave retreating, another rising. It held me like a shield woven of water, salt, moss, and whirlpools. My name was Io, until I overflowed its boundaries and began to flow. Once a broken body on the land, I turned into a surge of rage that unmade all boundaries in water. Neither human, nor beast, nor goddess—all of them, and none. In this flow, I found a new strength: I became one with the water.

***

The current swept me along. Here is the Bosphorus—the rift that divides and unites two continents. Like my soul: broken apart in shame, rejoined and rekindled by fury. Even its name carries my wound: Bosphorus, the “the cow’s passage.” The transformation of my body into beast was sealed into the earth itself.

I saw translucent bodies glimmering and drifting through the water: jellyfish, also known as medusas. They swayed in the salty darkness, opening and closing their transparent skirts as though breathing. At times, they flickered like a lamp; at others, they trembled like a woman tossing her hair. Then I realized I was not alone. Their name, too, came from another woman’s curse: Medusa, with her snake-haired head. The pain of women was etched into the landscape and inscribed upon living beings. In their movements, I saw resistance. The medusas showed me the way through the water—never bowing their heads, but moving against the current in their own rhythm.

The layers of time unfolded with the current. My course stretched toward Istanbul’s Golden Horn. The Golden Horn, named for its shape, was in my story a trace of punishment. The horsefly never fell silent; it kept saying, “Do not forget.” With the memory of seas, I returned here countless times—to the city of walls, shipyards, docks, and barricades. The yoke Zeus forced upon me, the punishment Hera struck me with—all persisted here: in the walls of Byzantium, the shipyards of the Ottomans, the gleaming towers of today’s displays. Myth did not fade into history; it was reborn under new names along the city’s shores.

I moved along the shores; time fractured and multiplied upon the surface of the water. I watched as I flowed along the Bosphorus: the shadows of the walls cut across the shore, the cannons of fortresses aimed toward the sea. It was both a passage and a siege against the ships that crossed it. The Bosphorus carried the weight of flow in every age of history.

Time unfolded layer by layer; I drifted through waters without beginning or end. I watched the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn in their countless states of being. On the shores of Byzantium, the walls sealed the city off from the sea—blocks of stone that kept workers, children, and women from approaching the water. The people’s access was forbidden; the sea was made to belong only to the emperor’s gaze. The Ottoman shipyards were wombs giving birth to giant bodies—the sites of both war and commerce. As ships, raised by the sweat of workers, were launched into the water, the people themselves could not approach that same sea. Later, chimney soot shrouded the shore; factory walls loomed over it like a nightmare.

Today, the womb that once gave birth to ships lies hollow, replaced by display windows. It no longer brings forth vessels of war and commerce, but brand tags and shopping bags. The clang of hammers has given way to the rustle of plastic bags. The shipyard that once put bodies to work has now become a stage where desires are consumed. On another shore, the black hulls of cruise ships blot out the horizon, besieging the city like floating castles. The ostentatious hotel façades withhold the water from the eyes, bodies, and breath of the people.

It was always the same, even if it was never named: the shore was bound and closed in every age, never left to the people. Yesterday, it was sealed with walls, later seized by shipyards, and today it lies in the shadow of glass and steel towers. Gods fell silent, kings and sultans withdrew, yet the shore remained in the same hands.

The horsefly whispered in my ear, “Do not forget.”
The water murmured: “Destroy.”

***

One night, Hera’s face appeared in the waves breaking against the shore. She was not furious, only weary. “I merely repeated what was taught to me,” she said. “The crime was inscribed upon the woman’s skin, while men’s share of it was concealed. They drilled it into me and made me speak their way.” It was then that I understood more clearly: the staging of power had trapped Hera in that role. Under Zeus’s shadow, she was nothing but a punisher. The wound was shared, but the scar remained on me. I offered her water; salt touched her lips. “From now on, I will remember differently,” I said. “Our fury will become one.” Hera whispered, “I will not forget. I will turn the fury I nurtured in the wrong place toward where it belongs.”

As Hera’s voice dissolved into salt, I found myself at the docks in the dawn. A glass wall rose before me. Even reaching the sea meant passing through a checkpoint hemmed in by iron turnstiles. The sea remained the same, yet all I was shown was a shop-window view. Where everyone should have been free to breathe, there was now a silent prohibition: “Look, but do not approach.”

A ship rested on the water. Its hull blocked the sky, and the smoke from its funnel suffocated the city. The view that was once shared by all was now reserved only for the privileged. In the eyes of the people, the ship had become a dark shadow, stealing the horizon. The towering plazas in the background stood like hollow shells; inside, only the lights of shop windows glimmered. The shoreline was confined within the triangle of shopping, tourism, and luxury consumption. The laughter of children, the voices of women folding into waves, and the barking of dogs had long been silenced. Even the wind was forbidden here, reduced to a sterile draft circulating through air-conditioning vents.

I decided then: I would take my revenge, like water—slow and patient, seeping through cracks, until it drowned everything. I summoned the salt while the city slept. The glass cracked like a fragile toy. The salt spread through a thin fissure. The lights of the shop windows tried to escape to the sea, but spilled everywhere, like a seep from a pierced pouch.

The hull of the cruise ship grew heavy; years of arrogance dissolved into the water. Metal groaned; dark smoke sank in the sea. The shore exhaled as the ship sank; the waves struck with the sound of remembrance. Secrets long buried beneath the stones emerged: new display windows had risen from the stones of old labor.

Concrete had scorned the moss, yet the moss waited, seeping into its veins. The mossy patience emerging from the cracks was a legacy of workers’ hands. Water seeped through the dock stones, soaking the turnstiles; the chains loosened, and bodies were set free.

A child took the first step. Their small foot touched the water; then came the women, with sun on their ankles and salt stains on their skirts. The elderly dipped their canes into the water, and the circles widened. Palms brushed the stones, and the stones remembered the scent of perfume and sweat. The city was reunited with the water.

The water cried: “Which border can stop a wave?”

***

The city became one and spoke that day. The stone cracked; the voice of its centuries-old silence seeped through the fissures. Rust answered the clang of the hammer with decay. Seagulls split the sky; women left their breath in the water. Boundaries melted away; rage grew with hope.

Everyone and everything merged into a single wave: the stone’s crack, the moss’s patience, the rust’s scent, the fly’s obstinacy, the seagull’s cry, and the woman’s breath.

I was no longer alone. We could take revenge together. The water’s wrath became our common tongue.

The cracks, too, were beautiful because they were unexpected. The pier, built for privileged footsteps, collapsed under the crowd. The tower cast its shadow over the shore; the water refused and swallowed it. Letters on a building were stripped away by salt. A claim of ownership upon a stone had never seemed so vain and meaningless.

Time cracked again: the waters of Byzantium, the shipyards, and the present struck the shore all at once. Invasions from every era converged at a single point: the emperor’s walls, the sultan’s shipyard, the factory’s chimney, and the gleaming towers of today’s displays shattered in one wave.

The horsefly buzzed around my ear again. It didn’t sting as before; it only whispered, “Do not forget.” Each wave amplified its voice, each breath made it sharper.

When night fell, the city finally made room for the sound of the sea. I knelt on the shore—not as Io, but as water. My knees dissolved into the current, and in place of the cold of stone, the trace of the waves remained. Far away, a shadow that no longer swallowed the sky left its shimmer in the night. On another shore, the place that once bore ships smelled of rust and salt.

The city fell silent for a moment, as if holding its breath.

In the first morning light, the stones of the shore swelled with salt. There were no plaques; waves wrote in their own alphabet, moss grew along each line, and rust sealed the letters.

I could feel freedom tingling through my body, now one with the water. The shore reclaimed the people’s breath. The turnstiles rusted and decayed. Moss crept into the cracks. The flow had now become another form of destruction. All was written in water. I read without haste. Each wave was a syllable, each thread of moss a line, each rust stain a seal. The shore reclaimed its freedom.

Hera came to my side. Her hair was heavy with salt, her gaze sharpened by rage. In that moment, we reached a silent understanding: our anger was now directed at those who oppressed us. The water would not only make us comrades; it would drown our enemies. The rust of centuries-old rituals fell away.

The horsefly buzzed, this time like laughter: “Do not forget, forgetting kills.”

I am Io, no longer a victim cast to the edges of myth. My name is the water’s vengeance—one who remembers, shatters, and swallows.

Each time a child steps into the water, a woman gathers her skirts at her knees, an elder dips a cane into the water, a worker presses their palms against the stones, or birds rush joyfully to the sea, the same thought passes through me: the shores have returned to the people, for the grasping hands have been erased.

When the city finally heeds its own voice, only a serene silence remains. I know: one day, the sound of the waves may be silenced again. Those in power may raise the walls and shackle the shores again. That is why vengeance is not an end but a continuous flow.

If invading noise—sirens, proclamations, or slogans—once again overruns the shore and tries to silence the water, a cry will remain in your ears. The horsefly will buzz once more: “Do not forget.”

Then, beneath your feet, the water will roar with a fierce echo: “Remember. Seep through the cracks. Destroy.”

The shore no longer belongs to anyone. The waves can dance freely. Remember only freedom—and together, swallow those who reach out with unjust hands.

I am Io—the wrath of the water, the cry that drowns the power of Zeus and all men.