The continuous transformation between solid and liquid, dry and wet generates various geologic layers and spatial conditions.1 The context for this reflection on wetlands is one in which water mixes with clay, silt, and sand.2 The older Turkish dictionaries often list four distinct words to describe it:3 bālçīḳ, çāmur, ṭīn (Ar.), and gil-gūy (Pers.).4 For Halîmî Çelebi, a 16th-century lexicographer, gil-gūy meant “black mud” (kara bālçīḳ) formed through the constant trampling of sheep.5 Caʿfer Efendi, a 17th-century local judge and a close friend of the then chief imperial architect, entered the word samanlı sıvā bālçīġī when bālçīḳ was mixed with straw to plaster walls, and helik when it was placed inside walls.6 His contemporary, the celebrated traveler and chronicler Evliyâ Çelebi, spoke of ṭīn-i mumessek, a kind of wet soil dug in Sarıyer and at the bottom of the Golden Horn. It was said to smell like musk and was beloved by Istanbul’s potters back then, finding its way into various forms of water jugs (kūze) and vessels (kāse).7 The fresh mud of Kâğıthane (Kaġıtḫāne çāmurī) was another highly sought-after one and even ignited a bitter feud, as it was smuggled and shipped from Istanbul to Europe for use in casting cannons.8 Esʿad Efendi, an 18th-century scholar and lexicographer of a trilingual Ottoman Turkish-Arabic-Persian dictionary, goes further, and for bālçīḳ entry, he amassed fifty-two words.9 Some reveal the workings of nature. For example, zabīṭa (Tur.) is the mud that settles at the bottom of a still water body, like a pool or well, and ṭamla is the darker, denser layer beneath it. The soft, dry mud left after a flood is ġıryel, and ġırgen is what the flood brings. Carried by the water’s currents is türnūk, while the mud left behind to dry in place is ferāṣ, or ḳula (Tur.) when it cracks as it dries.
On the one hand, these lexicalized items register a rich array of meanings and locally situated understandings of mud over time. On the other, they draw attention to a more troubling dynamic: the relational possibilities through which we encounter and know mud. Mud is never just mud, like the places and people. Nevertheless, mud has often been treated as a passive backdrop to human activity, something to drain, remediate, clear away, contain, stabilize, or turn into something else. These everyday, human-centered narratives contribute to a static conception, lacking specificity and vitality.
In the past decade, so far from Istanbul, in Minas Gerais, Brazil, two major tailings dam breaches at iron-ore mines, owned by the transnational mining giants Vale and BHP Billiton, unleashed millions of cubic meters of toxic waste.10 These catastrophes caused immense losses to human lives and livelihoods, and sent mercury-, arsenic-, iron-, and lead-laden waves of mud11 downstream toward the Atlantic Ocean.12 Mud that is entrenched in the extractive industries is the ongoing sedimentation of the present that is becoming part of contamination and, in a way, a treacherous space and post-disaster landscape for communities both near and distant, where life once was, but is not now as such.13 What would it mean, then, to radically reimagine ways of knowing mud and to share testimonies14 to resist the systematic impact of large-scale extractive activities and toxic flows?
Here, sometimes the footnote gives further details to contextualize, expand, and ground the main text. Sometimes it is where I name the people, ideas, and concepts that inspired/influenced the text. In both cases, each footnote helps me practice one of many good relations. Thank you very much, Merve (Anıl), not only for introducing me to Max Liboiron’s work, but also to many others. Thank you, Merve (Yücel), for sharing more references on this topic, and everyone in the reading group for the lively discussions and all the great ideas. I would also like to extend special thanks to the editor, Ezgi Yurteri, for her helpful feedback and suggestions.
In Western Armenian, mud (çāmur) is տիղմ or ցեխ (dighm, ts’ekh) and կավ (gav) is used for clay (kil). See V. H. Hagopian’s entry in A Dictionary, English-Armenian, Constantinople, 1907, pp. 108, 476. Accessed: 16.01.2026, archive.org. In Greek, λάσπη (láspi) is the everyday word for mud.
Evliyâ also provides many details about how kara bālçīḳ was taken out of the seabed between Eyüp and Hasköy and what processes it went through. Apparently, it was the divers (ġavvāṣ) who dug it out from the bottom of the Golden Horn, which was then loaded onto barges (mavna) and transported to the workshops of brick and roof tile makers. In this instance, however, he uses a different word, ṭīn-i siyāh (also meaning kara bālçīḳ). Ibid. It is difficult to tell whether he meant the same mud, or whether he observed variations in the Golden Horn’s mud across different spots. Something I wonder though is how those early modern observers considered what gave a seemingly uniform submerged terrain its distinct qualities in terms of soil.
My other inspiration is anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli’s explorations of how late liberalism—the entwined logics of extractive capital and settler liberalism—continues to mobilize and trouble the distinction between life (bios) and non-life (geos, meteoros) (or the lack of life). As she claims, “it is a difference that makes no difference,” because all forms of existence have within them a vital affecting force (what she calls animist) and thus potential to create profit. Since anything can become something more, Povinelli suggests that rather than maintaining a distinction between life and non-life, we better ask what sorts of formations we are keeping in existence or extinguishing that threaten the human species with extinction. Here is a primer to get started: Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 1–29. I owe many thanks to my colleague, anthropologist Rabia Harmanşah, for insisting that I read this book and for her generous support.