The morning boat was crowded. It was not, in truth, an ordinary day — there was wind, and the sea, even by Marmara standards, could not be called calm. But every time I step aboard and the course turns towards Sivriada, the same thing happens to me. A kind of uneasy reverence. Because that island carries a weight far heavier than anything a map can suggest.
Its official name is still Sivriada. But Istanbulites have called it something else for a century: Hayırsızada. The Isle of the Thankless. The Cursed Island. A place that bears such a name cannot simply be a dive site. Before entering the water, I found a corner of the crowded deck and stood looking out to sea — even as I checked my equipment, my mind was already elsewhere, back in the summer of 1910, and what truly happened there.
That year, Istanbul's streets were full of dogs. The stray dog population of the Ottoman capital had been part of the city's fabric for centuries; neighbourhoods claimed their own dogs, fed them, accepted them as a kind of urban ecosystem. But the winds of modernisation had begun to regard this as a problem unbecoming of a civilised capital. The municipal authorities of the day, anxious to present a Western face to the world, resolved to rid the streets of strays. Rather than slaughter them — which was itself a matter of controversy at the time — they chose exile. Eighty thousand dogs were rounded up, loaded onto boats, and left on this bare, waterless, shadowless rock in the middle of the Marmara.
Not a drop of fresh water. Not a tree. Not a crevice for shelter. Only stone, sun, and eighty thousand creatures with nothing in the world but each other.
History records that in those first days the sounds carried all the way to the city — long, broken howling heard from the shores of Kadıköy at night, and on favourable winds from even further away. Then the sounds diminished. Then they ceased altogether. How many days it lasted is not precisely known; some sources speak of a week, others of nearly ten days. But the outcome was the same: thirst, hunger, and the relentless sun turned that island into a theatre of survival. The dogs ate one another. And in the end, nothing living remained.
Istanbul heard. And this was not news the city could easily forget. Such a weight of conscience descended upon the people that the island's name changed with time. Sivriada remained in the official records, but in everyday speech it gave way to Hayırsızada — as though the very ground were an accomplice, as though the stone had been sentenced to remember what the city wished to forget. Today, one hundred and sixteen years on, that name is spoken with the same gravity.
I know all of this. I think it through again each time I enter that water. Today was no different.
***
I had with me a group of six Open Water students. The boat was full, equipment everywhere, everyone pressed shoulder to shoulder in the bustle of a crowded morning. The sea offered little assistance; there was swell, a perceptible current — it was not, by any measure, a glassy day. But visibility, by Marmara standards, was reasonable: seven metres, perhaps eight at most. No more, no less.
We descended. Eight metres, ten, twelve. Diving with a group demands a particular quality of attention — you track not only your own breath but the rhythm of six pairs of eyes, six separate anxieties, six different levels of experience. At thirteen metres, a rocky ridge began — the island's continuation beneath the surface, bare and hard, with little weed and none of the vivid colour one finds on richer reefs. Like the island itself: plain, unyielding, keeping its own counsel.
And there, in the shadow of an overhang, I noticed something that was not moving.
For a moment my eye slid past it — because it appeared to be part of the rock. Its colour, its texture, even the distribution of small irregularities across its surface matched the stone so precisely that even a trained instructor's eye could not separate them at first glance. Then something — perhaps the rhythm of a gill movement, perhaps a faint gleam in one eye — drew me back. A large grouper. Patient, still, pressed against the rock as though fused to it, in perfect camouflage.
I signalled the group to stop, and brought each person forward in turn, one by one. Speed is always the enemy underwater — it is haste that causes panic, startles creatures, clouds the water; managing this with Open Water students requires twice the care. The fish did not flee. It did not startle. It must have felt the vibration of six pairs of fins, yet it did not betray so much as a single muscle. It simply remained, and watched us all — as though we were guests in its domain, and it the host.
In that moment, thirteen metres down, looking into the eyes of that fish, something came to me with strange clarity. This creature was living, effortlessly, the very thing I had been trying to articulate in Rubelis Beyond for months. Neither aggressive nor retreating. Neither threatened nor threatening. It was simply there — so wholly at ease within its own environment that safety was not a separate feeling at all, merely the texture of its existence.
What gave it that, of course, was millions of years of evolution — being part of the rock was not a threat to it but a refuge; it had been born into this particular corner of the world, shaped for it entirely. For us divers, the matter is altogether different. We do not enter the water with any innate sense of belonging. We must relearn even how to breathe there — steady, controlled, a breath that leaves no room for panic. What we call panic rarely arises from genuine danger; it is born, more often, from the feeling of being in an unfamiliar place and sensing that one does not belong. That grouper had never once asked itself that question. My six students, each at their own pace, were learning to answer it again, right then.
We stayed with it for a few minutes. Then, quietly, without disturbing the distance between us and it, I gathered the group and we moved away — because some moments must be left alone, merely witnessed, never interfered with.
***
As we ascended, surfacing into the noise of the crowded boat and the excited first impressions everyone was eager to share, my mind returned to 1910. Beneath that island, just above the water through which my fins had drifted, the cries of eighty thousand living creatures had once echoed. Today the place is so indifferent, it seems as though nothing ever happened there — rough seas or calm, a crowded boat or a solitary one, the secret remains the same. To say the sea does not forget is perhaps wrong; the sea has no obligation to remember anything. It is we who remember. We who carry it, who changed the name, who summon that day again each time we say Hayırsızada.
When we climbed back aboard, everyone was telling their own story — the pride of having completed a group dive of nearly thirty, the first fish sighting, the first real experience of current. I stood a little apart and simply watched. Because for them, today was a first; for me, as with every dive at Sivriada, it was a day suspended somewhere between the weight of history and the stillness of that fish.
On the way home, I summed up the day to myself in a single sentence: the sea is capable of carrying the most tragic story and the most instructive lesson at the same time, in the same water. And sometimes, to understand that, all you need to do is descend thirteen metres and look at a creature resting motionless on a rock.