Cürek: A Mining Legend
A world built around an iron mine
In the hopeful, hurried days of the Republic’s first years, an iron mine was woken from its sleep in the heart of the silent mountains that look down on the Çaltı valley. The ore torn from the depths of the mountain came slowly down to the station on aerial ropeways that crossed the sky above the valley from end to end, and from there flowed along the rails, with endless patience, towards Karabük. But the extraordinary thing was not the splitting of the mountain; it was the new life that took root, quietly, in the middle of that unforgiving country. Around the mine a whole breathing world had been built, with its housing, its schools, its hospital, its cinema whose lights came on in the evening and its bakery that smelled of fresh bread. Those who made it called the order they had raised with their own hands “İşletme”.
This text is the story of that world: its hopeful founding, its slow rise, the human hearts that beat inside it, the heavy silence that settled over it in time, and what was left behind.
Iron
There was iron deep inside the mountain.
It had been there for millions of years. But it had not always been in a mountain.
This place was once the floor of an ocean. The iron was born down there, in the dark, under the water. Then the ocean closed; the seabed buckled, rose and became a mountain. The iron rose with it, into the sky.
Above the valley cut by the Çaltı, inside the rock, it waited, silent and motionless; on its own only a bed of ore, a wealth no one had yet named. People came long after.
Then the young Republic wanted to take its own iron from its own mountains. Human ingenuity, labour and engineering reached the mine. The mountain was opened; roads, pits and plants were built. The production areas known as A Kafa, B Kafa and C Plaseri were joined to one another by roads.
Aerial ropeways crossed above the valley. The iron ore travelled through the air, came down to the silos at Demirdağ station, met the wagons there and set off on the rails towards Karabük, towards the country’s newly rising iron and steel industry.
That is how the great story of Cürek began.
But what made Cürek Cürek was not the ore taken out of the mountain.
It was the world that began to form around it.
İşletme
The mine asked for labour. Work brought people to Cürek.
But people did not come only to work, and the state did not call them only to work. On the north bank of the Çaltı, on the slope of Cürek Dağı, a planned settlement was built that would make the workers’ lives possible as much as their work. At the centre stood the administrative and social buildings; around them, housing spreading step by step up the slope.
Housing rose. Schools opened. A guesthouse, a hospital, a mosque, a bakery, a cinema, sports grounds and a swimming pool were added; the hospital and the cinema shared a wall. The roads were laid in concrete and given pavements, pines were planted, parks and flower beds were laid out. A single plant heated the houses, and Cürek made its own electricity. In the middle of barren ground, a settlement grew green.
People called it simply “İşletme”.
The word was small; the world it named, large.
İşletme meant not only the pits and the plants but the whole life built there: the work, the housing, the school, the hospital, the mosque, the cinema, the bakery, the family, the children. There were workers leaving for their shift; there were railwaymen moving wagons at the station, men working in the pits, machines, workshops. In the morning children walked to school; later warm bread came out of the bakery; and when evening came the lights of the cinema went on.
In the villages around, most houses were built of earth.
Between the mountains, a modern little town had been built. Work carried the state’s guarantee; it had its wages and its pension. The cinema, the guesthouse and the pool asked only one thing of you: that you came.
The road that ran across the sky
Perhaps the most unforgettable sight of Cürek was the aerial ropeways.
Two lines ran side by side above the valley: one carrying the full buckets down from the pits, the other taking the empty ones back up. Each bucket had a number painted on it. As one drew away another appeared, and as that one went a new one came. It was like a road built across the sky.
The sound came from the pulleys that hung the buckets on the cable. Between the towers the cable had give; over a tower it was drawn tight, and there the pulleys screeched as they passed. With a loaded bucket that screech was like a trailer crossing stony ground, and sometimes a few pieces of ore spilled from above. Then the sound moved off and began again at the next tower. All day the valley was full of it.
A child could watch it for hours.
Below, the railway worked to a different rhythm.
The ore emptied into the silos at Demirdağ station and from there filled the wagons. The loaded wagons went down to Cürek station; there they were moved back and forth across different tracks, coupled to one another and made into one long line.
Heavy iron locking into heavy iron, wagons knocking against wagons, the puffing of the coal-burning engine — the valley was filled with these sounds too. When the train pulled away the engine’s great wheels turned without grip at first, then bit. Only then did the line move off.
Over the years inclines, narrow-gauge lines and new ropeway routes were joined to one another; each period found its own solution, but the direction was always the same: from the mountain to the station, from the station to Karabük.
The journey that began inside the mountain passed through the sky, came down to the rails and reached beyond Cürek, to the country’s factories.
Today we might call this an engineering system. For a child living there in those years it was something else entirely.
Life in Cürek
But machines could not turn a settlement into a town.
People did that.
The work and the security İşletme provided made it possible for people to stay in Cürek. By the accounts of those who lived there, close to two thousand people once made their home here. People came to know one another. Friendships were made. People fell in love. Weddings were held.
Children were born.
While one generation worked in the pits, the workshops and the railway, another ran through the streets of Cürek and grew up in its school. In the evenings people gathered in front of the cinema; matches were played on the sports grounds; neighbours knocked on one another’s doors.
There was a primary school in Cürek, and a middle school, and a high school. In most of the villages around there was no school at all. A child who wanted to study came to Cürek if he had a relative there, and took his place at a desk here. There were many such children. One of them stayed with his relatives in a two-room house in Cürek.
To say what prosperity is, big numbers are not needed. Because development is not only producing more; it takes on meaning where it touches a human life.
One baker is enough.
The baker
The bakery stood on the road to school. When hot bread came out, the smell filled the street.
The bread for a household was bought by its mother. The children who came to the bakery on their own were the ones who had come down from the villages to study; where they lodged there was no mother to buy the bread.
A whole loaf was mostly beyond them. Some asked for a half, some for a quarter. And some did not go in at all; they stopped at the door and looked inside.
The baker saw the child standing outside.
“Have you got any small change on you?” he would ask. “I’ve nothing to give people their change with — I’m short of coins.”
For a child who had nothing at all there was another reason ready: “We baked too much today. Better than letting it go stale and be thrown out.”
For one who had enough for a quarter, another still: “And who am I supposed to sell the other quarter to?”
Sometimes a child asked knowing the answer: “How much is half a loaf?” The baker would not name the price. “I badly need coins,” he would say. “Give me what you have and take it.”
There was a different reason every time. He would cut the loaf in two with his knife and hand over one half; he smiled as he held it out. The other half belonged to another child who would be standing at the door before long.
The child believed him.
So the bread was not given; it was bought. The child never had to explain that he had no money, and was never shamed in front of anyone.
The child did not take the half loaf home. He ate it there, at the door.
It took years to understand why that smile was a sad one.
One of those children grew up, came to the bakery one day and tried to pay what he owed.
The baker did not answer. “Come,” he said, and pointed to the back. A flour sack stood there, full to the brim with coins; it had stood like that for so long that it had gone stiff and held its shape on its own.
Not one of them had been spent.
They both wept.
This was Cürek’s real wealth. The iron ore had created an economic possibility; İşletme had built an order around that possibility. And people had built their lives inside that order.
Then the ropeways fell silent
No movement lasts forever.
The ropeways stopped. The sound from the towers was never heard again.
The great rhythm made by the wagons, the ore and the shifts slowly died away. The old order of İşletme came to an end. As work grew scarce, people left. Children grew up. Families who had once built their future in Cürek scattered to other places.
The cinema, the guesthouse and the pool were paid for in the end: everyone went.
The buildings were left behind.
This is not a figure of speech invented to describe abandonment.
It really happened.
The gates of a world where coming to work had once counted as a privilege, where children filled the schools, where people went to the cinema, bought bread from the bakery and families built a future, were now locked.
Inside, the buildings left from that life fell silent. Today the official record says the same thing: the former settlement is abandoned.
The tragedy of Cürek is not that a few buildings grew old.
The tragedy is the unravelling of the extraordinary order that people built between the mountains with the possibility a mine had opened; the slow turning into ruins of places that once stood for the future. What falls is not only stone and iron; what filled that sack vanishes with them.
On one side, the buckets moving one after another through the night as if they would never end.
On the other, a large lock put there years later.
The whole distance between the rise of Cürek and its silence today may fit between those two images.
Does the story end here?
Today the former İşletme world is not in use at all. The buildings are ageing. The pines that were planted have grown; they stand taller than the houses now, their branches touching the roofs. Time is slowly taking back what human hands built.
But this time we have something the past did not: we know what it was.
There are photographs. There are documents. There are buildings still standing, registered today as cultural assets. And most important of all, there are the accounts of the people who lived there.
That is why to look at Cürek only as “an abandoned mining settlement” would be to lose it a second time.
Perhaps the question is now this: can Cürek, once born of the possibility iron provided, live again on the possibility its own past provides?
Not, this time, to bring out ore. So that people can come and see that extraordinary industrial system — the ropeways, the railway, İşletme, the social life and the development thinking of an era.
As an industrial and living heritage.
As a place to visit.
As a story.
So that the flower that once opened in barren ground can be seen again.
Before the phoenix rises from its ashes, there have to be ashes. Cürek’s ashes are still there, under the rain and under time, not yet scattered.
Whether it rises again is no longer a decision for the past, but for today.
Respect for labour
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