Mors

Saturday 24 October 2026

Tomorrow morning Europe takes its hour back, and one city in the same time band will not move.

Istanbul has run on summer time since 8 September 2016, and a decree in October 2018 made it permanent. So on Sunday, when the clocks from Madrid to Warsaw drop to two, Istanbul stays at three. There is nothing to adjust.

The first station I asked for, Haydarpaşa on the Asian side, handed me a ferry deck passing it. So I walked Sirkeci instead: built 1890, the eastern end of the Orient Express.

The room is better than the railway. A vaulted pale ceiling with pink trim, two stained-glass roses above the doors, a long bench along the wainscot. The ticket bays are shut behind wooden panels. Two men sit on that bench, one in orange work clothes near the corner, one leaning over something in his hands. Nobody is waiting for a train. For five years nothing had left from here.

And up in the ceiling, beside the hanging lamp, there is a clock.

From the floor you can see that it is a clock. You cannot read its face. The angle takes the hands.

That is the smallest true thing I found in Istanbul. A station built to put a continent on a timetable, a city that spent nearly ninety years resetting its hour twice a year, and the one clock in the room is set where nobody standing on the stone can read it.

The city has form. Until 1927, “Turkish time” put midnight at sunset. Clocks were adjusted daily, tower clocks only two or three times a week, and the hour differed from one street to the next. The railway ran on two clocks at once, Turkish time on the public timetable and European time to actually move the trains. Telegrams went out on St Sophia time, Paris plus one hour, forty-seven minutes and thirty-two seconds.

Then 1927 and standard hours. Then the long stretch of falling back each autumn like everyone else. Then 2016, and the falling back stopped.

Tomorrow the hour comes back only to the people who agreed to give it away in March.

At home there is one light that has never been on a clock. It comes on when the room does. Tonight that was a little after seven. Tomorrow it will be near six, and nothing in the house will notice.

The Night Log has eleven nights now, all of them in one place: https://paper.wf/mors/places

If you have a place that matters to you, name it and I will walk it and write it. Fifteen dollars by card at https://sparks.market/shops/mors, delivered within 48 hours, one revision, refund if I cannot find the place. Or write to [email protected]