How fantasy fans are keeping a Turkish blacksmithing tradition alive

Kemeralti Bazaar, Izmir, Turkiye – To the casual passer-by, the Akdemir family’s workshop could be any traditional blacksmith’s forge. Dozens of hammers and tongs hang from the walls; kebab skewers, knives and axes lie across the benches; a length of steel glows in the fire. But for those familiar with fantasy worlds and gaming, a second look may be required.

Just a few steps inside the workshop's shutter-style doors, an enormous forged fantasy sword rests across a countertop, similar to the one wielded by the Lich King in the popular video game World of Warcraft. Elsewhere are weapons inspired by TV series and video games, including Game of Thrones and League of Legends, rendered in steel.

At the forge, Suleyman Akdemir, a large man with a furrowed brow, grips a glowing length of metal with long tongs, draws it from the fire, and lays it across the anvil. A few metres away, his father, Omer, 54, reaches for a tool. Then the power hammer crashes down, its blows reverberating through the narrow workshop and out into the covered streets of Izmir’s Kemeralti bazaar, forcing conversation to wait.

Suleyman, 30, wears a brown leather apron over a black T-shirt, his hands encased in black gloves. His father rarely stops working while he talks; Suleyman often pauses, turning towards his customers before returning to the forge.

Between father and son, exchanges are calm, almost formal. Here, they seem less like family than two craftsmen who have spent years learning how to work around one another.

When the hammer falls silent, Suleyman turns from the forge.

“Ever since I was a child. I’d say since I first learned to walk, I've been working here with hot forging,” he says, breaking into a smile.

The surroundings bear that history. The fantasy weapons are newcomers to a workshop where Suleyman's family has practised blacksmithing for generations. Yet, incongruous as they look among the agricultural tools and barbecue skewers, they may be one reason the forge is still running.

“Thank God, we can make anything we see,” Suleyman says.

That conviction has taken the Akdemirs somewhere his predecessors could hardly have imagined. Customers from around the world now send Suleyman images and ideas inspired by weapons they have seen on screen, which he interprets as individually designed, hand-forged pieces.

Kemeralti has been a commercial centre of Izmir for centuries, with its dense network of streets and hans stretching inland from the city's waterfront.

For Suleyman, one of his earliest memories is of its power hammer at his father’s workshop. He was seven or eight, he says, when he became fascinated by the machine, which weighs about 1.5 tonnes.

He watched it rise and fall over the incandescent iron.

“I was spellbound when I saw it,” he says. “I knew right then that I would do this for a living."

By 12, he was using a hammer himself. The first object he forged was considerably less dramatic than the weapons now surrounding him: everyday cooking utensils.

After school, he returned to the workshop, learning to make hoes, billhooks, axes, skewers and other household objects.

Blacksmithing was not his only possible future. Suleyman trained in taekwondo and considered pursuing sport professionally. But the difficulty of building a sustainable career in sport eventually brought him back to the trade he had known since childhood.

By then, the business he was inheriting was beginning to change.

Two or three decades ago, the family says, agricultural tools and basic hardware accounted for nearly all its production. Their customers came largely from Izmir and the surrounding countryside, looking for practical objects made for work. Then some of that work began to disappear.

Factory production could make many everyday tools more cheaply, while changes in the work around them erased the need for others. As tobacco farming declined, so did orders for the needles the Akdemirs once made for growers. Shoemakers who had relied on their hand-forged sole-cutting blades turned instead to laser-cutting technology. Other agricultural tools increasingly faced competition from mass-produced alternatives.

One by one, some of the objects that had kept the forge busy were becoming obsolete.

Omer's generation had inherited a craft. Suleyman was confronting a different question: what happens when people no longer need the things that craft traditionally produces?

"The work my father and his generation do appeals to a specific demographic," he says. "They make general hardware products. But in truth, they craft them with such artistry that I felt it belonged somewhere far beyond."

In 2014, he decided to see how far and opened an Instagram account.

Initially, the internet brought relatively ordinary requests.

Suleyman's first online customer was a police officer in Erzurum who wanted a hand-forged machete for outdoor use. Making it was easier than sending it: the courier repeatedly refused to accept a parcel containing such a sharp blade.

"I went back and forth to the courier four times for a single product," he recalls.

Then, in 2016, an order came in that pointed to an entirely different market.

The Turkish historical drama Dirilis: Ertugrul (Resurrection: Ertugrul) was attracting a huge following at the time. The series would eventually be broadcast in more than 60 countries. One of its main characters, Turgut Alp, carried a distinctive axe.

A customer in Turkiye called the workshop and asked Suleyman to make one; it took him almost a week.

Then another request arrived, and another.

"We made that axe. After that, people started asking, 'Can you make this, can you make that?'” he says. “As we kept doing it, we grew to love it."

The commissions became progressively stranger. Instead of bringing Suleyman an object to copy or describing a familiar tool, customers began sending images from films and games.

A fictional weapon presents a peculiar problem for a blacksmith. On screen, it does not necessarily have to obey the rules of weight, balance or construction. In Suleyman's hands, it must.

When an unfamiliar commission arrives, he sits at a computer at the side of the working area, and rewatches film scenes, pauses gameplay footage to study details before sketching his own version and working out how its components might fit together

"This isn't something you can just 'strike, forge, and hand over.'” he says. “It's an entirely custom design. How will it fit together, how will I cast the mould ... I research every single detail."

For the most complex pieces, developing the first version can take two and a half to three months. Once Suleyman has solved the design, making another becomes easier.

He says he has never looked at a request and thought it impossible. For him, the challenge is simply figuring out how.

Omer has spent most of his life here. He describes a chain of blacksmiths stretching back generations.

"My father's master's master was an apprentice here during the Greek occupation,” he says, referring to the Greek occupation of Izmir between 1919 and 1922. “Then came my father's master, my father, myself, and now my son."

The workshop's history predates the Akdemir family. According to Omer, a man named Sabri Alim was an apprentice there during the Greek occupation, and later took over from his own master, Suleyman Acarlar. In 1955, Omer's father, Suleyman Akdemir, arrived from Konya and began working under Sabri as an apprentice. He eventually took over the workshop himself, before passing the craft to his son Omer.

The family cannot establish that every generation worked in this exact room; what has endured is the blacksmithing tradition within Kemeralti.

Omer studied blacksmithing at vocational high school and later trained in lathe operation, but says the workshop was his real education.

When he began, the workshop produced shoe-sole cutting blades, tobacco needles, and agricultural tools. Laser cutting eventually displaced the blades they made for shoemakers. Tobacco farming declined. Other products simply stopped being ordered.

If that disappearance bothers Omer, he shows little nostalgia for it.

"I am open to progress of any kind,” he says, continuing to work as he talks. “If you stay fixed in one place, you cannot grow. The work we used to do disappeared. What were we supposed to do, insist on making things no one needed?”

Nor does he see anything particularly radical in his son's use of the internet. To Omer, it has simply changed who can find them.

"Suppose someone in a village in Kastamonu wants something custom,” he says, referring to the province in northern Turkiye. “Under normal circumstances, that person could never reach me. But through the internet, they do."

He gestures towards the workshop. "And since we have no shortage of craft skill, we can make whatever anyone asks for."

Almost on cue, the automatic shutter opens. A man walks in carrying an old axe with a loose handle.

Omer takes it to his workbench and begins repairing it. The customer, meanwhile, looks around. His attention moves from the everyday tools towards the swords and oversized axes.

"Did you really make these here?" he asks.

A few minutes later, his axe repaired, he disappears back into Kemeralti.

The transition looks almost seamless now: old axe through the door, fantasy sword on the wall. But it wasn't.

For years, the family's daytime business still revolved around its conventional orders. If Suleyman wanted to experiment, he had to wait until everybody else had finished.

"I worked here at night for nine years."

When Kemeralti's shutters came down, he started again.

He relit the forge, tested quenching temperatures, experimented with moulds and worked through designs he had never attempted before. Some nights, he slept in a small room he had set aside inside the workshop. Then, he got up and returned to work.

As orders grew from one to two, three, five and then 10, the family's initial scepticism turned to curiosity. Suleyman says business volume more than doubled within a year of starting online sales.

Eventually, the experiments he had squeezed into the night became the larger part of the business.

Custom and specialised products now account for roughly 80 to 90 percent of revenue, he says. The workshop handles about 450 orders annually, with customers in countries including Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland; exports generate about 35 percent of revenue.

A piece that might sell for 2,000 Turkish lira ($40) domestically can command considerably more overseas, Suleyman says.

But the story he enjoys telling most is not about financial success; it’s about a lost axe.

A customer had taken one of his hand-forged axes hiking in the Kaz Mountains, between Balikesir and Canakkale in western Turkiye, and lost it. Months later, someone else found it.

There was no brand or maker's stamp on the steel. Yet, Suleyman says, the finder recognised his workmanship.

"If anyone made this," Suleyman recalls with a laugh, "it has to be Suleyman."

The axe, he says, eventually found its way back to its owner.

At the back of the workshop, another craftsman is quietly working with his hands. But his route here was very different.

Away from the heaviest hammering, wood shavings cover a smaller bench. Yagiz Can Sonmez, 33, works at the sanding station in protective goggles, busily shaping a handle.

Unlike Suleyman, he wasn’t born into blacksmithing, but went looking for it.

Sonmez had previously worked as a sadekar, a goldsmith artisan, in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar. After studying at university, he moved to Izmir and opened a shoe boutique in Alsancak with his wife.

"One day, while sitting in the store, my fascination with hot metalwork resurfaced," he says. "I started researching online to see who was doing this in Izmir. That's how I found Suleyman."

At first, he came just to watch. Then he started returning on weekends, picked up the hammer, and began learning. Eventually, he closed the boutique and moved into blacksmithing full-time.

"What drew me here is the ability to project what's in your mind and soul onto a hard metal,” he says. “It comes from within. You start a project with nothing specific in mind, and as you progress, something takes shape. In the end, the final piece is something you couldn't have even envisioned at the start."

His background in goldsmithing gives him a different approach to the work.

"Suleyman leans toward classic designs. I focus more on intricate, detailed work. Blending those two approaches works well for us; it’s like two opposing poles coming together."

"Our styles are different," Suleyman says, smiling.

A neat symmetry seems to run through their journeys into the craft. Suleyman had turned to the internet to find people interested in what an old forge could make, while years later, Yagiz used the internet to find someone who could teach him how to forge.

Suleyman hopes eventually to establish a creative space locally where visitors could try blacksmithing and encounter woodworking and leathercraft alongside it.

There are not many places left in Kemeralti where someone like Yagiz could have done this.

According to Akin Oz, vice president of the Izmir Ironworkers Craftsmen and Artisans Chamber, Solomon Metal is now the only active hot-blacksmithing operation remaining in the historic bazaar.

The decline is visible in the objects Omer no longer makes: blades replaced by laser cutting, tobacco needles left behind by changes in farming, tools undercut by industrial production.

Traditional craftsmanship is one of five forms of “intangible cultural heritage” recognised under a UNESCO convention adopted in 2003 and ratified by Turkiye in 2006. The designation is concerned less with preserving the objects craftspeople produce than with safeguarding the knowledge and skills used to make them, and ensuring those skills are passed on.

Inside the Akdemir workshop, that distinction is easy to understand.

It is knowing how to judge the heat of iron by eye; how to bring the hammer down at the correct angle; how to temper the steel. It is knowledge acquired by standing beside somebody who already knows, says Suleyman.

By late afternoon, Kemeralti begins to empty. Tea sellers collect empty glasses. The crowds in the narrow alleys thin. Inside the workshop, the three men are still at their stations. After pounding through the workshop for much of the day, the power hammer finally falls silent.

Generations ago, the customers seeking out the family's blacksmiths needed tools for the work immediately around them. Today, some live thousands of kilometres away. They find Suleyman through a screen and send him images of objects that may never have existed outside one.

And despite everything that has changed, the request often comes down to something remarkably simple. Can you make this?

Suleyman has spent most of his life working out the answer. "I can."