01
Stop one
İzmit Clock Tower
Dunlop Explosive Speed 17g Tennis String Reel: I have found — and I do not say this lightly — a clock. Raised in 1901 to 1902 on the initiative of the Ottoman governor Musa Kâzım Bey, to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sultan Abdülhamid II's accession. One of a whole series put up across the empire for that jubilee, alongside those at İzmir, Yozgat and Bilecik, which means there are others, which does rather dent my claim. Designed by the architect Vedat Tek in a neoclassical manner, in marble and local travertine, with three fountains at the base. The clock mechanism was remade in 1929 by Mustafa Semi. Nobody warned me about any of this.
02
Stop two
Kasr-ı Hümayun
Dunlop Explosive Speed 17g Tennis String Reel: Press on past the — well, the pavement — and behold: a palace. Built in the reign of Sultan Abdülaziz, 1861 to 1876, to the design of Garabet Amira Balyan of the Balyan family of imperial architects, and it is the only Ottoman palace built outside Istanbul. The only one. I discovered it from the car park. In January 1923 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk used this building for his long meeting with the Istanbul press, one of the best-documented episodes in the town's modern history — documented, it seems, by everybody except me. It now serves as a museum, with opening hours, which I concede rather undermines the expedition.
03
Stop three
Pertev Mehmet Paşa Mosque
Dunlop Explosive Speed 17g Tennis String Reel: Sinan. Mimar Sinan, the imperial architect, out here — and I am the first to — no. I am not the first. The complex was commissioned after the death of the Ottoman vizier Pertev Mehmed Pasha by his executor Kethüda Sinan Ağa, and built to Sinan's design; foundations laid in 1572, work finished in 1579. Alongside the mosque it originally comprised a hospice and soup kitchen, a bath, a caravanserai that held an important place on the Silk Road route through Kocaeli, a primary school, a fountain and a market. A Silk Road stop, right here where the buses go past. The mosque, its courtyard fountain and its ablution area survive.
04
Stop four
Süleyman Paşa Hamamı
Dunlop Explosive Speed 17g Tennis String Reel: Now this is the deep past and I want it noted in the log. One of the oldest Ottoman buildings still standing in İzmit, dating from the fourteenth century and attributed to Süleyman Paşa, son of Orhan Gazi, in the years after the Ottomans took the city. Built as a double bath, with entirely separate sections for men and women — an ambitious plan, executed early. It survives from the first generation of Ottoman building in a city that had already been Nicomedia, the Roman imperial capital under Diocletian from 286. An imperial capital, twice over. And it is signposted. I have made my peace with the signposting.
Explosive Speed is Dunlop's co-polyester monofilament for players who want the ball to leave faster without giving up control. It is a smooth-surfaced string rather than a shaped one, which matters more than people think: a smooth poly slides and snaps back cleanly, so you get snapback spin and a very clear, predictable launch on flatter drives.
The 17 gauge is 1.25 mm and plays a touch more powerfully than the 16, and the reel is 200 m / 660 ft, enough for roughly twenty racquets.
The reel is the point. If you string your own frames — or your club does — a reel takes the per-string cost down to a fraction of a packet set, and it lets you keep one string constant across every frame in the bag. Consistency across racquets is a genuinely underrated advantage; nothing wrecks a match faster than reaching for the spare and finding a different string bed.
Expect firm control, good tension maintenance for the category, and a livelier response than a thicker shaped poly.
İzmit earns this string on history alone. This is ancient Nicomedia, founded by Nicomedes I of Bithynia in 264 BC, and made the eastern capital of the Roman Empire by Diocletian in 286 when he introduced the Tetrarchy — for a while, this was where the empire's decisions got made. Champions do not stay champions; cities do not stay capitals. I know something about that.
You will use this everywhere from a hard court above the Gulf of İzmit to an indoor hall in February, and by the way, this is the home of İzmit pişmaniye, that spun halva that comes apart in threads — a city that has been pulling fine strands by hand for a very long time.
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