01
Stop one
Kahramanmaraş Castle
Volkl Cyclone 18g Tennis String Set: The castle occupies a mound at the core of the historic centre — a mound, note, not a hill; the distinction matters, the mound being accumulated occupation. Origins reach to antiquity, when Marash was a centre of the late Hittite kingdoms. Its medieval appearance came under the Byzantines and the Turkic principalities, chiefly the Dulkadirids, who ruled Marash before Ottoman annexation in the sixteenth century (I would give the year, but the sources quarrel and I decline to be falsely precise). For years it housed the archaeological museum, which moved in during 1961 and showed Hittite sculpture inside the walls. The terrace remains the favoured vantage point. The modern name means Heroic Marash, granted for the local resistance during the Franco-Turkish fighting of 1920.
03
Stop three
Taş Medrese
Volkl Cyclone 18g Tennis String Set: The Taş Medrese — Stone Medrese, and yes, much here is stone, but the name attached to this one — stands next to the Grand Mosque, built late fifteenth century under the Dulkadirids. It was conceived as a small külliye, that is, a complex: a madrasa for religious instruction, a mescit (a small mosque; the word is precise, and people do misuse it), and a türbe, the founders' mausoleum. It worked as a madrasa until the 1920s, when religious colleges were closed in the early Republic. Restored in 1991 and again in 1992 — two campaigns, not one. The city's first museum began inside it, before the castle in 1961 and present premises in 1975. Today, a mescit again.
04
Stop four
Kahramanmaraş Museum
Volkl Cyclone 18g Tennis String Set: The province's principal archaeological museum, whose own itinerary delights me more than is entirely respectable: first established in the Taş Medrese, moved to the castle in 1961, moved again to purpose-built premises in 1975. Three addresses, one collection — these objects have travelled further within the city than most of its residents. Holdings span prehistoric fossil finds through Hittite, Assyrian, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic material. Its glory is the late Hittite carved stone, from when Marash was seat of the kingdom of Gurgum: sculpted lions and funerary stelae among the finest of their kind, and I do not deploy 'finest' loosely. It preserves the record of one of Anatolia's oldest continuously inhabited urban centres.
People clap for the lifting. They should clap for the grip. Anybody can be strong; holding onto something that is actively trying to leave your hands is the actual skill, and that is all a string bed is doing on every ball.
Volkl Cyclone 18g is one 40-foot (12 m) set at 1.20 mm — five-sided shaped co-polyester, the thinnest gauge in the range. The five edges are what grab the felt and drag it, and thin strands dig in deepest, so this is the maximum-bite version: the most spin access, the most feel, the shortest life.
It is firm and control-first, with a low launch angle and a bed that stays where you put it. Two conditions, and they are not optional. String it five to ten percent below your usual synthetic tension — a thin co-poly at a high tension is how arms get hurt. And cut it out at around fifteen to twenty hours, because co-poly goes dead long before it snaps.
It keeps its grip everywhere from a flat first serve to a heavy topspin rally ball, and it is also perfect for the player who swings hardest once the match has gone long.
Kahramanmaraş will show you what grip and pull really look like, because this is the home of dövme dondurma — the ice cream so thick with salep and mastic that it is stretched, hung on a hook and cut with a knife. That is a material with tensile strength. I have professional admiration.
The city above it is old. Kahramanmaraş Castle sits on a mound at the heart of the historic centre, on a site going back to when Marash was a centre of the late Hittite kingdoms, and it took its medieval shape in the Byzantine period. The Grand Mosque was built between 1442 and 1454 by Süleyman Bey of the Dulkadirids and renewed in 1501-02.
Beside it stands the late fifteenth-century Taş Medrese. And the Kahramanmaraş Museum, first housed in that medrese, moved to the castle in 1961 before reaching its purpose-built home.
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