Hello

Welcome.

This is the freest room in the library. The other three sections have rules: legal bases in the articles, dates in the updates, brevity in the questions. Not here. Here, I simply think.

Why the Alchemist

The alchemists tried to turn lead into gold and did not succeed. But in trying, they founded chemistry. They taught distillation, weighing, measuring purity. So the real transformation took place not in the metal, but in the method.

Our work really is with gold. With silver, platinum, palladium; with stones, with diamonds. But that is not the transformation we are after.

The raw material in our hands is different: a scattered body of legislation. A law, a decree, a few regulations, countless communiqués (tebliğ) and circulars (genelge). All written at different dates, for different reasons, often unaware of one another. A jeweller, a refinery, an exporter has to know all of them when starting work in the morning.

Making this heap readable — that is what we call distillation.

Why this library

For a long time I saw this: the questions are always the same, and the answers are nowhere to be found.

How much cash can I take abroad. What happens if I don't declare it. What if my export proceeds are late. I'm a jeweller, why does the Financial Crimes Investigation Board (Mali Suçları Araştırma Kurulu, MASAK) concern me. These are not difficult questions. Their answers are in the legislation. But to reach that answer you have to put three separate texts side by side, know which one amended which, and check the dates of entry into force.

Nobody does this. We said, let us do it.

Why such a narrow field

It is not possible for a lawyer to know every subject. Accepting this is not as hard as people think.

We chose two fields: precious metals and stones and foreign exchange legislation (kambiyo mevzuatı). We have written a book on each. While writing, I saw this: these two fields are in fact a single field. When gold crosses the border, it touches precious metals legislation, customs and foreign exchange all at once. Knowing one and not the other is like opening one door and leaving the other locked.

A narrow field means a deep well. And the depth of a well is shown by the taste of its water, not by its claims.

What you will find here

There are four sections, and all four take their names from the four measures of a diamond.

Clarity — questions and answers. Short, direct, unadorned.

Cut — legal analyses. Where we cut a subject open from beginning to end.

Carat — updates. What changed, when it entered into force, whom it concerns.

Colour — this place. The notebook. A place for what the legislation does not say, for what lies between the lines, and for questions that do not yet have an answer.

A promise

I will not try to persuade anyone here. Knowledge defends itself.

Where I am wrong, I will write that I was wrong. Where I do not know, that I do not know. If a question has no answer, saying "there is no answer" is more valuable than an invented one.

Everything else is in the detail. And detail has to be looked at through a loupe.

Come in.