iistanbul time company

Tarık Hatiboğlu recalls a nice anecdote of Louis Cartier that he read some 20 years ago. It is the beginning of the 20th century, one day the designers working for Cartier come to the master to tell him that although they are doing everything they can, they cannot produce anything new. The grand master answers, "Gentlemen, you live in Paris, please go out and look around you!"

As Tarık set out with the newly born Time Company, he was moved by an intense desire to put his own cultural impress on the watches he made. He wandered the streets of İstanbul, admiring the signs remnant of the city’s incredibly long and glorious history. Long standing in unexpected places like silent guardians of time, tell-tale signs of history offered a boon of inspiration to the designer. He read the many books of watchmaking on his library shelves abiding next to the history and photography books standing in evidence of his youthful passions and thirst for knowledge. He studied almost everything that could be found on old maritime instruments. He took inspiration from many different elements, such as the Turkish, Andalusian, Arabian, Byzantine and Ottoman motifs, portholes, and old devices like astrolabes, compasses, sundials, quadrants, qibla-numa, or qibla-indicators, as well as, Ottoman and pre-Ottoman architectural structures, domes and cihannümas, or panoramic attic structures. Tarık’s unique style, which combines elements from the past with contemporary design, took shape over time.

Throughout his life, Tarık has always grown out of stalemates with what he had learned over the years, and this time was no exception. He commenced his learnings on technical drawing and engineering, and proceeded sedulously, studying for thousands of hours. Through steady progress, his knowledge soon outgrew his teachers’; they were now baffled at his advanced questions that they rather left unanswered. Further down the road, he collaborated with a new generation of engineers, designers, and the gifted artisans of his milieu. A team consisting of Turkey’s finest have contributed their brilliance and elegance to the contemporary classics created in the atelier of the Istanbul Time Company.

In the watch designs of Istanbul Time Company, Tarık takes his reference in terms of subject and mode of operation from thousand years of history and shared cultural heritage. Rumi, Nasrettin Hodja, Ottoman frigates, Karagöz and Hacivat constitute themes for some of his watch designs, while traditional Turkish-Ottoman crafts such as marbling and enamelling are used as techniques in reconstructing the historical themes genuinely.

Tarık’s watches are much more than a series of timekeepers incorporating state-of-the-art technology. Through them Tarık reimagines and contemporizes history with a compelling narrative. Against the standardized preferences of consumerism sweeping the globe, Tarık constructs his watches in a truly distinctive style, born out of a code of design that includes cultural and historical specificities.

His contemporary classics bridge impossible realities, build not only connections but bonds. Two planes bond when the seasoned and steeled clockwork engineering meets and embraces the enigmatic past.

Half a millennium old enigmatic demons of the obscure miniature master Muhammad Siyah Kalem smile mysteriously from their enamelled dials. They are happy to have been given a beating heart in this new arrangement: Coming from the miniature, a two-dimensional art form, and enamelled into the solid depths of a robust dial, these delicate patterns come to life in a three dimensional universe, where they will tick next to the pulse of their owner.

‘The Tortoise Trainer’, the remarkable painting of Osman Hamdi, one of the most notable of the first generation of Turkish artists, also becomes the subject matter of one of Tarık’s watch collections. With his versatility and vision beyond his age, Osman Hamdi constitutes an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Tarık.

One of Tarık’s impending projects is a novel and innovative watch collection themed after the Muvakkit, or Regulator of Time, which evolved from a quest to recapture the mood of Islamic astronomers. Since the eighth century, Islamic scholars have studied sun’s movements, and using various devices such as astrolabes and sundials measured time precisely, partly due to an effort to faithfully fulfil the religious obligation to pray five times a day. Muvakkits were also among the best payed servants of the Ottoman sultan, since all the mariners of the empire depended on them for the regulation of time. Although the Muvakkit culture got mostly forgotten with the inventions of the modern age, Tarık’s unprecedented project will reawaken it. For the first time in the world, he is innovating a watch that mechanically indicates the times of prayer which change every day. When the Time Company launches the Muvakkit in year 2017, they will have devised a watchmaking first.

Tarık believes that watches are important items of self-expression, especially for men. The highly personal choice of a watch becomes an expression of who we are, and who we aspire to be. However, there is a hidden catch when one’s tastes and means lead one to acquire an expensive watch. Here, what complements the aesthetics of the watch as an object of desire is its being more inaccessible, and therefore one assumes, rather unique. However, considers Tarık, a watch’s inaccessibility ensured by its expensiveness does not make it unique in reality. With the fall of the Berlin wall and the opening of the Russian and Chinese markets, even top watch brands have altered their fabrication to accommodate mass production to suit rising demands. Nowadays, even the most respectable brands with an alleged claim of hand-made production are releasing over a million pieces a year.  Even as they offer their watch collections in limited numbers, they are actually distorting the meaning of the word ‘limited’ which no longer derives from a real value based on actual limitation, but becomes merely a derivation of demand begotten from annual meetings at trade fairs. An original item of jewellery or a work of art is valuable, because it is unique and because it will not be multiplied. One needs to be wary of and distinguish between so-called precious watches and truly valuable ones, observes Tarık.

On the other hand, due to its confined production structure, material requirements and aesthetic point of view, it is not possible for Istanbul Time Company to mass produce. Just as the manually and individually handcrafted cases can never be utterly alike, nor can the similarly hand-engraved enamel designs located on the dials precisely have the same colouring. In the atelier of the company where old dials become part of new contemporary classics, 150 years old heirloom mechanisms can be used. With materials so hard to find, Tarık can possibly choose to create a maximum of a few models and none of these models will exactly be like another.

Rarest pieces and most precious parts drawn from a vast historic heritage come back to life in the atelier of the Time Company, constituting part or frame of a new whole. Ottoman motifs are reinterpreted as watch crowns, while the sublime dome of the Dolmabahçe Mosque lends inspiration for an extraordinary dial. The unlimited imagination that makes such remarkable feats possible is also uninhibited by the usual consumerist considerations. Tarık is all too aware that too much of a good thing is nothing at all. Thanks to their rare features, his watches need to be solely produced in very limited numbers anyway.

The only exception to the very limited production of the Company is the 1915 watch collection. It made sense to Tarık that 1915, the first Turkish-made mechanical wristwatch collection, which was created to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Gallipoli be produced in the larger quantity of 1915 pieces. Doing so was necessary in order to meet the expectations of hundreds of people in Turkey and Australia who have been waiting to receive the watch at its debut. Additionally, he felt that it was important to emphasize the year of the war that left its mark in history with its unforgettable human virtues. This was a one-time occasion where any line in the Company’s collection would exceeded 15-20 pieces. No other collection created by the Istanbul Time Company, assures Tarık, will ever exceed two dozen. He knows that this is an important step in protecting, and over time increasing, the value of his watches.

As the founder and designer of the Istanbul Time Company, the first genuine manufacturer of complicated and exquisite mechanical watches in Turkey, it is the very intention of Tarık Hatiboğlu to add true value to the lives of watch enthusiasts in a world where, he believes, the tangible carries importance hand in hand with spiritual values.