Why We Built MEREK

I left Istanbul on a Tuesday in July with a laptop bag, a half-finished project, and the vague idea that I needed a week away. I drove east for twelve hours. I had not been back to Düzenli Köyü — my family's village in Artvin — since I was a teenager. I did not know what I was looking for. I found it anyway.

The first morning I woke up before five, before the alarm I had set and immediately did not need. The air through the window smelled like pine and something older. I made coffee and sat on the terrace and watched the valley fill with light. Then I opened my laptop and worked for four hours straight — the kind of focused, frictionless work I had been trying to manufacture in Istanbul for months. No commute anxiety, no ambient noise from the flat below, no notifications that felt urgent because everything in a city feels urgent. Just the task and the mountain and the light moving across the valley.

I repeated this for a week. Then another. The project that had been stalling for months shipped in three weeks. I was sleeping better. I was thinking more clearly. I was, for the first time in a long time, actually present in my own life. When I finally drove back to Istanbul, I sat in traffic for two hours forty minutes and thought: this is insane. We built systems that demand so much from people and give them nowhere to recover.

MEREK is the place I wish had existed when I needed it. A real working infrastructure — fast internet, proper desks, reliable power — inside an environment that makes the brain want to work. Not a retreat where you disconnect from everything. A village where you reconnect to what you were trying to build. We are still early. The houses are modest. The stage gets better every summer. The community grows slowly, which is the right pace. But the mountain was here before any of it, and it is not going anywhere. Come and see what it does to your work.