“Eftalia’s Atlantis”

Lightbox and video / İstanbul, 2012
Lightbox: 225X90X16 cm

Eftalia’s Atlantis takes its inspiration from one of the most striking urban legends of Istanbul, the story of a character who was known as “Mermaid Eftalia of Kadıköy” in the first quarter of the 19th century. Eftalia, a Greek singer, was known to sing along the Bosphorus together with her saz player father, her voice heard from the sea through the nights. Her life ends tragically as she spends the final years as an alcoholic living in boats and eventually dies on some rocks along the shores of the city. In his performative piece, Serttaş takes the role of Eftalia and he himself becomes a mermaid (more accurately, a merman) and swims in Marmara Sea in Istanbul. In his piece, while reintroducing a local urban myth of Istanbul, the artist also refers to the myth of Atlantis and alludes to different perceptions of local and universal myths in collective memory. Potential relations as well as conflicts between the local and the universal (or global, in today’s terms) are the causes of the artist’s own struggle to find his position as an artist. This is also represented in the physical impossibility of becoming a mermaid and in his exhausting struggle to swim in the sea in a mermaid costume.

“At night people listened to my voice without knowing who I was. Ever since I was five I have been nicknamed ‘Mermaid’. The funny thing is that I am still not really used to my real name ‘Eftalya’. The name ‘Mermaid’ means much more to me.

How did I come by that name? I was still very little and my father was a very keen saz player. When guests came he played his saz and I sang. We lived in Büyükdere on the Bosphorus. On moonlight nights we always went out in a boat on the sea. And my father let me sing on the boat all night long. Quite soon my voice became well-known all along the Bosphorus. On these moonlit nights twenty to thirty boats would follow us because they wanted to hear me singing. But nobody knew who I was. And so they looked for a name for this night-time singer with the lovely voice and started to call out ‘Mermaid’, ‘Mermaid’. This ‘Mermaid’ was the five-year-old Eftalya and from then on I became ‘Mermaid’.”

Eftalia Georgiadi