Yusuf Demir

Yusuf Demir reports on the bench: the goldsmiths, casters and setters whose skills predate every institution that now prices their raw material. He grew up around the Grand Bazaar workshops and writes about technique with the specificity of somebody who has been shouted at for holding a torch wrong.

His pieces trace how a craft survives industrial casting, how apprenticeships actually transmit knowledge that was never written down, and why granulation — a technique the Etruscans mastered and Europe then forgot for a millennium — remains a genuine test of a maker's hands.

He also covers the unglamorous economics: scrap flows, bench margins, and what happens to a workshop district when rent rises faster than the gold price.