Turkish delight

When Hüseyin Mengi joined the family boatbuilding business in 1983, it was still producing wooden fishing and rowing boats in the Golden Horn district of Istanbul, Turkey. He was 11 years old and began as an apprentice carpenter. Now, more than 35 years later, the boatyard has become a shipyard turning out 40-metre yachts in steel, aluminium and composite. Every now and then, Mengi still likes to pull on overalls and join the carpenters in the dust of the shop floor, but today he is smartly dressed to receive me and a potential Russian client on board his latest creation: the Virtus 44.

I visit the boat early one morning in Pendik, part of the urban sprawl on Istanbul’s Asian coast, and the rusty heart of Turkey’s boatbuilding industry. The Virtus floats at the end of a long pontoon in a berth said to match the South of France in terms of price, if not the splendour of the coastline. We climb on board a neighbouring ketch, also