Honest Weight is set in November 2009 at Karataşlı Cove, a small bay a short drive north of Ayvalık on the Aegean coast of Türkiye. The cove, the mill and the family who run it are invented. The town is real, and it shaped the case.
This note is the background we read while writing it. Nothing here is a clue, and you need none of it to solve the case. If you have already played, it may simply make the place feel more solid.
Where it is
Ayvalık is a town and district of Balıkesir Province, on the north-west Aegean coast. Across its bay lies a scatter of small islands, and beyond them, on a clear day, the Greek island of Lesbos.
The largest island, Cunda (also called Alibey), is joined to the mainland by a road across Lale Island, partly causeway and partly bridge. South of the town, the hill of Şeytan Sofrası, “the Devil’s Table”, is where people go to watch the sun set over the islands.
A town with two names
For most of its history the town was Greek-speaking and Greek Orthodox, and it was known in Greek as Kydonies, or Aivali. The war years changed that. Deportations during the First World War and the fighting of 1919-22 emptied much of the town, and the population exchange of 1923 completed the Orthodox community’s departure to Greece. Muslim families from Lesbos, Crete and other parts of Greece settled in their place.
You can still read that history in the streets. The Saatli Camii, the “mosque with the clock”, was once the Greek church of Agios Ioannis. On Cunda, the old Taksiyarhis church is now a museum. The historic centre, with its stone houses and narrow lanes, has been a protected conservation area since the 1970s.
Oil and soap
Ayvalık lives on olives. The hills around it are covered in groves of the local variety, the Ayvalık olive, also known as Edremit, and the town’s oil is registered in Türkiye as a designation of origin, Ayvalık Zeytinyağı.
From the nineteenth century the town filled with stone factories that pressed the oil and turned part of it into soap. Their tall brick chimneys still stand along the shore and between the houses. Some kept working late into the twentieth century; others have been empty for decades. In 2017 Türkiye put the town’s industrial landscape on UNESCO’s Tentative List for World Heritage, and in 2024 one restored oil and soap factory reopened as a museum.
When we drew the mill in Honest Weight, we gave it that kind of history: a family firm with a soap works beside the press hall. Everything inside the mill is invented.
The season
Picking begins in October. The main harvest and pressing run from about November into December, and sometimes into January. The case is set inside that season, on the last night of pressing before a holiday, when everyone wants the work finished.
How we used all this
We do not write a case to teach history. But a case only feels fair when the world around the evidence holds together: the names, the forms, the season and the way people talk. For Honest Weight that meant Turkish names and titles used the way people use them, official forms laid out the way a Turkish office would lay them out, and statements read with a light Turkish accent.
The people and what happened to them are fiction. The town that holds them is not.