Community Project for Education and Permaculture

Welcome to Öylece Köyü! We are a small open community who as of February 2022 have started a project on a land near Burhaniye in Turkey. As we are still in the beginning, we are meeting regularly and planning the first steps to develop our ideas. But before we get to the specifics of the now, we would like to introduce you the long-term ideas that inhabit Öylece Köyü.

Öylece – just like that

We are a group of people of different backgrounds who came together for and through Öylece – just like that. We have various ideas, intentions and plans but share a common ground as of the realization of a space for safety, support, creativity, art, nature, community, education, and exchange. There are a lot of similar projects existing and forming in many countries, but in Turkey we struggle to find alternative spaces in which we can create and share knowledge together. That is the reason why even starting this project already gave us a more positive and constructive vision about the future, a hopeful way of starting a change. It is essential to us that this space is inclusive, which we understand as of welcoming to not only a small group of the same ‘bubble’. Like Rumi said, “Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.”

We think of Öylece Köyü as a living entity, a small organic structure, a baby. Our main philosophy is “integrate rather than segregate”. This concretely means that we do not have final list of what we will create but more want to grow as a process by integrating into the land. First learning to understand the soil, the trees and the surroundings we live with, to then create a space that integrates our ideas to this specific area rather than segregating by creating a fixed plan from outside. We want to settle in the nature that has opened its arms to us, in accordance with certain principles and harmony, without disturbing its texture and grow food through permaculture. We want to create open spaces for creativity, art and exchange to thrive, to make music, write, dance, paint. We want to build a library full of books to feed ourselves and each other, have space to exchange, think and debate. We want to host workshops, organize small festivals. Even now the people involved bring a great variety of knowledge with them. Our interests already extend to the fields of philosophy, art and science in many different ways. We want to use this as a resource to share with everybody coming to Öylece Köyü but also want to invite people from different areas in the future.

The now and the needs

Before those ideas are able to concretize, we need a basic infrastructure to support our needs. We have agreed on three basic points to start:

- Energy: for the beginning we want to purchase a portable solar energy panel and a battery. In the future we plan to have fixed solar and wind energy systems.

- Water: as of today, there is a small shallow well as well as a basic rain water containing pool on the land. As the orientation of the land is steep. We want to build a pumping system from the bottom of the land (where the water pool is) to the top, to then have a distribution from a water container to the whole land through gravity.

- Living infrastructure:

o Toilets: we are planning to build a compost toilet using Bokashi composting.

o Open kitchen: for the beginning, we will keep our kitchen simple, build a stone/clay oven and

some working space for preparation as well as sitting opportunities

o Workshop/Warehouse: a space for keeping our building materials safe from the weather.

The planned costs are distributed this way: - Energy 2500 euro

- Water 500 euro

- Living infrastructure 850 euro

With this GoFundMe, we hope to gather the funds to organize solar energy already this summer. Energy being the first stepping stone to continue building.

In September we will open the land for the first gathering in which we will create and fill the land with new art, music, memories and meaning.

We hope for and value your support to help us take the first steps in creating a space of safeness and love!

Dearly,

Your Öyleceliler