From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Karagöz ve Leif—Koku Sahnesi (2018–ongoing)
This article documents a Turkish Karagöz adaptation. For related Middle Eastern shadow-puppet traditions, see Karagöz, Palestinian shadow-puppet theatre, and Shadow-puppet traditions and Beach Surgery.
The work engages Leif's blindness as a structural principle: the audience sees shadows while smelling the truth beneath. See The blindness of seeing.
An adaptation of the classical Turkish **Karagöz** shadow-puppet tradition, treating Beach Surgery as an olfactory comedy-drama where the audience watches silhouettes move across an illuminated screen while discrete scents are released in real time, keyed to the narrative's emotional and symbolic arcs.
Karagöz (literally "black eye") is a 500-year-old form of improvisational shadow theatre, traditionally performed in Ottoman coffeehouses with stock characters, witty dialogue, crude humour, and loose plots. *Karagöz ve Leif* preserves this tradition's anarchic spirit while mapping the cycle onto its archetypal roles: Karagöz—the bumbling, everyman hero—becomes Leif (blind, confused, devoted); Hacivat—the scheming wit and foil—becomes Katita (strategic, red-lipped, sardonic); and the supporting cast (the Jew, the drunk, the soothsayer, etc.) become Newcastle's crowd, Mr & Mrs McRae, the mechanic, the boar, the data-harvesters, and the drones.
The **six acts** correspond to Leif's six chapters. As the silhouettes enact each scene, the theatre releases a signature scent:
- Act I: oud and leather (mystery, introductory elegance)
- Act II: rose attar and antiseptic (the underground pool, the clash of beauty and surgery)
- Act III: sea-salt and orange blossom (the dissolve into the desert)
- Act IV: mechanical oil and rust (the radio igloo, Leif's doubled vision)
- Act V: hibiscus and copaiba (Katita's red, synthetic nature, the cabin)
- Act VI: ylang-ylang with faint electrical hum—the "Kármán breath" (the wings, the fall, redemption or refusal)
The theological frame is sophisticated: **shadow is a refusal of vision**. Leif's bandaged eyes see nothing; the audience sees only silhouettes, never the full body or face. Yet the scent—the sense Leif retains and the audience uses to *supplement* sight—becomes the "true" sense, the one that cuts past illusion. Oud, leather, salt: these are real; the shadow is always a lie. By the end, the scent-sense and the visual-sense have switched roles. The audience has learned to see through smell.
Performed annually during Ramadan at Galata Mevlevihanesi, a 17th-century Whirling Dervish lodge in Istanbul, with audiences sitting in two rows facing the screen. The puppeteers improvise extensively, incorporating local references, current events, and audience call-and-response—true to Karagöz tradition. The scent-release is controlled by an unseen technician, timed to the puppeteers' precise dramatic beats; the synchronization is considered a form of secular *dhikr* (remembrance ritual). Several recordings exist; the most widely circulated is the 2022 performance, now subtitled and available through ████████ [citation needed].