Candlelight evenings: the small flame that turns a flat into a home

We moved to İstanbul in 2013. The flat we came to after leaving our home in Konya didn’t belong to us for the first few weeks: bare walls, unopened boxes, the children’s voices echoing in unfamiliar rooms. One evening I found a candle in a box I couldn’t even remember packing, set it on the kitchen counter and lit it.

It’s hard to describe what happened. But that little flame softened the corners of the room; the boxes became a little less like boxes. That night, for the first time, the flat felt like our home.

Why candles are back in the kitchen

A candle used to be the thing you fished out of a drawer when the power went out. Now it sits in the most visible corner of the house — and more and more people are pouring their own. Candle-making videos everywhere online, weekend candle workshops in İstanbul cafés, twenty-somethings turning up to birthdays with a candle they made themselves. It has become one of the fastest-spreading home crafts of the last few years.

I think the reason is this: candle-making is quick to finish and immediately useful. Poured one evening, lit the next day. You choose the scent, you choose the colour, and the container can be an old tea glass from your own cupboard. When it’s done you don’t just have an object — you have an evening.

What the small flame does

As a mother raising four boys, I know my favourite hour of the day: the half hour after everyone is asleep. Switching off the lights and lighting a candle turns that half hour from leftover time into set-aside time. The yellow of a flame instead of the blue of a phone screen. You feel the difference even in your sleep.

Candles also carry memory. A particular scent brings back a particular winter. The clove-scented candle in my mother’s house is still, for me, the morning of bayram. With candles you pour yourself this is stronger still — you chose the scent, and now it’s the smell of your own home.

Getting started in Türkiye

Candle-making needs far less than you’d think, and nearly all of it comes from a stationery or hobby shop (hobi dükkânı).

• Start with soy wax. It melts at a low temperature, burns clean, and can be melted in a pot on the kitchen counter. It’s the most forgiving material for a first candle.
• Find the container at home. A slim-waisted Turkish tea glass, an old jam jar, a cup from your mother. You don’t need to buy vessels; the prettiest candles live in old ones.
• Pick one scent — don’t blend yet. Lavender, orange peel, cinnamon. A single scent the first time; blends come later.
• Go to a workshop. In the big cities there’s a candle workshop most weekends; an afternoon, a few friends, and you come home carrying your own candle. It’s the most enjoyable way in — and most run happily in English if you ask.

No flame in the nursery — but a light, yes

No candle burns in a newborn’s room; every mother knows that. But that room needs a soft light too: for night feeds, bedtime stories and the quiet hours in between. Flameless, warm, and carrying their name.

Their name in a softer corner

A soft cloud cushion with their name brings a little comfort to the room where the day winds down.

Add their name

After the boxes

That first winter’s candle is long gone. But a candle still burns every evening in our İstanbul home; the boxes were unpacked, the walls filled up, the children grew. I learnt that night that it isn’t the big furniture that makes a home. A small flame is enough.

— Merve Çokal Doğan