He works in a brown leather apron, in the same place he has worked since he was a boy. "Ever since I was a child," he says, "I've been working here with hot forging." He remembers the first time he saw the hammer. "I was spellbound when I saw it. I knew right then that I would do this for a living."
The forge goes back to 1955, when his great-grandfather's mentor came to Izmir from Konya. The craft passed down from there and later to his father, Ömer Akdemir, now 54. For decades the family made what the bazaar needed: cutters for shoe soles, needles for tobacco. Then factory production and laser cutting arrived, and orders for those tools stopped coming.
In 2014 Süleyman opened an Instagram account, hoping to find new customers. Two years later the messages began to change. People wanted axes like the ones carried in Diriliş: Ertuğrul, the drama about the 13th-century father of Osman I, founder of the Ottoman dynasty. Netflix took the series to viewers outside Turkey, and the requests followed it.
The axes led to other commissions. Customers asked for weapons from World of Warcraft, Game of Thrones and League of Legends. One sword was modelled on Frostmourne, the blade of the Lich King, carried in the game by a prince who became the thing he fought against. A bazaar forge that once made tobacco needles now hammers out swords for imaginary kingdoms, and it uses the same fire to do it.
According to Akin Öz, vice president of the Izmir Ironworkers Craftsmen and Artisans Chamber, no other hot-forge is still working in Kemeraltı. The bazaar grew from the 17th century onward, partly on land made by filling in the old harbour of Smyrna. It has lost most of its smiths. This one survives because its customers are people who grew up on screens.
The work has also brought people to the forge. Yağız Can Sönmez, 33, trained as a goldsmith and came back to metal as Süleyman's apprentice. Wood shavings pile up at his sanding station, where the hilts take shape. "What drew me here," he says, "is the ability to project what's in your mind and soul onto a hard metal."
His father does not see this as a break with tradition. "I am open to progress of any kind," Ömer Akdemir says. "If you stay fixed in one place, you cannot grow."
At the end of the day, as the bazaar empties, the tea sellers go from shop to shop to collect their glasses. The hammer goes quiet, and the iron on the anvil cools until it is grey again.