Gurlevik was born on a summer evening in June, when Yusuf Özdemir, watch and arts enthusiast, read that the legendary watch designer and painter Gerald Genta had sketched the iconic Nautilus in five minutes. He brought the idea to his partner, Muhammed. When Muhammed asked what they would call it, Yusuf offered the name of Mount Gürlevik, the mountain at whose foothills he had once raised cattle, and which stood in his imagination as an emblem of majesty and permanence.

Genta had drawn the Nautilus from the memory of a diver's helmet. That same evening, Yusuf looked around him and asked himself: if I were to draw a watch right now, what would I draw? He reached for paper and pen, and drew what would become the Gates Collection — Gurlevik's second chapter, still unreleased. Its production was quietly set aside, because what had begun as a five-minute sketch had stretched into nine months. In the interval, Gurlevik's first collection, Maritime, was brought into the world.

It was within this act of drawing, and in the decisions made around it,  that Gurlevik's philosophy found its shape. Neither Yusuf nor Muhammed wished simply to make watches. What they sought, with clarity, was to create stories that could be worn. They resolved to engrave into a timepiece the full arc of a journey: one of curiosity, reverence, and pride.

The word Gurlevik is Turkish for babbling, the sound of water finding its way forward. Written on the dial of a wristwatch, it is a dedication: to the vast geography between West and Far East, to our world, and to the magnificent Eastern Renaissance in which some of the most noble lives in human history were quietly and brilliantly lived.