1972 Mersin · Türkiye
The water knows
what you loaded.
Sea freight out of Mersin since 1972, and the road, rail, air and project work that carries the same box the rest of the way.
01 Approach
Eighty frames of one camera, moving. Nothing here is a photograph or a painting — it is a model of Mersin harbour built at real size and rendered from wherever the camera happens to be.
02 Alongside
KERTE MERSİN: 260 metres, 32.2 across, 4,520 TEU. The reflections move because they are traced from wherever the camera is, not painted under the hull.
03 Amidships
Red antifouling, black boot top, petrol topsides — three bands whose meeting point is her draft. Where the sea cuts them tells you what she is carrying.
04 The stow
Every box on deck is the same 12.192-metre object, held at the same eight corner castings. That invariance is the entire business.
05 The berth
Four gantries at 30.48 m rail gauge and 55 m of outreach. What the cranes can reach is what decides the size of ship this berth can work.
Scroll — the camera is one continuous move
01 What we are
A forwarder that owns ships.
Most freight forwarders book space. We book space, and on fourteen of our services the space is ours, on a hull with our name on the bow.
That is not a boast — it is why our schedules hold when the market turns. It also means we carry the whole argument of this business on our own balance sheet: a ship is a fixed cost that floats whether or not it is full, and every decision below follows from that.
KERTE was founded in 1972 by Ali Rıza Tanrıöver with one chartered coaster carrying Mersin citrus to Beirut. Fifty-four years later the ports are the same ports. There are just more of them.
02 The waterline
Load her and she settles.
Scroll, and watch the red band go under.
A ship's draft is the one figure in this industry nobody can argue with. Put weight aboard and she sinks until she has displaced her own mass. Between light ship and her summer mark KERTE MERSİN settles 5.80 m — the antifouling that stands clear of the water when she is empty is under it when she is full, and the deck edge comes down to meet you.
- Draft
- 10.42m
- Displacement
- 58,653t
- Cargo
- 32,453t
- Aboard
- 3,458TEU
- Freeboard
- 8.88m
Drag, or use the arrow keys. Twelve rendered states, one camera, one exposure — only the load changes.
03 The mark
TL, either side of a circle.
Every KERTE vessel carries the load line disc of Türk Loydu, the Turkish classification society — a 300 mm circle with a horizontal line through its centre and the letters TL beside it. The centre of that line is the summer load line. On KERTE MERSİN it is 12.00 m above the keel, and below it she is legal.
Abaft the disc is the comb: TF tropical fresh, F fresh, T tropical, S summer, W winter. Fresh water is less dense than sea water, so a ship loaded to her fresh mark in Rotterdam rises to her summer mark by the time she reaches the Channel. Winter in the North Atlantic gets its own line, lower, because the sea there is worse.
04 The box
Nothing about it changes.
A forty-foot container is 12.192 × 2.438 × 2.591 m, and it is the same object on a ship, a chassis and a rail wagon.
That is the whole idea. The corner castings are in the same eight places, so the same twist-lock holds it down whatever is underneath. Everything KERTE sells is a consequence of the box being invariant while the mode beneath it is not.
The one on this page is KRTU 481502 0. The last figure is a check digit — arithmetic on the other ten, defined by ISO 6346. You can check it yourself.
Forty frames, one turn, one box. The terminal moves behind it in true parallax because the camera is orbiting a real model at real size — 12.192 m of it, on the apron between the rail siding and the quay.
05 The modes
Four ways inland.
The box comes off the ship. What happens next is a question about geography, time and what the cargo is worth per kilo — not about which department you called.
Sea
FCL and LCL on fourteen weekly and fortnightly services. Our own tonnage on the Mediterranean and North Europe legs.
Road
Own fleet, own drivers, own workshop in Tarsus. Customs cleared before the truck leaves the yard.
Rail
Five regular corridors. The Tehran block train has run weekly since 2013.
Project
Out of gauge, heavy lift, transformers and turbine blades. Flat racks, route surveys and the permits.
06 The network
Filed by bearing.
A kerte is one point of the compass: 11.25°, one thirty-second of the horizon. Turkish sailors set course by them long before anyone in Mersin used degrees.
We file the network the same way. Every office sits at the kerte of its true great-circle bearing from the quay at Mersin. Beirut is 15 — Kıble, the south wind. Rotterdam is 28, Karayel. Shanghai is 6, Poyraz. The bearings are computed from coordinates, so nobody has to take the filing on trust.
28 kerte 315.00° · Karayel
- İstanbul Türkiye 365 nm
- Ambarlı Türkiye 373 nm
- Antwerp Belgium 1,549 nm
- Rotterdam Netherlands 1,563 nm
- Felixstowe United Kingdom 1,671 nm
- New York United States 4,722 nm
- Houston United States 5,920 nm
07 Schedules
Fourteen services.
Sailing days are fixed a year ahead. Where a service is marked KERTE tonnage, the ship is ours and the slot cannot be sold out from under you.
| Code | Rotation | Frequency | Ships | Days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MED-1 | Mersin · Piraeus · Gioia Tauro · Valencia · Barcelona | weekly | 4 | 11 |
| MED-2 | Mersin · Alexandria · Damietta · Piraeus | weekly | 3 | 7 |
| LEV | Mersin · Iskenderun · Beirut · Aqaba | twice weekly | 2 | 5 |
| ADR | Mersin · Gioia Tauro · Koper · Trieste | weekly | 3 | 9 |
| BLK | Mersin · İstanbul · Constanța · Odesa | weekly | 3 | 8 |
| NEU-1 | Mersin · Valencia · Antwerp · Rotterdam · Hamburg | weekly | 6 | 18 |
| NEU-2 | Mersin · Genoa · Le Havre · Felixstowe | weekly | 5 | 15 |
| RED | Mersin · Jeddah · Jebel Ali | fortnightly | 4 | 12 |
08 Home
Mersin.
Türkiye's largest Mediterranean port, and the reason there is a company here at all.
Our berth is on the eastern container quay: 340 m of face, 14.5 m alongside, four ship-to-shore gantries at 30.48 m rail gauge and 55 m outreach. Behind it, 88,000 m² of bonded and free-zone warehousing, our own customs brokerage, and a rail siding that puts a box on a wagon without it touching a road.
Since 2024 the berth has shore power. The main engines stop at the quay.
Ask us what it costs.
Give us the port pair, the commodity and the weight. You will get a rate and a sailing, not a form.