Memories and Meanings at the Museum of Innocence.

Memories and Meanings at the Museum of Innocence.

August 2022.

Two years after our unforgettable visit to Istanbul in the autumn of 2020, Sladja and I were in Serbia getting ready for an exciting new adventure. It proved to be a memorable yearlong journey that started in Georgia and culminated in Armenia via Greece.

As fate would have it, our flight from Belgrade to Batumi included a stopover in Turkey, which handed us an unexpected day with our old friend Istanbul. A single day meant keeping things simple. We reacquainted ourselves with the streets of the old town, crossed Galata Bridge and went back to the wonderful Pandeli Restaurant for dinner.

We also added a new sight to our Istanbul archives. And what a unique and curious one it turned out to be. Ever the voracious reader, Sladja happened to be halfway through a novel by the Nobel laureate Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk.

Memories and Meanings at the Museum of Innocence.

The Museum of Innocence unfolds in Istanbul between 1975 and 2000 and follows a passionate affair between Kemal, a wealthy businessman engaged to be married, and Füsun, a working-class shop girl and distant relative. The book won wide acclaim for the tangle of themes it takes on, among them female identity in Turkish culture and the ways western influence has both shaped and unsettled Turkish society.

Without giving too much of the story away, Kemal and Füsun’s relationship becomes something of a doomed romance. He celebrates and mourns his loss by collecting precious objects tied to Füsun and their time together, then keeps going until he has amassed a wider record of Turkish culture and the social climate of the 1970s and 80s. Eventually, he buys Füsun’s family home, and turns it into a museum.

Here is the part that gets me. Pamuk dreamed up a real museum in tandem with his novel, then spent years gathering actual objects and antiques to write into the fiction as he went. Four years after the book came out, the museum was ready to open its doors. It did so with a grand ceremony in April 2012.

Orhan Pamuk.

The novel was still in Sladja’s bag when we decided we were going, so we set aside a few hours of our single day and made for Istanbul’s Çukurcuma neighbourhood. It won us over on arrival, a compact grid of quiet streets lined with antique dealers and small art boutiques.

You couldn’t walk past the museum by accident. It’s a narrow three-storey house, unassuming enough beside its neighbours, but painted a deep oxblood red that singles it out from every pale facade on the street. Built in 1897, the wooden tenement once held four families across four floors.

Pamuk purchased it in 1999 and spent the best part of thirteen years with a team of artists and designers transforming it into today’s museum.

A few people came and went as we arrived, but the place was hushed. We bought a pair of tickets, 250 lira each back in 2022, and stepped into the silent, dimly lit interior.

Memories and Meanings at the Museum of Innocence.

The museum runs across three floors, with the shop in the basement, and holds 83 installations. That’s one glass case or cabinet for every chapter of the novel: chapters 1-51 on the first floor, 52-79 on the second and the final four in what they call the penthouse.

Sladja kept recognising objects and the parts they play in Kemal and Füsun’s love story. I hadn’t read a word of it, and I’d still call it one of the most absorbing couple of hours we spent in Istanbul. In fact, it stands up perfectly well as an exhibition of Turkish antiques and social history.

It also works as a study of what it means to be a collector, of how the objects we keep from our past are living broadcasters of nostalgia, comfort, bliss, regret, anguish and so much more.

In 2014 the museum won the European Museum of the Year Award. Explaining their decision, a panel of judges called it “small, local, sustainable and deeply personal.”

“The measure of a museum’s success should not be its ability to represent
a state, a nation, a company or a particular history. Rather, it
should be its capacity to reveal the humanity of individuals.” – Orhan Pamuk. 

Sladja and I found the installations really inventive and thought-provoking. On the ground floor we were drawn straight to a board displaying 4,213 cigarette butts. In the novel Kemal keeps the remains of every cigarette he watches Füsun smoke, marvelling that “Each one of these has touched her rosy lips and entered her mouth.” In his eyes, they are artefacts of intimacy.

I found this fascinating and creepy in equal measure, more so when I realised that Kemal had numbered and dated each stub. Here and there, he’d even added notes on where Füsun had smoked it and what the two of them were doing or talking about at the time.

Some of the cabinets recreate locations from the novel. One holds the Şanzelize Boutique of Chapter 2, where eighteen-year-old Füsun is working when Kemal first walks in, its shelves set with a yellow shoe and a handbag. Later Kemal learns that the boutique has closed. “I was pained not only at the loss of my own memories, but equally by a sudden feeling that life had gone on without me.” 

Memories and Meanings at the Museum of Innocence.

Chapter 15 takes a sober look at the social rules and taboos around sex, dating and marriage. The newspapers of the period were anything but sober. They ran scandalous exposés on women who had slept with men outside marriage and sensational pieces on working-class girls who had turned to prostitution. There were also stories about women who had been raped, or whom the papers had decided were adulteresses. Photographs of them ran alongside, with a black bar laid across their eyes.

Chapter 16’s cabinet is a curious one, a single painting of the fictitious Kuyulu Bostan Street, where Füsun lives with her parents. Kemal goes there one evening and stands in the dark looking up at her second-floor window.

Hmm.

Years later he describes that evening to a painter, who works it up at Kemal’s request into the scene on the wall: the chestnut tree, an inquisitive street dog, the yellow glow of the windows.

Speaking of streets, how about this hand-drawn map? Kemal has marked on it every road he needs to avoid, because each one reminds him of Füsun and the memory hurts. Stickler that he is, he has even graded them. The red streets are off limits altogether. The orange ones may be used in an emergency. What a guy.

Memories and Meanings at the Museum of Innocence.

One of my favourite displays belongs to Chapter 47, where Kemal’s father dies. It’s packed with objects, photographs and letters, and I stood there wondering where on earth Pamuk had found all this stuff. He gives little away. Some of the pieces, he says, come from his own family. Others he fell for in the antique shops of Istanbul.

“Every man’s death begins with the death of his father. My father’s death had turned all the familiar props of my childhood into objects of immeasurable value, each one the vessel of a lost past.” – Kemal Basmaci.

Between the cabinets, on coffee tables, banisters and shelves, copies of the novel sit waiting to be picked up. I leafed through one and found the margins full of notes left by other visitors.

Chapter 49’s cabinet holds a grotty bathroom sink and mirror, lifted from the Keskin family home. Arranged around it are the everyday things that Füsun, her mother Nesibe and her father Tarık would have reached for each morning.

Our slow circuit through the cabinets ended at the top of the house. The penthouse is where Kemal, an old man now, lives alone. It’s here that he hires none other than Orhan Pamuk to set down his life, handing the author his memories, his affair with Füsun and all, and charging him with writing the book about it.

Memories and Meanings at the Museum of Innocence.

One wall of glass units in the penthouse follows the real Pamuk at work, with some of his original notes and scribblings on display.

After nearly two hours we made our way back down to the shop and bought a postcard. Six years of Pamuk’s life went into the novel, thirteen into the building. We left with one small printed square of it, tucked into Sladja’s handbag as we went out into the sunshine to find coffee.

It’s now on our own wall at home, among dozens of others we’ve carried around the world. A square of our own story, filed and kept. A memory and a meaning.

Like this? Take a look at my series of articles on Istanbul.

I’ve been living, working and traveling all over the world since 2001. So why not check out my huge library of travel reports from over 40 countries.