Istanbul the shards of a beautiful mosaic
But wait, one piece is missing: Istanbul as the capital of a modern, republican Turkey. For a brief glance back, especially one at Istanbul from the 1970s to the early 2000s, when rapid economic development buoyed the spirit of the city, go to the Museum of Innocence. Envisioned by the Nobel Prize literature laureate Orhan Pamuk and named after his novel of the same name, the museum opened in 2012, four years after the book was published, and since then has become a place of pilgrimage for Pamuk aficionados, many of whom from China.
However, those who have yet to read the book should not feel intimidated. According to the novelist, the museum and novel were conceived and developed in tandem from the outset, and therefore could be appreciated separately.
That is true. All the more than 1,000 exhibits, from a whole wall of suspended cigarette butts and grainy pictures to wine bottles, street fashions and stuffed animals and doll parts, are arranged in such a grippingly grotesque way that it is impossible not to read stories into them. Salvaged personally by Pamuk between the mid 1990s and 2008 from the lives of his own, his family and friends, as well as the strangers he met, these items are curios, detritus and reminders, and their display, a fine, emotional and infinitely inspiring exercise in museum curatorship.
