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As you approach the Museum of Innocence, on the intersection of two steep cobbled streets in Istanbul’s Çukurcuma district, the building seems to loom over you fantastically, its jettying upper floors and striking maroon paint conjuring a fairytale setting. It is a fitting first impression for a home in which nothing is quite as it seems.
“This building — the Keskin family home between 1975 and 1999 — was converted into a museum between 1999 and 2012,” declares an inscription inside the entrance.
But the Keskin family is make-believe, summoned from the imagination of Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel Prize-winning author and the museum’s creator, to whose 2008 novel, which shares its name, the building is a companion.
The book chronicles the doomed love affair between Kemal, an affluent Istanbul businessman, and Füsun, a distant cousin, during and after which he buys, collects and steals objects to memorialise her and their time together. Towards the end of the book, he assembles them into a museum, placing its charge, and that of telling his story, into the hands of Pamuk, who introduces himself as a character in the final pages.
Inside the 19th-century wooden house, in place of furniture, display cases, numbered and arranged in order, correspond to some of the 83 chapters in the 750-page novel. They paint a picture of Istanbul and Turkey between the 1950s and 2000s, battling a course to modernity, suspended precariously between east and west, seen through the prism of a tumultuous love. Alongside these objects, photographic displays amplify the portrayal of a society at once flamboyant, epicurean and coercive.
An elegant ladies’ heeled shoe, bag and belt are positioned below the shop sign of Şanzelize, the upmarket fashion boutique in which a chance meeting between Kemal and Füsun marks the beginning of the affair.
A frame occupying an entire wall of the ground floor contains 4,213 cigarette butts, each annotated with a date, “squirrel[ed] away” by Kemal on supper visits to the home of the now-married Füsun and, as the novel says, “bearing the unique impress of her lips at some moment whose memory was laden with anguish or bliss, making these stubs artefacts of a singular intimacy.”
The couple renew contact after a separation of eight years over driving lessons Kemal gives Füsun, a pretext for time alone together. The corresponding display features the “elegant dress — with its V-shaped neckline and its skirt falling just below her knees — that she would wear to each driving lesson, as a sportswoman might wear the same tracksuit for every training session.”
An audio guide compounds the blurring of life and art — switching freely from the novel to Pamuk’s own narration as curator. Struggling to get my head around it all, I encounter Madelyn — to my relief, a real person — in her mid-twenties, from San Francisco, who shares my bewilderment. “It’s like touring Istanbul without a guide,” she says.
Designating the building its museum of the year in 2014, the European Museum Forum commended its “personal, local and sustainable model” and “innovative, new paradigms for the museum sector”. The words echo Pamuk’s own Modest Manifesto for Museums, displayed on the opposite wall: “We need modest museums that honour the neighbourhoods and streets and the homes and shops nearby . . . The future of museums is inside our homes.” Even, apparently, when the homes are make-believe.
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