You get the impression as you step on the landing, that you are in an episode of CSI or Criminal Minds. Up on the first floor (yes, the cigarette display takes half of the ground floor!) is where the rest of the museum begins. It took Pamuk well over a year to finish the task! I mean, if that’s not dedication, I don’t know what is.
Kemal collected these stubs from Füsun’s ashtrays and had Pamuk wrote a comment on each one of them. Photo by Alya Barakatīack to the first cigarette display. Then with all the hard work and dedication! Now wait till you see the dark red and brown displays that align the walls of the museum along with the low lighting that make the museum more of a mausoleum or a shrine. A bit dreary, isn’t it? But also, what an idea! The creative person in me is impressed, primarily with the idea. This obsession has fed the museum with thousands of artifacts and knick-knacks that Kemal took (read: stole) from Füsun’s house, where he was her husband’s constant guest and partner for eight years. The museum starts off with a huge display of Cigarette stubs! 4213 to be exact! Huh?! As per the audio guide, the book is about an obsessive guy named Kemal who lived in 70’s Istanbul through to the 2000s and both the book and the museum are about his obsession with his one-time lover and distant cousin Füsun.
Photo by Alya BarakatĪfter I paid the hefty 30 TL on entering and another 5 TL for the audio guide (I needed one since I hadn’t read the book, but I now suggest that those who have read it get one too), I stepped into the parallel work of fiction. The museum received “The European Museum Award” in 2014 and the rumor goes that Pamuk had practically spent all his Nobel Prize money -1.5 Million Dollars- on it, including the money he bought the three story building with, 12 years earlier. It took him four years to open it in 2012, in Beyoğlu, Istanbul. Pamuk got an idea as he was writing a novel back in 2008, that a museum would perfectly complement his storyline and the work for “The Museum of Innocence” (same name as the book) had thus started. What does that have to do with a museum, you ask? That’s coming right up! A Turkish Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Pamuk has made fame in Turkey and abroad by authoring a bunch of books that integrate fiction with the Turkish social and political scenes both new and old. You might have not heard of this museum but if you are a reader, you would probably have bumped into the name Orhan Pamuk.
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