Istanbul: Memories and the City

This memoir by Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk interweaves his autobiography with a portrait of Istanbul, the city where he was born in 1952 and has lived his entire life. Part personal history, part cultural essay, the book traces Pamuk's childhood and young adulthood against the backdrop of a city in decline following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, exploring how the melancholy of that decline shaped both the city's identity and his own.

Pamuk begins with a childhood fantasy: somewhere in Istanbul, there lived another Orhan, a double of himself. This idea took root at age five, when his parents separated and he was sent to live with his aunt in Cihangir while his older brother, Şevket, stayed with their grandmother in the Pamuk Apartments in Nişantaşı. A framed picture of a child on the wall, playfully identified by the adults as him, intensified his sense of a ghostly other self. The fantasy persisted into adolescence: When unhappy, Pamuk imagined his double living a happier life elsewhere in the city.

The Pamuk family occupied different floors of the same five-story apartment building, built in 1951 on the former garden of an Ottoman pasha's mansion. Each apartment contained unplayed pianos, locked glass cabinets of untouched porcelain, and unused furniture, creating what Pamuk calls sitting-room museums, symbols of the family's ambivalent westernization. His grandmother's apartment was dark and cluttered with framed photographs through which Pamuk learned to weave the past into the present. His grandfather, a civil engineer, made a fortune during the 1930s railroad boom but died young, leaving wealth that Pamuk's father and uncle gradually exhausted through failed business ventures.

Pamuk characterizes his father as charming, optimistic, and frequently absent, and his mother as the rule-setter and emotional anchor. His brother was his primary rival for their mother's love, and their increasingly violent fights between the ages of 6 and 10 became a defining feature of childhood. Between ages four and six, with Şevket at school, Pamuk discovered the joys of solitude and cultivated an elaborate "second world" of daydreams, piloting imaginary submarines and conjuring fleets of spaceships. His father, seemingly aware of this inner life, offered him 25 kuruş, a small Turkish coin, to reveal his thoughts.

Throughout the memoir, Pamuk intersperses his personal story with extended reflections on Istanbul's history and visual character. He describes the city in black and white: wooden houses blackened by decades of poverty and neglect, drab winter clothing, chiaroscuro twilight, and stray dogs that defied every government campaign to remove them. He traces the destruction of Ottoman mansions in his own neighborhood, recounting how they burned or were demolished during his school years.

A central concept is hüzün, the Turkish word for melancholy, which Pamuk distinguishes from western melancholy as described by Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Where Burton saw melancholy as the companion of creative solitude, hüzün is communal, shared by millions. It has roots in Sufi mysticism, which values spiritual anguish at distance from God as honorable. Pamuk argues that hüzün pervades every aspect of Istanbul life. In a long, incantatory passage, he catalogs images that evoke this collective feeling: fathers carrying plastic bags under streetlamps, old ferries moored to deserted stations, teahouses packed with unemployed men, broken seesaws in empty parks, and ship horns booming through fog.

Pamuk identifies four "lonely melancholic writers" who shaped modern Istanbul's self-image: the poet Yahya Kemal, the novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, the memoirist Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar, and the journalist-historian Reşat Ekrem Koçu. All four admired French literature yet struggled to achieve originality. Their authentic subject became the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the melancholy its ruins inspired. Pamuk devotes particular attention to Koçu, whose unfinished Istanbul Encyclopedia, begun in 1944, mixed strange historical curiosities with personal obsessions. He recounts how Tanpınar and Yahya Kemal walked through Istanbul's poorest neighborhoods after World War I, forging what Pamuk calls "the melancholy of the ruins," a nationalist vision rooted in the beauty of decay.

Pamuk examines the influence of western travel writers on Istanbul's self-understanding, including the French poet Gérard de Nerval (1843), the journalist Théophile Gautier (1852), and the novelist Gustave Flaubert (1850). Because İstanbullus, the residents of Istanbul, wrote so little about their own city until the 20th century, Pamuk argues, western accounts provided the only literary record of its streets. He describes a troubled symbiosis: Western observers identified what made Istanbul exotic, while Turkish westernizers viewed the same features as obstacles to erase. As the city modernized, what the travelers had found distinctive vanished: Janissary troops, slave markets, dervish lodges (Sufi religious meeting houses), and Ottoman clothing.

The memoir also addresses Istanbul's treatment of its non-Muslim minorities. In the devastating riots of September 1955, provoked by a bomb planted by a Turkish agent at Atatürk's birthplace in Salonika, mobs destroyed Greek, Armenian, and Jewish shops and homes; the Pamuk family watched from their windows. The family's relationship with Islam was ambivalent: No one prayed or fasted, yet they observed religious holidays with guilty half-measures, and Pamuk identifies guilt as the essence of his own relationship with religion.

At 15, Pamuk began painting Istanbul landscapes obsessively, first in bright Bosphorus scenes and then in darker depictions of back streets influenced by Maurice Utrillo, a French painter known for urban street scenes. He recognized that he could paint only by pretending to be someone else, an early intimation that identity is acquired through imitation. His father, finding him at work, respectfully asked, "So how are we doing today, Utrillo?"

During his years at Robert Academy, an American school, Pamuk's childhood ended. His brother left for Yale when Pamuk was 16, and Pamuk felt a core inside himself disintegrate. He began skipping school to explore Istanbul's back streets, riding ferries and buying old books. His first love affair began at the family's summer resort, where a girl he calls the "Black Rose" began visiting his painting studio. After both families discovered the relationship, the Black Rose was sent to boarding school in Switzerland. Pamuk wrote nine letters; five were posted. None were answered.

In February 1972, during his second year of architecture studies, Pamuk stopped attending classes. His pleasure in painting had waned, and architecture held no appeal. One March day, he boarded a small ferry on the Golden Horn, the inlet separating old Istanbul from newer neighborhoods. As the old ship moved through the water with trembling windows, he watched wooden houses, cypress-filled cemeteries, mosques, and Byzantine ruins pass by, as dark as midnight even at midday. This ride marked the moment Pamuk accepted the hüzün that gives Istanbul its beauty, recognizing that the city's ruins could become his second world now that painting no longer sustained him.

The memoir closes with evening arguments between Pamuk and his mother during his father's long absences. His mother counseled caution and normalcy, warning that in Turkey, an artist would have to toady to the state and the rich. After these arguments, Pamuk escaped into the dark Istanbul streets, walking for hours through Beşiktaş, Taksim, Beyoğlu, and Cihangir, fueled by rage and a strange happiness at belonging to such a sorrowful place. The memoir ends with his declaration to his mother: "I don't want to be an artist. I'm going to be a writer."