Huzun. The melancholy Turkish people feel about living in a grand past and frayed present. It envelopes Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul.
Under the spell of the elegant sadness of his work, I expected to see a decaying city, once centre of the world, now past its prime; but found it pulsating with Ramadan lights, old European style buildings reborn as terrace cafés, bustling with young people, street musicians and of course bookstores selling Pamuk’s new book, Museum of Innocence.
Clearly, Istanbul as a guidebook was a dated idea. And yet in this city of many worlds — Christianity and Islam, Europe and Asia, East and West, weathered stone and shiny glass towers — rereading Pamuk on its identity crisis is educative and elevating. “Turkishness is about not feeling at home in the west,” Pamuk said at a book reading in Mumbai last year. “If I lose that I will lose my anger and my ethics.” He now spends most of the year at New York’s Columbia University, but writes in Turkish. Like Turkey, Pamuk is both Western and Eastern.
Every time you feel like you’ve got a fix on the city, Pamuk pops up in your head with his history of how many outsiders came in, understanding it sometimes, more often getting it totally wrong. Nowhere was this more evident than at the Pera Museum’s exhibit of paintings by 19th century Western travellers who, in brief visits, saw only Istanbul’s exotic Oriental side. Looking at the vivid canvasses of tortoise sellers, harems and belly dancers, one understands the “love-hate relationship with the western gaze” Pamuk talks about.
(This story appears in the 05 February, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)