Guide
The Museum of Innocence stands in a three-storey building of 1897 in Çukurcuma, İstanbul, and opened on 28 April 2012. Orhan Pamuk shows in it the objects he collected and kept through his life, and the museum carries the same name as the novel he set in the city; he funded it entirely from his own money.
The novel behind it was published in Türkiye in August 2008 and reached first place on the bestseller lists within three days. It begins in 1975 and tells of the love between Kemal, the educated thirty-year-old son of the wealthy Basmacı textile family, and Füsun, the beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter of their poor distant relatives the Keskins, who works as a shop assistant. At a reading at the Burgtheater in Vienna, Pamuk said the novel tells a love story set upon a situation of class.
The book and the museum grew together. The idea came to Pamuk ten years before he began writing; he started after publishing Snow, stopped a year later to write his memoir İstanbul: Memories and the City, then returned to it, working on the novel for seven years in all. For the parts of the book about collecting, keeping and making collections he studied the history of museums and visited many museums in Europe and Asia. The cover of the novel is a collage made from old photographs in the collection he assembled while writing the book and making the museum.
