Guide
The Orhan Kemal Museum is a house museum in a three-storey building in the Cihangir quarter of Beyoğlu, İstanbul, founded to keep alive the memory of the writer Orhan Kemal. It was established in 2000 by the Orhan Kemal Culture and Art Centre, set up by his son Işık Öğütçü.
On display are some seventy photographs of the writer, most of them taken by Ara Güler, family photographs kept by his wife Nuriye Öğütçü, original first editions of his books, private letters, theses and articles written about him, the typewriter he used, his well-known felt hat, the cast taken of his face when he died in Bulgaria — a procedure applied there to statesmen and to great artists — the Medal of Independence belonging to his father Abdülkadir Kemali Bey, and a letter Nâzım Hikmet wrote to him from the prison at Bursa.
The typewriter stands in a room that reproduces the writer's study exactly and is among the most important things in the museum. The building also holds a library and a coffee house named İkbal Kahvesi.
The building is an apartment block of 1940. Bought in 1997, it was turned into a museum without changing the arrangement of its interior. What would be displayed, and how and where, was decided by Işık Öğütçü and his family out of their own memories and experience.
The museum receives an average of five thousand visitors a year, most of them school groups or high school and university students coming on their own, and visitors have the chance to hear about Orhan Kemal from his son. The museum is overseen by the directorate of the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in İstanbul.
