Istanbul: Memories and the City: Prhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City represents the first twenty-two years of his life using various approaches from autobiographical details of his own childhood memories, photographs from his family album, newspaper articles, paintings and writings on Istanbul by luminaries from different walks of life. Pamuk, appears intermittently as both the narrator and author who narrates his experiences of the city.

The four famous Turkish stalwarts, Yahya Kemal, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Abdulhak Sinasi Hisar and Resat Ekrem Kocu, played a prominent role in the creation of Pamuk’s Istanbul hence providing him with an Istanbul he has never seen. Throughout the narrative, he refers to various Turkish and foreign authors who have lived, visited and written about his city. Although they had different styles, what these writers had in common was the love for the city. All four were influenced by the French tradition and attempted to express their feelings for Istanbul using Western style of writing.

The writings of these four writers have provided Pamuk with the perspective of an Istanbul that he did not experience even though he has been staying there since his birth. These writers, who had witnessed the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Turkish Republic, aimed to reinvent the identity of their city. Their aim was to create an image for Istanbul to which the people of the Turkish Republic could relate. In their attempt to create a national image for their city, these writers went into the poor back streets of Istanbul. The ruins, poverty and neglect dominating those parts of the city functioned like witnesses of the adversities that the city and its people had undergone. The ruins of the Ottoman Empire were consoling memo...

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...hose parts of his city like a foreigner. He can thus become his own Westerner in the old neighborhoods, where he can feel like a stranger in the city where he has lived since his birth. The foreign gaze enables Pamuk to see the city as a new one, and explore it in a very peculiar manner because now a broken building means more than it did earlier. Before he read Gautier’s book about his experience in Istanbul a broken building was just a building destroyed due to the fall of the Empire, but now it has huzun, poetry and various other things that Pamuk can add to his narrative about his city of Istanbul.

Works Cited

Hande, Gurses. “Out of Place in Istanbul.” London: Ubiquity Press, 2010. Web. 7 Jan. 2014.

Pamuk, Orhan, and Maureen Freely. Istanbul: Memories and the City. New York: Vintage International, 2006. Print.