“Still, the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us.
The huzun of Istanbul is not just the mood evoked by its music and its poetry, it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only in a spiritual state, but a state of mind that is ultimately as life affirming as it is negating.” “If I am to convey the intensity of the huzun that Istanbul caused me to feel as a child, I must describe the history of the city following the destruction of Ottoman Empire, and – even more important – the way this history is reflected in the city’s ‘beautiful’ landscape and its people. The feeling of decay and loss affects the inhabitants who experience a melancholy, which, according to Pamuk is best described by the Turkish word ‘ huzun’: it is the collective melancholy that weighs on the city like a shroud when you see the evidence of the ruins around you: Old Pasha mansions along the Bosphorus burned down symbolic of a civilization going up in flames. The Arabic alphabet was abandoned for a Romanized one. He got rid of the harems and the janissaries and the dress codes of the past.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of the Republic of Turkey and its first President introduced sweeping reforms in the twenties and thirties to westernize and secularize society within a short span of time. Pamuk bemoans the decline of a city that was once a glorious Empire. That being said, I am well aware that an outsider’s temporary experience of the city is remarkably different from that of a person born and brought up there. The Istanbul I visited has been rebuilt for the most part and has a vibrancy and vitality that the memoir fails to capture. He depicts a city that no longer exists, a city in memory.
Although the book was published in 2005, Pamuk is describing the city of his childhood and young adulthood, the Istanbul of the fifties and the sixties. The city I visited was colorful and bustling, a far cry from the dismal picture painted by the writer. It didn’t turn out to be quite the book I was looking forward to reading during my stay. I haven’t read any of Pamuk’s novels and I thought this would be a good introduction to his writing. I picked up Orhan Pamuk’s memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, in anticipation of a trip to Istanbul and finished reading it while I was in the city. I am continuing in the vein of my previous blog post and writing about a book I read in the place it was set.
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