3 June 2009 | Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk is working on the establishment of a Museum of Innocence, which – as described in his latest novel by the same name, would contain representations of Istanbul’s culture since the 1950s.

The future museum in Istanbul’s Cukurcuma district is expected to make a poetic and documentary representation of the city’s culture since the mid-twentieth century, through the display of objects used in daily life, photographs, paintings and movies, the TurkNet website reported recently.

Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel, Museum of Innocence, tells the story of Kemal, the son of a wealthy Istanbulite family, and his poor and distant relative Füsun, whome he loves. Starting in 1975 and continuing up to the present, the novel also gives readers the details of Turkey’s social and cultural history in the past decades, as well as the beauties of the author’s native city Istanbul.

Orhan Pamuk has been working toward the museum’s establishment since he started writing the novel in 1999, according to an earlier publication by the Archinect website. At that time, he bought a three-story building in Istanbul and hired an architect to transform the building into a museum where the novel and the museum would criss- cross each other in a love story between Kemal and Füsun. In it, Kemal obsessively collects every object Füsun touches, in remembrance of their complex history into the Museum he builts.

“The enjoyment of the novel and the enjoyment of the would-be museum are two entirely different things,” Pamuk was quoted as saying last year. “The museum is not an illustration of the novel and the novel is not an explanation of the museum. They are two representations of one single story perhaps.”

According to TurkNet, the effort to establish the Museum of Innocence is also supported by the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency as a cultural heritage investment for the city of Istanbul. The agency is making efforts to have the museum’s opening in 2010.

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