Today we caught the ferry to Karakoy, and walked up the big, big hill, past the Galata Tower, to the Galata Mevlevi Lodge Museum, which we'd glimpsed but not entered last time.




To briefly (and inexpertly) explain some of this terminology: The Mevlevi Sufi order was founded in the 1200s by Jalal ad-Din Rumi. This tekke, as dervish or Sufi lodges are known, was established in 1491, and is the oldest of its kind in Istanbul. (What we see today is not the original, of course, which succumbed to fire in 1765. The current buildings started life in 1796, but have undergone several major restorations.) The first sheikh (leader) of the tekke was Muhammad Semai Sultan Divani, a descendent of Mevlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi himself.

Having become interested in Rumi and his extraordinary life and influence, I found lots that was instructive here. How you train a whirling dervish, for example (you need a board with a nail in it...), and what a wandering dervish would carry (i.a., a horn, a defensive weapon, a food bowl...). Also impressive was the reminder of the Sufi contribution to arts such as marbling, calligraphy, music, and literature (and I need to find out more about Leyla Hanim...).

The Sema area itself was very beautiful, with a walnut floor, moulded decorations, and fine trellis screens that threw pretty shadow patterns on the walls behind. (No photos allowed, unfortunately.)

The grounds are also pleasant, and various notable figures connected with the lodge are buried in the cemetery.






Then we headed along the big road where the embassies are (noting the conspicuous police presence in front of the Swedish and Russian envoys' complexes...). And plunging down the hill again, we made for our next objective, the Museum of Innocence:



At the behest of author Orhan Pamuk, this corner house was converted into a museum, a process that took more than a decade (1999-2012). There are three substantive floors, plus a basement that is the museum shop:






This is an absolutely unique endeavour... You see, I'm currently reading the novel by Pamuk that is also called The Museum of Innocence. The two -- book and museum -- were created in tandem, shaping and feeding into each other. I'm challenged and amazed (not to mention bamboozled) by the ever-shifting boundary between reality and fiction that such an extraordinarily bold double project highlights.

I've not finished the book, and once I have, there will, of course, be a corresponding Velvet Cushion post. But the basic story, narrated by "Kemal", is that in the period leading up to his formal engagement to Sibel, an eminently eligible young woman, he becomes obsessed by an 18-year-old distant relation called Fusun. When Fusun calls quits on the whole business of being second fiddle, and disappears, Kemal is viscerally affected. One of the few things that can bring him comfort is the assembling of objects that are connected with her in some way. It is of such objects that this collection is made.

The various showcases each reflect a chapter in the book, and each is meticulously curated and aesthetically irreproachable. On the top floor, there's a display of Pamuk's hand-written notes, which make clear the amount of conceptual effort that went into this:



And each case is also a little cameo of Istanbul as it was, an extraordinary little history that every visitor will appreciate differently depending on his/her knowledge of the period. As Leigh Turner puts it: "The Museum paints a picture of life in Istanbul in the 1950s-80s with an intimate, almost voyeuristic intensity."




Change never stops, of course. According to Elif Batuman, "Fifteen years ago, when Pamuk first bought a building here, Cihangir had been a working-class area dotted with small workshops specialising in the manufacture of plastic tubs and children’s footballs. Today the proletarian teahouses and barbershops are outnumbered by vegan-friendly cafes and the showrooms of increasingly ironic antiquarians."


Batuman also has a very interesting account of the genesis of the project:

"The inspiration for the Museum of Innocence came to Pamuk in 1982, while he was having dinner with the last prince of the Ottoman dynasty. Exiled after the formation of the Turkish republic, the prince ended up in Alexandria and worked for decades at the Antoniadis Palace museum, first as a ticket collector and then as director. Now, back in Istanbul after a fifty-year exile, he needed a job. The guests discussed the delicate subject of employment for the straitened septuagenarian prince of a defunct empire. Someone said the Ihlamur Palace museum might need a guide: who better than the prince, who had lived there as a child? Pamuk was immediately taken by the idea of a man who outlives his era and becomes the guide to his own house-museum...

"Ten years later, Pamuk came up with an insane plan: to write a novel in the form of a museum catalogue, while simultaneously building the museum to which it referred... You might think that Pamuk’s first step, as a writer, would have been to start writing. In fact, his first step was to contact a real-estate agent. He needed to buy a house for his future heroine, Fusun. During the 1990s, Pamuk visited hundreds of properties, trying to imagine Fusun and her parents living in them... In 1998, Pamuk finally bought a three-storey wooden house in Cukurcuma. Fusun, the petulant beauty, was thus neither a Nisantasi socialite nor the scion of Galata bankers, but an aspiring actress living with her seamstress mother and schoolteacher father. The heroine’s socioeconomic position and much of her character were determined by real estate.

"For the next ten years, writing and shopping proceeded in a dialectical relationship...

"Contemplating a glass of polymer-based raki with ice, I wondered whether a museum could be said to be magical realist, or unreliably narrated. I decided to ask Pamuk: he said only that he wanted the museum to be 'a place where time is frozen'... I met Pamuk’s editor, who made my head explode by relating that, since he hadn’t ended up writing the novel in the form of a museum catalogue, Pamuk had recently decided to write the catalogue as a separate book."

Also read Batuman on the efforts that went into creating Box 68, labelled "4213 Cigarette Stubs"...


After lunch (nice, but a little expensive, we thought, probably because of its proximity to Taksim Square), we headed off to Pamuk territory:




Actually, we didn't make it quite that far, feeling a little hot and tired by now (what's with this unseasonably warm weather??). But we did get to Macka Demokrasi Park, which is mentioned frequently in the novel:



Then down the hill towards the Dolmabahce Palace and the Kabatas ferry terminal. And home for what, sadly, is our last night in Istanbul.