Istanbul, one of the world’s premier cities has a new draw. Famed Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk, has created the world’s first museum  based on a novel and built it in Istanbul. While this may at first seem like a vanity project, in fact, the museum took years to prepare and an estimated $1.5 million to build. The museum instead serves as a kind of homage to Turkey in the 1970′s, the period where many believe Turkey transitioned into the ‘modern’ era. Turkey still maintains some of it’s ancient charms, but it seems that this museum is a bridge between it all and a great tribute to Turkey’s past and representative of the possibilities for its future. In this new era of experiential and immersive museum and theater going, this museum brings something new to the senses.

Based on the novel of the same name which he penned in 2008, Pamuk’s museum – like all of his endeavours – is a labour of love, which effectively brings to life the characters and events of his most recent work, as well as the time in which it was set.

The Museum of Innocence tells the story of Kemal Basmaci, a member of Istanbul’s upper class, and his love for Fusun, a distant relative who he by chance encounters while shopping for a gift for his fiancée. Set during the early 1970s – a time when Pamuk himself was living the upper class high life in the city’s Nisantasi district – the novel, like many of Pamuk’s other works, describes the awkward convergence of East and West in Istanbul, as well as the identity issues which continue to plague Istanbullus to this day. According to Pamuk, aside from being a love story redolent of nostalgia, The Museum of Innocence explores the psyche and characteristics of Turkey’s upper class citizens, who ‘in spite of their pro-Western attitudes are highly conservative’. (via reorientmag.com)

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