The Museum of Innocence

One man's love turned into an inventory of a city. The map runs from the wealthy boutiques and flats of Nişantaşı, where Kemal is engaged and the affair begins, down the hill through Beyoğlu to the old timber houses of Çukurcuma, where the years of longing settle and where Pamuk later built a real museum to hold them.

Kemal

Nişantaşı, Kemal's district

The engagement

The gilded world Kemal is born into: a wealthy Istanbul family, an apartment among the well-to-do of Nişantaşı, and an engagement to a suitable young woman. Pamuk's own childhood district, its avenues of tailors and shops frame the life the narrator will slowly abandon.

Opening chapters

explicit Nişantaşı is a real district and the novel names it repeatedly; the family's specific flat is invented, so this sits at the heart of the quarter, near the Teşvikiye junction.

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