Museum of Innocence

For many years, Orhan Pamuk has been asked this question: "Are you Kemal; the hero of your novel The Museum of Innocence?" And when the time came for the most famous Turkish Nobel writer to open a museum on the European side of the Bosphorus bearing the name of his novel, he finally decided to answer: "Yes, I am also someone who spent my childhood and youth between the years 1950 and 1990, and I was raised among the children of the bourgeoisie in Nişantaş. Later, Kemal and I were rejected by the class to which we belong. To be precise, we were cast out from it. Kemal because of his love for Füsun, and I because of my love for literature and my political stance. And neither of us regrets." The Museum of Innocence is above all a concept about love. An impossible love story that brings together Kemal, from the aristocratic class of Istanbul in the 1970s, and Füsun, the poor girl with whom he has a distant kinship. The details go beyond traditional romance, revealing the human dilemma between Eastern and Western cultures, without being isolated from the social and political changes surrounding Istanbul at that time, which left a deep mark even on the lovers' stories.