'I believe in the secret of things': Author Orhan Pamuk opens up at the Museum of Innocence

The Museum of Innocence was published as a novel in 2008, became a physical museum in 2012, and reached a much wider audience with this year's Netflix series.

Euronews Turkish team was personally welcomed at the museum by Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk who discussed the philosophy behind the novel, the memorial power of objects and his thoughts on the museum's legacy.

The sentence 'I didn't know it was the happiest moment of my life' is now recognised as one of the most striking openings in world literature. What do you think makes this sentence so powerful?

The novel also ends with this sentence: "Let everyone know, I have lived a very happy life." The first and the last sentence have three words in common: happiness, life and know. These three are very important characters in my novelisation. We may be happy, but we may not know it; as a matter of fact, the protagonist Kemal is exactly the same in this regard.

I think the most important value of life is happiness. Tolstoy is the greatest writer for me, in all his novels he explored the meaning of life and the reasons for happiness. Since The Museum of Innocence is a novel that deals with all these issues - happiness, life and the meaning of life, realising happiness - it begins and ends with two sentences containing these words.

Did you know from the very beginning that this story would one day turn into a real museum?

Of course, in the last pages of the novel Kemal explains in detail how he set up this museum. In other words, I didn't say 'first the novel became very popular, then I'll do the museum'. I thought about the museum and the novel at the same time. As a matter of fact, when I bought this building in 1998, I hadn't started writing the novel yet. This is a neighbourhood in Istanbul around Çukurcuma, Cihangir and Taksim. I decided that the heroine would live here after I bought this house, which I turned into a museum. I was writing the novel as I bought the items exhibited in the museum because the essence of the novel is this: a man falls in love with a woman in such a way that this love follows such an unhappy course that the man collects many items to remember the woman. I first bought and collected the objects, and then I wrote the novel by looking at them.

Is this an archive of happiness, or can we say it is more like an archive of unhappiness?

The Museum of Innocence has an archive aspect, of course. I like museums anyway. Archives are the memories of society, they are places that accumulate things that have happened in society. But archives accumulate texts and papers, while museums accumulate objects that are the memory of society.

The Museum of Innocence can also be called a modest city museum, which houses a kind of history of Istanbul life from the 1950s to the present day. The Museum of Innocence is not only a museum based on a novel, but also a museum of urban life, especially of westernised secular bourgeois life.

How did you come up with the idea for the museum?

As I explain in the book 'The Innocence of Things', the catalogue of the museum, the idea for the museum first came to me when I met Prince Ali Vasıf Efendi, one of the last members of the Ottoman dynasty.

After the ban on members of the dynasty entering Turkey was lifted - in the late 1970s, early 80s - I had the honour of sitting at the same table with him. He was the director of the Antoniadis Museum in Alexandria, Egypt. People who loved and respected him were saying, "Let's find you a job in Turkey". Because he was looking for a job because he had no money.

During our conversation, he told us that he spent his youth in Ihlamur Pavilion. Then the following idea came to my mind: If the grandson of an Ottoman sultan was made the manager of Ihlamur Pavilion where he spent his youth... There are similar examples in history: In China, a former emperor became a museum director. Well, I thought it would be nice.

From that thought, the following question arose: Can a person be both object and subject in a museum? The objects exhibited in this museum; Füsun's cigarettes, salt shakers, utensils, photographs she uses in her daily life, these are objects. The narrator voice is the subject. What if the exhibited object and the narrator voice are the same?

As a writer who writes experimental novels, I developed this idea. Let me create such a museum so that the narrator exhibits the objects of his own life - how he fell in love with a woman, what he accumulated because of that love. The voice that this man will use when he personally welcomes the visitors and shows them around the museum is the first person singular voice that I use in the novel.

At the end of the novel, Kemal says "Let everyone know that I have lived a very happy life", but he doesn't look very happy.

Yes, everyone can see that Kemal is very unhappy; he is dying of love. Those who love this book, those who find themselves in this book are not happy lovers, but rather unhappy lovers, those who suffer from love pains.

At the end, as I show in the book, it is Kemal who comes and tells me the story of the novel, and he is a bit confused, complex, troubled, to use the term we use in daily life.

Kemal lived an unhappy life because he suffered from love pangs and was ostracised from the westernised circles of the middle-upper class to which he belonged. Because he thought that the reader might laugh at his story as the society did, he said, "No, it's not like that. Let everyone know, I lived a very happy life," she says.

However, the novel also implies the following: You have read the 500-page novel, visited the museum, watched the series. "Yes, I was very unhappy, but I would rather live an unhappy love than an ordinary, uneventful, loveless life. The real happiness is to live a deep life, not to be happy in love," Kemal says. Or being in love to this extent makes one happy in itself.

As the French poet Aragon said, there is no happy love. If there is a happy love, there will be beautiful children and a happy marriage, but I would not write a novel about that.

In your novels, we mostly see the coincidence of objects with memories. Can you tell us a little bit about this?

In my opinion, around every object, there is a halo - aura, if you like - that consists of memories and prejudices that we are not aware of about that object. The Museum of Innocence, both as a museum and a novel, is built on this.

In the story, Kemal starts collecting objects because he is unable to meet his beloved and owning those objects replaces the beloved he cannot have. I am a novelist who writes by paying attention to things, not only in the Museum of Innocence but also in my other novels.

I believe that things have a magic, a spell. Let me give you an example: We went to the cinema with our lover, we watched it hand in hand; then we lost him, we forgot about him, let's say we got rid of that love. Years later, if we find that cinema ticket in the pocket of a forgotten coat, all those memories and pain come back.

Objects have the power to bring back the memories we have forgotten, the memories hidden in our minds and souls. The whole Museum of Innocence project, the novel and the museum - the series was not something I had planned, but I am pleased with the series - is based on this power of reminding.

Kemal is both glad that he kept the items while thinking about his museum, he says "I will make a museum" and he comes and tells me his story. At the same time, because he cannot be happy right now, he is trying to hide his current love pain.

We collect the belongings of our lover, our ex-boyfriend, our ex-girlfriend. Then we marry someone else, we are happy with someone else, but we still keep them in a corner. Because we respect our own memories, we respect ourselves, and even if those things are bad, even if we lived unhappily, they represent our past.

The Museum of Innocence does not do what everyone secretly does: it does not collect the belongings of the ex-lover and hide them from the new lover, it shows them. "Let everyone know, I lived a very happy life, I collected Füsun's belongings and made a museum, here you go," she says.

The Museum of Innocence has been translated into 60 languages and promoted in various countries around the world. Its popularity has already increased with the broadcasting of the TV series this year. What kind of visitor profile has the museum created over the years?

45 per cent of the visitors to this museum, which has been open for 15 years, are Europeans and Westerners. Now, with the broadcasting of the series, there are many more Turkish visitors. In the first years, the number of visitors per year was 16,000, around 60-70 people a day. The museum was standing with their ticket money. Nowadays, with the effect of the series, maybe 500 people come a day.

I have never received any support from the state for my museum, not for political reasons, would I take it if the state gave it. They were not interested. But international visitors, not only from Europe, but also from Asia, China, Korea, have been my main supporters keeping the museum alive, and I am very grateful to them.

Even when it was empty, the museum paid the salaries of its staff. Without the Nobel Prize in Literature, I would not have had the money to build this museum; I utilised the prize money by building the museum.

I have always been proud of the fact that the museum has been included in the lists of "15-20 places to see in Istanbul" in the tourist guides on the internet for years since its opening, and I think they have helped me to keep my museum alive and bring it to this day by increasing the number of Western visitors.

After the series, more Turkish visitors started to queue at the door. I am also very grateful to them. After this series, I became more certain that the museum will survive for many more years with the support of visitors, but nothing can be certain.

What kind of a legacy would you like to see the Museum of Innocence in the future?

I would like to see it as a museum of the belongings of the middle-upper class Istanbul bourgeoisie or the heroine, who is more petty bourgeois, and the daily life of Istanbul.

The author Orhan Pamuk imagined such a thing, he thought of the museum while writing his novel; this is a unique and original thing. When I was collecting these objects one by one, I was writing the novel by looking at them.

Above all, this museum has its own unique atmosphere: When you step into a traditional old Greek building within the urban fabric of Istanbul, you encounter a completely different atmosphere.

Museums draw us into another world in terms of space and architecture. Today, especially in the West, educated upper class people visit museums on Sundays instead of churches, and fill their spiritual lives with museums.

I feel that in the future, even when I am no longer here, I will remain in people's spiritual lives not only as a text and a book, but also physically through this museum. I will not be the only one; people who used the same phones, the same salt shakers, the same hats and dresses, the same umbrellas as me will also continue to live here. Visitors will see how Istanbul was lived between 1974 and 2000, and they will remember that I wrote the story that takes place among all these objects in order to keep this life alive. Thinking that I have done something original, they will respect and show interest in our life.

My deepest consolation is to have established this museum, to keep it alive and to have written its novel, which serves as a kind of catalogue.