Çukurcuma is an Istanbul neighborhood whose importance in the novel grows from its intimate connection to Füsun’s family home and Kemal’s repeated visits there. The steep streets and ordinary domestic rhythms of the district become the setting for nearly eight years of shared suppers, while Kemal’s routes through it make the neighborhood a map of desire, memory, and absence.

Setting and Neighborhood

Füsun’s family, the Keskins, live in a building at the corner of Çukurcuma Avenue, popularly called Çukurcuma Hill, and the narrow Dalgıç Street. From there, a ten-minute walk along steep, winding streets leads to Beyoğlu and İstiklal Avenue. The neighborhood is close to the city’s busy center but has its own uneven, lived-in character: dilapidated wooden houses lean over sidewalks, abandoned buildings bear traces of Greek families who have emigrated, and Kurdish squatters make homes in some of the vacant properties. At night, stovepipes jut from windows, while small bars, meyhanes, snack shops, grocery stores, tobacconists, and music shops keep the streets active into the early hours. The district can seem cheerful and lively to Kemal after a peaceful evening, yet oppressive and ugly when he leaves the house miserable.

Çukurcuma’s population includes dockworkers, clerks, small-shop owners, Romany and Kurdish Alevi families, descendants of Italians and Levantines, some old Greek families, and workers such as taxi drivers, postmen, bakers, and grocers. Kemal sees evidence of a loose connectedness in the help offered to him, the neighborhood’s interest in unusual cars, and the speed with which gossip travels. It is not the unified community he associates with older Muslim districts, but it has a shared life that makes his presence as a wealthy outsider noticeable.

Routes, Arrival, and the House

The journey to the Keskin home is part of the neighborhood’s emotional geography. Çetin usually collects Kemal from Nişantaşı shortly before seven in the evening. They pass through traffic around Harbiye, Taksim, and Sıraselviler before winding through Cihangir and Firuzağa and descending past the historic Çukurcuma Hamam. On other evenings, they avoid traffic by way of Dolmabahçe and Tophane, turning into Boğazkesen Avenue. Whatever the route, Kemal’s heart begins to race as the car turns onto the Keskins’ street; the mixture of joy and panic recalls his childhood anticipation on the way to school.

Tarık had bought the building with his savings after tiring of renting an apartment in Nişantaşı. The family’s entrance is on the first floor, and they also own a small ground-floor apartment with an entrance on Dalgıç Street. Tenant families move in and out of that apartment over the years, separate from the central story of Kemal’s visits. Füsun befriends one tenant, Ayla, and sometimes goes with her to the cinema, but keeps such neighborhood friendships from Kemal. Much later, the ground-floor apartment becomes part of the Museum of Innocence, linking the building’s everyday domestic history to Kemal’s later act of collecting.

The threshold itself marks the awkward social arrangement surrounding Kemal’s presence. During the first months, Aunt Nesibe comes downstairs to let him in; afterward, she generally sends Füsun. Her habit makes clear that the family understands why he visits, even though no one can openly name the reason. She greets him with news from television or remarks about food, making his arrival seem ordinary. The family calls him a guest, but settles on the less explicit idea that he comes to sit. The house is thus both a real family home and a stage on which the visitors and hosts manage an unspoken attachment.

The Years of Supper Visits

Kemal’s first visit takes place on October 23, 1976, eleven days after Aunt Nesibe gives him an open-ended welcome. His final night in Çukurcuma with Füsun and Aunt Nesibe is August 26, 1984. Across those seven years and ten months—2,864 days—he visits for supper 1,593 times, an average of about four visits a week. The pattern is not mechanical: some weeks he sees the family daily, while at other times he stays away in an attempt to persuade himself that he can forget Füsun. Yet he never manages to remain absent for more than ten days. The family comes to expect him, keeps a place for him, and can often guess when he will appear.

The visits establish a private rhythm within the city’s public time. The Keskin home’s large German-made wall clock, with its wooden and glass case, pendulum, and chime, stands by the entrance as a reminder of the outside world. In practice, the television becomes the household’s timekeeper. At seven each evening, before the national news, a large clock appears on screen. Füsun checks her wristwatch against it, as Tarık checks one of his pocket watches. Kemal watches Füsun concentrate on setting the time and smiles when she looks back at him after getting it right. The repeated domestic gesture turns clock-setting into a quiet exchange between them, even as the household’s television schedule and the clock’s chime measure time passing.

Most visits begin around seven and end after the nightly television broadcast, often close to midnight. Kemal estimates that he spends about five hours in the house each time, though shame makes him minimize the length of his stays in his own mind. The rhythm is interrupted in September 1980, when a military coup brings martial law and a ten o’clock curfew. He must leave at a quarter to ten, and the rushed drive through darkening, empty streets makes each visit feel abruptly insufficient. The curfew imposes official time on the household and cuts short the private time Kemal has built around seeing Füsun.

A Landscape of Memory and Absence

Before settling into the visits, Kemal tries to cure himself by forbidding his own return to the Merhamet Apartments and by removing places associated with Füsun from his mental map. He marks the Şanzelize Boutique, the apartments, Kuyulu Bostan Street, and other locations as prohibited, while treating some routes as places he may cross only in necessity and without lingering. This imagined map does not make the city neutral. Instead, it records how strongly remembered encounters govern his movements and how a street can become a source of danger to his composure.

The effort to avoid reminders gives way to a city populated by apparitions. Kemal sometimes believes he sees Füsun in crowded public places or at a window, then recognizes that the figure is only a product of his longing. He nevertheless returns to places where such visions have occurred, adding them to his mental map of Istanbul. In Çukurcuma and other old neighborhoods, a glimpse that proves false does not send him away; it persuades him, irrationally, that the real Füsun must be nearby. His search leads him through poor districts, coffeehouses, and damaged streets, where even graffiti and death threats lose their power to unsettle him while he imagines her close at hand. The city’s spaces acquire meaning through the act of searching: they are no longer merely routes or addresses but signs connected to the possibility of finding her.

The neighborhood’s ordinary objects and repeated scenes become equally charged. During quiet evenings the family may sit without speaking, listen to a car pass or rain strike the windows, watch television, or attend to the stove. Kemal may look at Füsun’s hand or remember a small present he might bring on his next visit. These uneventful details matter because repetition lets him associate particular objects and gestures with the larger experience of sitting at the dinner table with Füsun and her family. Çukurcuma’s significance lies not in a single dramatic encounter but in the accumulated texture of these evenings: the same route, the same table, and a private attachment carried inside an ordinary neighborhood.

From Home to Remembered Place

When Kemal can no longer visit Füsun in Çukurcuma, the neighborhood’s role in their relationship changes. They meet in Beyoğlu instead, choosing cinemas after looking over the posters in Galatasaray and sitting together in the cool, dim theaters. The new setting allows them to hold hands and share whispered conversations, but it also marks a departure from the long supper routine at the Keskin home. Çukurcuma remains the place associated with those years of regular presence, and its streets retain the emotional force of the visits even after their meetings move elsewhere.

The novel makes the neighborhood legible through both physical routes and repeated domestic time. A building corner, a steep street, the journey from Nişantaşı, and the television clock give shape to an attachment that cannot be spoken openly. At the same time, Kemal’s prohibited map and his later searches reveal how memory revises urban space: familiar streets become forbidden, promising, or haunted according to what he hopes to recover. Through the Keskin home and the accumulated evenings around its supper table, Çukurcuma becomes more than a setting. It is the place where longing takes the form of routine, and where routine preserves the past as a lived part of the city.