“Collectors’ embarrassment”

“Collectors’ embarrassment” describes the stigma that surrounded private collecting in 1990s Istanbul: a collection could be seen not as knowledge or cultural achievement but as the outward sign of a private wound. Kemal Basmacı encounters that shame among collectors of film memorabilia and other everyday objects, then makes its transformation central to the Museum of Innocence, where possessions connected with grief and love are displayed publicly rather than hidden.

The hidden wound behind a collection

Kemal distinguishes collectors who regard a museum as the natural destination of a collection from those who collect for the act itself. The latter may begin in search of an answer or consolation, or under the force of a compulsion, but in a society that does not consider collecting reputable or useful, they conceal what they do. Their objects point, in this account, not to public knowledge but to a personal injury that the collector would rather not expose.

The phrase becomes concrete for Kemal in early 1992, when he searches for posters, lobby photographs, and ticket stubs from films he saw in the summer of 1976. He wants to display them in the Museum of Innocence. After bargaining with Hıfzı Bey for lobby photographs, Kemal hears how people mock the collector for filling his home with what they regard as rubbish. Hıfzı is pleased that a visitor values his collection, yet his pleasure is shadowed by the knowledge that others disparage the hobby. He presents collecting as his sole vice, distinguishing it from drinking, smoking, gambling, and pursuing women. The exchange makes the embarrassment social: it is produced not simply by the objects, but by the contempt directed at the person who keeps them.

Objects, motives, and suspicion

Kemal’s encounters with collectors reveal different ways private attachments become legible through things. One collector’s doorknobs and keys acquire meaning from the likelihood that a loved person’s hand once touched them. Siyami Bey spends three decades gathering photographs of ships that passed through the Bosphorus, and gives Kemal copies of his duplicates. Between 1995 and 1999, Kemal seeks postcards from Halit Bey the Invalid, hoping to find images of streets and neighborhoods he visited with Füsun. These collections preserve more than objects: each collector connects material traces to an experience that cannot be recovered directly.

The question collectors face is therefore often an indirect inquiry into their private lives. A seller of small portraits used at funerals asks Kemal why he wants the objects, rather than what he intends to do with them. Kemal recognizes the assumption behind the question: that keeping and storing things must arise from heartbreak, distress, or an unspoken psychological wound. The exchange turns a transaction into a demand for personal disclosure, and shows why collectors may experience their work as something shameful even when the objects carry coherent, deeply felt meanings.

Kemal’s account also marks a boundary between collecting and hoarding. In December 1996, a Tophane resident died beneath accumulated paper and old objects; the death was discovered months later, after the smell from the house became unbearable. Newspaper coverage increased public apprehension about collectors. The episode underscores the risk of collapsing very different relationships to objects into one suspect category: the stigma attached to collecting could make preservation, private attachment, and dangerous accumulation appear alike.

Istanbul’s collectors and public standing

In the 1990s, personal museums were almost nonexistent in Istanbul. Collectors were privately contemptuous of their own obsessions and could be openly scornful of one another, with jealousy intensifying their attacks. When Kemal’s aunt moved to Nişantaşı and the architect İhsan began converting the Keskin house into a museum, people derided the project as a private museum of the sort found in Europe, while also emphasizing Kemal’s wealth. He hoped that the museum’s form would let others see him not as someone driven by an unnameable wound, but as a rich collector choosing to exhibit his holdings.

At Hıfzı Bey’s urging, Kemal attends a meeting of the Lovers of Collectible Objects Association, the first such group in Turkey. The meeting takes place in a small wedding salon, but it offers no immediate sense of fellowship: collectors he knows by name regard him with silent suspicion, treating him like an interloper. Hıfzı later explains that seeing even a wealthy man use objects to soothe a troubled heart unsettles them. They had imagined that wealth would cure the compulsion they regarded as an illness. Their reaction exposes the limits of Kemal’s attempted distinction between a private, wounded collector and a respectable museum-maker: his wealth does not initially protect him from the shame he shares with them.

That distance changes as word of Kemal’s love for Füsun becomes common knowledge. The collectors begin helping him and telling him about their own efforts to bring their collections out of hiding. Their participation gives the museum materials and witnesses, but it also makes the project a response to a wider condition. What had been concealed as an embarrassing private pursuit can enter public life when collectors recognize one another’s attachments and allow their work to be seen.

From embarrassment to display

The Museum of Innocence gives Kemal a way to recast shame as pride. He argues that objects which bring their owners shame can, once displayed in a museum, become possessions to take pride in. The change is not merely a matter of placing things in cases: the museum assigns them a public context and invites visitors to recognize the lives and attachments they carry. Kemal’s collection is built around his love for Füsun, but the principle reaches beyond his own story to the collectors whose work he once encountered in secrecy.

The museum’s planned arrangement expresses this ambition. Kemal insists that visitors should be able to see the entire collection from wherever they stand, so that the objects and the story they compose are present together. He associates this all-at-once view with losing the sense of time and finding consolation. In spring and summer, he sleeps in the attic of the converted house, among the objects that recall Füsun; the space lets him experience the museum not only as an exhibition but as a place of continuing intimacy with his memories.

Kemal also wants the museum’s guards to interpret the collection with dignity, explaining its history, his love for Füsun, and the meanings invested in her possessions. Their task, as he defines it, is not simply to police visitors but to make the museum a place of reverence. At the same time, he wants it open to lovers who have nowhere else in Istanbul to kiss, and proposes that readers of the book receive free admission on their first visit through a ticket included in each copy. These plans connect private memory to public access: the collection is to be explained, visited, and encountered rather than hidden. “Collectors’ embarrassment” thus names both the stigma the museum confronts and the transformation Kemal hopes its public display can make possible.