“The Proud Ones” and “The Bashful Ones”

“The Proud Ones” and “The Bashful Ones” is Kemal’s two-part account of collecting: some collectors welcome public display, while others conceal what they gather because it exposes a private wound. The distinction becomes more than a contrast in temperament when Kemal turns his hidden, grief-driven collection into the Museum of Innocence. There, he proposes that objects once connected to shame can be displayed with dignity, and that a collection can make an individual life publicly legible without surrendering its intimate meaning.

Two kinds of collector

Kemal presents the distinction as an observation formed through travel and wandering in Istanbul. The Proud Ones are pleased to show their collections; he says they predominate in the West. They regard a museum as the collection’s natural destination, even when its objects began as ordinary items picked up one by one. The example he gives is a brochure about a collector of beverage containers and advertising: a child brings home a soda can, finds more, and eventually hopes to collect them all and exhibit them. In this account, accumulation finds its fulfillment in recognition and display.

The Bashful Ones collect for collecting’s sake, but their impulse does not necessarily begin without a purpose. Kemal describes the same possible starting points for both groups: a search for an answer or consolation, a response to difficulty or pain, or a compulsion that is hard to explain. The difference lies in how the collection is understood and shown. Where collecting is not respected as a contribution to learning or knowledge, the Bashful collector may hide it as an embarrassment. The objects then point, in Kemal’s formulation, not to useful information but to the collector’s wound.

Kemal places his own collecting within this second pattern. His collection grows out of his attachment to Füsun and his effort to bear the pain of losing her; its objects preserve fragments of the life they shared. His classification therefore carries a personal implication: the concealed collection is not simply an eccentric hobby, but a material trace of distress that the collector may be reluctant to expose.

Objects, status, and embarrassment

The distinction also resonates with the social meanings attached to objects in Kemal’s earlier life. On April 27, 1975, while walking home with Sibel after supper at Fuaye, he noticed a Jenny Colon handbag in a shop window because she admired it. He returned to the Şanzelize Boutique the next day and bought her a bag. When Sibel examined it, she identified it as an imitation by the cheap thread used to attach its label. She would not carry it to their engagement party, where the counterfeit would be exposed beside the genuine Jenny Colon bag she had bought in Paris.

The episode makes possession a test of status as well as affection: the gift’s intended meaning does not cancel the distinction between a prestigious original and a visibly inferior copy. Kemal’s account of boutiques in wealthy Istanbul neighborhoods likewise describes goods brought from Paris and Milan or copied from imported fashion magazines, sold at inflated prices. Set beside his later theory of bashful collecting, this episode shows how objects can acquire sharply different public values. Some are displayed to signal taste and standing; others are hidden because their meaning is personal, compromised, or difficult to explain.

From hidden collection to public museum

Kemal’s museum reverses the concealment associated with the Bashful Ones without simply adopting the Proud Ones’ model of display. He brings his collection into the converted house where the Keskin family had lived, making objects tied to his relationship with Füsun available to visitors. He also imagines the museum as a place where shameful or private possessions can become sources of pride through careful presentation. In his view, exhibiting such objects changes their public status: what had seemed embarrassing can be treated as worthy of attention.

That transformation depends on how the museum interprets its holdings. Kemal wants its guards to explain the history of the collection, his love for Füsun, and the meanings he has invested in her possessions. He does not define the guards’ central task as silencing visitors or policing couples who kiss; he wants them to give the museum the dignity of a place of reverence. Their dark wood-colored velvet suits, pink shirts, and ties embroidered with images of Füsun’s earrings are part of this planned atmosphere. The museum is to remain open to lovers who have nowhere else in Istanbul to kiss, joining public display to the private emotions the collection records.

Kemal’s preferred arrangement also resists the usual separation of objects into a sequence that visitors can see only one case at a time. He insists that the whole collection and all the display cases should be visible from wherever a visitor stands. Because the objects and, with them, his whole story can be seen together, he expects visitors to lose their sense of time. He calls this loss a consolation: the museum’s value lies not only in preserving beloved old objects but in gathering their meanings into a single space.

A museum of lived experience

Kemal’s proposal extends from exhibition design to the visitor’s pace and route. He wants each object softly lit so that visitors can examine it without hurry and compare his attention to Füsun with memories of their own. He sets a limit of fifty visitors at a time and requires groups and school classes to make appointments. The rules protect the unhurried encounter he wants, rather than treating the museum as a destination for crowds passing quickly through display rooms.

He contrasts this ideal with crowded Western museums and with what he considers imitations of Western art institutions established by wealthy people in Turkey. Against displays that reproduce an imported cultural model, he argues for museums that show people their own lives. His museum is organized around the life he shared with Füsun, while the ordinary possessions in its cases make that life available to others. He invokes Proust’s image of furnishings sold after an aunt’s death and seeming to cry in their new setting: Kemal’s museum, by contrast, keeps its collected objects within the house he has made their home.

The distinction between the Proud Ones and the Bashful Ones thus becomes a question of who may show a collection, and what that act of showing can mean. Kemal takes a private accumulation shaped by grief and gives it a public setting, but he does not present it as detached information. The guards, the visitor rules, the visible cases, and the linked story all guide visitors toward an understanding of the objects as evidence of attention and attachment. His museum seeks to make a personal wound visible without reducing it to spectacle, and to turn the collector’s embarrassment into a form of shared recognition.