Bosphorus

The Bosphorus is both a physical setting and a recurring structure of memory in Kemal’s account of Istanbul: its shores host family outings, social gatherings, and private moments, while its waters also frame episodes of loss and public crisis. Repeated journeys along and across it connect otherwise separate periods of his life, making the strait a measure of how the city and his understanding of happiness change.

Setting and Social Landscape

Kemal encounters the Bosphorus through places associated with different kinds of social life. The route between the city’s hills, its waterfront districts, and the far shore appears from car windows, restaurant gardens, summer-house terraces, and public bridges. In these views, the water is not detached from the city: ferries, yali gardens, palaces, neighborhoods, and the movement of residents all contribute to the landscape Kemal remembers.

A long lunch with his father at Abdullah Efendi’s restaurant in Emirgân gives this geography a family and class dimension. The restaurant had moved from its earlier location on the main avenue in Beyoğlu to a small farm above Emirgân, after many of its wealthy customers acquired cars. On the drive there, Kemal listens to his father’s advice while watching the City Line ferries and the gardens of the yalıs pass by. The journey joins inherited social habits to a changing city: a familiar restaurant has relocated, and access to its new setting depends on the automobile and the view from the road.

The strait also supplies the setting for elite sociability. At Zaim’s party celebrating the launch of Meltem fruit soda, guests gather in Zaim’s Ayaspaşa apartment, whose position affords a broad view of the water. Kemal recalls a circle of friends brought together by yacht trips, parties, clubs, and nights driving around Istanbul. The Bosphorus view is part of the occasion’s display of prosperity, but it also locates the group within a shared social world that Kemal remembers as temporarily intact.

Family Rituals and Public Memory

The Bosphorus enters family life not only as scenery but as a route through the city’s public customs. During an Eid al-Adha outing, Füsun and Kemal ride in his father’s deep-red 1956 Chevrolet, driven by Çetin Efendi, through the city’s holiday streets. Their drive passes Maçka and Dolmabahçe; later, they cross the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn. The journey lets them observe the holiday throughout Istanbul, from poorer districts and backstreets to major avenues and wealthy neighborhoods. The widespread practice of sacrifice makes the city feel, in Kemal’s retrospective account, unified by a ritual whose visible effects cross class boundaries.

A different kind of public ritual is associated with Kemal’s childhood home near Teşvikiye Mosque. From the apartment’s sitting room and balcony, the family could observe funeral processions departing from the mosque and moving toward Nişantaşı Square. The processions introduced Kemal and his brother to death as a recurring feature of neighborhood life. Their childhood play imitated what they saw: they carried divan bolsters on their shoulders as though they were carrying a coffin, while household employees followed them. The Bosphorus does not stand alone in these memories; it belongs to a larger map of Istanbul where family routines, religious observances, and public ceremonies become inseparable from particular views and routes.

Courtship, Leisure, and Repetition

The waterside landscape also marks changing forms of intimacy. At Belgrade Forest, overlooking Bentler, Kemal spends a day outdoors with Sibel, Zaim, Nurcihan, and Mehmet. Sibel and Zaim work on an old swing while Kemal joins Nurcihan and Mehmet in a children’s game. Looking back, he remembers the occasion as a gift of beauty and ease, even as he recognizes that his private anguish threatens to intrude on it. The contrast reveals how the same shared outing can be remembered both as social happiness and as a moment shadowed by emotional conflict.

During the period when Kemal and Sibel stay at a yali, the Bosphorus becomes part of his attempt to believe that he can begin again. In the morning, reflections from the water reach the ceiling of the house, and its view seems to him to announce a recovery he hopes is underway. Later, swimming in the strait offers him a temporary way to manage the pain of love: he describes looking at the underwater world from an inverted position and finding a perspective beyond his immediate distress. The water’s role changes from a promise of renewal to a brief means of bearing suffering, without resolving the underlying conflict.

After Kemal begins visiting the Keskin family in Çukurcuma, outings to Bosphorus restaurants create a more regular setting for his closeness with Füsun. At first, he arranges a group meal at Urcan in Sariyer, involving Aunt Nesibe so that the outing does not appear to be a private date. In the summer of 1977, Tarık joins the family as well. The excursions become a custom, repeated at least monthly in later years and continuing in different seasons. In the car and at the restaurants, Füsun can sit beside Kemal, and their quiet conversation and physical proximity differ from the more constrained pattern of their visits inside the family home. The repeated journeys offer a socially acceptable frame for closeness that cannot be openly named.

Over the first two and a half years of these visits, the outings lose some of their novelty. Familiar meals, exchanged looks, conversations, and journeys recur, gathering into a quotidian pattern that Kemal experiences as outside ordinary time. That recurrence is central to his later account: the Bosphorus excursions matter not only as exceptional romantic scenes but as ordinary occasions whose repetition becomes precious in retrospect.

Urban Crisis and Changing Perspective

The strait also connects private life to political events. In the early hours of November 15, 1979, an explosion awakens Kemal and his mother. From their apartment they see flames on the far side of the Bosphorus, near Üsküdar, and initially mistake the incident for another act of political violence. The fire draws Istanbul residents toward public viewpoints. Kemal crosses the Galata Bridge with the crowd and follows it as far as Gülhane Park, where the light from the burning tanker illuminates the surrounding landmarks and shore. The waterway that had framed dinners and family drives now becomes the setting for a citywide spectacle, gathering strangers into a common act of watching.

For Kemal, the Bosphorus remains subject to private as well as public changes in meaning. At times, the city’s streets and places associated with Füsun become so difficult for him that he marks districts on a mental map as forbidden or restricted. Elsewhere, he frequents crowded places where he might glimpse what he takes to be her ghost, and Istanbul becomes a network of signs that recall her. These practices make clear that his remembered geography is not a neutral record: desire and grief determine which routes he avoids and which places he repeatedly seeks out.

The change of perspective becomes especially clear when Kemal leaves Istanbul by plane. He realizes that outside the city he can consider Füsun and their history more fully, whereas in Istanbul he has seen her through the prism of his obsession. The distinction gives the Bosphorus, and the city around it, a double role: it is the setting of the life he shared with Füsun, and part of the urban environment through which that life becomes difficult to see from a distance.

The Bosphorus in the Museum

Kemal’s museum project turns remembered places into part of a larger effort to preserve experience. He wants visitors to encounter the objects of his collection with time and attention, alongside photographs of Istanbul neighborhoods he and Füsun visited. He limits admission to fifty people at a time and requires groups and school classes to make appointments, explaining that an unhurried visit lets the collection be seen as a whole. In this design, the Bosphorus excursions belong to more than a private romance: they are among the shared experiences that give the objects their context.

The museum’s purpose, as Kemal describes it, is to present the life he shared with Füsun rather than to substitute imitations of Western art for Turkish lives. The Bosphorus outings help make that claim concrete. A car journey, a family meal, or a recurring evening by the water can carry as much historical and emotional weight as an officially celebrated landmark. As a result, the strait functions throughout the narrative as a meeting point between the ordinary and the monumental: a place where daily habits, social distinctions, intimate memories, and public events occupy the same landscape.