Early 1992

Early 1992 is a turning point in Kemal’s collecting: in Istanbul, he begins seeking film memorabilia from the summer of 1976 to display in the Museum of Innocence. The search makes the distance between a lived moment and its later remembrance tangible. Posters, lobby photographs, and ticket stubs are not simply evidence that a film once played; assembled with other everyday remnants, they help give private memory a public form.

The search for film traces

In the early months of 1992, Kemal looks among Istanbul collectors for posters, lobby photographs, and ticket stubs from films he had seen with Füsun in the summer of 1976. His purpose is specific: to display these materials in the museum he is building. The objects connect the collection not only to the films but to a shared experience now recoverable chiefly through its fragments.

One seller, Hıfzı Bey, parts with lobby photographs after a lengthy bargain. His pleasure at finding a buyer who values his collection gives way to sadness at letting the photographs go. He explains that others have mocked his hobby and treated the material he keeps as rubbish. For Kemal, the exchange reveals that the collector’s attachment is not reducible to an item’s market price: a collection can hold personal meaning even when the surrounding society refuses to recognize it.

From remembered cinema to collected objects

The sought-after photographs recall an open-air cinema on a hill between Pendik and Kartal, overlooking the Sea of Marmara and the Princes’ Islands. Factories, leftist slogans, and smoke from the Yunus Cement Factory formed the setting around the screen. In the film Kemal remembers, Orhan Gencebay plays a poor fisherman caught in a story of rape, forced marriage, and suffering. The audience’s silence during the scenes of sexual violence, and the question of shame raised by a woman whose virginity has been stolen, gave the screening a painful resonance for Kemal as he watched beside Füsun.

By 1992, those screenings belong to the past, but their traces can still be sought, handled, and displayed. Kemal also gathers Istanbul views, postcards, cinema tickets, restaurant menus, rusty cans, newspaper pages, branded paper bags, medicine boxes, bottles, celebrity photographs, and images of ordinary Istanbul residents. He judges these everyday records especially eloquent about the place where he and Füsun had lived. Their significance rests in their capacity to preserve a world in detail, not merely to illustrate a famous event.

Collecting, shame, and memory

Kemal’s encounters with collectors expose a contrast between public esteem and private attachment. Some collectors’ homes are so crowded with photographs, posters, clippings, and magazines that there is scarcely room to live; in extreme cases, the owners can barely make their way inside. In one two-story house in Tarlabaşı, a collector describes his holdings with restrained pride and gives their number as 42,742. Such accumulation can appear embarrassing or excessive to outsiders, yet Kemal sees in it objects saturated with memories of people and streets that may otherwise disappear without being gathered or ordered.

The period therefore belongs to a larger distinction in Kemal’s account between time as a sequence of moments and objects as carriers of those moments. Recalling a happiest instant in retrospect means acknowledging that it cannot return. Mementos offer consolation because they preserve its colors, textures, and images; during his years of dinners at the Keskin home in Çukurcuma, Kemal takes objects Füsun has touched in order to keep something of those happy moments for the future. The early-1992 hunt extends that practice from personal keepsakes to the material culture of the city.

A private past made public

Kemal’s collection eventually enters a converted museum, where he also keeps the bedframe, mattress, and blue sheet associated with his first sexual encounter with Füsun. He sleeps in the attic among the objects, making the museum at once an exhibition and a place to inhabit. In his formulation, a museum transforms time into space: objects that once belonged to separate moments can be seen together, giving the visitor a view of the story as a whole.

That ambition also shapes how the museum is meant to be understood. Kemal wants its guards to explain the collection and the love invested in Füsun’s possessions with dignity, so that objects once treated as shameful can become sources of pride. He further imagines visitors seeing the entire collection from wherever they stand, and asks for a map in the novel and a ticket in each copy so readers can follow the story through Istanbul and enter the museum. Early 1992 is thus more than a date attached to a buying expedition: it marks the work of turning the fugitive materials of remembered life into a collection that others can encounter.