Kemal’s creation of the Museum of Innocence

Kemal Basmacı’s creation of the Museum of Innocence transforms his private grief over Füsun into a collection, a building, and a story offered to public view. What begins as an effort to preserve moments of happiness through objects becomes an answer to loss: Kemal gathers the things Füsun touched, acquires the Keskin family’s home in Çukurcuma, and reshapes it into a museum that he also inhabits. The project gives physical form to his belief that objects can hold the colors and textures of a vanished time, even as it exposes the shame, longing, and possessiveness bound up in collecting them.

From grief to a museum

The idea first came to Kemal after a month in intensive care following the car accident. When physical therapy began, learning to walk again felt like starting life over. His thoughts returned constantly to Füsun, but their character had changed: she was becoming a figure of the past, and his suffering no longer rested on the desire to possess a future with her. At the Merhamet Apartments, sitting on the bed among the objects he had collected, Kemal began to feel that telling his story might ease the pain. He also understood that telling it would require bringing the collection into the open.

His attachment to mementos had a history that preceded the museum. He had tried to forbid himself from visiting the Merhamet Apartments and touching things that recalled Füsun, even marking streets and places on a mental map as prohibited, but the restrictions were difficult to maintain. At the Keskin home, he pocketed small things that could disappear unnoticed—matchboxes, cigarette butts, saltshakers, coffee cups, hairpins, and barrettes—and eventually began replacing larger household objects with new ones. The collection was therefore not assembled at a distance from the relationship: it grew out of Kemal’s repeated presence in the house and his desire to carry away something of the life lived there.

Kemal’s account of happiness explains why the objects mattered. Looking back, he identifies a moment with Füsun as the happiest of his life, while recognizing that naming it as such confirms that it belongs to the irretrievable past. He believes a person can bear the pain of that recognition by possessing something from the moment. At their first sexual encounter, Füsun’s earring fell onto the blue sheet, and Kemal failed to notice it. Years later, he regarded the oversight as one of the sins for which his journey to Paris was a kind of atonement. The missed earring crystallizes the project’s contradiction: the collection preserves traces of intimacy, but no object can restore the moment or undo what he did not see.

Paris and the collector’s model

Kemal left Istanbul without being able to explain even to himself what the Paris trip was for. Once airborne, he found he could think about Füsun and their story from outside the city that had surrounded him with reminders of her. In Paris he sought out smaller, often empty museums rather than the crowded, celebrated institutions. Their collections of personal belongings and unusual objects offered consolation, and the quiet rooms seemed to exist apart from the city’s traffic and construction. There, Kemal began to imagine framing his own collection with a story and displaying the life his family and acquaintances considered wasted.

Particular museums helped him test what could count as a collection. At the Musée Nissim de Camondo, he became more confident that the Keskin family’s plates and cutlery, along with his seven years of collected saltshakers, could be worthy of display. The Musée de la Poste made room in his conception for the letters he had written to Füsun. A museum of lost property suggested that objects as varied as Tarık Bey’s false teeth, empty medicine boxes, and receipts might belong if they recalled her. At the Musée Maurice Ravel, everyday possessions—including toothbrushes, cups, figurines, toys, and an iron cage with a singing nightingale—brought him close to tears and strengthened his sense that ordinary things could carry personal meaning.

The Musée Gustave Moreau made an especially lasting impression. Moreau had adapted his family home to display his paintings after his death; to Kemal, the converted house had become a museum of memories, each object charged with significance. He returned there seven times over the next twenty years, experiencing the same awe. The visit offered a model not simply for arranging objects but for transforming a lived-in house into a place where memory could be encountered. Paris helped Kemal recast what he had hidden as a collector’s undertaking, and the shame he had felt about hoarding began to give way to pride.

Buying the Keskin house

Back in Istanbul, Kemal went directly to see Aunt Nesibe and proposed buying the entire building. He described the aim as commemorating Füsun in the house, while also raising the practical question of Aunt Nesibe’s future there. She initially wept at the prospect of living alone, and Kemal found her an apartment on Kuyulu Bostan Street, near her former home. A month later, she deeded him the Çukurcuma building, including its ground-floor flat and all its contents. On the advice of the lawyer who had handled Füsun’s divorce, they inventoried the belongings and had the document notarized.

The transfer did not immediately sever Aunt Nesibe’s connection to the house. She was slow to move, furnished her new apartment with care, and continued to say that she could not leave the home and its memories. The building was thus more than a container for Kemal’s private collection: it remained a place of attachment for the family whose everyday life had furnished its contents. Kemal’s plan to turn it into a museum depended on the same household history that made the house difficult to relinquish.

Collection, shame, and public display

In the 1990s, personal museums were unusual in Istanbul, and collectors often felt contempt for their own pursuits as well as for one another’s. As architect İhsan began converting the Keskin house, people dismissed Kemal’s plan as an imported private museum and attributed it to his wealth. Kemal hoped that appearing to collect for a museum, rather than from an unnamed psychological wound, would make his behavior more acceptable. His visit to the newly established Lovers of Collectible Objects Association did not at first reassure him: he felt isolated among collectors, whose suspicion and hostility wounded him. In time, as knowledge of his love for Füsun spread, some of them helped him and shared their own experiences of bringing hidden collections into public view.

Before moving the objects from the Merhamet Apartments, Kemal photographed the collection, which filled most of the room where he and Füsun had made love. He combined it with objects gathered in Çukurcuma, things found during his travels, possessions from the Keskin home, items recovered from rubbish dens, and contributions from collectors and witnesses to his story. The objects’ movement from intimate possession to arranged exhibit changed their role without erasing their ordinary origins. Kemal also recognized that familiar things circulated far beyond one household: similar lighters appeared in flea markets across several cities, while a saltshaker from a small Istanbul factory could be found in restaurants and shops from Istanbul to New Delhi, Cairo, Barcelona, and Rome. The mass-produced object connected private domestic routines to the lives of countless other families.

The objects most closely tied to Füsun remained central. Kemal moved the bedframe, musty mattress, and blue sheet from the Merhamet Apartments to the museum and stored them in the attic. He had come to the building not only to exhibit the collection but to sleep among its reminders of her. The attic, once a dark, mildewed space used for the water tank and inhabited by pests, had been cleaned and opened to the stars through a skylight. Kemal’s arrangement reverses the usual passage by which a house becomes a museum: after turning another family’s home into a museum, he tried to make it a home again by placing his bed and himself among the exhibits.

Memory made into space

Kemal’s museum gives architectural form to his distinction between the painful line of time and the happiness contained in individual moments. He believes that connecting moments—or connecting the objects that carry them—also means confronting the line’s end and the fact of death. During the years he visited the Keskin household for supper, he collected things Füsun had touched in the hope of preserving enough happiness to last for the rest of his life. The museum makes those fragments visible together, converting remembered time into a spatial arrangement that visitors can move through.

Kemal began spending more nights in the attic, where İhsan had made an opening between the building’s upper and lower levels. From there he could be among the collection and feel connected to the whole structure. His mother worried about his living there but accepted that the museum was the only way he could bear losing Füsun; she even offered old clothes and household materials of her own. The museum’s significance therefore lies in more than preservation. It is Kemal’s attempt to give grief a form that can be inhabited and shown: a private history assembled from humble things, at once a memorial to Füsun, a record of a shared household, and the setting in which he continues to live with the past.