Nurcihan

Nurcihan is Sibel Hanım’s close friend from lycée and a returning Parisian whose past and future romances expose the uneasy terms on which Istanbul society accepts women’s independence. Once privately adventurous and later committed to courtship before marriage, she becomes the center of a matchmaking effort, a rival’s attention, a long marriage, and a friendship’s eventual rupture. Her life is not narrated directly; Kemal encounters her through parties, other people’s accounts, and a few vivid scenes in which her gestures reveal a changing social world.

Identity and Background

Nurcihan and Sibel Hanım have known each other since their lycée days and traveled together to France. In Paris, Nurcihan had several love affairs, consummated them, and for a time lived with some of the men. She kept this life secret from her wealthy parents in Istanbul. The narrator reports that the experiences eventually left her sad and drained, and that under Sibel Hanım’s influence she was planning to return to Istanbul. Her history is therefore not simply a mark of sexual freedom: it is also a source of fatigue and a past that she must reckon with when seeking a future partner at home.

The standards surrounding that past are set by the people around her. Kemal tells Berrin that Nurcihan needs a man who values her, is at her social level, and will not be troubled by her French relationships. Sibel Hanım, meanwhile, feels both admiration and compassion for her friend. The combination shows how Nurcihan’s experiences can be understood as courageous and still leave her exposed to judgment. Her prospects depend not only on attraction but on whether a prospective husband can accept a history that male friends may find intriguing while also treating it as a threat.

Courtship and Competing Matchmakers

Sibel Hanım tries to arrange a match between Nurcihan and Mehmet, seating them together at a gathering. The plan initially appears uncertain: Berrin doubts that the two are making progress, while Sibel Hanım recognizes that Mehmet’s interest is complicated by what he has heard of Nurcihan’s past. He is intrigued by her relationships with French men, but frightened by what that knowledge might mean. Sibel Hanım decides to intervene and help the two along.

The arrangement also becomes a contest. Zaim tells Kemal that he believes Nurcihan likes him and that he likes her a great deal. Since Sibel Hanım is trying to bring Nurcihan and Mehmet together, Zaim asks Kemal to help him compete on equal terms. He wants Nurcihan included in a picnic at the Meltem factory, arguing that the matchmaking efforts of Sibel Hanım and Mehmet have kept him from getting close to her. His interest makes the proposed match less straightforward than Sibel Hanım’s plan suggests: Nurcihan is not merely the object of a scheme, but a woman whose affections are being interpreted and pursued by more than one man.

By dawn, the social maneuvering has given way to an intimate, comic scene at Kemal’s parents’ home. Nurcihan goes through Kemal’s mother’s drawers, explaining that she is looking for a swimsuit for a planned swim at Kilyos. As she searches, she handles embroidered stockings from the 1950s, lace-up corsets, hats, and scarves; she also encounters house and land deeds, a pouch of keys, and old society-page clippings. Her curiosity is described as refined and respectful, and she appreciates the beauty of Kemal’s mother. The scene places Nurcihan’s sociability and interest in other people’s things against Kemal’s private sorrow over Füsun, whom he had never taken to Kilyos. Meanwhile, Mehmet watches Nurcihan with love and admiration, newly delighted by the prospect of marrying her, though Kemal senses that his happiness remains shadowed by fear of deception and a degrading outcome.

Engagement, Marriage, and Social Expectations

Nurcihan does not want to marry immediately. She tells Kemal that Mehmet wants them to marry right away, but that she would prefer to become engaged first, as Kemal and Sibel Hanım had done, and enjoy being in love before settling into marriage. Her preference gives the relationship its own pace: she does not treat marriage as the automatic next step in a successful match, even while she intends to marry Mehmet. Her remark also invites Kemal to reflect on the example he and Sibel Hanım have set, though Nurcihan senses that there may be something about their relationship she does not know.

The couple’s courtship develops over years. According to Zaim, three years after they began seeing each other, Nurcihan and Mehmet still had not made love and were telling people they planned to marry. Although Mehmet knew about her earlier affairs in France, Nurcihan remained determined not to have sex with him before marriage. She made light of the decision, saying that premarital abstinence, rather than wealth, was the basis of a true, lasting, happy, and peaceful marriage in Muslim countries. Mehmet appeared to share her humor and her interest in inherited customs. Together they praised old music, Ottoman ancestors, and the wisdom of earlier generations, without being branded devout or reactionary by their social circle. They drank freely at parties but maintained their manners and elegance; Mehmet might recite lines of Divan poetry and raise a glass to the love of God while looking into Nurcihan’s eyes.

Their relationship thus joins practices that might seem contradictory to outsiders: an earlier European sexual past, a deliberate decision to abstain before marriage, and a cultivated attachment to Ottoman poetry and old music. The couple’s social acceptance depends in part on the way they carry these interests—with wit, polish, and the ease of people who belong to their circle. Their choice also unfolds in the wake of Kemal’s broken engagement to Sibel Hanım, which had made Istanbul society wary of women trusting men before marriage. Nurcihan and Mehmet’s announced intentions to marry offer a socially legible future, but the history around them shows how fragile that respectability can be.

Marriage and the Fracture with Sibel Hanım

Before the wedding, Nurcihan plans to go to Paris at Christmastime to shop and tie up loose ends before becoming formally engaged and then marrying Mehmet. Sibel Hanım considers joining her. Kemal encourages the trip, privately hoping that Sibel Hanım’s absence will let him search Istanbul for Füsun; at the same time, he tells himself that he may marry Sibel Hanım when she returns. At the airport, he sees tears in Sibel Hanım’s eyes as she says goodbye. Mehmet, facing his first separation from Nurcihan in months, remarks that life feels empty without the women. The departure makes visible the closeness of the two friends and the couples’ intertwined social lives, even as Kemal’s concealed motives complicate the farewell.

Mehmet and Nurcihan eventually marry at the Hilton, where the press is expected to attend. Zaim tells Kemal that Papatya, contracted by Lemon Films, is to sing a Meltem jingle with the Silver Leaves at the wedding. Kemal is stunned to learn of the plans and asks why he was not invited. Zaim explains that there were extended discussions: Sibel Hanım does not want to see Kemal, and Nurcihan, as Sibel Hanım’s best friend, is bound up in that decision. Mehmet still cares deeply for Kemal, but, according to Zaim, he is so happy with Nurcihan that he wants to keep trouble from disturbing his happiness. The wedding brings the match Sibel Hanım initiated to completion, while Kemal’s exclusion marks how far his own rupture with Sibel Hanım has carried him from their shared circle.

The marriage does not preserve the early courtship unchanged. After Nurcihan has given birth, Mehmet confesses to Kemal that he loves and respects her but no longer finds her as attractive as before. He describes how their romantic courtship, marriage, and the beginning of family life gave way quickly to old habits. They sometimes leave the children with his mother and go out together, but more often Mehmet visits new clubs and bars alone. The account is Mehmet’s, not Nurcihan’s; it reveals the strain in their married life without explaining how she understands it or what she wants from the relationship.

Friendship, Change, and Narrative Significance

Nurcihan and Sibel Hanım eventually fall out over what appears, to others, to be a difference in taste and custom. After Füsun’s death, Mehmet tells Kemal that Sibel Hanım had been needling Nurcihan for becoming too à la Turca: going to gazinos to hear classical singers such as Müzeyyen Senar and Zeki Müren, and fasting during Ramadan. Kemal immediately doubts that these are the real cause of the estrangement. The underlying reason is not disclosed, and Nurcihan herself does not explain it in the scenes recounted. Their lost intimacy is therefore registered as a fact with an obscured cause, rather than resolved into a neat disagreement about tradition.

Nurcihan’s later manner also unsettles Kemal’s memories of their former circle. At a new restaurant beyond Etiler, where the menu presents unfamiliar dishes as American cuisine, she does not mention Sibel Hanım or ask how Kemal is coping after Füsun’s death. Instead, she says she knows deep in her bones that he will be happy one day. The kindness lands painfully: six months after Füsun’s death, Kemal believes that happiness has become impossible. He feels he is meeting a new Nurcihan, as if their common memories no longer connected them. The difference may belong partly to the rapidly changing restaurant and city streets around them, which he finds alienating, but it also marks the distance opened by time, marriage, and grief.

Nurcihan’s arc is presented through contrasts rather than a private account of her inner life: Parisian affairs and premarital abstinence, drinking and inherited religious or poetic customs, an old friendship and its unexplained collapse, romantic courtship and the altered habits of marriage. She is a participant in the matchmaking that binds the social group, but not simply its prize; she sets terms for her courtship and helps shape the public meaning of her relationship with Mehmet. Later, her hopeful prediction to Kemal becomes a measure of how differently they inhabit the same world. For her, happiness remains imaginable; for him, her confidence only sharpens the sense that his own life has irreversibly changed.