April 12, 2007

April 12, 2007, marks the death of Kemal Basmacı, who died in Milan at sixty-two on Füsun’s fiftieth birthday. The date joins the private history of his love to the public legacy of the museum he founded: even at the end of his life, Kemal was away from Istanbul to visit a collection that embodied his conviction that ordinary things could preserve the texture of lived experience.

Death in Milan

In the early hours of April 12, Kemal was asleep in a large room overlooking Via Manzoni at the Grand Hotel et de Milan, where he stayed whenever he visited the city. He suffered a heart attack and died there. The circumstances are quiet and ordinary—a sleeping traveler in a familiar hotel—yet the date gives the death an intimate resonance: it was Füsun’s fiftieth birthday.

Milan had been a recurring destination for Kemal. He made every opportunity to visit the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum, whose collection he considered “one of the five most important museums in my life!” By the time he died, he had visited 5,723 museums. His journeys were not simply a tally of places seen: he described museums as experiences shaped by their collections, rather than spaces to stroll through, and considered a museum emptied of its collection merely a gallery.

The Museum and the Everyday

The Bagatti Valsecchi Museum particularly moved Kemal because its historic collection consisted of the everyday furnishings of the two brothers who had renovated the house: beds, lamps, mirrors, pots, and pans. Its objects offered a model for the museum Kemal had founded. The significance of a collection lay not only in rarity or grandeur, but in the way ordinary possessions could hold a life and make it perceptible to others.

The account of Kemal’s final thoughts returns to this idea. For him, a collection expressed the character of an experience; objects gave that experience a form that could be encountered again. His death therefore closes a life spent gathering and visiting, while leaving behind a museum intended to make personal memory available to visitors.

Funeral and Aftermath

Many of the people named in the book’s index attended Kemal’s funeral at Teşvikiye Mosque. His mother, Vecihe, watched from the balcony, as she customarily did, wearing a headscarf. Those gathered in the courtyard could hear her crying as she bade farewell to her son. The scene gives the account of his death a familial aftermath: the museum visitor and collector whose life was organized around objects is remembered here through his mother’s visible grief.