Maçka–Taşlık

Maçka–Taşlık is a recurring meeting place in Kemal’s search for Füsun, where conversations with her confidante Ceyda unfolded against a view of Dolmabahçe. Its significance is both practical and mnemonic: Kemal went there for news of Füsun, then discovered that he had preserved the view in photographs, making the landscape a quiet record of his longing.

Meetings with Ceyda

During the years when Kemal was seeking Füsun, he and Ceyda met in Maçka, Taşlık. Ceyda was Füsun’s closest confidante and could tell him what she knew of Füsun’s life. As Ceyda spoke, Kemal would look toward Dolmabahçe. The place thus joined two kinds of attention: Ceyda’s spoken account of the absent woman and Kemal’s gaze across the view.

These meetings mattered because information about Füsun reached Kemal indirectly. Maçka–Taşlık was not a place where he encountered Füsun herself; it was where he listened to someone who knew her. The landscape framed the intervals of waiting and inquiry rather than resolving them.

The view as a collected memory

Much later, while speaking with Ceyda and Orhan Pamuk about photographs, Kemal remarked that he had accumulated many pictures of the Dolmabahçe view from Maçka. The discovery gave material form to a repeated experience: he had been looking at the same prospect while hearing news of Füsun, and had preserved it again and again without apparently recognizing the collection’s pattern at the time.

The photographs make Maçka–Taşlık more than a setting for conversation. Each image holds a view associated with a particular practice of remembrance: returning to meet Ceyda, listening, and looking outward while Füsun remained elsewhere. The accumulation links an ordinary urban prospect to the duration of Kemal’s search.

Ceyda’s later revelation

The later conversation at Ceyda’s home also brought an unexpected photograph into Kemal’s account of Füsun. Ceyda showed him a picture from the finals of the 1973 Milliyet Beauty Contest, in which Hakan Serinkan was whispering the cultural questions Füsun would be asked onstage. Kemal had not seen the photograph before. At the sight of it, his face turned pale and he fell silent; Ceyda eventually gave him the picture.

That discovery occurred during a conversation shaped by the memories and photographs exchanged between Ceyda and Kemal, not at Maçka–Taşlık itself. It nevertheless sharpens the place’s narrative role: the meetings there had made Ceyda a channel to Füsun’s past, while the photographs of the view preserved Kemal’s own repeated acts of listening and looking. Maçka–Taşlık holds the pattern of those encounters in retrospect, a familiar view made meaningful by the absence around which the conversations turned.