Teşvikiye is the Istanbul neighborhood where Kemal’s domestic life, family history, and longing for Füsun become inseparable from the streets around him. Its large family apartment overlooks Teşvikiye Mosque; nearby, the Merhamet Apartments offer Kemal a former study retreat and later a refuge for remembering Füsun. The neighborhood also contains the routes he tries to forbid himself, the home he watches from a distance, and the scenes of funerals that teach him how private grief can inhabit public space.

Family Homes and Social Boundaries

Kemal’s mother recalls a distant, complicated family connection between the two households. Füsun’s grandmother and mother were not, strictly speaking, blood relatives of Kemal’s family, but his mother had long insisted that they be addressed as aunts. The women lived in the backstreets of Teşvikiye and were desperately poor. In earlier years, Kemal’s mother had supported Nesibe, who went from house to house among Istanbul’s affluent neighborhoods looking for work as a seamstress, and sometimes called her to sew a dress for a party or wedding. That history of care soured after Nesibe encouraged her sixteen-year-old daughter to enter a beauty contest: Kemal’s mother considered the decision shameful, while Nesibe took pride in it. The dispute gives Teşvikiye a social geography as well as a familial one, bringing an affluent household and impoverished relations into uneasy proximity.

The family apartment is a durable point of orientation for Kemal. Apart from his years in America, he has spent his life in the large home whose sitting room and wide balcony look toward Teşvikiye Mosque. His mother’s rooms, the balcony, and the view down toward the mosque acquire new meanings as family circumstances change. The neighborhood is not simply the setting of his childhood; it is the familiar ground against which grief and absence register.

The Merhamet Apartments and Everyday Routes

At 131 Teşvikiye Avenue, the Merhamet Apartments contain a flat belonging to Kemal’s mother. Before going to America, Kemal used it as a hideout where he could study and listen to music; later, he still went there at lunchtime, between two and four, to shut himself away and work. When Füsun asks where to leave his money, he gives her that address and whispers that the flat is number four, on the second floor. The apartment thus shifts from private retreat to a place tied to their meeting and the beginning of his emotional turmoil.

After that encounter, Kemal buys a yellow jug on impulse. It remains on the family dining table for twenty years, and touching its handle brings back the misery of those days and the silent sadness with which his mother watched him at supper. When he asks his mother for the Merhamet Apartments key, he gives work noise as his reason for wanting to return. She hands him the building and flat keys, tied together with a red ribbon, and asks him to look for a missing vase. The practical errand and the concealed purpose meet in a familiar object and a familiar address.

Teşvikiye’s streets also preserve Kemal’s routes of desire. From Alaaddin’s shop, where he buys a cheap baby doll for Füsun, he walks toward Kuyulu Bostan Street, passing places associated with his childhood, including the coffeehouse where his friends played cards and the schoolyard where they played football. Rather than approach Füsun’s family home, he stops far enough away to see its lit second-floor windows through the chestnut tree. He knows the visit could create a scandal, yet the sight of the house intensifies his jealousy and his wish to know whether Füsun is with someone else.

A City Rewritten by Absence

When Kemal tries to prevent himself from returning to places associated with Füsun, he turns the neighborhood into a private system of prohibitions. On a modified map of Nişantaşı, he marks the Şanzelize Boutique, the Merhamet Apartments, the police station, Alaaddin’s corner, and Kuyulu Bostan Street as red zones from which he is absolutely barred. Orange streets are allowed only in an emergency, if he has not been drinking and can cross them quickly. Yellow routes remain dangerous because ordinary travel can set off recollection: even his accustomed path from Satsat to the Merhamet Apartments, and the route Füsun took home each day from the boutique, seem strewn with emotional traps. His childhood places are mapped too, including the vacant lot where lambs were sacrificed and the corner of the mosque courtyard where he once watched Füsun from afar.

The prohibitions do not hold. When Kemal learns that Füsun is not at the boutique, he makes his way toward her home despite his attempt to avoid the surrounding streets. Later, after her family’s telephone line is disconnected, he crosses streets he had marked orange and goes to Kuyulu Bostan Street. The curtains have been removed, no one answers the door, and the janitor’s wife tells him that the family has moved. Teşvikiye has not changed its streets for him, but the signs he reads in them have changed: a known route now delivers the fact of Füsun’s disappearance.

In his search, Kemal’s memory extends beyond Teşvikiye into Istanbul’s poorer neighborhoods. He wanders through Vefa, Zeyrek, Fatih, and Kocamustafapaşa, where imagined sightings of Füsun make unfamiliar streets feel enchanted. Those wanderings show how the emotional map formed around Teşvikiye expands across the city: places are measured by the chance of encountering her, or by the memories that make such an encounter seem possible.

Funerals, Return, and Recollected Time

From the family balcony, funerals at Teşvikiye Mosque are part of the neighborhood’s daily public life. As a child, Kemal watches the processions and plays at carrying an imagined coffin with heavy bolsters from the divan, imitating the bearers’ swaying walk. When a famous person dies, visitors sometimes come to the apartment not to see the family but to watch the funeral. The ceremony, which might offer consolation or a final act of respect, can become a diversion for onlookers. Teşvikiye’s closeness to the mosque makes death visible, but does not guarantee that those who witness it understand its private weight.

That distance collapses at Kemal’s father’s funeral. On an icy, snowy day, Kemal’s mother watches from the balcony as the coffin is carried from the mosque morgue to the funeral stone and then toward the hearse. Overcome by grief, she faints before she can join the procession. Kemal shakes hands with the mourners and searches the crowd for Füsun and her parents; when he sees that they have not come, he feels buried alongside his father. He then leaves his family and takes a taxi to the Merhamet Apartments, where the familiar smell and Füsun’s pencil and unwashed teacup console him. The nearby neighborhood holds two absences at once: his father’s death in the public view of the mosque, and Füsun’s absence in the private objects he carries to bed.

Teşvikiye’s meanings are therefore layered rather than fixed. Its streets can be routes to work, childhood play, or an unwise search; its apartments can shelter family life or preserve the traces of a lost relationship; its mosque can frame a spectacle or a devastating farewell. In Kemal’s recollections, the neighborhood becomes legible through repeated acts of looking, walking, avoiding, and returning. Familiar geography acquires the pressure of memory, so that even an ordinary street or balcony can hold a whole private history.