The 1990s collecting period in Istanbul

The 1990s collecting period in Istanbul is the point at which Kemal Basmacı’s private accumulation of Füsun’s traces takes shape as a public project, the Museum of Innocence. His search for objects brings him into contact with a largely hidden community of collectors: people whose crowded homes and unpopular obsessions make collecting appear less like scholarship than an embarrassing wound. The period’s defining reversal is that the very things collectors had been mocked for keeping could, once selected and displayed, become a source of shared memory and pride.

The Istanbul collecting scene

In the early months of 1992, Kemal searched among Istanbul specialists in film paraphernalia for posters, lobby photographs, and ticket stubs from films he and Füsun had seen during the summer of 1976. The materials were intended for display in the Museum of Innocence, but the search also revealed how little public respect collectors received. After bargaining at length, Kemal bought lobby photographs from Hıfzı Bey, who was pleased that someone valued his collection yet saddened to part with objects he cherished. His account of being mocked for filling his home with photographs and films shows the social cost attached to the hobby: collecting was treated not as a contribution to knowledge but as a private vice.

Hıfzı Bey described collectors whose rooms had become so densely packed with photographs, posters, newspaper cuttings, and magazines that their families abandoned the homes. Some collectors, most of whom had never married, were then free to keep acquiring objects until their houses became rubbish dumps, difficult even to enter. The heaps made the collections both materially abundant and practically inaccessible: a collector might possess what Kemal sought but be unable to retrieve it. With Hıfzı Bey’s help, Kemal entered several of these notorious houses and sifted through their detritus for material that could be brought into view.

From private accumulation to a museum

The objects Kemal recovered extended beyond film memorabilia. He assembled Istanbul views, postcards, cinema tickets, restaurant menus he had not thought to save at the time, rusty tin cans, yellowed newspaper pages, company-logo paper bags, medicine boxes, bottles, celebrity photographs, and images of ordinary Istanbul residents. Their value lay not only in their subjects: together they spoke of the city where Kemal and Füsun had lived. The collection turned the overlooked residue of everyday life into evidence of a particular place and a lost shared world.

This work grew out of a personal practice of attaching memory to things. Kemal understands mementos as preserving the colors, textures, images, and pleasures of an experience, sometimes more faithfully than the people who shared it. He had also gathered objects connected with Füsun, including her orphaned earring, lipstick, and hairpin. By the time the collection was brought together, its sources included objects stored at the Merhamet Apartments, the Keskin family’s old possessions, material found in Istanbul’s hoarded collections, and items supplied by members of the Lovers of Collectible Objects Association and other witnesses to Kemal’s story.

The planned museum provoked the same embarrassment that surrounded collecting more generally. After Nesibe the seamstress moved to Nişantaşı and architect İhsan began work on the Keskin house, people derided Kemal for making a private museum in the European manner and pointed to his wealth. Kemal hoped the label of wealthy patron would make his collecting seem like public-minded celebration rather than evidence of an unspoken psychological wound. The explanation did not erase the tension: the museum’s authority depended on objects gathered through an intensely personal attachment, even as Kemal sought a socially acceptable frame for that attachment.

Collectors, shame, and recognition

At Hıfzı Bey’s insistence, Kemal attended a meeting of the Lovers of Collectible Objects Association, recently established as Turkey’s first such group. The meeting took place in a small wedding salon, but it offered no immediate sense of fellowship. Collectors he already knew by name watched him with suspicion and treated him more harshly than they treated an ordinary Istanbul collector. Kemal felt like an outsider among people who were themselves pushed to the margins; Hıfzı Bey suggested that seeing a rich man use objects to soothe a troubled heart only deepened their revulsion and despair.

That reception changed as Kemal’s love for Füsun became common knowledge. The collectors who had first kept their distance began helping him and sharing their own struggles to bring their work out of concealment and into public life. Their movement from suspicion to cooperation makes the period more than a story of one collector’s acquisition. Kemal’s museum project created a possible public destination for objects whose owners had been taught to regard them, and themselves, with shame.

Memory, space, and public display

The museum’s design gives physical form to Kemal’s idea of memory. He wanted visitors to be able to see the entire collection and all its display cases from wherever they stood, so that the objects—and the story carried by them—would be present at once. In this arrangement, the museum does not simply place old things in rooms; it tries to suspend the sense of a line of time that begins in the present and ends in loss. The objects make time spatially accessible, while the whole collection gathers scattered moments into a viewable world.

Kemal brought the bedframe, musty mattress, and blue sheet from the Merhamet Apartments, where he and Füsun had made love, into the converted museum house, placing them in its attic. He began spending nights there, amid the objects that recalled Füsun, and imagined the building as both museum and home. His mother accepted the arrangement as the only way he could bear the loss, and contributed old clothes and personal belongings of her own. The museum thus drew private and family memory into a setting intended for public visitors, while Kemal’s sleeping in the attic pulled the institution back toward domestic life.

Kemal’s instructions for the museum extended this transformation to its visitors and staff. Guards were to explain the history of his collection, his love for Füsun, and the meanings attached to her possessions; their work was to give the museum the dignity of a place of reverence, not merely to police behavior. At the same time, the museum was to welcome lovers who had nowhere else to kiss. Kemal also wanted a map at the end of the novel to guide readers through Istanbul, and a ticket in each copy of the book for free first admission. The collecting period therefore culminates in a design that links objects, narrative, city streets, and visitor experience: private recollection is made available for public encounter, without entirely surrendering its intimacy.