The Creation of the Museum of Innocence is the transformation of Kemal Basmacı’s private hoard of objects associated with Füsun into a museum housed in the Keskin Family's Home in Çukurcuma. It gives architectural form to his conviction that ordinary things can preserve the texture of lost happiness: the building becomes both a public collection and, when Kemal sleeps among its contents, a place he tries to make a home again. The project turns private grief into an arrangement others can see, without making that grief disappear.

From private consolation to a museum

Kemal’s collecting begins as a response to the knowledge that his happiest moments with Füsun belong to the past. Looking back, he understands that naming one instant as the happiest also means accepting that it will not return. He believes the pain can be borne by possessing something from that instant, and that mementos preserve colors, textures, images, and pleasures more faithfully than the people who shared them. The collection is therefore not an incidental hobby: it is his attempt to hold on to a vanished present.

This attachment takes shape through small things encountered in Füsun’s life. Among the objects Kemal carries away are matchboxes, cigarette butts, saltshakers, coffee cups, hairpins, barrettes, ashtrays, cups, and slippers. At first he takes items that are unlikely to be noticed missing; later, he begins replacing more conspicuous household belongings with new ones. The china dogs on the television become one visible sign of this practice. Knowing that the family has become aware of his interest, he explains the replacement of a broken dog as a purchase from the Spice Bazaar. Collecting moves between secrecy, substitution, and the effort to keep the household’s objects within reach.

Acquiring the Keskin house

After returning from Paris, where he had found solace in small and often empty museums, Kemal visits Nesibe the seamstress and tells her that he wants to buy the house itself, including everything in it. The request follows his recognition that the building could commemorate Füsun more fully than individual souvenirs could. He offers Nesibe another apartment in Nişantaşı, near her former home. A month later, she deeds to him the entire building in Çukurcuma, including the ground-floor flat and its movable contents. On the advice of the lawyer who had handled Füsun’s divorce, they inventory the contents and have the document notarized.

The transfer does not make leaving emotionally simple for Nesibe. Although she has a new apartment, she is in no hurry to move; she oversees new lighting and furnishes the apartment carefully, yet continues to tell Kemal that she cannot leave the house and its memories. Her attachment makes clear that the building is not an empty container awaiting a new purpose. It has been a lived family space, and its history cannot be separated from the objects Kemal wants to preserve.

Private collecting and public judgment

The museum project also changes the social meaning of Kemal’s collection. In the 1990s, personal museums are nearly nonexistent in Istanbul, and collectors regard their own obsessions, as well as one another’s, with embarrassment and contempt. When Nesibe moves and the architect İhsan begins converting the Keskin house into a museum, people gossip that Kemal is making a private museum in the European manner and emphasize that he is rich. Kemal hopes the explanation of wealth and museum-making will spare him the suspicion that his collecting exposes a hidden psychological wound.

At Hıfzı Bey’s urging, Kemal attends a meeting of the Lovers of Collectible Objects Association, described as the first such group in Turkey. He arrives hoping to encounter reminders of Füsun that might belong in his account, but the collectors’ suspicious, mostly silent reception makes him feel like an outsider among people already treated as social outcasts. Hıfzı Bey explains that the collectors resent seeing even a rich man turn to objects to soothe a troubled heart. In time, when Kemal’s love for Füsun becomes common knowledge, the collectors begin to help him and share their own struggles to bring their collections into public view. The museum thus emerges within a community that is at once ashamed of collecting and seeking a way to make it visible.

From stored objects to a built collection

Before moving the objects kept at the Merhamet Apartments to Çukurcuma, Kemal photographs the collection filling much of the room where he and Füsun had made love twenty years earlier. He then brings it together with what has accumulated in the museum house: old Keskin possessions, objects gathered during his travels, things taken from rubbish dens, items supplied by other collectors, and objects received from witnesses to his story. The scale and variety of the collection shift it from a private store of keepsakes into a deliberately assembled record.

Kemal sees ordinary manufactured objects as part of a shared material life extending beyond the household that once used them. A saltshaker from a small Istanbul factory, for example, appears in restaurants in poorer districts of Istanbul and in places as distant as New Delhi, Cairo, Barcelona, and Rome. Similar lighters and saltshakers turn up in flea markets and shops across different cities. Their repeated manufacture and circulation show how familiar objects pass through countless homes, where people live with them intimately and later forget them. In the museum, their commonplace character is precisely what can connect Kemal’s personal memories to lives beyond his own.

Living inside the museum

The objects do not remain arranged only for visitors. Kemal brings the bedframe, musty mattress, and blue sheet on which he and Füsun made love at the Merhamet Apartments to the museum and stores them in the attic. The room, once a dark and mildewed place for the water tank, is made clean and bright, with a skylight open to the stars. Kemal uses a new door on Dalgıç Street, climbs the staircase, and falls asleep on the bed among the things that remind him of Füsun.

This act reverses the building’s conversion. Kemal recognizes that while some people fill their own homes with objects until they become museums, he has turned another family’s house into a museum and is now trying, through his bed, room, and presence, to turn it back into a house. In spring and summer he spends more nights in the attic, in a space designed to let him see the building’s upper and lower levels and remain among every object in the collection. His mother accepts the arrangement as the only way he can bear losing Füsun. For Kemal, the museum makes time spatial: the gathered objects give separate moments a place together, even as their arrangement cannot restore the life from which those moments came.