Turkey

Turkey is not merely the setting for Kemal Basmacı’s story: its shifting customs, class distinctions, and city streets shape what he can remember, where he can go, and how he understands private life. The country appears through particular Istanbul households and neighborhoods, but also through broader tensions between secularism and religious custom, Westernization and inherited codes, and mass-produced objects and intimate memory.

Social Customs and Change

The novel places its characters in a society where inherited expectations persist alongside modernization. In the 1970s, premarital chastity remained a powerful measure of a young woman’s respectability, even in affluent, Westernized circles. Urbanization and later marriage had begun to alter the practical force of the convention in some parts of Istanbul, but they had not erased its moral authority. The resulting pressure fell unevenly: young people who had formally committed to marriage could meet some tolerance, while women outside that expectation risked judgment and exclusion. Kemal’s account also describes a gendered double standard in which male fantasies about women’s sexual freedom coexist with close scrutiny of women’s conduct and appearance.

Religious practice is likewise shown as custom rather than a simple division between observance and disbelief. Kemal’s parents were secular and did not pray or fast; they understood their outlook through their attachment to Atatürk and the secular republic. Yet their family still arranged the customary sacrifice for the Feast of the Sacrifice and distributed meat and skin to the poor. Kemal’s father and the rest of the household kept away from the act itself, leaving its performance and the almsgiving to the cook and janitor. The episode shows how a public or communal ritual could remain part of family life even when its religious meaning was not actively embraced by the household.

Economic hardship forms another part of the country’s social background. Kemal’s mother recalls that Nesibe the seamstress and her family were desperately poor, while stressing that poverty was widespread in Turkey at the time. She had once recommended Nesibe to her friends as a capable and good person, and called her to sew dresses for parties and weddings. In August 1957, Nesibe worked through the night at the family’s summer home in Suadiye to finish a wedding dress. The recollection links class difference to ordinary domestic intimacy: sewing, household labor, and family visits bring people together even as their circumstances remain unequal.

Istanbul as a Personal Geography

Within Turkey, Istanbul is the landscape most thoroughly shaped by the narrator’s memory. After deciding that he must stop visiting the Merhamet Apartments and seeking Füsun there, Kemal tries to impose discipline by redrawing the city in his mind. His imagined map marks the Şanzelize Boutique, the Merhamet Apartments, a police station, Alaaddin’s shop, and Kuyulu Bostan Street as forbidden places. Red zones are absolutely barred; orange streets are permitted only in necessity, without alcohol and crossed quickly; yellow routes also require caution. His own home and Teşvikiye Mosque fall within the orange restrictions. The map turns streets into an instrument of attempted self-control, but its many boundaries also reveal how completely his lost relationship has occupied his everyday geography.

Avoidance does not keep the city free of Füsun. Kemal begins to see her likeness in crowded places and marks those locations on his mental map as well. Istanbul becomes a network of signs associated with her, and his wandering changes accordingly: he looks into the distance in the hope of encountering her apparition. The imagined sightings are brief consolations, not mistaken reunions; he knows they are products of his unhappy imagination. Still, he deliberately returns to places where they occur, allowing the city to sustain an illusion he cannot relinquish.

His search takes him into the poorer neighborhoods of the old city, including Vefa, Zeyrek, Fatih, and Kocamustafapaşa. Driving over cobbled and uneven streets, he interprets the appearance of Füsun’s ghost as a reason to remain in the neighborhood, even when he recognizes that the figure was not her. A damaged old fountain, cats in a square, political slogans and threats on walls, and people gathered in coffeehouses become part of a cityscape he experiences as enchanted by his hope. The movement also exposes a class boundary: Kemal imagines that approaching Füsun and her family requires him to spend time in, and live more like, the neighborhoods they inhabit.

Domestic Places and Shared Time

The country’s social world is rendered not only through streets but through rooms and recurring routines. At the Keskin household, an ordinary New Year’s Eve tombala game gives a family object an intimate history. In 1980, Kemal brings an antique glass associated with his grandfather, Ethem Kemal, as a surprise prize. He and Füsun had drunk whiskey from it at their last rendezvous, on the day of his engagement. The family accepts the glass among the game’s everyday prizes, but Füsun does not recognize its connection to their past. Tarık Bey later uses it as a rakı glass; Kemal, sitting at the table, cannot properly indulge the memory attached to it. Its household use and its private significance occupy the same space without becoming the same thing for everyone present.

That difference extends to the family’s possessions. Kemal observes that the Keskins’ objects seem to belong to the household as a whole, while he imagines Füsun’s clothes and belongings in a private room shared with her husband. Over time he secretly takes matchboxes, cigarette butts, saltshakers, cups, hairpins, barrettes, and other objects, later moving on to larger items and replacing some with new ones. He is ashamed of the collecting and does not want to share it. When he takes a porcelain dog from the television, he claims that the original broke at home and gives the family a replacement. The exchange lets the household continue its routine while the displaced object acquires a different role in Kemal’s private collection.

Objects, Movement, and National Setting

The objects that begin as household fixtures eventually connect Turkey to a wider geography. When Kemal assembles his collection in the Çukurcuma museum house, he sees the same kinds of saltshakers, lighters, thimbles, and other goods in flea markets and shops across the Mediterranean and beyond. He traces one familiar saltshaker from a small Istanbul factory and the Keskin table to restaurants in poorer parts of Istanbul, a halal restaurant in New Delhi, a Cairo soup kitchen, Barcelona street stalls, and a shop in Rome. The object’s repeated appearance suggests the scale of mass production: copies circulate across national borders and enter ordinary homes, where people may grow attached to them without noticing that attachment.

Kemal brings the collection together with the bedframe, mattress, and blue sheet associated with his earlier life with Füsun in the Merhamet Apartments. These objects move from private rooms and hidden storage into a museum, where their local histories sit beside the wider circulation of everyday goods. Turkey consequently appears at once as a particular place of family customs and urban class divisions, and as part of a region connected by migration, commerce, and shared material culture. In the novel, the country’s streets and household things do more than furnish the story: they preserve the differences between public custom, private memory, and the meanings a single person gives to an ordinary object.