Nicosia/Istanbul: Ruins, Memory and Photography

When Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006, the Swedish Academy chose to announce the award by concentrating on Pamuk’s memories of Istanbul in his autobiography, Istanbul: Memories of a City (2005).1 The book, a melange of Pamuk’s autobiography and the history of Istanbul during the author’s childhood combined with flashbacks to the Ottoman past of the city, concentrates on the author’s and the city’s melancholy, or to be more precise it focuses on the Turkish equivalent of the Western idea of melancholy, huzun. There are around two hundred photographs and illustrations in the text, from Orientalist images of the city to photographs by Turkish photographers and a collection of family photographs.