Istanbul: Memories and the City

Istanbul - A Tribute to a city ( original title: İstanbul - Hatıralar ve Şehir ) is an autobiographical novel by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk in 2003 In October 2006, he was in favor of the Swedish Academy that he was " on the quest for the melancholic soul. have his hometown Istanbul found new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures ", awarded the Nobel prize for Literature.

Background

Istanbul is the most populous city of Turkey and the center for culture, commerce, finance and media. The urban area stretches along the north shore of the Marmara Sea on both sides of the Bosphorus, the strait between the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Due to this situation, both in the European Thrace and Anatolia in Asia Istanbul is the only metropolis in the world that is situated on two continents. The urban settlement area is home to about 13.7 million inhabitants, which occupies the fourth place among the most populous cities in the world. With two central terminal stations, numerous Fernbusbahnhöfen, two major airports and a distinctive waterway Istanbul is the largest transportation hub in the country. His transit location between two continents and two marine areas makes it an important station of the international logistics.

The metropolis can since the founding of their original neighborhoods look back on 2600 years of history, in which she served three great empires as its capital. The architecture is characterized by ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary architectural styles last. It combines elements of the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans and Turks together to form a cityscape. Because of this uniqueness of the historic center of the UNESCO declared World Heritage Site. For a long time Istanbul was an important center of Orthodox Christianity and Sunni Islam. It is the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch and has numerous mosques, Cemevi, churches and synagogues. In 2010, Istanbul European Capital of Culture.

Content

In his memoirs he writes about his life in Istanbul and focuses in particular on the degree of cultural change that Turkey has shaken, and the seemingly endless struggle between modernity and the past. He describes the deep melancholy (Turkish hüzün ) of its inhabitants, which is not an integral part of the everyday culture of Istanbul. Orhan Pamuk understands hüzün as "the feeling, with the infected to intense way in the last century Istanbul and its inhabitants ." In addition, Pamuk mourns in his novel about the lost common family tradition. The book is packed with photographs of the "Istanbul in the early 1950s to the Present", probably in large part by Ara Güler.

Criticism

The historian Norman Davies threw Pamuk ago, his view of Istanbul was " completely turkozentrisch " and " marked by a remarkable historical myopia ". Pamuk was "a writer who accepts only the recent past in the view and everything else fades. " "The past, it seems, is not enough back further than the world of his parents and grandparents. "