The Museum of Innocence
— — a novel turned into rooms you can walk through.
Not only on a wall.
“A small house museum on a sloping street in the Çukurcuma quarter of Istanbul, opened in 2012 by the novelist Orhan Pamuk to hold the objects of his novel of the same name. Cigarette stubs in a long vitrine, hairpins, a porcelain dog, the salt-cellars of a 1970s dinner table. The novel and the museum are two ways of telling the one story, and the building keeps its own slow weather.
The Museum of Innocence, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Museum of Innocence — Masumiyet Müzesi — occupies a nineteenth-century wooden house on Çukurcuma Caddesi in the Çukurcuma neighbourhood of Beyoğlu, on the European side of Istanbul. It was opened in April 2012 by the novelist Orhan Pamuk, who bought the building in 1999 and developed it in parallel with his novel of the same name, published in 2008. The museum and the novel share characters, objects, and rooms; the book even contains an admission ticket good for one entry. In 2014 the museum received the European Museum of the Year Award.
The building is a narrow four-storey timber-framed house, painted oxblood red, typical of the late-Ottoman housing stock that survives in pockets of Çukurcuma and Cihangir. The renovation, designed with the architects Ihsan Bilgin and Cem Yücel, kept the original façade and stairs and rebuilt the interior around 83 vitrines, one for each chapter of the novel. The objects inside — 4,213 cigarette butts in the entry case, ticket stubs, lottery tickets, a quince grater, lipsticks, the yellow Chevrolet number plate — were collected over more than a decade from Istanbul's second-hand dealers, many of whom worked the same Çukurcuma street.
The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10:00 to 18:00 (until 21:00 on Thursdays), and closed Mondays. The standard adult admission is around 200 Turkish lira; readers carrying a copy of the novel that contains the printed ticket can use it for one free entry. Photography is not permitted on the upper floors. The space is small — a single vertical promenade from the cigarette vitrine on the ground floor up to Kemal's attic — and most visitors spend between one and two hours inside. The nearest tram stop is Tophane on the T1 line, about 600 metres downhill.