Notes on Istanbul
Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City, at once a cultural history, an urban meditation, and a deeply personal act of witnessing, resists easy classification. It occupies space between a memoir and an ethnographic portrait, refusing the distance of observation. Istanbul is presented by Pamuk as a city shaped by memory, history and affect. And in doing so, he constructs an intimate and vulnerable portrait, an inward-facing gaze that reveals as much about the observer as it does about the observed.
Pamuk can easily be read as an observer of Istanbul, someone who walks the streets attempting to record its ruins, history and melancholic moods. But to position him only as an observer would be a mistake. His writing emerges from within the city and misses the analytical distance an outsider might claim. At the same time, Pamuk inhabits a relatively comfortable social and economic position, having grown up in a well-to-do family that shields him from harsher realities. This positionality is crucial and makes one thing very clear: Pamuk does not and cannot give us the “true” picture of Istanbul. What he offers instead is a carefully constructed perspective, something that is emotionally authoritative while remaining honest about its limits. This partiality, rather than weakening the text, becomes its methodological strength. The city Pamuk describes is filtered through memory, childhood, loss and living. Pamuk’s Istanbul is not a neutral entity but a lived environment, experienced through moods, images and intimate routines. In this sense, the book operates in a register strikingly close to ethnography, even if it resists classification as one in the strict anthropological sense. Its sustained attention to the relationship between self and the city, to the affect and collective emotional life, places it in conversation with anthropological concerns about subjectivity, belonging, and urban experience. Central to this affective landscape is Pamuk’s concept of hüzün. While the term literally translates to sadness, Pamuk develops it as a collective melancholy embedded in Istanbul as it processes and works to emerge from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent sense of political and cultural displacement. Hüzünis both collective and deeply personal. It permeates architecture, streets, weather, and everyday interactions, while still being experienced uniquely by each inhabitant. It becomes at once a source of pride and a marker of loss, combining the shame, anger and helplessness people feel about the city’s present condition, about themselves, with a stubborn attachment to the city. Pamuk insists that hüzüncannot be fully understood by outsiders because it is not a feeling that can be observed; it must be lived. While this resonates in his context, his inward lens risks romanticising exclusion, suggesting that a city’s emotional life belongs only to those who have grown up within it. Yet Pamuk’s careful acknowledgement of his limitations helps negotiate this tension. He does not claim to speak for Istanbul; he speaks from within it.
The Istanbul Pamuk describes is emphatically a city of its people. One of the book’s central claims is that Istanbul belongs to its residents, who collectively mourn its decline. This mourning is rarely conscious or articulated, unfolding instead through habits, gestures and ways of seeing. Pamuk locates hüzün in the mundane, in how people walk, dress, speak, and relate to one another, their homes, neighbourhoods, monuments, and the Bosphorus. Melancholy is not confined to moments of crisis but embedded in the ordinary rhythms of daily life.
This emphasis aligns closely with anthropological approaches that understand culture as enacted in everyday practice rather than expressed solely through formal discourse. Pamuk’s attention to the mundane reveals how collective emotions are sustained and reproduced over time. In this sense, Istanbul can be read as an ethnography of affect and vulnerability, one that privileges lived experience.
At the same time, the memoir form inevitably narrows the city’s spatial and social scope. Much of the narrative is anchored around Pamuk himself and the apartment building in which he grew up, creating an Istanbul filtered through classed memory and domestic intimacy. While economic uncertainty and social inequality are acknowledged, they remain mostly at the margins. The lives of those less fortunate than the Pamuks appear only fleetingly, glimpsed through a “steamy window,” visible only through the haze of hüzün.
This raises an unavoidable question: who gets to represent the city? Pamuk’s ability to write a memoir is both shaped and, in itself, a privilege. His Istanbul is richly textured, but unevenly illuminated. The working poor, migrants, and marginalised communities are present largely as the city’s melancholic backdrop rather than people with their own voices. While this does not invalidate Pamuk’s project, it complicates it. His Istanbul is one among the many, shaped by class, memory, and emotional investment.
Pamuk offers a deeply situated account that foregrounds vulnerability as a mode of knowing. His exploration of home, both the family apartment and the city, is not ordinary because it treats belonging as something fragile, haunted by loss and change. Pamuk does not want to capture Istanbul in a definitive sense, but articulate his relation to it. His Istanbul belongs to its people, but it is filtered through his voice, his memories and his sense of loss, resulting in a work that is neither purely literary nor ethnographic but an attempt to write a city through emotional inheritance, partial truths and the ethics of speaking from within.
Imbesat Fatima, B. A. Sociology and Anthropology, Ashoka University
