Istanbul

Çukurcuma & Cihangir

1 gallery · 0 museums · 0 places

About this district

Çukurcuma is downhill and off the map — the streets that fall away from İstiklal toward Tophane, too steep and too tangled for the crowds to follow. What fills them is antiques. Old furniture, chandeliers, film posters, the accumulated objects of a century of Istanbul households, spilling out of shop after shop down the slope. And in the middle of it, in a wooden corner house, Orhan Pamuk built the Museum of Innocence — 83 vitrines, one for each chapter of his novel, filled with the everyday objects of a 1970s Istanbul love affair. A museum made out of a book, set in the neighbourhood the book is about. Cihangir, the ridge above, is the café-and-writer quarter that leans into it.

Galleries

Museums

No published museums in this district yet.

Places

No published places in this district yet.

An open, columned tomb pavilion with a padlocked iron gate standing on one side and no walls around it, so the locked gate can simply be walked around.
Editorial

Nasreddin: The Trickster Everyone Claims

A padlocked gate with no walls, two rival graves, and stories told among two dozen peoples: how the wise fool of the Islamic world became a shape every culture fills with itself.

In Akşehir, a tomb said to hold Nasreddin Hodja stands in an open pavilion behind a heavy padlocked gate — with no wall on either side. It is the perfect monument to a man who may not be in it. The stories told under his name belong to more than one tradition and more than one century: Turkish, Persian, Arab, Central Asian, Uyghur. Reformist satirists, Soviet novelists, Chinese animators and UNESCO have each tried to give him a fixed home.