Çukurcuma & Cihangir

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.