8. Turkey's First Fruit Soda

"Here I am exhibiting the newspaper advertisements, the commercials, and the bottles of strawberry, peach, orange, and sour cherry flavors of Turkey’s first domestic fruit soda, Meltem, in memory of our optimism and the happy-go-lucky spirit of the day." (The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk)

"Before big multinational companies came to dominate global markets, local firms in non-Western countries were sometimes inspired to produce fruit-based drinks, colas, and sodas of their own, revealing a desire to be national and traditional as well as, ironically, a longing for the trappings of “modern” life. In 1952 we lived in the Ongan Apartments in Ayazpasa, on the floor below the one where Zaim threw the Meltem launch party. This was the first home I ever lived in that had a view of the Bosphorus—through a window and the gaps between neighboring apartment blocks; maybe that’s why this photograph fills me with such a deep serenity and sense of timelessness. When I was a child in the 1950s, Istanbul had a population of about one million, and the westernized middle class was as yet quite small, so it always seemed to me that everyone knew one another in the city. The novel, the museum, and my life story have been built around these seemingly coincidental convergences." (The Innocence of Objects by Orhan Pamuk)