7. The Merhamet Apartments

"I’m very interested in the tradition of naming apartment buildings, a common practice in Istanbul; I like the lyrical quality of some of these names, and the many different ways in which the signs As a child, I saw many flats in Istanbul that were used mainly as storage space for the odds and ends nobody had the heart to throw out, and the toys of now grown-up children. My own personal memories inspired my descriptions of the flat where Kemal and Fusun used to meet. Perhaps this was only possible because of low rents, taxes, and heating costs. Regardless, these flats relied on heating stoves for warmth, and were consequently always cold, just like my mother’s flat, where I’d converted one of the rooms into a painting studio. My grand¬mother spent the last thirty years of her life, after her husband died and her daughters were married, in a single room in a house the size of the museum. The rooms that had once been home to an animated, joyful, crowded family life were now under an inch of dust, but the objects that furnished them had been perfectly preserved. Whenever my older brother and I used to walk into one of these eerie, quiet rooms, we always felt, with a shiver, that the objects were communicating with each other." (The Innocence of Objects by Orhan Pamuk)