When is a museum not a museum? When it’s the Museum of Innocence, of course.
First a novel and now a beautifully presented evocation of the content of that novel, the Museum of Innocence (Masumiyet Caddesi, Cihangir Caddesi, closed Mondays, admission TL300, free to people who have ticket in back of book) is probably best thought of as a vast, extended piece of conceptual art in multimedia format. The book itself is something of a doorstopper despite the fact that it rests on the fairly flimsy story of a man’s eight-year-long obsession with a woman that plays out with little drama right up until the end. Now onto that story has been added this extraordinary house-sized “museum” that seeks to encapsulate aspects of the book in traditional museum-style glass cases full of objects.
Each of these vitrines is a little work of art in itself, as is, surprisingly, the wall on the ground floor that is decorated with 4,213 cigarette butts supposedly from cigarettes smoked by the fictitious heroine, Fusun, alongside tiny hand-written quotations from the book. From a distance it looks fleetingly like a board onto which innumerable dead butterflies have been pinned, a Victorian convention that would itself have been most at home in a museum.
Only on the topmost floor does the Museum of Innocence finally give in to the ways of conventional museums when it showcases some of the original hand-written pages from the book’s manuscript. These are so scrawled, drawn and doodled upon that it’s hard to believe even the author could have deciphered them. Savour them while you may, though, since computers have rendered such examinable rough drafts pretty much a thing of the past.
Transport info
No public transport actually passes the museum so you will first have to get to Çukurcuma or Galatasaray and then walk. It’s no more than 15 minutes’ downhill stroll away from İstiklal Caddesi and could easily be visited on a detour when walking down Boğazkesen Caddesi towards the Galataport.
