Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

VOICE SINGS IN OWN LANGUAGE

"He asked if it were possible to make up a story that had no moral or

"meaning.

"We discussed how the ideal story should begin innocently,

"like a fairy tale..." DISTANT SIREN

"..be frightening like a nightmare in the middle and conclude sadly,

"like a love story ending in separation."

"Somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, there lived another Orhan,

"so much like me that he could pass for my own twin.

"I'm nothing but a corpse now.

"A body at the bottom of a well.

"Though I drew my last breath long ago and my heart has stopped

"beating, no-one apart from that

"vile murderer knows what's happened to me."

Orhan Pamuk is one of the few Turks known far beyond their country,

along with the moderniser Ataturk and today's iron fist,

President Erdogan. CHORAL MUSIC

Pamuk was thrust to fame by two momentous events.

SHOUTING

He was put on trial for speaking out

about the fate of Turkey's Armenians...

..and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

APPLAUSE

You have made your native city an indispensable literary territory,

equal to Dostoevsky's St Petersburg, Joyce's Dublin or Proust's Paris,

a place where readers from all corners of the world can live another life

just as credible as their own.

Pamuk's own sense of leading a double life, and the tensions he

lives under, spill over into a museum he's created,

a museum of history, mystery and longing.

CROWS CAW

This is the story of a writer's love affair with his changing city.

"In a city, you can be alone in a crowd.

"In fact, what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the

"strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes." CATS MEOW

DOOR KNOCKER

Oh, hello! Hello! LAUGHTER

Very nice to see you. Great to see you. Great to be here.

Please, come in. Thank you.

My God, what a view!

But it's not sharp today.

I like Istanbul's winter better than summer.

Why? Probably because of my childhood.

I like the black and white Istanbul, the melancholic Istanbul.

Around early 2000, this was only an office, then...I was married

then, and I used to walk here, just like every man had an office,

come to the office, go back.

But after political pressures, death threats,

the Turkish security police advised me,

why don't I live in the same place where I write?

Which I also believe good police advice,

because if you write in the same space that you have your sleep,

then your dreams are combined with the texts.

Which I'm... HE LAUGHS

That is, that's such an Orhan line,

"the dreams are combined with the texts"!

Yeah, or intertwined with the texts.

I like it when you're dreaming, and I wake up always after...

..like my father, after the age of 50, I never have eight hours of sleep,

I wake up in the middle of the night, and with my pyjamas on,

I tick, tick, tick, sit at my table.

And then I have also this.

What's the name of that building? Cihangir Mosque.

Before this, there was a monastery here.

Istanbul was only there.

The Topkapi is there, of course.

Then there was not even a road - you come from there with a boat.

Our conservative government, although they're conservatives,

they are destroying a lot of old buildings,

they are destroying our history.

But the only thing they're preserving are the mosques.

But they don't care about the rest.

They don't think that history, our identities,

are related to old neighbourhoods, old architecture.

But I don't want to complain. Look at this.

You don't want to complain, but you ARE complaining.

This is very contradictory. Yes.

This is your way. Yes, this is the balance of truth in my life! LAUGHTER

I want to capture the beauty of the life,

but how can you not complain when

you see they are destroying that beauty?

What is the novel you're currently writing?

I'm writing a historical novel that takes place in 1900,

and there is plague, Ottomans, Europeans, imposition of quarantine.

There is also boys and girls and love and the richness,

complexity of life in my part of the world.

Quarantine is a horrible thing.

People come to your house - "Just leave your house, we're burning

"this, we're burning that!" A Turkish doctor would want

quarantine, so that he saves the lives of his people,

while the people DON'T want that.

I like these ironies.

Saving the lives of people who hate you, who don't want you,

who don't want your ideas, your science.

And this is the decline of Ottoman Empire -

even the normal person in Ottoman Empire understood that the empire

would not live long. So, also, this feeling of

decline, death,

Europe is doing so much and we cannot produce or this or that...

These are my subjects.

PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

"An old pharmacist was suffering from insomnia and memory loss.

"He invented a drug he hoped would cure him of his affliction.

"And it did.

"This caused a certain furore -

"naturally people were excited at the idea that a Turk had finally

"invented something.

"But we were never to know if, having cured himself of insomnia,

"he also found his way back to the heavenly garden of memory,

"for the old pharmacist slept on and on, never to wake again."

In my early years, I trashed Ottoman culture,

till I went to New York and I was

influenced by the vast American museums,

university libraries.

Then I began to ask myself, "Well, what is my identity?"

You grew up here in this extraordinary city,

and yet you have to go to America to discover that there is a history.

Yes.

After that, I paid attention to old culture and avant-garde literature

as well.

A person who was, say, reading TS Eliot and also Ottoman poetry

was the ideal for me.

Pamuk's early book, The White Castle, was about just this -

the meeting and merging of east and west, Ottoman and European.

A Western slave has an Eastern owner who wants to learn all he knows

about science. They gradually swap roles.

There are no Eastern persons, there are no Western persons,

there are no secular persons,

there are no heavily fundamentalist or religious persons -

we all have it in our hearts.

In his breakthrough book, My Name Is Red, Pamuk blends Ottoman history,

the murder mystery and the post-modern.

In the 16th century, the Sultan's painters at the palace illustrate

books with jewel-like stylised miniatures, like these.

This is one of the scene of scenes that is imitated all the time,

all the time. They feel threatened but intrigued by the new art

infiltrating from the West, with its realism and perspective.

The Venetian artist Bellini was sent to the Sultan's court.

Bellini does a painting of a scribe.

Ottoman miniaturist. Look at that painting.

And then they do a Muslim version of Bellini.

They put them together and copied - look at the hand.

They added something here, right? Yeah. What have they added?

They added a miniature.

"If, under the influence of the Franks, we paint, embracing

"our individuality, we might resemble ourselves,

"but we won't be ourselves."

TRADITIONAL MUSIC PLAYS

So, this is the outer wall of Topkapi Palace.

Yeah.

I remember the first time that I was around here,

because it was something interesting and strange.

Maybe I liked the "otherness".

"Death occupied my mind -

"the silence of death -

"but as I passed through the gate where countless pashas had been

"executed, the guards acted as if they didn't even see us.

"My parents bought some basic pocket books,

"one of which was about Ottoman art,

"and I used to copy the Ottoman miniatures.

"When I was 13, I could tell the difference between 16th century and

"18th-century miniatures."

A murder scene.

Between the ages of seven and 22, I thought that I would be a painter.

The desire to paint never stopped.

But I killed, in a way, killed the painter in me, and started writing.

"You will examine books that no-one else has seen,

"you will gaze upon incredible pictures and pages of gold, and like

"hunters, you will track the spore of your prey - the murderer."

I'll show you the places that matter to me for my novel. Yeah.

"I am a tree and I am quite lonely.

"I weep in the rain.

"For the sake of Allah, listen to what I have to say.

"I don't want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning."

This was built in...

It's never one century. Everyone adds something.

But what counts is these courtyards - the more you go in,

the more you're at the heart of the palace.

In 1995, I'm writing My Name Is Red.

I came here. I was not that famous then, and a guy said,

"Aren't you Orhan Pamuk?" I was not that famous.

"Yes." "Oh, are you going to write a book set here?"

And I said a bit nervously, a bit feeling upset about it, and I said,

"Yes!" HE LAUGHS

That day, I entered the Treasury, because, in my book,

they also entered that place.

"We fearfully and silently, as in a dream, passed the Treasury." CLOCK TICKS

"I felt that I'd seen this place before and knew it well.

"Yes, I was in the presence of the head treasurer -

"he was gazing upon the illustrations that rested on a

"reading table, where the clerk had

"placed them after taking them from me."

CLOCK CHIMES

"The pictures remained with the head treasurer,

"and I passed through the Gate of Salutation,

"which had earlier felt like the gate of Heaven."

It's problematic, displaying miniatures -

once they're exposed to light,

they die, they fade away.

This place always motivates my imagination.

I like old things.

And not because old things represent, for me, national

identity, national past - but they

evoke other worlds, other places,

and also places that I feel I have strong affinity to,

but I don't know why. And my novels are also about that.

My flat is there, right at Cihangir Mosque.

As I showed Topkapi from my flat,

now I'm showing you my flat from Topkapi.

SHIP HORN BLOWS

"Just as the doors of houses are closed of an evening and the city is

"left to darkness, painting was also abandoned.

"It was mercilessly forgotten that we'd once looked upon our world

"quite differently.

"The miniaturists did not grow angry and revolt,

"but like old men who quietly succumbed to an illness,

"they gradually accepted the

"situation with humble grief and resignation."

Freud says, what is repressed comes back in disguise.

I am the past of Turkey coming back

in postmodern clothes.

Living in this city for 60 years is seeing everything change,

everything change, everything change.

Especially in our neighbourhoods,

we used to play with my brother, this game.

"So, what was this shop before?" "Something, a sandwich shop."

"But before that?" You know, "A shoe shop."

"Before that?" "A bank." "What about before that?"

"Oh, yes, that...!"

Living in a city, after a while, you learn everything,

and that's your life.

MELANCHOLY PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

Pamuk's secular, upper-middle-class family saw

themselves as looking to the future and to Europe.

They were followers of Turkey's modernising leader, Ataturk,

and sent their children to westernised schools.

They all lived in this upmarket area of Istanbul, Nisantasi.

It's unrecognisable now from those days - though their house still

stands. Welcome! Hello!

I'm here to greet you in your own home!

This is my daughter. Hello. Very nice to meet you, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

We are now in front of the family apartment.

I lived here a lot of years, maybe 30 years. But it's...

..it has, full of so many memories.

Isn't it strange to have a building named after you?

OK, it's a bit embarrassing, but let me explain,

that's the tradition here.

The family name was put in front of the apartment building as a sort of

address. This is a very posh area, very upmarket area, isn't it?

Yes. Yes, that's one of the reasons that I'm not living here.

The spirit of the place is lost.

It used to be old two-storey and three-storey-high buildings.

A lot of consulates, too, here, gardens...

There used to be wooden houses here,

then those houses were all torn down.

What's your memories of this building?

During my childhood, we lived in another apartment building, just one

street away. We visited relatives

here and I knew that it was very central to my father's work,

especially for The Museum Of Innocence,

and The Black Book.

"Memories you thought you'd lost forever came flooding back into your

"mind - memories you'd forgotten you forgot.

"It's like being a child again and pulling out an old cabinet to find

"behind it all these coloured pencils,

"combs and lavender marbles you'd forgotten you lost."

This is probably my first photo in my life.

This is my father. HE CHUCKLES

These are all you, yeah? Yes!

This is my mother and my brother.

I'm not jealous of their intimacy, Alan. Really?! LAUGHTER

This is at the balcony of Pamuk Apartments,

and one of these...these buildings are still there.

"We lived on the fourth floor, but I had the run of the entire building

"from the time I was old enough to climb off my mother's lap,

"and can recall that on each floor there was at least one piano.

"When my last bachelor uncle put his newspaper down long enough to get

married and his new wife moved into the first-floor apartment from which

"she was to spend the next half-century gazing out of the

"window, she brought her piano with her."

Who is that? This is me.

"No-one ever played on this piano, or any of the others.

"I assumed pianos were places for exhibiting photographs."

My grandfather died early.

My grandmother was the powerful person carrying a set of keys and

shouting at everyone and scolding,

although she never left the apartment building.

But she was controlling the whole population,

and her cook was the cook for the whole family.

He would shout, "The dinner is ready!"

And then you would hear all the uncles, cousins, various floors,

would hear that the family's gathering for dinner.

I loved that!

This was family life, normal life. Family life is always, for me,

fighting, arguing, shouting.

These photos that I'm showing you are actually taken, were taken

in the years when family were troubled in business.

My father and my uncles were losing a lot of money, and my grandmother

was crying all the time.

But it also...

..but they continued the sort of fancy family life we had.

And my mother tells me that I am always an optimistic person,

open to the world, that's how I was.

And after so many intimidations and drama,

I'm still in a happy morning day,

open to the world and happy, and

frankly believe that everything will be fine.

This is the sad Orhan - probably there are some worries,

I know what's in my head. I still have this chemistry, angry,

"I'll have revenge," "I'll show you, I'll show you!" I'm saying.

I know what I'm thinking. I'm sometimes like that now!

Shall we go upstairs?

"I'll give you something back!

"Agh...!"

So, this is my archive... Your archive.

Then we go here.

My cousins, my grandfather,

my father, uncles, all had mathematical minds.

I was terrorised with my uncle asking me mathematical quizzes,

even when he catches me in the stairs.

Maybe I wanted to be an artist to run away from the terrors of

mathematics. For me, a house is

where you should have access to your library.

"Sitting rooms where not meant to be places where you could hope to sit

"comfortably." CLOCK TICKS

"They were little museums designed to demonstrate to a hypothetical

"visitor that the householders were westernised."

His Museum Of Innocence is both a novel about obsessive love and a

real museum in Istanbul,

which displays all the objects which the characters in the novel touch,

see and hear.

It's a collection of objects of desire.

When I was making the museum, every day with my bodyguard behind me,

I walked this 11-minute walk.

And that was a happy period of my life, because I was not writing,

I was working with a group, group of artists, to finish the museum.

I didn't feel guilty about not writing.

I was happy in that I have an aim, an artistic aim,

I am accomplishing something and doing with other people.

I like working with other people. In the end, I like being in crowds.

He put the money from winning the Nobel Prize into the museum.

OK, here we are - Museum Of Innocence, aha!

CLOCK TICKS

As if in a dream, the museum merges Orhan's own early life,

the lives of the thwarted lovers in his novel,

and that of Turkey in the 20th century.

"It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it.

"Had I known, had I cherished this gift,

"would everything have turned out differently?

"Yes - if I had a recognised this instance of perfect happiness,

"I would have held it fast and never let it slip away."

LIVELY PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

"While I waited for my mother to notice me,

"I would sit at her dressing table and fiddle with her perfume bottles,

"lipsticks, fingernail polish,

"Colognes, rose water and almond oils.

"I would rummage through the drawers, play with the assortment of

"tweezers, scissors, nail files, eyebrow pencils, brushes,

"combs and various other sharp, pointed instruments.

"I'd look at the baby photographs of me and my brother that she had slid

"under the pane of glass on the table."

My uncle had an American Dodge.

D-O-D-G-E.

And he would give the key of the car to my father,

and my father would put us in the car and we would go to Bosporus,

every Sunday, and my father would take a camera.

My love of Bosporus comes from this.

It's a happy family day, we stop and buy fish,

we listen to, Sunday, some music some place.

I loved it when he cracked jokes, and he was smarter than any of us.

And, in fact, I wanted to be like him.

These are photos that I shot.

I was happy about this picture because very rare my mother

embraced, touched my father like this. A romantic photo.

There is a sadness with my mother and with my family,

first because my father was disappearing.

He was not around.

And the reason for this, that, erm, he ran away with other woman,

to tell the truth.

And then my mother was left with my father's side.

So my mother was living with my grandmother, with my paternal

cousins, with my father's brothers,

with my father's sisters, while the father was absent.

My mother and father sometimes would intensely argue.

Tensions upset me. I preferred that when the tensions express,

they had a fight, and then one of them disappears and then we are left

with the other. Though I want this person, my father or my mother,

back, they would treat us better when they had a fight!

LAUGHTER

They would go to different places and leave us with my grandmother.

Sometimes they would even separate us.

And then I wanted to return back to our house and dream of the other

Orhan who was left there.

It was the idea of my double, which is in German called doppelganger.

ATMOSPHERIC CHORAL MUSIC

"On winter evenings, walking through the streets of the city,

"I would gaze into other people's houses through the pale orange light

"of home, and dream of happy,

"peaceful families living comfortable lives." DOG BARKS

"Then I would shudder to think that the other Orhan might be living in

"one of these houses.

"I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses,

"streets and neighbourhoods of my childhood.

"I poured my soul into the city streets, and there it still resides."

VOICE YELLS IN OWN LANGUAGE

"The city has no centre other than ourselves.

"For me, it's always been a city of ruins and end-of-empire melancholy.

"The people of Istanbul simply carry on their lives amongst the ruins."

MELANCHOLY PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

There was a gulf, of course, between the Nisantasi set and the poor.

And the chasm, even back then, was religion.

"Our maid, bored of being at home, carried me there,

"and I liked that place, with its floors carpeted just like at home."

The family attended this, their local mosque, mainly for funerals.

"We reduced religion to a strange and sometimes amusing set of rules

"on which the lower classes depended.

"My fear, which I shared with everyone in the secular Turkish

"bourgeoisie, was not of God, but of

"the fury of those who believed in Her too much."

This, what's being said on these...?

Names of people.

Someone is in love with Begum. Um...

"What if hopes are finished?"

"We want a miracle."

"I'm bored." ALAN CHUCKLES

"From the moment I learned how to read,

"the imaginary world inside my head was adorned with constellations of

"letters.

"They did not convey meaning or even tell a story, they just made sounds.

"Walking home from school, even if I was very tired,

"my eyes would find words."

This is almost Dickensian, this...

..these streets! Yes, you're right! THEY LAUGH

"The automatic reading machine installed itself in my head.

"At the same time, my mother had begun to instruct us in the dos and

"don'ts of life outside."

VENDOR SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

"Not to buy food from the dirty vendors on quiet streets."

THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE

This grocery shop is titled Huzur - a very sophisticated word,

implying inner peace.

I care about names of apartment

buildings and names of small streets.

Grocery shop names - they are all poetic somehow.

And if you put them together - reading them, walking, reading them,

walking - I used to do that when I was a child and I'm still doing it.

CROW CAWS

I always wanted to live in a neighbourhood where children play in

the streets.

Instead, Orhan was in his house, full of pianos and carpets,

sparring with his elder brother.

He was strong, my brother.

And sometimes father was not around.

We were left to each other many, many times.

He used to bully me, and then this is normal in my part of the world.

I was crying and fighting back and being physical all the time, and my

mother would, "Don't fight! Enough!"

MARTIAL MUSIC PLAYS

Below in the street, things were hotting up.

The first of many military coups came in 1960.

In a country where human rights were violated so much, and in the '60s,

'70s, '80s, if you're a leftist,

there's no way that you can evade government torture.

In the '60s, '70s, if you're doing military service,

you would definitely get - if you're not a university graduate,

an officer - you would definitely get beaten.

In a country where there was so much physicality,

in an upper middle-class family -

a westernised, secular, civilised

family, we were also struggling and

pushing around, maybe too much.

MELANCHOLY MUSIC PLAYS

When I was here at the university, in the '70s,

left-wingers and right-wingers would shoot each other in these streets.

And most of the time, university was boycott,

or some group will control it and

would not allow the others to come here.

It was the nationalist gangs who used gun.

In order to survive, you either have to belong to one group,

or keep your opinions to yourself.

Oh, right! So, this was the 1970s?

Yes, this was the subject of Silent House, and also Black Book.

"The barber was washing somebody's head under the tap.

"He looked at us in the mirror.

"'I'll take two tickets, guys,' he said.

"'You could have ten,' said Mustafa. 'You could sell them here.'

"'Leave two, that's enough,' said the barber.

"'Two?!' I suddenly lost it.

"'No, not just two! You'll take ten!'"

How does Turkey resolve these, how can someone from...?

I think political problems are resolvable,

and you have to have more...

..less authoritarian, more democratic

leadership and more engagement with Europe.

"The people who lived in those old wooden houses in the city's outlying

"neighbourhoods were all waiting for a saviour.

"As was the rest of the city in those days -

"as they are even today.

"They sincerely believed that if the army stepped in,

"the price of bread would go down,

"that if sinners were tortured, the gates of Heaven would fly open."

At this radical, turbulent time, Pamuk was studying architecture.

One of his tasks was to advise on the preservation of the old Ottoman

houses.

It was a losing battle.

Many buildings like that in my childhood, and I've seen all burning

down, all burning down, one by one.

ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC PLAYS

In the 1970s,

lazy professors would send us students around to central Istanbul,

where there were so many wooden houses.

They said, "Look at the old map and mark this as an old building.

"Once your building is marked, you cannot destroy it."

So they hated us in those neighbourhoods.

This building is now preserved.

The regulations in the '60s were such that you burn it down and the

government says, "OK, you can do a building."

Then everyone burned their buildings.

Now they are tougher - if you burn it down,

you can only rebuild it like this.

They could have done a six-floor apartment building here.

MAN SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

See, they are destroying the history

and making...only to make money, he's complaining, rightfully.

You read his books. Yeah. What do you think of his books? HE ANSWERS IN OWN LANGUAGE

He's saying my sentences are long. Too long!

LAUGHTER

He could be your editor! Yes! LAUGHTER

It's a Unesco preservation? Yes. When I used to come here,

there was nothing like this 25 years ago, so they're improving!

Except it's not being given much respect, has it? Look!

Yes. THEY LAUGH

The problem is that we all want to preserve the past because we also

want to have a glamorous identity - Ottoman sophistication -

but on the other hand, we also want the comforts of modernity,

and then it's very hard to reconcile these.

Turkey's golden age of architecture was long gone.

Young Orhan felt despair at what he would now be expected to build,

the city it would produce.

This is when he gave up painting and dropped out of architecture -

a God that had failed.

"It was as if my soul were the pristine pages of a notebook.

"I had learned what was necessary, as well as what was unnecessary,

"and I had arrived at the end of all the adventures,

"voyages and mysteries I could possibly invent for myself."

Pamuk no longer presumed to design his city.

Instead, he would dream it,

chronicle it, construct it out of words.

"In this wretched land of ours,

"what other path is open to us except to write?"

For seven years, he would live alone with his mother, writing away.

Many of his early books would be

based in his eccentric extended family.

"As he climbed the stairs, Galip steeled himself for what lay ahead,

"his mind racing through the scenes with the practised impatience of a

"reader leafing through a book he's already read too many times to count.

"Uncle Melih will be in grandfather's chair,

"reading the newspaper he's brought down from his own apartment.

"He will say the usual - 'That boy's never going to pull himself together. Never!'"

I think he's a great model for young writers.

He was my idol,

not because he was successful or brave or he knew Ottoman history or

modernist literature, but because he was patient.

He could devote

all his hours to writing, to forging sentences,

and that's the kind of devotion that I wanted in my life,

and I think that's why he inspires so many Turks, young Turks,

because of his devotion,

like a monk.

We want novelists to be wise men and women who come out of their caves

maybe every five years and deliver us the book.

But it didn't down go down so well with Orhan's family.

I was a disappointment for my mother.

My brother went to best American university,

while I am a university dropout.

I'm saying, "I'm going to be a novelist."

No-one trusts that.

Is there anyone successful as a novelist in this poor country in the

1970s?

My mother once said about me...

there was no prospect of a good life for me,

and I also felt guilty about that.

These were the saddest years of my life.

My cousins, my friends, were getting married.

And I wouldn't want to go to that wedding because there I was, almost

30, 29, and everyone would ask me,

"Orhan, what do you do?"

And my answer was,

"I'm writing a novel, and it's not even published, and I'm doing that

"for six years." And everyone would think, "My God, this guy is lost!"

So I would be embarrassed to go there,

and stay at home and work and work and hope for success!

CROWD CHANTS

He looked down on a world in chaos.

This led to another military coup in 1980.

It would haunt his books.

This is the time that he began, in earnest, his pacing around the back

streets of the city.

"If my fast-extinguishing love of painting could no longer save me,

"then the city's poor neighbourhoods

"seemed prepared in any event to become my second world."

The streets had a consoling power.

Streets somehow answered my sentiments of sadness, loneliness,

thinking that if you go in, that inner richness matters.

There was another impulse, too.

As a novelist, Pamuk wanted to understand the people of Turkey,

not just the people of his own class.

Normally, the Turkish intellectuals who want to defend secularism,

modernity, all the things that they think define themselves,

their approach towards the working class is, they want to educate them,

they want to enlighten them,

they want to show them what's wrong with them.

But Pamuk is not like that, Pamuk wants to be like them,

maybe only in his books, but in his books he wants to be like them.

SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC PLAYS

Something designed by Salvador Dali for Alfred Hitchcock.

He wants to imagine their lives in detail.

So, when I met Pamuk, I realised he

had this constant way of questioning.

"How do you spend your day?"

"When does your girlfriend leave the house?"

"When do you start working?"

"What's your favourite hour during the day?"

I was like a character to him.

And I can imagine him getting excited by a seller on the street or

by a well-digger.

That's the Pamuk project.

So he's building a language in which to communicate the grand story

of Turkey to readers who are outside of his class.

In Turkey, books are printed just 2,000 copies,

because that's the readership,

but he wants to be read by 200,000.

How many cigarette butts are here?

4,213 cigarettes.

These are actually smoked by the beloved,

and she was a bit intense and

expressed herself through the way she crushed...

So, the way she stubbed her cigarettes?

Yes, stubbed. Kemal, in the book of The Museum Of Innocence,

falls in love with his distant relative, Fusun, a shop assistant.

They separate, but he obsesses about her for the rest of his life,

collecting every cigarette that she'd smoked.

MATCH IS STRUCK

Kemal not only collected them, also wrote a note about her moods.

That lover's attention to beloved is very much like the novelist's

attention to the world.

Now, here, there are images of Fusun's hand.

I shot them, I'm proud to say.

This is my first attempt as a video artist.

And did you audition a lot of people...?

I identify with Kemal.

He falls off from his class. Yeah.

He falls off because of his love story,

which makes him a bit ridiculous.

I fell off my class because I wanted to be an honest writer.

I wrote about my country and then, of course, politics is inevitable.

Is there a sense of guilt, of...

You were brought up in a privileged environment,

so much of your work is reaching out to a different class, to...

To readers, yeah.

Yes, there was a feeling of guilt

because, exactly as you said,

I came from a privileged family in a very poor country.

This was strong in me.

The clash with his own class came to a head with his novel Snow.

It's set in the 1990s in Kars,

meaning snow, in the Far East of Turkey.

The religious right was now on the rise.

Snow's main character, Ka, is not unlike Orhan,

but the book tries to get inside the heads of ordinary believers, too.

Women are committing suicide over being forced

to remove their headscarves.

My mother said to me, my friends are saying,

"Why do you pay so much attention to the problems of headscarved women?"

The state was not allowing women into universities

if they were headscarved.

65% of women, by nature, by tradition, wear headscarves.

In a way, that was making discrimination for women.

And that led to the popularity of Erdogan,

because he took them to universities.

I mean, this is very complex... Yes. ..the politics you're talking about.

It was read like you were taking a position.

DOG BARKS

My character, Ka, wants two things which contradict.

He was out in Europe,

now he wants to belong to Turkey and goes to the poorest parts of Turkey,

just to have a sense of having a community.

He also still cherishes European

ideals of egalitarianism,

respect for women's rights and, more strongly, secularism,

but these ideas definitely contradict in that part of Turkey.

Just four years later, things got even more political for Pamuk.

SHOUTING

Nationalists were outraged, and Pamuk was charged

with denigrating Turkishness.

"The case that was opened against me, and the political quandaries in

"which I then found myself, turned me into a far more political,

"serious and responsible person than I wanted to be."

Because of your views about what had happened to the Armenians,

you became a target for the nationalists and you went on trial.

How did you feel about that? It felt bad. I, I confess that it's

not something that I want to talk about too much.

I don't also want to pose as a victim.

One day, I'll write about these things in a tender, thoughtful way,

but I don't want to shout too much about that.

They were bad days. Thank God I survived.

Very happy, survived, back at home,

and still operating here, with my bodyguard, but it's OK.

That's the life, I'm happy to be here.

The worst disaster is to be an exile, for me.

I knew what it was to be an exile because, for a while,

I could not return, or I return like a rat, you know, hiding.

THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE

The case was dropped, but it resurfaced in 2011,

when Pamuk had to pay compensation to the nationalists who'd complained

against him.

Now the nationalists are helping Erdogan's authoritarian and

religious party to stay in power.

His message about internal security pours out of every TV set.

Turkey had changed immeasurably since Pamuk started to write.

On the outskirts of Istanbul, green fields had given way to shanty

towns, to house the millions of newcomers from the east.

These in turn were swept away and replaced by high-rises.

"Don't let rich people make you feel ashamed.

"The only difference between us and them is that they got to Istanbul

"first and started making money before we did.

"Mevlut saw transmission towers,

"trucks on the asphalt roads and new concrete bridges,

"and read them as signs that the country was growing and developing.

"Istanbul had changed so much

"that his memories now seemed like fairy tales.

"The city was growing inexorably out of his reach."

"When the time came for his own one-room house,

"Mevlut felt his heart breaking.

"He observed his whole childhood - the food he'd eaten,

"the homework he'd done, the way things had smelled,

"the sound of his father grunting in his sleep -

"hundreds of thousands of memories all smashed to pieces in a single

"swipe of the bulldozer shovel."

I'm not a political person.

I look at this texture and try to find beauty in it.

Walk, walk, walk.

Look around, enjoy humanity.

But the art of the novel, by definition, is political.

And middle-class writer spends six years to identify

with a street vendor.

First, you have to get the details right.

You interview a lot of people. You talk, talk, talk.

I want to see how people live here.

I was here in this cafe, sitting here,

almost 22 or 23 years ago as we are talking.

These places are intertwined with your memories.

Oh, I was looking at this street, down to see, and I was terribly in

love and so sad.

The next time you look at that view, you remember your sadness.

Or you remember this building or that square

when you learn about some military coup or major incident,

someone drop a bomb there, and you remember that you saw that.

These demolitions are hard to endure because you understand that you're

losing your memories.

I travel around. I go to China, I go to Korea, I go to India.

They always ask, "So, we also want to keep our heritage and we also

"want to be modern and prominent in the world. What do we do?"

And there's no... It's the most

popular question and there's no answer.

The only answer to that - don't be hard on, you know...

pay respect to both sides. Yeah.

CLOCK TICKS

CROW CAWS

"He was uncomfortable talking about sex, but not about kissing.

"During one of our late-night raki drinking sessions,

"I found out that he sometimes associated kissing with visions of a

"mother seagull putting food into her impatient chicks' open beaks."

WINGS FLUTTER "On one of these nights,

"he had me smell the Spleen perfume Sybil had bought in Paris.

"It smelled of night-time and eternity."

VENDOR CALLS OUT IN OWN LANGUAGE

"The first thing Mevlut would do when he stepped out into the cold

"was shoulder the yoke he'd been using for 25 years to carry his

"plastic jugs of boza -

"the traditional drink made of fermented wheat.

"Like a soldier about to step on to the battlefield,

"he would set out on his night's endless walk.

"He would shout, 'Boza!'

"and feel he was really calling out to his own past."

THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE

VENDOR CALLS OUT IN OWN LANGUAGE

Oh, my God!

I'm happy with friends and I'm writing what they talk about.

For example, "What do you expect from life?"

Not necessarily these people are talking. Yeah. If you don't do these

beautiful things in this country, you get mad.

Erm... You pick up.

OK, that green one. That green one. Why, why green?

No idea. Wow. This is, for example, ideas for The Red-Haired Woman.

Ah! You know, I had an interview with a well-digger,

and it tells a lot that went into the novel.

And then it's sort of a shy self-portrait.

Mmm. You don't look too happy, though.

Yes. OK, this is...

Yeah, this is myself.

My name in the family was Crow, because I was skinny.

The desire to paint never, never stopped.

Many years later, I resurrected the painter in me.

LIVELY PIANO MUSIC PLAYS I like that one.

I am happier when I paint, when I draw.

My mood when I paint is the mood of the guy who's singing when he's

having his shower. ALAN LAUGHS

While, when I write, it's more like playing chess.

You love looking at the world from above.

Above, or looking at the landscapes.

The landscape from my desk.

LAUGHTER

And this is the lady you have been seeing around.

As she is now scolding me. She's scolding you?

Yes! Again, the same lady. LAUGHTER

Asli is reading.

Once, she was exactly reading like this. LAUGHTER

In some restaurants in Istanbul, they show you the fish first,

before cooking it! LAUGHTER

Anyway, I'm happy I'm showing them.

What did you think when you saw his notebooks?

So creative.

He absorbs, and what he absorbs, he would like to express it on paper.

It makes him so happy,

so seeing him like a child, playing with his notebooks, pens, colours,

he's amazing.

I feel embarrassed because I feel as if I'm an autistic child...

No, no. ..and the mother can't stop talking about me! LAUGHTER

It makes him very happy, really. They're precious.

But she's always advising me, "Don't publish your diaries."

And, "Darling, only the pictures, but leave the text."

THEY PERFORM SONG IN OWN LANGUAGE

The history of my private life is, in a way,

that crowd I enjoyed when I was eight years old, ten years old.

50 years later, everyone was alone,

Old people died.

My uncles, father, everyone had business fights with each other.

That crowd is a sort of a nostalgia for me.

They disappeared.

That big umbrella of a big house,

where everyone gets together,

all that disappeared.

It's a sadness in my life.

THEY REACH A CRESCENDO

HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

This is a regular visit to my mother's,

which I do on every Sunday,

and then we were going to take her out to dinner, the three of us.

THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE

This teapot is probably 60 years

old, like everything my mother is using.

Very old kitchen utensils.

Pottery in my mother's kitchen

actually should go to a museum.

THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE

What was he like as a little boy, this one?

He was very naughty,

but he was scolded,

And then when he was 16,

he said, "You are scolding me all the time and you don't scold my brother."

Ah. Yeah. Ah-ha. He was jealous of his brother?

Very jealous of his brother.

This cupboard is the spirit of The Museum Of Innocence.

I spent a lot of time in my childhood looking at this swan now

that is exiled and put in a prison.

I don't know what her mistake is!

But, you know, I was that kind of child.

Impersonating them and making them speak like,

in My Name Is Red, where the objects' colours speak.

I live today to remember it tomorrow.

That's why I'm keeping objects, that's why I'm writing.

I'm a graphomaniac, in a way.

Like me, every Sunday, my father used to visit his mother,

but he would not take her out to

dinner because she would rarely leave the house.

The absence of my father,

not having a Freudian father who would dominate you,

a sort of a liberation you may get

if your mind is not oppressed too much.

The spirit of The Red-Haired Woman is based on lack of my father.

The book secretly argues that a lack of father, a lack of a centre,

a lack of power, a lack of an

authoritarian ruler also confuses us.

Fathers lend us this liberating

feeling that you don't have to make

the main decisions, you just follow his footsteps.

I am happy that I did not follow

anyone's footsteps in my life.

"Soldiers had first come for him the night after the military coup.

"My mother was devastated.

"She told me that my father was a hero, that I should be proud of him.

"When my father again disappeared, seven or eight years after that,

"it was different. Upon his return, after almost two years,

"my mother seemed not to care that he had been taken away,

"interrogated and tortured.

"She was furious at him.

" 'What did he expect?' she said.

"So, too, after my father's final disappearance,

"my mother seemed resigned.

"That's what made me think my father didn't always disappear

"for the same reason.

"But what is this thing we call thinking anyway?"

We have now a very authoritarian system.

Democracy is disappearing.

My friends who are writers, novelists,

are in jail, not because of their novels - yes,

because of their journalism.

I am very much upset about that.

Our political problems are not very sophisticated.

50,000 people are in jail, 150 journalists are in jail.

You don't need too much sophisticated theory to feel angry

about that and also feel guilty at home, writing your fancy novels.

That's the only thing I can do.

Turkey is a dangerous place to be a writer,

but it can have its riches.

You might have thought that, for Orhan Pamuk, this would be a vision

of Hell, but once again the strangeness of his mind surprises.

I feel so privileged in the history of humanity.

Are there many writers who see, in 60 years,

their city grow from two million to 17 million?

And all that change and change and change.

And I was inside all the time.

Human anxiety about change and desire about change,

conservatism and modernism, and destroying, destroying,

destroying, and making and making and making,

and I was chronicling.

I have stuck to this subject and write about it, write about it,

write about it.

They all think that my Istanbul is nostalgic Istanbul.

Yes, I wrote those early books, but now I love this subject.

I want to explore it.

I want to see the human side of it.

This is what I like now.

TRADITIONAL MUSIC PLAYS