내 걸음으로 걷는 길

If she thought we weren't sitting peoperly on her silver-threaded chairs, our grandmother would bring us to attention. "Sit up straight!" Sitting rooms were not meant to be places where you could pounge comfortably; they were little museums designed to demonstrate to a hypothetical visitor that the householders were westernized. A person who was not fasting during Ramadan would perhaps suffer f..

My mother, mr father, my older brother, my grandmother, my uncles, and my aunts--we all lived on different floors of the same five-story apartment house. Until the year before I was born, the different branches of the family had (as with so many large Ottoman families) lived together in a stone mansion; in 1951 thet rented it out to a private elementary school and built on the empty lot next do..

I was born in the middle of the night on June 7, 1952, in a small private hospital in Moda. Its corridors, I'm told, were peaceful that night, and so was the world. Aside from the Strambolini volcano's having suddenly begun to spew flames and ash two days earlier, relatively little seems to have been hapening on our planet. The newspapers were full of small news: a few stories about the Turkish..

Here we come to the heart of the matter: I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood. Although I've lived in different districts from time to time, fifty years on I find myself back in the Pamuk Apartments, where my first photographs were taken and where my mother first held me in her arms to show me the world. I know this persistence owes some th..

"The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy." -Ahmet Rasim Ch. One - Another Orhan From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: Somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lives another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double. I can't remember where I got this idea or how it came to me. It must ..