Urban Travel, Sustainability & Accessibility

BY ORHAN PAMUK A city one has lived in long enough shapes itself into one's own image, acquires the traits of one's personalit...

BY ORHAN PAMUK "Here we come to the heart of the matter," he says early in the book. "I've never left Istanbul,...

BY ORHAN PAMUK Istanbul as shared melancholy, Istanbul as double, Istanbul as black-and-white images of crumbling buildings and phanto...

BY ORHAN PAMUK There is a past tense in Turkish -- it does not exist in English -- that allows the writer to distinguish between hear...

BY ORHAN PAMUK Through the descriptions of other writers -- several Turkish masters, various traveling foreigners -- Pamuk parades yet...

BY ORHAN PAMUK As with himself and the picture of his "other," Pamuk suggests, Istanbul is haunted by another Istanbul, a sh...

BY ORHAN PAMUK Pamuk begins his inquiry with an image, a kitschy portrait of a child brought back from Europe that was hung in the hou...

BY ORHAN PAMUK Huzun is therefore a sought-after state, and it is the absence, not the presence, of huzun that causes the sufferer dis...

BY ORHAN PAMUK According to Orhan Pamuk, the melancholy of Istanbul is huzun, a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times i...

BY ORHAN PAMUK All happy cities resemble one another, to paraphrase what Tolstoy famously observed of families, but each melancholy ci...

BY ORHAN PAMUK If readers are inclined to be suspicious of a fiction writer's memories--as well they should be--more than 200 ph...

BY ORHAN PAMUK In chapter 10, Pamuk explains the ambiguities of huzun, the Turkish term for melancholy.  This single word provides...

BY ORHAN PAMUK Reminiscent of works by Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, Pamuk’s novels, mostly set in his native Turkey, ...

BY ORHAN PAMUK Istanbul's hüzün, Pamuk writes, "is a way of looking at life that... is ultimately as life affirming as it is ...

BY ORHAN PAMUK Turkish novelist Pamuk (Snow) presents a breathtaking portrait of a city, an elegy for a dead civilization and a medit...

BY ORHAN PAMUK At times when I accept as my own the stories I’ve heard about my city and myself, I’m tempted to say, “Once upon a time I...

BY ORHAN PAMUK It’s a sensation as sweet as seeing ourselves in our dreams, but we pay a heavy price for it.  Once imprinted in ou...

BY ORHAN PAMUK I feel compelled to add or so I’ve been told. In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay ...

BY ORHAN PAMUK When she was reading the latest on this drama, my mother was alone in her room, or so she told me with a mixture of regre...

BY ORHAN PAMUK In the hours before I was born, my mother had been avidly following a local story:  Two days earlier, the caretaker...