“Still, the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernize and modernize might have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire, rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved’s clothes, possessions, and photographs. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums. That which I would later know as pervasive melancholy and mystery, I felt in childhood as boredom and gloom, a deadening tedium I identified with the “alaturka” music to which my grandmother tapped her slippered feet. I escaped this state by cultivating dreams.”
Orhan Pamuk
Istanbul - Memories and the City
From “The Destruction of the Pashas’ Mansions: A Sad Tour of the Streets”
No comments:
Post a Comment