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added energy to our neighborhood! If respectable people are now frequenting these streets it is because of his museum.” Tekin then complained about the coverage of Gezi events by the international media. “They represented this city as if it was a war zone,” he said. “In fact not much had changed here. All the violence took place around the park. It was peaceful in Çukurcuma.” Ahmet Ok, who runs a leather shop on the other end of the street, begged to differ. Living in an apartment in Cihangir, Ok experienced firsthand how the tear gas used by the police affected even the residential areas that had nothing to do with the events. Ok told me how things have changed over the last four years as people from the United States and Europe started renting houses in the neighborhood. He said he had been a tourist guide for more than 25 years; when I suggested whether he was bored sitting behind a desk all day long in his shop he said he had lately become an avid reader of books. (He confessed to enjoying My Name is Red, Pamuk’s IMPAC winning novel, more than the Innocence.) “I heard that Pamuk is about to finish a new book and that it is about a boza seller,” he said. “I wonder whether he will build a museum for the boza seller as well.” Pamuk has frequented the streets of the neighborhood for the last 13 years. When he is in town (which is not always, since Pamuk is lecturing at Columbia University one semester a year) he visits the shops and talks to their owners. In Turkish we call antique dealers antikacılar, which is a neutral word. Antika insan (an antiquated person), on the other hand, is not so neutral: it means a weird kind of person, which the protagonist of Pamuk’s book arguably is. (Following
the death of his lover, he collects everything she left behind.) During my childhood, my relatives told me that writers, artists, and such people were antika insanlar, and that I should keep my distance from them. Seeing how much the Nobel laureate, his antique-dealer neighbors, and the thousands of protestors who had wanted to preserve trees in a public park had in common, I feel glad that I have never taken their advice.
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