Europe’s Museum of the Year – is a museum, based on a novel, based on a museum, where the objects of the protagonist’s obsession come to life.

The museum was not real. The objects here did not belong to the people that the inscriptions said they did; the house did not have the history that was claimed for it; even the audio tour, asserting that the curator worked with an imaginary character, was threaded with fiction.

Objects that Füsun associated with
Objects that Füsun associated with - In a neat trick played at the end of the novel, Kemal uses those objects to form the nucleus of a real-life museum, and hires an old acquaintance, the writer Orhan Pamuk, to write his story. And, in an even neater trick – and the reason, beyond creative sleight-of-hand, that the museum has received such recognition by the academic community – the objects of Füsun and Kemal provide a rarely seen slice-of-life look at 20th-century Turkey.As I sought out the museum, a blood-red, Ottoman-style wooden house on a back street in the hilly Beyoğlu neighbourhood of Çukurcuma, I noted ruefully that I perfectly fit the novel’s description of the museum’s eventual visitors: “the single women who end up in the museum having lost their way in the street”. When I finally arrived, I marvelled for a moment. I knew the house wasn’t really the house of Füsun’s family, as the book said it was. But it looked just as I’d imagined.

The Museum of Innocence may be the most creatively daring project of Turkey’s most daring living author. Awarded the title of European Museum of the Year in May 2014, the Museum of Innocence is a museum, based on a novel, based on a museum. All share the same name. And all seep with the life and culture of Istanbul in the second half of the 20th Century.

In the mid-1990s, even before Orhan Pamuk, the concept’s creator, author and curator, had received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novels, including 1998’s My Name Is Red and 2002’s Snow, he was embarking on a secret project. He was gathering objects, the sorts of everyday flotsam and jetsam that marked Istanbul in the second half of the 20th Century: salt shakers, old photographs, a quince grater. But he was assembling more than a collection. “I wanted to collect and exhibit the ‘real’ objects of a fictional story in a museum and to write a novel based on those objects, Pamuk writes in The Innocence of Objects, the museum’s guide. “At the time, I did not know what sort of place the museum would be, and neither did I know the shape the novel would take. But I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels – more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul.”