Source: The Metropole — "Once Upon a Time in Istanbul: The City of Melancholia as Remembered by Orhan Pamuk"
- Title: Once Upon a Time in Istanbul: The City of Melancholia as Remembered by Orhan Pamuk
- Publication: The Metropole (Urban History Association's group blog)
- Date: 27 September 2022
- URL: https://themetropole.blog/2022/09/27/once-upon-a-time-in-istanbul-the-city-of-melancholia-as-remembered-by-orhan-pamuk/
- Type: secondary (academic/critical blog essay); credulous of Pamuk's framing, critical of the Orientalist comparison it draws
- Accessed: 2026-09-03
Extract
- Defines hüzün, following Pamuk, as "a communal feeling, an atmosphere and culture shared by millions," explicitly distinguished from solitary, individual melancholy; states it "oscillates between physical pain and grief" and "stems from the same 'black passion' as melancholy."
- Names four specific Turkish predecessor writers Pamuk credits as shaping his own conception of Istanbul's melancholy: Ahmet Rasim (1884–1933, whose epigraph opens Pamuk's book), Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar (1887–1963, a Bosporus memoirist described as "blinded by nostalgia"), Yahya Kemal [Beyatlı] (1884–1958), and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962) — a documented literary tradition of named source-culture writers behind the word's modern popular sense, not a single novelist's invention (contrast litost, built almost entirely from Kundera alone).
- Notes Gérard de Nerval visited Istanbul seven years before Flaubert (1850); discusses Flaubert's own visit mainly to critique his Orientalist, condescending framing of the city — the piece does not develop a clear line of influence from Nerval/Flaubert onto the Turkish melancholic writers named above.
- Confirms the book is "trans. by Maureen Freely" without further comment on translation choices.
Gaps
- Provides no etymological content and no discussion of the word's English-language dictionary status.
- The claimed Western-literary-influence angle (Nerval, Gautier, on Yahya Kemal/Tanpınar) is asserted more clearly in WebSearch-synthesized secondary summaries than in this directly-read article itself — recorded on the word page as reported, not as confirmed by this specific source.