![]() ![]() ![]() As the violence snowballed and spilled onto the streets I walked past the museum door, looked at the building’s red facade and tried imagining the silence inside. ![]() During the early days of protests, when local youths marched to the park, tourists continued to fill Pamuk’s museum. Four weeks after the cancellation of the May Day gathering a small group of die-hard environmentalists kick-started the events in Gezi park, struggling to protect one of the last green areas in Taksim, where the government wanted to install a kitschy shopping mall. When the government had opened the square for the May Day gathering in 2010, after a 32-year-long ban by previous administrations, the move was much praised by the country’s leftists and liberals. The loss of Istanbul’s innocence had been a gradual process: on (four days after Pamuk’s museum celebrated its first anniversary), the city’s governor abruptly canceled the May Day gathering in Taksim square. ![]() It has been a lively, intense, and dangerous 500 days, during which time Istanbul witnessed frequent outbursts of violence and the destruction of any trace of innocence it might still have possessed. A LITTLE MORE than 500 days has passed since Orhan Pamuk opened the doors of his Museum of Innocence to the public in Istanbul’s Çukurcuma neighborhood. ![]()
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