As an alternative
to other contemporary art museums, Orhan Kemal Museum in Cihangir is
open to its visitors with its unusual concept, classification and
exhibition.
Cihangir is a
neighbourhood in Beyoğlu, largely populated by artists and ‘legal
aliens’, and it is one of the symbols of urban transformation from
the traditional to the modern with its mosques, cafes and old
buildings. Beyoğlu of today has significant similarities with that
described in Orhan Kemal’s soft, illustrative realistic observations
in terms of personal stories and peculiar-to-itself symbols embedded
in the daily life of a metropolis, just like other traces of the
transformation observable in the structure of the city.
Established by the
realist writer Orhan Kemal’s son Işık Öğütçü, the museum not only
introduces the old master to the present generation, it also gives a
touch of reality to a period and culture now part of history. The
period we are referring to was an almost 70 –year period of socio-historical
transformations in Turkish history which witnessed the migration
from the rural to the urban areas. This period finds itself in Orhan
Kemal’s literary style that intertwines the historical, the personal
and the social and the museum perpetuates his memory with his boks,
letters, personal items and family photographs, his posthumous mask,
the typewriter he used and his study on display. Ara Guler’s
photographs, Turhan Selçuk’s caricatures, Nazım Hikmet’s poems and
Balaban, Fikret Otyam and Orhan Peker’s paintings and sculptures
show and describe him to the visitors. You can also find in the
museum building a library of his books translated into different
languages and a replica of the “İkbal” coffeehouse in Nuruosmaniye
where he stopped by on his walks up to Bab-ı Ali, especially when he
was broke.
Who is Orhan Kemal
?
Orhan Kemal was born
as real name Mehmet Raşit in Adana in 1914, when his father,
Abdülkadir Kemali Bey, was in the army. Abdülkadir Kemali became one
of the MPs of the first parliament of 1920-23, when he was 33. Then
he established “The Ahali Cumhuriyet Party” against the ruling
government, but it was dissolved later on and he had to take his
family and flee to Syria. These years later became the subjects of
his novels, “Baba Evi” and “Avare Yıllar”.
Orhan Kemal returned
to Adana in 1932. He found more excitement in detective novels and
football than in school. He encounters fort he first time with the
life of the working class through İsmail Usta he befriended in the
Giritli’s coffeehouse. He worked as a clerk in a factory, keeping
company with the workers, listening to their problems, writing their
petitions fort hem. And he fell in love with Nuriye, a beautiful
worker girl. He wrote about how he was feeling then as, “I am in my
twenty-two, drunk and in love with her, nobody but her.” The couple
later had their children Yıldız, Nazım, Kemali and Işık,
respectively. He entered the Turkish literary milieu as an
avant-garde, realist writer in the years of WWII.
His first works were
the syllable-metered poems he wrote in traditional Turkish folk
poetry. Those poems were published when he was in the army in
literary magazines as “Yedigün”, “Yeni Mecmua”, “Ses”, “Yeni Ses”
and “Yürüyüş”, under Raşit Kemali nom de plume as a precaution
required by the political conditions of the day. During his military
service in Niğde in 1938 he was sentenced for 5 years for “reading
boks of Maxim Gorky and Nazım Hikmet” and sent to Bursa Prison, but
this became a turning point in his life. He met Nazım Hikmet there
and with Hikmet’s encouragements he turned to prose. His first
prose work, “Balık”, being a part of his novel “Baba Evi”, was
published in “Yeni Edebiyat” newspaper in 1940, under pseudonyms of
Raşit Kemali and Orhan Raşit, which was followed by his short
stories published in “Yürüyüş” and “İkdam” newspapers and “Yurt ve
Dünya” magazine in ’42 and 43’, under Orhan Kemal nom de plume. His
writing career boomed after he returned to Adana on 26 September
1943, following his 5 year imprisonment.
With his twenty-five
novels, countless short stories, memories, interviews, film scripts
and even dramatic plays, Orhan Kemal always tried to Express the
social problems of the people he lived among. Frequented by the
student groups from the schools all over İstanbul, the Orhan Kemal
Museum in Cihangir is a kind of open university with its cultural
activities and has been a factory of writers since 1972 with its
“Orhan Kemal Novel Awards”, organized by family members in order to
provide new writers with the opportunity to meet with their readers.
Established by his son
Işık Öğütçü in 2000, the Orhan Kemal Museum opens it doors to
visitors as a discussion and conversation platform, with the aim of
cherishing the memory of this realist master of Turkish literature
and re-introducing him to the new generations. The poem he wrote in
1941, “On 2000s”, perhaps beter manifets his worldview, his ideals,
his personality than reflected in the photographs, his
… The year nineteen
hundred
To give its
place
To year two
thousand
And to say, How
strange it was!
O, good old
year 2000…
“On 2000”
I
would like to see
For the 1941 war