Link only available on sub pages

Text in the showcase:

On his trip to Italy, Montaigne discovered how melancholy one can become at the sight of ancient ruins. I experienced this as a child among Ottoman ruins as hüzün.

From the novel „Istanbul: Memories and the City“:

So this is how two friends living in Istanbul – one a poet, the other a prose writer – drew upon the work of two friends from Paris – one a poet, the other a prose writer – to weave together a story from the fall of the Ottoman Republic, the nationalism of the early Republican years, its ruins, its Westernising project, its poetry and its landscapes. The result of this somewhat tangled tale was an image in which Istanbulites could see themselves, and a dream to which they could aspire. We might call this dream, which grew out of the barren, isolated, destitute neighbourhoods beyond the city walls, the ‘melancholy of the ruins’, and if one looks at these scenes through the eyes of an outsider (as Tanpınar did) it is possible to see them as picturesque. First seen as the beauty of a picturesque landscape, melancholy also came to express the sadness that a century of defeat and poverty would bring to the people of Istanbul.