Hüzün is undeniably the main theme of Istanbul: Memories and the City. That’s because hüzün is part of Istanbul. Author Orhan Pamuk says that “this city has made me who I am” and thus hüzün is also part of the author (6). What is hüzün though? It’s a confusing term that is hard to describe, but absolutely essential to understanding Istanbul and its people.
Hüzün is the Turkish word for melancholy. But the term is much more complex than that. According to Pamuk, it begun “its life as a word for loss and the spiritual agony and grief attending it” (90). In my best attempt to condense Pamuk’s chapter long and really book long description of it, I have come to this: hüzün is the communal ache of Istanbul that embodies its fall from cultural glory during the Ottoman Empire to poverty and ruins of the present; it is a mysterious experience that the Istanbullus holds onto by choice, with dignity and pride.
The word originated in the Arabic language and was used in the Islamic tradition. As time progressed it slowly diverged into two meanings, each with a different philosophical background. Pamuk discovered first that hüzün was what a person experienced when he was overly consumed by worldly things and material goods. The second meaning which evolved centered instead around a feeling that is had when one is not close enough to Allah.
What strikes me about how the word is used now, is that it describes the condition of Istanbul and its people after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, in which Islamic religion and culture flourished, and the revolutionary secularization and westernization of Istanbul by Ataturk. The devout Muslim might add that Istanbul is both too indulged in Western materialism and far from Allah.
Pamuk reflects that “the hüzün of Istanbul is not just the mood evoked by its music and its poetry, it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only a spiritual state but a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating” (91). He says that “to feel this hüzün is to see the scenes, evoke the memories, in which the city itself becomes the very illustration, the very essence, of hüzün” (94). “It is by seeing hüzün, by paying our respects to its manifestations in the city’s streets and views and people, that we at last come to sense it everywhere” (98). For the Istanbullus, “hüzün gives their resigation an air of dignity, but it also explains their choice to embrace failure, indecision, defeat, and poverty so philosophically and with such pride, suggesting that hüzün is not the outcome of life’s worries and great losses but their principal cause” (104). However, according to Pamuk, hüzün is not this dark and depressing concept, but is rather beautiful. And this beauty is reflected in Istanbul and its buildings and its people.
It seems that Pamuk would argue that you cannot truly understand hüzün unless you are aware of the Istanbul’s historic fall from glory and have been an Istanbullus for a very long time as he has (he still lives in the same Pamuk apartments that he grew up in as a boy in Istanbul). Nevertheless, from reading Pamuk’s chapters, I feel like I have a vague understanding of hüzün. And…by visiting Istanbul—gazing upon the historic ruins, observing the faces of the Istanbullus, breathing in the Bosphorus, taking in the mystery and imagining, as Pamuk did, the former glory of the city—I too can gain at least a partial, maybe even satisfying idea of hüzün.
kulturogrenci 