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http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1745559,00.html

   

'I want to continue the life I had before'

Earlier this year, Turkey's bestselling novelist Orhan Pamuk faced prison for daring to 'insult' his country. Now, he tells Aida Edemariam in his first British interview since the case was thrown out of court, he wants to get back to what he does best - writing books



Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe


'From a very young age," begins Orhan Pamuk's memoir of his lifelong home, Istanbul, "I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me he could pass for my twin, even my double." When his parents' frequent quarrels overwhelmed him, he describes how he would play what he called the "disappearing game": sitting at his mother's dressing table, he would adjust her three-way mirror until Orhans reflected Orhans reflected Orhans, ad infinitum. He notes that it was a game he would later play in his novels, which is true enough; they are full of refracted selves and voices and bit parts for a narrator called Orhan.

This is also, however, a useful way to think about Pamuk the writer and his place in the world. He is published in more than 40 languages, and has had to slowly get used to the fact that "my books are being read with completely different reactions in different countries". In Turkey he is both a literary, difficult author, and a teller of absorbing whodunnits; a European-influenced stylist and an assiduous miner of Turkish history. More awkwardly, of late he has become a kind of litmus test: by daring to speak out against his government he has highlighted Turkey's tendency to silence dissent and the tensions between Turkey and Europe that he has spent a life trying to overcome.

Pamuk is the author of five novels, one of which, My Name Is Red, won the International IMPAC award; Istanbul was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize and in the history category of last week's British Book awards. So he is is a major writer here, but this is nothing compared with how big he is in Turkey. Thanks to The New Life, which, at the time of its publication in 1994, was the fastest-selling novel in Turkish history, and the bestselling My Name Is Red, he has been a celebrated figure at home for some time; he was really catapulted to infamy, however, when he remarked to a Swiss interviewer in February last year that "a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in this country and I'm the only one who dares talk about it".

This would be accepted by most historians as an accurate summary of Ottoman treatment of the Armenians in 1915-17 and of Turkey's decades-long conflict with Kurdish separatists. But the former in particular is a version officially denied by Turkey, where it was wrongly reported that he used the word "genocide". Later in 2005, the Turkish government made all such "insults" to the state punishable with jail. (By the end of last year, about 60 writers and journalists faced trial, many under this legislation.) Newspapers launched hate campaigns against Pamuk, some columnists even suggesting he should be "silenced". His books and posters of him were burned at rallies and he received death threats, after which, for a while, he went into hiding abroad.

Eventually he returned to face trial and a possible three years' imprisonment. "Living as I do in a country that honours its pashas, saints and policemen at every opportunity, but refuses to honour its writers until they have spent years in courts and in prisons," he wrote in the New Yorker four days before his court date, "I cannot say I was surprised to be put on trial. I understand why friends smile and say that I am at last 'a real Turkish writer'." The trial in December was adjourned within minutes when the judge passed the matter to the justice minister; in January, the justice minister passed it back to the court, which decided there was no case to answer. It has been said this was only because of the firestorm of international condemnation the trial provoked, yet though Pamuk now insists the case would have been dismissed regardless, it would be foolish to ignore the fault lines it exposed.

He is reluctant to talk about his recent troubles. "I want to continue the life I had before," he says, early in our meeting, his first British interview since his acquittal. "The writer's life. Publishing books. Writing books." Though being a writer, he ruefully acknowledges, is a slightly different thing in the UK than in Turkey, where as often as not it means being erected as a political lightning rod.

I arrive at his Bloomsbury hotel a little early, while his publicist is going through his schedule for the next couple of days; when he hears this includes a meal with Harold Pinter he slaps his knees and whoops with delight. It is instantly endearing, suggesting a man constructed of enthusiasms and transparencies - though it also becomes clear that his capacity for childlike joy is accompanied by confidence, steeliness and a necessary care. "Look," he replies impatiently to a query, later, about Turkey's shifting interpretations of the concept of free speech (a right, incidentally, included in its constitution under pressure from the EU), "I never had any trouble writing novels. I talked about this with my publisher when we were publishing Snow, which was my only explicitly political novel - but then nothing happened to it. The only time I had trouble, I had trouble because of interviews, madam" - and he waggles a finger at me. Then laughs. But he is serious. While the trial was pending, it was illegal for him to discuss it. This is no longer the case, but he still seeks refuge, skittishly, in generalities.

Snow, which he began writing two years before 9/11, is set in Kars in north-eastern Turkey and tackles the urgent issues of secularism and religion in a country which has been torn between the two for most of the last century. It is full of intimations of trouble, of arguments that might be unwise for the author to broach in an interview, say, but which his characters can discuss at length. "Can the west endure any democracy achieved by enemies who in no way resemble them?" asks one; another comments that "the world has lost patience with repressive regimes". Pamuk begins Snow with the famous Stendhal quote: "Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters." The irony is that the rest of his fiction is also political, if far more obliquely so; it has set up, within its characters, opposing ideological poles, then patiently probed what Pamuk calls "the confusion in between".

From his penthouse window in his Istanbul home - in a building called Pamuk Apartments because, when he was growing up, all five floors were owned and occupied by extended family - he can see Hagia Sophia, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, the Topkapi palace, the suspension bridge that links Europe and Asia - "all the essentials", as he puts it. He hasn't much time for my theory about how his still living here is unusual in these days of mass migration - that is a myth, he feels, perpetrated by a highly visible, mobile minority. "The rest of the world lives in the same street, the same building. The father builds a house, then the child lives there. So I don't want to talk about my experience as a unique thing." On the other hand, he concedes that still living in this place does perhaps give him "a strong centre in my spirit. The world, for me, has obvious beginnings."

Pamuk grew up in a rich Ottoman family that was, through profligacy and mismanagement, progressively becoming less so. The young Orhan was meant to become something useful, preferably an engineer or an architect. He chose painting initially, then writing, despite his father's exhortations that he should enjoy himself more. When is he happiest now? "If you leave aside sensual pleasures, sexual pleasures, good food, good sleep, and so on, then the happiest thing is that I have written two and a half, three good pages. I am almost assured that they are, but I need confirmation. My girlfriend comes, we are happy, I read to her, she says, 'This is wonderful' - that's it! That's the greatest happiness." It is an old need, felt also "when I lived with my father and mother, and did paintings and drawings when I was a child, and they said 'it's nice'".

Many of his friends in the unstable 1970s, when he was in his 20s, were radical marxists; he began a political novel at the time about that milieu, but it had to be abandoned half-finished in 1980 when reality, in the form of a military coup, intervened. Turkey's politics, never tranquil, have remained volatile since; many of the more extreme leftwing parties are still banned; 10 years ago one militant group staged hunger strikes in which more than 60 died.

Although he read the marxist pamphlets favoured by his friends, Pamuk simply found Woolf or Faulkner more interesting. He is currently preparing a collection of essays from the past 30 years, many of them about his lodestars: Mann, Tolstoy, Proust, Nabokov, Borges, especially Dostoevsky. He has been criticised for being too western a writer, though, he points out acerbically now, the Turkish literature he was kicking against when he started out - marxist, peasant-romanticising, 19th-century-inflected realist fiction - itself had western models in Erskine Caldwell, Gorky, Steinbeck. "A bit of experimentalism is always 'betraying the nation' in my part of the world."

Pamuk's fiction plays with voice and subject - for him, this is a way of exploring what it means to be Turkish. So The White Castle (1995), in which a 17th-century Italian scholar is captured by Ottoman pirates and sold to a Turk eager to learn about the west, "is a sort of intense personal conflict ... Of course, it was also a story of doubles. That was the first book that had some international success. Then, when I was doing interviews, thinking about the book in an international context, I realised that doubles are Turkey's subject: 95% of Turks carry two spirits in themselves. International observers think there are the good guys - seculars, democrats, liberals - and the bad guys - nationalists, political Islamists, conservatives, pro-statists. No. In the average Turk, these two tendencies live together all the time. Every person is fighting within himself or herself, in a way. Or maybe, very naively, carrying self-contradictory ideas."

The charges against Pamuk hit international headlines weeks before talks about Turkey's entry into the EU, and played straight into long-festering concerns on both sides. Turkey's pro-European Islamist government has been implementing reforms at a dizzying rate, and Pamuk, who has always argued for Turkey's entry into the EU, was troubled that "in Europe, conservative people who do not want to see Turkey in Europe tried to abuse my situation. They wanted to show that this country does not deserve Europe, which put me in an awfully awkward situation."

He was trapped in a similarly awkward position at home where there is increasing unease about the ever-multiplying hoops the country is being forced to leap through if it wants to join the union. Some, such as his translator Maureen Freely, argue that inflaming anti-Turkish sentiment was a deliberate strategy, not by fundamentalist Islamists but by Turkey's secular, but authoritarian, old guard, who do not want to see their influence undercut. "I think there is a nationalist movement in Turkey," says Pamuk, "which is abusing the feeling of insecurity that the nation has facing Europe and inventing a past in which Turkey was mistreated, humiliated by the western powers. It never happened. They are inventing a humiliation that the nation does not carry in its spirit, to serve the ultra-rightwing, nationalistic, political causes."

Which is not to say that there is no humiliation. My Name Is Red (2003), the sprawling intellectual whodunnit that made his name outside Turkey, dramatises the tussle - literally to the death, as it is also a murder mystery - between Islamic manuscript illuminators and artists seduced by the western concepts of style, originality and representation. The gore-soaked ending makes clear that the methods of an alien but dominant culture can neither be avoided nor easily aped.

"It's a metaphor for a very common Middle-Eastern fantasy," says Pamuk, "that of taking sophisticated, attractive inventions, techniques, [or] objects from the west, without paying the spiritual price. To appropriate an invention, be it artistic or technical, you have to have at least a part of your spirit embracing it so radically that you somehow change. That is one of the things that I see in my culture that makes me very angry."

He is not angry, he says, because of the urge to copy in itself: "Though that is deplorable, hateful, I have great understanding for the inevitable desire to imitate. I'm angry because that kind of fantasy is based on a very simplistic world picture. In the novel I'm writing now [to be called The Museum of Innocence], there is a dialogue about poor people. A cruel but observant upper-class person says words to the effect that, 'They are so naive that they believe being poor is a sin and their guilt will be forgotten as soon as they get some money.'

"So all these fragile feelings of imitation, of not having, of being angry with your own country, with the west, with everything" - he has elsewhere called these feelings simply "shame" - "I think that the whole non-western world is living these damning personal dilemmas. To understand nationalism and anti-western sentiment in the rest of the world, you have to go to these shadowy places, rather than to the latest political developments, which are actually just end products."

So does he think he was the victim, in a way, of Turkish self-hatred? This too, apparently, would be too simplistic. "Self-hatred is OK. I have self-hatred too. It's OK. What's bad is if you don't know how to get out of it, don't know how to manage it. Self-hatred is, in fact, a good thing if you can clearly see the mechanism of it, because it helps you to understand others." It is a kind of plea.

[cardus]

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1749228,00.html

Capturing the conqueror

When Ottoman ruler Mehmed II asked Venice for a 'good painter', he was sent Gentile Bellini, whose portrait of him brought a lasting touch of the Renaissance to the east. Orhan Pamuk on the story behind a new exhibition at the National Gallery

Saturday April 8, 2006
The Guardian

 
There are three artists we know as Bellini. The first, Jacopo Bellini, is remembered today not so much as a painter but as the man who brought the two more famous Bellinis into the world. His elder son, Gentile Bellini, was, during his lifetime (1429-1507), the most famous artist in Venice. Today he is remembered chiefly for his "voyage east" and the artworks it inspired, most particularly his portrait of Mehmed the Conqueror, while his brother Giovanni is celebrated by today's art historians as one of the great painters of his time. It is commonly acknowledged that his colouring had an enormous impact on the art of the Venetian Renaissance and therefore changed the course of western art. When Sir Ernst Gombrich speaks of that tradition in his lecture "Art and Scholarship", remarking that "without Bellini and Giorgione, there would have been no Titian", it is Giovanni, the younger brother, to whom he refers. But it is to his elder brother Gentile that the National Gallery's new exhibition, Bellini and the East, pays tribute.

After taking Istanbul in 1453, at the age of 21, Mehmed II's first aim was to centralise the Ottoman state, but he continued his incursions into Europe, thus establishing himself in the world as a ruler of consequence. These wars, victories and peace treaties - whose names every lycée student in Turkey must memorise and recite one by one with nationalist fervour - led to large portions of Bosnia, Albania and Greece coming under Ottoman rule.

His power having been greatly enhanced by these conquests, Mehmed II was finally able to effect a peace treaty between the Ottomans and the Venetians in 1479, after almost 20 years of war, pillaging and piracy in the Aegean islands and the fortressed ports of the Mediterranean. When envoys began travelling between Venice and Istanbul to bring about this treaty, Mehmed II expressed a wish for Venice to send him a "good artist", and the Venetian senate (who were very pleased with this peace treaty, though it meant giving up many of their forts and a great deal of land) decided to send Gentile Bellini, who was then busy adorning the walls of Great Council Hall of the Doge's Palace with his gigantic paintings.

So it is Gentile Bellini's "voyage east" and the 18 months he spent in Istanbul as "cultural ambassador" that is the subject of the small but rich exhibition at the National Gallery. Though it includes many other paintings and drawings by Bellini and his workshop, as well as medals and various other objects that show the eastern and western influences of the day, the centrepiece of the exhibition is, of course, Gentile Bellini's oil portrait of Mehmed the Conqueror. The portrait has spawned so many copies, variations and adaptations, and the reproductions made from these assorted images have gone on to adorn so many textbooks, book covers, newspapers, posters, bank notes, stamps, educational posters and comic books, that there cannot be a literate Turk who has not seen it hundreds if not thousands of times.

No other sultan from the golden age of the Ottoman empire, not even Suleyman the Magnificent, has a portrait like this one. With its realism, its simple composition, and the perfectly shaded arch giving him the aura of a victorious sultan, it is not only the portrait of Mehmed II, but the icon of an Ottoman sultan, just as the famous poster of Che Guevara is the icon of a revolutionary. At the same time, the highly worked details - the marked protrusion of the upper lip, the drooping eyelids, the fine feminine eyebrows and, most important, the thin, long, hooked nose - make this a portrait of a singular individual who is none the less not very different from the citizens one sees in the crowded streets of Istanbul today. The most famous distinguishing feature is that Ottoman nose, the trademark of a dynasty in a culture without a blood aristocracy.

In 2003, to celebrate the 550th anniversary of the Ottoman Conquest, the Yapi Kredi Bank had the painting brought from London to Istanbul, and exhibited it in Beyo-lu, one of the busiest districts of the city; schoolchildren came in by the busload, and hundreds of thousands queued up to stare at the portrait with a fascination only a legend can bring.

The Islamic prohibition against painting, the particular fears about portraits and ignorance about what was happening in portraiture in Renaissance Europe, meant that Ottoman artists did not and could not make portraits of sultans that were this true to life. But this caution towards a human subject's distinguishing features was not confined to the world of art. Even the Ottoman historians, who wrote a great deal about the military and political events of their age, were disinclined to think or indeed write about their sultans' defining features, their characters, or their spiritual complexities - though there was no religious prohibition against doing so.

After the founding of the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923, when the westernising drive was just getting under way, the nationalist poet Yahya Kemal - who lived in Paris for many years and was as well acquainted with French art and literature as he was oppressed by doubts about his own literary and cultural heritage - once remarked ruefully: "If only we had painting and prose, we'd be another nation!" In so saying, he may have been hoping to reclaim the beauties of a lost age as documented in painting and literature. Even when this was not, strictly speaking, the case - as when he stood before Bellini's "realistic" portrait of Mehmed the Conqueror - what troubled him was that the hand that drew the portrait lacked a nationalist motive. One can sense a profound displeasure in these words, a Muslim writer's dissatisfaction with his own culture's shortcomings. He is also succumbing to the common fantasy that it might be possible to adapt to the artistic products of an utterly different culture and civilisation with ease, and without changing one's soul.

There are many examples of this childish fantasy on display in Bellini and the East and its accompanying catalogue. One is the watercolour from a Topkapi Palace album that is attributed to an Ottoman artist named Sinan Beg, and is almost certainly inspired by Bellini's portrait. The catalogue gives it the title Mehmed II Smelling a Rose; because it is neither a Venetian Renaissance portrait nor the classic Persian-Ottoman miniature, it leaves the viewer feeling unsettled.

In an article about Seker Ahmet Pasha, another Turkish artist who drew from both eastern and western artistic traditions - the Ottoman-Persian miniature and European landscape painting, especially that of Courbet - John Berger spoke of this same unease. And though he felt it stemmed from the difficulties of harmonising different techniques, such as the use of perspective and the vanishing point, he also sensed that the underlying problem was the difficulty of harmonising world views. In this Bellini-inspired Ottoman portrait, the one thing that makes up for the clumsiness of the execution - and it seems to make the sultan uneasy as well - is the rose that Mehmed II is smelling. What makes us aware of this rose and even its scent is not so much its colour as Mehmed II's prominent Ottoman nose. Upon learning that Sinan Beg, who painted this watercolour, was in fact a Frankish artist living among Ottomans, and most probably an Italian, we are reminded yet again that cultural influences work in two directions and are both complex and difficult to fathom.

Another painting rightly attributed to Bellini takes us away from scholarly disputes and concerns about political correctness to suggest a more humane east-west story, and with extraordinary elegance. This marvellously simple watercolour, no larger than a miniature, shows a young artist or scribe sitting cross-legged. Because the paper that the ear-ringed youth is touching with his pen is blank, we cannot be sure if he is an artist or a scribe. But from the expression on his face, from his look of concentration and the shape of his lips, even from the confidence with which his left hand shields the paper in his lap, I can see that he is utterly devoted to his work. His dedication to a blank sheet of paper, and his heartfelt surrender of self, make me respect the young artist. I feel him to be someone who holds the beauty and perfection of his work (be it a drawing or a text) above all else; he is an artist who has achieved the happiness that can only come from giving oneself over to one's work.

My appreciation of the beauty of the beardless page's pale face combines with my appreciation of the compassion that the artist felt for him while drawing his portrait. It was first noted by the semi-official historian Kritovoulos of Imbros, and later repeated by many western, Christian chroniclers, that Mehmed the Conqueror valued beautiful and handsome youths, took political risks for them, and asked for their portraits to be painted; from this time onwards, good looks were an important factor in the selection of pages in the Ottoman palace. The beauty of the young artist, and the way he gives himself over to the beauty of that which he is drawing, combined with the simplicity of the ground and the wall behind him - these give the painting the air of mystery that I sense every time I see it.

Of course, the mystery has much to do with the fact that the paper the youth is looking into with such concentration is utterly blank. If this beautiful artist can think with such concentration of the thing he has yet to paint, it must mean that he can already see this image shimmering in his mind. We know from the way he has pressed his pen against the blank paper, from the way he is sitting, from his very expression, that this artist knows what he is about to paint. But there is nothing in his surroundings - no object, text, sketch, mould, human figure or view - to suggest what the painting in the artist's mind might be. We feel as if this frozen moment from 525 years ago will soon cease to exist, and as the artist scribe begins to move the pen in his hand, his beautiful face will light up in even greater happiness, as if he is watching someone else's pencil race across the page.

A century ago, in 1905, this painting was still in Istanbul; today it belongs to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Years ago, after wandering among this museum's great and opulent Titians and John Singer Sargents, I found my young painter on a display table in a corner, on one of the top floors. To see him, I had to lift the thick cloth resting on the glass to protect the painting from light damage and bow my head. As I gazed down at the painting, the distance between me and it seemed to be the same as the distance between the painter and his blank sheet of paper. I was looking at Bellini's small painting in just the same way that a sultan might, in a private moment, look at a miniature illuminating the thick and heavy book in his hand. I, too, was gazing downwards like the painter in the painting.

What distinguishes Islamic painting from western painting after the Renaissance, as much as religious prohibitions and perhaps even more than that, is this secretive downward gaze that Bellini captures so profoundly in this portrait. Islamic painting was a restricted art, permissable only to decorate the insides of books, and so confined to small spaces; never was it suggested that these paintings might hang on walls, and they never did! As the scribe sits cross-legged and lost in thought, gazing down at the blank sheet that will become his painting, he strikes the same pose that the rich and powerful person - most likely a sultan or a prince - will be obliged to take to look at this same painting.

Let us contrast this pose - this downward gaze of the cross-legged painter as he bends over a blank sheet of paper - with the stance a western artist might take to view his own painting: Velázquez, for example, viewing Las Meninas. We see first the things that define both paintings as objects - the edges of the paper or canvas, the painter's pen or brush, and the creative concentration on the artist's face. Bellini's eastern artist's gaze is not towards his world or his surroundings; it is fixed on the blank paper on his lap, and we can tell from his expression that he is thinking of the world inside his head. The artistry of the Ottoman-Persian miniaturist is to know and to recall all the great art that has preceded him, and to remake it in a burst of poetic inspiration. But Velázquez is lifting his head to see the vanishing point, to the world reflected in the mirror, to the world itself and the complexity of that which he is painting. We cannot see his painting either (though we guess that the scene before us is the one he is painting), but we can see from Velázquez's tired and self-interrogating look that his head is full of the weighty questions rising from the painting's unbounded composition. Bellini's young painter, however, looks at his blank sheet with the happiness of a youth recalling, with almost metaphysical inspiration, a poem he has learned by heart.

In my corner of the world, the seated scribe attributed to Bellini is well-known, even if it is not as famous as his portrait of Mehmed the Conqueror. The cross-legged figure is commonly thought to be Cem Sultan, who was treated so cruelly by his older brother and whose sorry fate was described in numerous exotic and melodramatic novels. In the textbooks of my childhood - written by the passionately nationalist westernisers of the early Republic - Cem Sultan was portrayed as being open to art and to the west, a broad-minded prince bursting with youth, while his older brother, Bayezid II, who would go on to poison Cem, was a fanatic who turned his back on the western world.

After the death of Mehmed the Conqueror, Bellini's portrait of the artist was sent first to the Aqqoyunlu Palace in Tebriz, then to the Safavid Palace in what is today Iran. Before it was returned to the Ottoman palace, either as war booty or a gift, this extraordinary painting was much copied, this time by Persian artists. One of these copies, now in the Freer Museum in Washington DC, is, at least according to those romantic souls who dream of eastern and western masters working on the same pictures, sometimes attributed to Bihzad.

To look at this adaptation from close up is to notice that where Bellini so elegantly chose to place a blank sheet of paper, the Safavid painter has placed a portrait. In so doing he reminds us how little Muslim artists knew about the western art of portraiture, and most particularly the concept of the self-portrait, and how they were beset by anxieties about their technical inadequacies in these areas. The Harvard professor David Roxburgh discovered that, 80 years after its execution, Bellini's small portrait was placed in a Safavid album alongside other portraits, including some from the Ming dynasty. A sentence from its foreword shows that even the greatest Safavid artists found themselves lacking in this regard: "The custom of portraiture flourished so in the lands of Cathay (China) and the Franks (Europe)."

But this is not to say that Persian artists were blind to the irresistible power of portraits. In the tale of Husrev and Sirin, the classic Islamic story that inspired more miniatures than any other, the beautiful Sirin first falls in love with the handsome Husrev just by seeing his portrait. The irony is that the Persian artists charged with illustrating this scene were technically naive by Venetian Renaissance standards of portraiture. In illuminated Persian manuscripts, this scene requires a painting within the painting, just as Bellini's and Bihzad's retouched portraits do - though almost always, they depict not a portrait, but the idea of a portrait.

After the Renaissance, the west first felt its superiority over the east not on the battlefield, but in art. A hundred years after Bellini's "voyage east", Vasari described how even Ottoman sultans obliged by their religion to take a dim view of painting were in awe of the skill Bellini showed in his Istanbul portraits and still inclined to praise them extravagantly. When writing of Filippo Lippi, Vasari relates how, after the painter was captured by eastern pirates, his new master asked him to do his portrait; so taken was he by its shocking realism that he set Lippi free. In our own day, western analysts, perhaps because they are uneasy about the consequences of the west's excessive military prowess, prefer not to talk of the indisputable power of the art of the Renaissance. Instead, they point to Bellini's sensitive portraits to remind us that easterners, too, have their humanity.

After the death of Mehmed the Conqueror, his son Bayezid II, who did not share his father's way of life or his passion for portraiture, had Bellini's portrait sold in the bazaar. In the Turkey of my childhood, our lycée textbooks lamented this rejection of Renaissance art as a mistake, describing it as a missed opportunity, and suggesting that, had we gone on from where we'd started 500 years ago, we might have produced a different kind of art and become "a different nation". Perhaps. Whenever I look at Bellini's cross-legged painter, I think this "other path" might have served miniaturists best. Because they could have painted so much better once seated at tables - and also could have saved themselves from aching joints and legs.

Translated by Maureen Freely.

· Orhan Pamuk is the author of My Name is Red, Istanbul: Memories of a City and Snow (Faber).