Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel literature laureate, is preparing to open a Museum of Innocence in Istanbul next summer, and the city has already seen a ripple effect from his prize. I sailed up a storm-hit Bosphorus with writers from 30 countries during the inaugural Istanbul Tanpinar literary festival in November. Run by Nermin Mollaoglu of the dynamic literary agency Kalem, and coinciding with Istanbul's book fair, this is the city's first international writers' festival, and aims to feed a growing interest abroad in writing from Turkey. It is named after a dead Turkish novelist and poet whose resuscitated reputation owes much to Pamuk's praise.
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar described this as the "city of two continents" in his modernist masterpiece A Mind at Peace. Published 60 years ago - and only last year in an English translation from Erdag Goknar by Archipelago Books - the novel unfolds over 24 hours on the eve of the second world war, and has been tagged as the "Turkish Ulysses". Pamuk, himself no mean chronicler of his home town, regards it as the "greatest novel ever written about Istanbul".
So why is Tanpinar, who died in 1962, so little known? The short story writer Ciler Ilhan told me he was "despised for years by writers who believed only in the Turkish republic. He was seen as old-fashioned – but he's groundbreaking." Born in 1901 and steeped in the Ottoman culture on which Kemal Ataturk's republic of 1923 turned its back, Tanpinar wrote a satire, The Time Regulation Institute (1961), about a man striving to adapt to westward-looking "modernisation". He ignored the 1928 drive to purge Turkish of Arabic and Persian - some two-thirds of the Ottoman dictionary. Another writer, Ayfer Tunc, believes this richness of style has contributed to an "ironic and deplorable" ignorance of his genius among young Turkish readers.
The new annual festival may help change that. Largely reliant on private sponsorship, it was launched in style in the Ciragan Palace, once home to the Ottoman sultans, and now part of a luxury hotel on the Bosphorus. Cosier venues ranged from bookshops and cafes along the main shopping drag of Istiklal Caddesi, to the subterranean Byzantine Basilica Cistern, near the great cathedral-turned-mosque of Aghia Sophia. The festival was also a terminus for Word Express, an ambitious project in south-east Europe backed by the Wales-based Literature Across Frontiers. This brought 23 young writers on train journeys through the Balkans from Ljubljana, Bucharest and Sarajevo, in a move to relink areas sundered by politics and bloodshed.
Turkish writers are among those with a keen eye on history. A recent novel by Can Eryumlu, Teardrops of Chios, looks back to Ottoman massacres against Greeks on the Aegean island of Chios in the 1820s. "Turks are amnesiac", says Eryumlu, who feels they were also encouraged to forget that "we all have different ancestors", in order to forge a unified state from a defeated empire after the first world war. He spent time on the Greek island to research the novel, and sees it as important to tackle topics that remain raw: "If Greeks say it, Turks say it's a lie. The only way is for a Turk to say it."
Some writers sense an opening up of the past. "It's becoming easier to talk about history," says Yigit Bengi, a young fiction writer for whom Turkish nationalism is "officially created, and does not have deep roots". His stories draw on a more ancient and layered history, including Roman and Byzantine, and he is writing a novel about the role of Turks in the Crusades, when they were "used as slave soldiers on both sides - Christian and Muslim". Bengi was among 200 Turkish writers and academics who issued an internet apology a year ago for the mass killings of Ottoman Armenians in 1915.
Fethiye Cetin's 2004 memoir My Grandmother (translated by Maureen Freely in 2008), about her discovery that her beloved grandmother was an Armenian Christian but had been adopted by a Turkish military officer after the massacres and forced to deny her origins, was a bestseller in Turkey. She was the lawyer of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrank Dink, assassinated in 2007. For Cetin, whom I met last year, the "only way to overcome the trauma of the past is to talk; being silent destroys everybody". Her new book, Grandchildren, consists of interviews with 25 other people who have also discovered an Armenian grandparent, and whose family experience challenges an official culture of denial.
Tanpinar's Notebooks furnish an epigraph for Pamuk's first novel since his Nobel, The Museum of Innocence, which will be out in the UK in January in Maureen Freely's superb translation. It contains a locator map for his museum, and a free entrance ticket. The actual museum, in an Ottoman-style house along a stretch of antique shops in hilly Cukurcuma, will hold Istanbul ephemera that Pamuk gathered for inspiration while writing his Proustian (or Tanpinesque) epic of lost love. I had a preview of the collection when the novel came out in Turkish, in Pamuk's nearby office apartment overlooking Cihangir mosque and the stretch of water where the Golden Horn inlet meets the Bosphorus. He told me his "museum of the everyday", which holds everything from ferry tickets and women's hair clips to a quince grinder, would have a display for each of the novel's 83 chapters. In a conceit that might have pleased Tanpinar - as well as writers gathered in his name – the mundane memorabilia are "vessels of a lost past".
