Çukurcuma is where a Nobel novelist turned his book into a real museum, one modest townhouse among streets already crowded with the past. This hollow in the Beyoğlu hills — çukur means pit — filled in the 1800s with tight rows of wooden and stone houses, and later with the city's dealers in old things. Its lanes now hold shop after shop of chandeliers, brass, gramophones, vintage cameras, Ottoman calligraphy and furniture waiting to be restored. Decorators, film-set designers and collectors comb them for pieces the rest of Istanbul threw away.
You walk it slowly, because the streets tilt and every window asks you to stop. Doors stand open onto rooms stacked floor to ceiling, where a dealer nurses tea while you turn over a tarnished samovar. The quarter climbs and folds, so you lose your bearings between Cihangir and Galatasaray and surface somewhere unplanned. Cafes and small galleries have settled in beside the older shops, and the mixture — cracked mirrors, cats, restoration dust, coffee — is the whole point. Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence sits quietly among it, an ordinary house holding thousands of small objects from a vanished Istanbul.