The Museum of Innocence keeps 4,213 cigarette stubs in a single glass case, each one supposedly smoked by a woman who never lived. Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's Nobel-winning novelist, built the museum and his novel of the same name as one work, hunting objects in flea markets, writing them into the doomed love story of Kemal and Füsun, then setting them out across a house. Eighty-three vitrines fill four floors of a narrow, wine-red nineteenth-century building, one for every chapter. Kemal, sick with longing, hoards everything Füsun has touched, and the rooms make his obsession solid.
You climb through dim rooms past hairpins, saltshakers, matchboxes, a quince grater, and faded photographs of old Istanbul, every object lit like a relic. Little here is grand, and that is the point: ordinary things are made to carry a whole imagined life. The house has since become a quiet pilgrimage site for readers from around the world; anyone arriving with the novel can have the ticket printed in its pages stamped at the door in place of paying. In 2014 the museum was named European Museum of the Year, a rare honour for a collection that documents lives which never existed.