Emotional Cities 1: A POIGNANT ISTANBUL

The first book of the four-volume short story collection by storyteller, playwright, and satirist, architect Hikmet Temel Akarsu, gathered under the overarching title “Emotional Cities,” is now available from Metinlerarası Kitap: A Melancholy Istanbul.

The first published volume of the short story selection, totaling four volumes, A Melancholy Istanbul, as its name suggests, begins with stories about Istanbul and continues in later sections with descriptive stories focusing on cities that the author considers important in architectural, social, and cultural terms, such as Kırklareli, İzmit, Kayseri, Denizli, Konya, Niğde, and Bursa. The sensitivity to the built environment, which we always see in the works of Hikmet Temel Akarsu, an author with an architectural background, reaches its peak in these stories.

In the stories, where the author attempts to create a very different and original form from the architectural essays whose examples we see in Turkish literature in the works of highly esteemed authors like Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Reşat Ekrem Koçu, Ahmet Rasim, and Salah Birsel, the urban fabric, the spirit of the place, and the architectural and social structure are narrated in the background with extensive descriptions, while in the foreground, human conditions with a strong emotional dimension are presented through dramas where reality and fiction are indistinguishably intertwined.

This original form had also garnered interest with its beloved examples in the author's "Emotional Journeys" series, previously published by 1984 Publishing House, consisting of four novellas titled Love in Symi, Late Summer in Sozopol, Farewell Venice, and A Night in Barcelona.

The “Emotional Cities” series will continue with fictional or sometimes auto-fictional stories from cities the author has traveled to, seen from a broad perspective, and filled with intense emotional imagery. The second book is titled Mornings Are Cool in Brașov and generally focuses on Central European cities such as Budapest, Prague, Vienna, Brașov, and Berlin. The third of the continuing volumes is titled The Traveling Cavalier and mainly deals with cities in Turkey and its nearby geography that share the same culture, such as Cappadocia, Edirne, Cyprus, Famagusta, Baku, and Nakhchivan. The fourth volume is titled Siesta Beaches, and as its name suggests, it consists of stories set in nearby geographies such as Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, North Macedonia, and the Aegean Islands, sometimes melancholic, sometimes cheerful, but always taking us to the deep-seated emotion of urban culture and architecture.