Abstract: City ruins are among the most important images in Orhan Pamuk’s writings. His representation of ruins in cities, such as Istanbul, is Pamuk’s important attempt to root his writing in Turkey’s own culture and seek different contents and topics while facing powerful Western culture. Similar to the 18th and 19th century Romantic view on the aesthetics of ruins, Pamuk highlights the aesthetic value of ruinsand the melancholic sentiments in special historical contents. It is in such writings that Pamuk finds a kind of poetics and imbues his writings with a style of melancholic Romanticism. Meanwhile, as a writer who is greatly concerned with Turkish social reality,Pamuk attempts,in his diverse ruin writings, to recall the rich and varied cultural memories about different historical periods and ethnic communities, express his serious concerns about modernity, and counteract the opinions and actions aimed at abolishing historical traditions during the process of Turkish modernization. Hence, Pamuk’s writings on ruins, which showcase some of his writing concepts, aesthetics, and multicultural propositions, are essential to understanding him as an author and his writings.

Key words: Orhan Pamuk, ruins writings, the aesthetics of ruins, melancholic Romanticism, cultural memories