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Byzantium. Constantinople. Istanbul. Each name conjures its own scent of history, its own veil of dreams, its own kaleidoscope of images. For Westerners like us, walking through the present city's streets and looking through lenses, we are bound to fall into framing the place as exotic—becoming ocular orientalists—despite our better critical selves; if not, we risk taking no pleasure at all in being there as foreigners. We can not truly understand the place and its people; our experience of it is that of a sojourner at best: interested, perhaps sympathetic, but always drawn from a distance, unable to grasp fully what makes Istanbul fascinating. Istanbulli writer and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, interested in the melancholy of his city and its inadequate representation both by native and by Western devotees, notes wryly in his memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City: "The fragility of people's lives in Istanbul, the way they treat one another and the distance they feel from the centers of the West, make Istanbul a city that newly arrived Westerners are at a loss to understand, and out of this loss the attribute to it a "mysterious air" (101).