Turkey’s most celebrated living novelist, Orhan Pamuk, is turning his fictional Museum of Innocence into a real tourist attraction in Istambul. The winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature is transforming an old building in central istambul into a real-life incarnation of the shrine to lost love that his character Kemal Basmaki created in the novel  The Museum of Innocence.

The idiocyncratic institution, which is due to open in early 2011, will house 83 exhibits relating to the 83 chapters of the book. Supported by the Istambul 2010 European Capital of Culture project, this unique museum will also be an exclusive attraction with a strict limit on the number of visitors admitted each day.