"This might seem unprincipled cynicism, but in the secular fury of Ataturk's new republic, to move away from religion was to be modern and Western; it was a smugness in which there flickered from time to time the flame of idealism. But that was in public; in private life, nothing came to fill the spiritual void. Cleansed of religion, home became as empty as the cities ruined yalıhs and as gloomy as the fern-darkened gardens surrounding them."
--Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City
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