The work of Orhan Pamuk, 2006 Nobel laureate in Literature, is defined by an engagement with the long-standing crisis of identity in Turkey that stems largely from an ambivalent encounter with the western model of modernization. His novels address not only the collective sense of loss and displacement caused by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and by the subsequent implementations of the Turkish modernization project in early 20th century, but also the tensions between remembering/preserving and evading/forgetting the past. In this paper I consider two specific works of Pamuk: Istanbul: Memories and the City (2004), a pseudo-autobiography that weaves together the author's memories of his childhood and the city's multi-layered history; and The Museum of Innocence (2009) which rehearses the collective identity crisis in a melodramatic love story. I suggest that in these works Pamuk articulates the crisis of identity as an agonizing sense of homelessness which is managed by nostalgic attempts to reconstruct the lost home. Both of these works, I argue, in effect tell stories of fetishistic attachments to an idealized lost home that lead to its museumification. Whether it is imagined to be the privileged domain of a bourgeois household as in Istanbul or the soothing experience of a love affair as in The Museum of Innocence, the lost home eventually gets replaced by the museum where the longed-for past is reduced to a collection of frozen, static objects to be looked at and melancholically consumed in a present that is experienced as lacking and impoverished. While I locate the concept of the museum as an entry point to the close readings of these texts, I simultaneously consider the broader ethico-political stakes involved in museumification. Bearing in mind the significance and urgency, in the current socio-political context of Turkey, of working through a past that is ridden with collective hurt and trauma, I aim to reveal some of the shortcomings of museumification as a particular mode of relating to the past. In this context, I explore through Pamuk's texts the paradoxical workings of museumification where the ostensible purpose of remembering/preserving the past slides into its opposite and in fact assists the desire to forget.