Defne Ozan

Defne Yıldız writes a widely-read architecture blog advocating for Istanbul's historic building stock. Emre Kaya runs a renovation contracting firm that, in Defne's view, strikes the wrong balance between preservation and modernisation. They've been arguing in blog comments for two years under pseudonyms. When Emre's firm takes on the renovation of Defne's Cihangir apartment building, the pseudonyms last approximately three days before someone connects the dots. *Istanbul, Eventually* is literary romance about preservation, professional identity, and the slow work of learning what someone actually thinks when you've spent two years arguing with what you assumed they thought. It is a love story built on the particular intimacy of people who disagree about things that matter—about what buildings are for, what history is worth preserving, what a city owes its past. The novel unfolds in four parts: the renovation that brings them together, the cohabitation of their disagreement, the revelation of what the online debate was covering, and eventually—the city, the building, the question of what comes next. Defne is an architectural historian who believes that a building's value is in its continuity, that every renovation decision is a choice about what to keep and what to erase, and that most contemporary renovations erase the things that make a building worth keeping. Emre is a contractor who grew up in his father's restoration firm, who believes that buildings have to function in the present, that perfect preservation is sometimes a form of neglect, and that the argument about preservation is usually an argument about who gets to decide what a building means. They are both right about some of it. They are both wrong about some of it. The novel takes seriously the task of figuring out which is which. The Istanbul they move through is a city of layers—Byzantine beneath Ottoman beneath Republican beneath contemporary, each generation building on what came before or burying