Thirty-eight years ago, I took the Orient Local from Luxembourg to Turkey, passing in three days through France, Italy, Yugoslavia (it was one country then), Bulgaria and Greece on the way to Istanbul.

We were serenaded on the train by Bulgarian school children in the middle of the night. Yugoslavian guards patrolled outside with huge Alsatian wolves as our passports were checked on the stopped train just past Trieste. Women in black dresses and scarves pulled the plows as we passed their fields on the way to the gateway to the East, the city that has had many names, Bursa, Constantinople, Istanbul.

Turkey in 1969 was a strange place, both East and West. The country was Muslim, but Kemal Attaturk had outlawed the fez for men, and the chadoor and headscarves for women. Turkish was printed not in Arabic but in Western script. The Turks could not understand why Jackie Kennedy had married a hated Greek but were, and still are, one of our fiercest allies.

The Turks were to be taken seriously, as they were perched strategically and sensitively between the East and West, astride the Hellespont, the sea gateway to Russia, to the Caucasuses, and to ancient Pontus where Cicero, Catullus and Pliny the Younger once governed.

Reading the books of Orhan Pamuk, a recent Nobel prize winner who writes in Turkish, I can see that Turkey has not changed that much since I was there. Hospitality is still a high value. If you are invited into the room behind the shop, you are a valued guest, honored with highly sweetened tea to be sipped slowly, even though out on the street, the men will say salacious things about tourist women behind their backs.

This ambiguity exists through Pamuk's works and through Turkey still. The Bosphorus still runs clear and cold through Istanbul, but on the shore, the yalis, the wooden mansions dating from the Ottoman Empire, slowly rot in the sun. Pamuk's family owned one of these decrepit buildings in his youth, along with several apartment buildings where several generations lived inharmoniously together.

Pamuk's book “Istanbul: Memories and the City” is careful to show this contrast between what appears to be true and what he finds later. The city is a labyrinth of narrow, ancient streets surrounded by closely shuttered buildings where people hide, and yet all of the streets eventually run down to the swift-flowing Bosphorus.

In each novel Pamuk plays with or shows a doppleganger, either a person with two personae within or two people who are almost identical. “The White Castle” has the latter, one a captured Italian slave in the 17th century who pretends to be full of Western knowledge and his physically identical counterpart, an official in the Ottoman Empire, who at first thinks that knowledge would be valuable to him.

Pamuk uses the similarity between the two as a parable for the fate of the Ottoman Empire when it was seduced by German technology in World War I and also to ask, “who are we really?” The slave and the master alternate places until it is difficult to distinguish between them at all. They also suffer disaster, as the Empire did at the beginning of the 20th century.

The same ambiguity occurs in “My Name is Red,” set in the world of Islamic 16th-century miniaturist painters in Constantinople. The book is a paean to the exquisite paintings themselves, an homage to the painters, a disquisition on Islamic philosophy, and a murder mystery.

A dead man, a dog, a murderer, a coin, two lovers, and a tree take turns narrating this tale. “My Name is Red” is both an examination of the way figurative art is viewed within Islam and a love story that demonstrates the tricky mechanics of Ottoman marriage laws. Orhan Pamuk not only captures the world of 16th-century Istanbul, but also is able to open an entire philosophy of art to Western readers.

“Snow” continues with the same themes, and this time the doppleganger is one person, Ka, a Turkish poet who has spent 12 years in exile in modern Germany. He has returned to Turkey finally and travels to far-off Kars on the Russian-Turkish border near the Caucasus Mountains.

Ka is to investigate the suicides of young girls who are “head scarf” girls, barred from schools for wearing the Muslim scarf covering their hair. Ka is also there to reunite with Ipek, a lovely former classmate whom he wishes to marry.

Kars is a tightly wound knot of tension between secular and religious forces, and Ka's investigations lead him into encounters with all the major players, including a terrorist, the leader of the head-scarf girls and a crowd of rioters. Ka is both a trickster, so he can get Ipek alone, and a dervish who regains his inspiration to write poetry.

And throughout, the snow falls evenly over Kars, covering the tumid, mean streets of the city, closing traffic in and out, while the revolutionary unrest and Ka's desires sort themselves out under a blanket of snow.

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Ralph Mohr taught English and Latin at Marshfield High School for 31 years. He welcomes comments regarding the column at rmohr1565@charter.net.