The Narrator/Orhan
The narrator stays unnamed almost through the entire novel, and he is only referred to as "Orhan Bey" or "Orhan" towards the very end of the novel. A novelist and old friend of Ka, Orhan tasks himself with piecing together the last years of Ka's life and recovering the lost poems that Ka wrote during his time in Kars. The result of this quest to piece together Ka's later years is the novel itself, which Orhan tells us time and again. Orhan claims that it was Ipek's beauty which moved him to try and understand Ka's mental state and actions towards the end of his life, and he often compares himself to his deceased friend. Additionally, at the end of the novel, Orhan's daughter Rüya is mentioned—the name of Orhan Pamuk's daughter in real life. Thus, the fact of the novel's narration is designed not only to provide the third-person omniscient perspective that historical hindsight provides, but it is also designed to bridge the gap between personal recollection and history, as well as art and mythology/memory. This latter tension is a key theme of the novel in the form of its obsession with theater and craft, so it is especially fitting to see echoes of this fixation in the text's narration.
Kerim Alakusoglu (Ka)
Kerim Alakusoglu—professionally and casually known as Ka—is the protagonist of the novel. He is a poet by trade, and at the start of the novel, he has only just returned to Turkey after years of self-exile in Germany. He found himself longing for the "backwards" and provincial culture of the homeland he once abandoned, and so he has come to Kars as a journalist to write an article about teenage girls who had committed suicide over the issue of headscarves in the classroom. This, however, is only Ka's nominal reason for coming to Kars—his true purpose is to meet Ipek, his former schoolmate with whom he is infatuated. Ka spends a great deal of the novel wrestling among different national, religious, and personal allegiances, but by the novel's end, his supercilious manner and jealousy leads him to betray Blue and anger Ipek. In the end, he returns to Germany alone and, four years after the related events in Kars, Ka is shot dead on a street in Frankfurt by disciples of Blue.
Muhtar
Muhtar is Ka’s acquaintance from his university years, and he is also a hobbyist poet. Now, however, he is more familiar to Ka as Ipek's ex-husband. Ipek and Muhtar's marriage fell apart because Muhtar found faith and became a devout Muslim, and he tried to persuade Ipek to cover herself with a headscarf. Now single, he runs to be the mayor of Kars under the religious Prosperity Party's banner. However, he is seen as a threat to the secular order by both the police and the intelligence services of Turkey, so he is often detained and beaten. He is a loyal follower of the Sheikh Effendi.
Turgut Bey
Turgut Bey is a former school teacher and Communist activist, but after serving time in prison for his beliefs, he has withdrawn from politics. He is Kadife and Ipek's father, and he lives a reclusive and quiet life with them in the Snow Palace Hotel of Kars. He never leaves the hotel, but Ka is eventually able to persuade him to leave to attend a secret meeting at the Hotel Asia and sign a joint statement with Islamists and Kurdish separatists (people whom he usually reviles out of his reverence for "intellectualism").
Ipek
Ipek is the woman Ka is in love with. Though she is initially hesitant to return Ka's affections, by the end of the novel, she wants to leave Kars for Frankfurt with him, where she thinks she might finally have a chance at being happy. However, she never leaves Kars out of a sense of betrayal when Ka reports Blue to the authorities: after all, Ipek knows that such an action is gong to devastate Kadife, and she is greatly turned off by Ka's jealousy when faced with knowledge of Ipek and Blue's past affair. Ipek is a very beautiful and tender person, but she is also a free-willed and independent woman, which makes her an object of great admiration both around town and to all those who meet her (like Orhan himself).
Kadife
Kadife is Ipek’s sister. She is not as conventionally beautiful as Ipek, but she is more determined, defiant, and brave. Kadife originally has scorn for the girls who wear headscarves in defiance of state orders, but she eventually comes to support them and starts wearing a headscarf herself. Though she is a lover of the pro-Islamic nationalist Blue, she is also a fiercely feminist and assertive woman whose opinions on most prominent issues are filtered through the lens of gender. She understands that there can be no real liberation for Muslim women in Kars without both economic and personal independence for women in general, and it is this desire to make an impact that leads her to act in Sunay Zaim's play and eventually kill him (although this latter part is an accident). She often pushes back on both Ka and Blue's reductive logics towards women, and by the end of the novel, she is married to Fazil.
Blue
Blue is a representative of the Islamic nationalists who act in defiance of the established secular laws of Turkey. Though he is branded as a fundamentalist and regressive terrorist by the state, he is in reality a very composed and suave gentleman—in fact, he barely even looks Turkish (with features like his midnight blue eyes). He is Kadife's lover, and though he stays in hiding for most of the novel, he comes out to meet with Ka and attempts to get a statement out to the Western press. In the end, however, Blue is betrayed by Ka out of jealousy regarding his past relationship with Ipek. Ultimately, however, Blue is made a martyr for the cause, and his disciples in Germany are responsible for Ka's death after the events of the novel.
Sunay Zaim
Sunay Zaim is an aging actor first encountered by Ka when he comes to Kars, and he leads a traveling theater troupe with his wife, Funda Eser. In the past, Sunay was a prominent actor, but in his pseudo-political bid to play Atatürk in television and movies, he made enemies among both Islamists and the Kemalist camp, each of whom seized on his faults and spread gossip to discredit him. When the snowstorm hits Kars during the events of the novel, Sunay realizes that this is his perfect chance to create a true artistic masterpiece that bridges theatrical fiction and reality, so he stages a republican coup during a play that leaves many dead and injured in Ka. However, knowing that his time in the spotlight from the coup is brief, and knowing also that his remaining life is short (he is terminally ill), he stages a second play just as the snow begins to thaw in which he plans his own murder by Kadife and discusses a variety of political themes.
Z Demirkol
Z Demirkol is a former Communist who has turned into a violent republican in service of Sunay Zaim. During the coup, he incites a series of violent crimes and also takes over the local telecommunication utilities. Moreover, using his previous special operations experience, he manages the coup's intelligence operations, and it is in this capacity that he tells Ka about Ipek and Blue's past affair in order to make Ka turn on Blue.
Serdar Bey
Serdar Bey is a newspaper publisher in Kars, and he is a friend of both Turgut Bey and various political factions that pay him to print biased news. He also is notable throughout the novel for printing a variety of stories before they happen—a testament to the lack of free will in Kars under strict political and military controls, but also evidence of the persuasive power of the media. A particularly striking relationship in the text is between Serdar and Ka, since Serdar essentially forces Ka both to perform his work and to go into hiding as a result of what he writes (though he doesn't even really support the newspaper himself).
Necip
Necip is a young boy who attends the religious high school in Kars. He is infatuated with Kadife (who he calls Hicran), and he dreams one day of writing Islamic science fiction. He is naturally drawn to Ka, but he argues with Ka throughout the text over atheism and whether or not atheism's consequences point towards suicide. Nonetheless, he and Ka remain close throughout the text until he is killed during the coup. He is also a close friend of Fazil.
Fazil
Fazil is Necip's friend and the eventual husband of Kadife (after the events related in the text). He is also a devout Muslim, and after Necip's death, he is haunted by his friend's ghost to a point where his life comes to mirror that of his old friend—for example, falling in love with Kadife. Eventually, however, he shows Orhan around town and helps him realize that Ka did in fact betray Blue. Moreover, he takes Orhan to the place that inspired both Necip's vision of a godless world and also Ka's poem on this topic. Finally, Fazil is notable for his rather explicit rejection of the novel as an aesthetic project, since he says that Orhan's novel will ultimately only allow Westerners to pity and otherize him. In response, he tells Orhan's readers not to trust everything they read in the novel about Kars.
