midnight_pera_palace.md

Midnight at the Pera Palace

The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

Prologue

• A young reporter named Ernest Hemingway saw the beginning. "From all I had seen in the movies, Stamboul ought to have been white and glistening and sinister," he wrote in the Toronto Daily Star in the late autumn of 1922.

Grant Hotel

• It was not difficult to see, White said, why Bosphorus boatmen were widely regarded as perfect specimens of Ottoman manliness and reputed by locals to be Istanbul's most skillful lovers.
• Rebellious janissaries - the sultan's corps of elite troops and bodyguards - might take out their frustrations by deliberately reducing thousands of houses to ash, leaving iron fixtures twisted, stone foundations exposed, and a third or more of the city in ruins.
• Most of the old city's seven hills were taken up by monumental mosque complexes, such as the Baroque-style Nuruosmaniye on the second hill, the majestic Suleymaniye on the third, and the Selimiye on the fifth, and this in turn reduced the space available for housing the city's burgeoning population.
• Even for seasoned travelers, the excitement of approaching the train in a French station never dulled. "I am going by it! I am in it! I am actually in the blue coach with the simple legend outside: CALAIS - ISTANBUL," wrote Agatha Christie of one of her frequent journeys by rail.
• Few visitors were aware that the exotic-sounding street to which they were directed by their guides and interpreters - Kabristan - actually meant Graveyard.

The Gray Fleet

• But no future had a longer past than the Ottoman Empire. Its demise was the most overanticipated event in diplomatic history. Arguing over how other countries and empires might profit from its end was one of the fixtures of great-power diplomacy for much of the nineteenth century.
• By Ziya's estimate, no more than one out of every fifteen people on the street was a Muslim.

Occupation

• On the same day the Allies began their occupation, an Ottoman field commander named Mustafa Kemal checked into a room in the Pera Palace.
• In that event, the British would need experienced natives like himself to help manage the situation. "What I want to know," Mustafa Kemal said to G. Ward Price, "is the proper quarter to which I can offer my services in that capacity." Price reported his conversation to British officers at the Pera Palace, but the response was dismissive.
• His energetic job hunt had also made his name much better known than when he first arrived in Istanbul. By early 1919, Mustafa Kemal seems finally to have come to the attention of Allied authorities, with plans put in place to arrest him and deport him to Malta as a subversive endangering the armistice.
• Non-Muslims were the city's barkeeps and bankers, its brothel owners and restaurateurs, its exporters and hoteliers. As late as 1922, Greeks still owned 1169 of 1413 restaurants in the city, compared with 97 owned by Muslim Turks, 57 by Armenians, and 44 by Russians.

Resistance

• The American high commissioner in the city, Admiral Mark Bristol, had sent a raft of telegrams arguing that the partition of the country would inflame the local sentiment against the occupation and provide yet another specific cause around which the nationalists could coalesce. ... News of the Serves accord had precisely the effect that Admiral Bristol and others had predicted. It was one thing for Ottoman officials to give up the outlying parts of the empire but agreeing to the effective partition of Anatolia and the elimination of local control over Istanbul and the Straits was a monumental concession.
• In early October 1920, King Alexander of Greece went walking with his German shepherd. Along the way, his dog leapt on a Barbary macaque, a monkey that belonged to one of the palace gardeners. Another monkey rallied to the defense, and the king ended up with a severe bite. He thought little of it at the time, but within a few days the bite turned septic. The king took to his bed and died before the month was out.
• Some 213000 people, mainly Greek Orthodox and Armenian families who had lived in Smyrna for countless generations, left it for good. Three-quarters of the city was in ruins.
• "Foreigners are nervous ... remembering the fate of Smyrna," Ernest Hemingway reported from the scene, "and have booked outgoing trains for the weeks ahead."
• Mehmed joined the British commander for his last crossing of the Bosphorus, a short ride to the British battleship Malaya, and a long sea journey toward voluntary exile. Harington had hoped the sultan would give him a small token to commemorate the event - a cigarette case, perhaps - but Mehmed instead entrusted him with looking after his five wives, whom he left at the palace.

Moscow on the Bosphorus

• "I think that one could say, without exaggeration, that nowhere else during the period of immigration, even in the Slavic countries that welcomed us, did the Russians feel more at home than in Constantinople," recalled the Russian lawyer and former senator Nikolai Chebyshev.
• Thomas Whittemore knew one thing that the Russians themselves had not yet come to understand: They were in all likelihood never going back.

Konstantinoupolis

• "Anything more like a lunatic asylum than Haidar Pasha Station cannot be imagined," recalled Agatha Christie on her first visit in the 1920s. ... she bypassed Pera Palace and stayed at the Tokatlian Hotel on the Grande Rue.
• At that point, the city was part of an emerging nation-state, not an empire, but any newsagent would have laughed at the idea that Istanbullus might ever be squeezed into a single national identity. Istanbul had eleven newspaper in Ottoman Turkish, seven in Greek, six in French, five in Armenian, four in Ladino and other languages spoken by local Jews and one in English.
• Disputes between pro-Hellenic and pro-patriarchal factions sometimes erupted into violence. In the summer of 1923, a band of Hellenic nationalists broke into the patriarchate, interrupted a meeting, and dragged the patriarch, Meletios IV, down a staircase, before the melee was stopped by Allied police. The patriarch promptly excommunicated the leaders of the mob. Fed up, Meletios soon left Istanbul and retired to a quiet monastery on Mount Athos.
• Turkish negotiators had originally proposed the expulsion of the entire Greek population of Istanbul. If allowed to remain, Greeks would be "the means of importing corruption and disloyalty into our country," insisted Ismet Pasha. The hellenic government argued that adding more Greek refugees would create a humanitarian disaster
• The Lausanne treaty mandated the compulsory exile of around a million Greek Orthodox and five hundred thousand Muslims.
• Lausanne was a schizophrenic treaty. Parts of it contained the blueprint for uprooting a million and half people. Other portions seemed a multiculturalist's model for protecting the rights of minorities.
• When Ankara announced the creation of an alcohol monopoly in 1926, putting the production and sale of intoxicants solely under the control of a state-licensed firm, one of the major fields of non-Muslim commercial activity in Istanbul also became fully nationalized. In 1923, the Pera Palace - one of the city's foremost properties with an absentee owner - was declared the property of the state.
• In 1934, a new law required all Turkish citizens to take surnames but expressly forbade people from registering names that had recognizably non-Turkish endings.
• When Prodromos Bodosakis - the absentee owner of Pera Palace - died, in 1979, his business interests stretched from the munitions industry to wine production, chemicals, and shipbuilding. He was simply "the most powerful man in Greek industry."
• In December 1927, Pera Palace was purchased from the state by a Muslim businessman, Misbah Muhayyes, who formally registered his ownership in the municipal property records in 1928.
• Istanbul's non-Muslim minorities fell from an estimated 56 percent in 1900 to 35 percent by the late 1920s. Izmir, the former Smyrna, went from 62 percent non-Muslim to 14 percent.

The Post-War World Was Jazzing

• "The man who raises a thirst somewhere east of Suez is going to be unable to shake it in Constantinople once Kemal enters the city," Hemingway predicted.
• With the elimination of the sultanate in 1922, Yildiz palace complex was repurposed into a casino.
• In 1926, municipal authorities issued orders banning the Charleston - not because it offended Muslim sensibilities but because record numbers of people were being admitted to the hospital for sprains and bruises.
• Until well into the twentieth century, a home-cooked meal was a rarity. This mode of dining was almost exclusively the purview of the wealthy, who could afford a permanent kitchen in their villa or mansion.
• The word "harem", from the Arabic for "forbidden", was originally more architectural than sexual, referring to the portion of a Muslim home reserved for private family use.
• The black eunuchs - kara agalar - generally of Ethiopian or Sudanese heritage, had been brought into slavery by middlemen and eventually found themselves at the epicenter of the imperial system. But in a time of changing mores and political revolution, they were out of a job.
• Especially for occupying armies, providing opportunities for recreational sex was as much a part of a commander's job as ensuring a steady supply of food and adequate equipment.
• A two-week snapshot of hospital records in 1919 showed Ottoman soldiers mainly suffering from typhus or smallpox, while British and French troops reported 2 cases of typhus, 1 of pneumonia, 6 of influenza, and 84 of gonorrhea and syphilis.

The Past Is a Wound In My Heart

• Especially popular during Ramadan and other holidays, Karagoz held its own against film until First Word War, when the first permanent movie venue opened opposite the British Embassy off the Grande Rue.
• The first talkie in Turkish, On the Streets of Istanbul, appeared in 1931, created by the firm that would become one of the principal film producers in the early republic, the Ipekci brothers.
• Two years later, Ipek Film debuted its first locally produced talkie, A Nation Awakens. directed by Muhsin Ertugrul.
• A detailed survey of first-run films in the summer of 1932 revealed the range of Istanbul's viewing preferences: 96% of films showed characters using alcohol, 74% had a plot concerned with wealth and luxury, 70% centered on a love affair, 67% had actresses clad in suggestive clothing, 52% showed passionate romance, and 37% featured sexy dancing. 63% also determined to have an implausible plot.
• The traditional separation of the sexes had never been an obstacle to determined lovers, even under the Ottomans, but with the rise of dark and comfortable cinemas, there was now a new environment in which the amorous could meet.
• In 1933, when the Austrian writer Franz Werfel published his famous Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a novel depicting the Armenian genocide, Armenian Catholics in Istanbul responded by burning the author in effigy, an attempt to win the favor with the Turkish government.
• The Zildjians (origin Zilci) were a family of Armenians whose roots in the city went back centuries. Since the early seventeenth century, they had been the principal supplier of cymbals to Ottoman military bands. In late 1920s, they moved to Massachusetts.
• Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegun were born in Istanbul in the tumultuous era of war and revolution - in 1917 and 1923, respectively - but they spent their lives outside the city, first in London, and after 1935 in Washington, DC where their father served as the Turkish Republic's first accredited ambassador.

Modern Times

• The Turks legislated their monarch out of existence without ever marching on a royal palace. They conquered no territory but their own. They embraced the idea of parliamentary republic but just as quickly enveloped their supreme leader in a cult personality that exceeded that of the Ottoman sultans.
• Mustafa Kemal's blue eyes and charismatic personality made him one of the most swooned-over heads of state in the world. He appeared on the covers of major international magazines more often than almost any leader of his time.
• Like other revolutionaries, Kemalists wrote their history with an eraser in hand.
• The brilliance of Mustafa Kemal's strategy lay in his ability to pick the right opponents to use against others.
• Revolutionary courts, known as independence tribunals were established. More than seven thousand were arrested, close to seven hundred were sentenced to death.
• Military planes, one of them piloted by the president's adopted daughter, the aviation pioneer Sabiha Gokcen, were sent to bomb villages. Aerial attacks on Kurdish areas in Dersim region in 1937-1938 became a kind of Turkish Guernica.
• Although officially secular, the state privileged Sunni Islam as a true marker of Turkish identity, regardless of an individual's actual level of religious devotion. In the alchemy of religion and identity in Kemalist Turkey, one was judged not so much by which religion one practiced but rather which religious heritage one rejected.
• Under the Ottomans, few of these families would have dreamed of using "Turk" to describe themselves. That label was generally reserved for a country bumpkin more comfortable astride a donkey than in the sophisticated environs of Istanbul. Mustafa Kemal's great innovation was to elevate the derogatory label into a new nationality.
• "Ne mutlu Turkum diyene" said Mustafa Kemal. THe phrase was at the same time descriptive and cautionary. It was an honor to be a Turkish citizen but it made life easier if you claimed you were a Turk in an ethnic sense as well.
• On October 28, 1928, between the zero hour of six o'clock in the morning and the all-clear cannonade in the evening, no one was allowed to leave home, even for Friday prayers. It was the day of the first-ever national census.
• The space around Taksim is saved only by the area known today as Gezi Park, a swath of green off to one side, which Prost had intended as a formal garden built on the site of an Ottoman-era military barracks that he had deemed parasitical.

Beyond the Veil

• Turkish Women's Union even attempted to form a women's political party in the summer of 1923. It was technically the first party created in Turkey, founded several months before the Republican People's Party. The administration refused to register it.
• Halide Edip's family's outlook - imperial yet progressive - was evident in their son's names. The first Halide called Ali Ayetullah; the second she called Togo, after the Japanese admiral who defeated the tsar in the Russo-Japanese war.
• "Dr. Adnan Bey is one of the leaders of the present Nationalist Government, but it is generally felt that his position is due rather to the remarkable personality of his wife than to his own genius."
• Mustafa Kemal's willingness to buy off local warlords, his increasing suspicion of any form of disagreement, and the establishment of independence tribunals to mete out punishment to open rebels as well as quiet dissenters - all seemed the opposite of the world Halide had been trying to create.
• The next year, Mustafa Kemal delivered a thirty-six-hour speech known as the "Nutuk", a discourse that rewrote the history of the independence struggle by denouncing his enemies and placing himself at the center of the narrative.
• She became the chair of the English Department at Istanbul University - the institution's first female professor - and translated Shakespeare into Turkish. Her version of Coriolanus, about the journey from war hero to tyrant and from exile to revenge, is still admired.

Living Like a Squirrel

• As a diplomatic report noted in 1930, the government's stance was to assume that "any malcontent in republican Turkey is at least communist and probably a spy."
• Among the many foreigners who had been seduced by the artistic socialism of a Meyerhold or a Mayakovsky, Nazim was among the most wistful for that earlier era of Soviet experimentation, before Stalin and the Gulag. His weakness was a common one among his generation: the ability to will himself to look through the awfulness of Stalinism back toward a time when going to Russia could seem, to a teenaged Turk, the ultimate form of liberation.
• "Some people know all about plants, some about fish," he had written. "I know separation." He remains there, far from Istanbul, probably the world's most celebrated national poet still in exile from his homeland.

Island Life

• "Dear Sir," Leon Trotsky wrote, addressing Mustafa Kemal. "At the gate of Constantinople, I have the honor to inform you that I have arrived at the Turkish frontier not of my own choice, and that I will cross this frontier only by submitting to force. I request you, Mr. President, to accept my appropriate sentiments."
• Trotsky had been delivered from his Turkish exile and was on his way to a new life, first in France, then in Norway, then finally in Coyoacan, a borough of Mexico City. He and Natalya carried newly issued Turkish passports that made their status clear: "The bearer of this passport," declared the first page, "is not under the protection of the Turkish state."

Queen

• After being declared Miss Universe in Spa, Belgium in 1932, Keriman arrived back in Istanbul to an uproarious welcome. She toured the nation, greeted at each stop with an enthusiasm that rivaled only that shown for Mustafa Kemal himself. She was invited to appear in a film but refused. Honor demanded otherwise, she said.

Holy Wisdom

• As Whittemore knew, something called the Byzantine Empire was largely a construct of modern historians. The first appearance fo the word Byzantine in English dates only from 1794, and that in a source relating to botany, not history or culture.
• The adjective Byzantine eventually became a synonym for anything overbureaucratized, recondite, opaque, and ridiculous.
• Mustafa Kemal sent Kerima Halis, still wearing her Miss Universe crown, to meet Venizelos as a symbolic recognition that times had changed between the rival nations. The Hagia Sophia was a similar exercise in cultural detente. Ironically, restoring the greatest material expression of Greek Christianity became one of the most powerful levers wielded by the Kemalists in their drive to make the country more Turkish, more secular, and more secure with its neighbors.

Shadow Wars

• Just as Istanbul had been the way station for White Russians pushed out of Bolshevik Russia, it now served as a lifeline for academics, especially Jews, dismissed from their posts by the Nazis.
• Albert Einstein might have been part of the cohort as well, if an invitation from the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, had not come through before he was able to move to Istanbul.
• In Sofia, he had seen the disciplined German soldiers, the mechanized transports, the crisp uniforms. Now he could see Turkish soldiers being sent to reinforce the border: an army of oxcarts and ponies, and men armed with what looked like antique muskets. "My impression was strengthened that, if the Germans decided to attack and occupy Turkey, there would certainly be nothing to oppose them until they got to the Bosphorus, if then," Rendell recalled.
• Many efforts to elicit information or to buy Turkish sympathies were not surreptitious but, rather, public and invariably creative. In February 1943, Germany returned the decayed corpse of Talat, the Unionist leader and mastermind of the Armenian genocide, who had been shot more than two decades earlier by an Armenian assassin in Berlin. ... He would eventually be joined by other Young Turks, including his associate Enver, whose remains were brought from Tajikistan in the 1990s. In a twist that no one seems to have noted at the time, the hilltop that Talat's remains were reinterred happened to look across to one of the city's main Armenian cemeteries.

Paper Trails

• According to a secret report by the OSS, the tax assessment for Armenian property owners amounted to 232% of their property's value, 179% for Jews, and 156% for Greeks, while Muslims were assessed at just under 5%.
• The wealth tax was repealed in March 1944 and prisoners were allowed to return home, but their properties were never restored.
• A follow-up note from the embassy the next spring contained more information: The family apparently had been killed at the beginning of the German occupation four years earlier. The people to whom the Palestine authorities had issued immigration certificates, to whom the passport control officer in Istanbul was prepared to issue a validation, and to whom Turkish officials were asked to issue a transit visa were already dead by the time the first stamp had been placed on any of their documents.

At the Gate of Felicity

• "It would appear from the telegrams received by Hirschmann and myself that the War Refugee Board is under the impression that the principal difficulty with which we have been confronted has been a reluctance on the part of the Turk Government to cooperate," Ambassador Steinhardt wrote to Washington in March 1944. "Thus far this has not been the case. Up to present time our principal difficulty has been the refusal of the Axis authorities in the Balkans to permit Jewish refugees to depart."
• Even after the Turks had ceased requiring transit visas for Jews holding valid immigration certificates, the Romanian government insisted that migrants present special exit documents before departure.
• Pope Pius XII's concern for protecting Rome and Vatican City from Hitler's armies also pushed him to speak cautiously when addressing the issue of German atrocities, even though Vatican diplomats were fully aware of the horrors being perpetrated in occupied Poland and the Axis-occupied parts of the Soviet Union.

Epilogue

• On September 6-7, 1955 looters stormed into shops and homes owned by Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and other non-Muslims, seeking revenge for the supposed desecration of a spot sacred to Kemalism. At least eleven people were killed, and more than 5600 shops, homes, restaurants, churches, and schools were damaged. ... The "September events," as they are still called in Turkey, were the last straw for many of Istanbul's minorities.
• Modern European history has two dominant modes, the national and the elegiac. Both are, in their way, fictions. National history asks that we take the impossibly large variety of human experience, stacked up like a deck of playing cards, and pull out only the national one - the rare moments in time when people raise a flag and misremember a collective past - as the most worthy of our attention. The elegiac asks that we end every story by fading to black, leaving off at a point when an old world is lost, with a set of ellipses pointing back toward what once had been.
• Ottoman bourgeois became ardent Turkish republicans. Muslim villager remade themselves as apartment-dwelling Istanbullus. White Russians became Parisians. Greeks started new lives in Athens and Thessaloniki. Some of their grandchildren no doubt rolled their eyes at old stories about a shop on a long-forgotten foreign avenue. Armenians went to America or, in their tens of thousands, stayed put in their homeland, living quietly as Turkish citizens and, sometimes as self-declared ethnic Turks.