Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  MIDNIGHT

  AT THE

  PERA PALACE

  The Birth of Modern Istanbul

  Charles King

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  New York • London

  The main entrance to the Pera Palace Hotel, on the corner of Graveyard and Thugs Streets.

  For

  Ctlin Partenie,

  teacher and friend

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE

  GRAND HOTEL

  THE GRAY FLEET

  OCCUPATION

  RESISTANCE

  MOSCOW ON THE BOSPHORUS

  KONSTANTINOUPOLIS

  “THE POST-WAR WORLD WAS JAZZING”

  “THE PAST IS A WOUND IN MY HEART”

  MODERN TIMES

  BEYOND THE VEIL

  LIVING LIKE A SQUIRREL

  ISLAND LIFE

  QUEEN

  HOLY WISDOM

  SHADOW WARS

  PAPER TRAILS

  AT THE GATE OF FELICITY

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Chronology

  Notes

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Index

  Pera / Beyolu circa 1935

  Istanbul Today

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In writing about a complex past, inconsistency of language is inevitable. I use the name “Istanbul” throughout this book, even though before 1930 or so, many locals and most foreigners knew it as a version of “Constantinople.” I use the word “Muslims” to describe people who would have used that label in the Ottoman era, regardless of their level of religious devotion. Many of these people would later come to call themselves Turks. People of Greek Orthodox heritage in Istanbul have long distinguished themselves from Greek-speakers who live in Greece, and I make a similar distinction in English. I call the former “Greeks” and the latter “Hellenes.” I refer to the present stiklâl (Independence) Avenue as the “Grande Rue,” a term that many people continued to use in the interwar years, even after the street had officially been given its current name.

  I generally spell Turkish words in the Turkish fashion. I make exceptions for idiosyncratic spellings found in written sources, which I have left unaltered, and for terms and names that have English equivalents (hence, pasha rather than paa). I refer to some historical characters—especially Turkish Muslims—by one or more given names up until the time they adopted an inheritable family name, around 1934. Before then, individuals were normally referred to by a first name plus an honorific, such as “Pasha” for generals or senior administrators, “Bey” or “Efendi” for men of rank, and “Hanım” for similarly placed women. “smet Pasha” would therefore be the equivalent of “General smet,” while “Halis Bey” would be something like “Mr. Halis.”

  I mainly use the cardinal directions to describe the layout of Istanbul, even though a glance at a map will show this to be inaccurate; there are few geographical features that run strictly east–west or north–south. The hilltop neighborhood once called Pera can be subdivided into many different subsections today, and most of them are now contained within the municipal district of Beyolu.

  Of course, if a reader is trying to track down the characters and locales in this book, these finer points of usage need not be a hindrance. Istanbul is, after all, a very forgiving place.

  But Istanbul is so vast a city, that if a thousand die in it, the want of them is not felt in such an ocean of men.

  EVLYA ÇELEB,

  Seyahatname (Book of Travels), seventeenth century

  The palace is empty, its fountain silent,

  The ancient trees have grown brittle and dry . . .

  Istanbul, Istanbul! The last dead encampment

  Of the last great migration.

  IVAN BUNIN,

  “Stambul,” 1905

  Constantinople and the narrow straits upon which it stands have occasioned the world more trouble, have cost humanity more in blood and suffering during the last five hundred years, than any other single spot upon the earth. . . . It is not improbable that when Europe in her last ditch has fought the last great battle of the Great War, we shall find that what we have again been fighting about is really Constantinople.

  LEONARD WOOLF,

  The Future of Constantinople, 1917

  MIDNIGHT

  AT THE

  PERA PALACE

  PROLOGUE

  A bartender pouring a glass of raki at an Istanbul establishment.

  WHEN I FIRST SAW THE Pera Palace, nearly twenty years ago, you had to have a rather specific reason for being in that section of Istanbul, like getting a lamp rewired or calling on a transgender prostitute. The old hotel was squat and square, wrapped in dirty, green-plastered marble. Its faded fin-de-siècle grandeur was out of place amid the seedy mid-rises that had grown up pell-mell in the 1970s and 1980s. Inside, the red-velvet chairs in the Orient Bar were always empty. The bartender seemed surprised whenever I stopped in for a cocktail and a bowl of stale leblebi, tooth-cracking roasted chickpeas.

  Things had once been different. The Pera Palace was established in 1892 to service clients arriving on the Orient Express in the capital of the Ottoman Empire. For decades afterward, it was the obvious place for out-of-towners to stay. The wood-and-iron elevator, which rose up like a birdcage through the marble staircase, had been only the second one installed in Europe (after the Eiffel Tower’s). A baroque dining hall stood next to a lounge of faux-marble inlay and filigreed screens, covered by a soaring glass canopy. Beyond the building’s stately façade lay Pera, Istanbul’s most fashionable neighborhood. A short walk along the main street, known to many Istanbullus in the nineteenth century and after as the Grande Rue, led to the embassies of most of the major world powers. Next door to the hotel, American diplomats shared the street with both the YMCA and legal brothels, and not far away, the British, Russians, and Germans could entertain government officials in gilded restaurants and dark clubs.

  The Pera Palace was meant to be the last whisper of the Occident on the way to the Orient, the grandest Western-style hotel in the seat of the world’s greatest Islamic empire. Like Istanbul itself, the hotel was Europeans’ first major port of call when they went east into a traveler’s fantasy of sultans, harems, and dervishes. But before the Pera Palace had celebrated its twentieth year in business, all of that had begun to change.

  A revolution deposed a long-reigning Ottoman sultan and ushered in more than a decade of political turmoil and communal violence. The First World War brought military defeat and foreign occupation. And in 1923, in one of modern history’s most profound exercises in political self-creation, Turks made a purposeful break with their Ottoman past, rejecting an Islamic and multireligious empire and declaring in its place a secular, more homogeneous republic. Turkey’s new leaders shifted their capital two hundred miles to the east, to the wind-whipped hills of Ankara, far from the corrupting memories of the old center.

  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. He had arrived from the Balkans by train, rolling past brick-red Byzantine land walls and children splashing in the water, into a tumble of small mosques and wooden houses with dusty domes and sprung clapboards rubbed gray by salt and wind. He had seen roads choked with colorfully dressed peasants trudging behind muddy, bristle-haired water buffaloes. Queues of migrants in damp overcoats snaked around foreign embassies. Demobilized officers str
utted in frayed tunics. From a plaza near the Pera Palace, he looked through a spyglass at refugee families pressed tight against the railings of a steamer spewing ash. Everything white was dirty white, he observed, and the mood was hopeless and resigned, like the feeling of waiting while a doctor and nurse are upstairs with someone you love.

  Veils and harems, fezzes and frockcoats were disappearing. The sultan and the caliphate—the institution that embodied Muslims’ understanding of God’s will on earth—would soon be declared defunct. Hours and dates would be reckoned the way they were in Paris or New York, not as in Mecca and Medina. Ministers and generals were moving to Ankara. Foreign embassies and their entourages would follow. Istanbul was settling into a self-absorbed sense of hüzün, the hollowed-out melancholy that Turkish intellectuals said infused the crumbling walls, tumbledown mansions, and rotting seaside villas.

  But between the two world wars, displacement and disorientation opened up a set of opportunities that no one could have foreseen. Loss was also a serviceable kind of possibility. The antidote to hüzün was what the Turks called keyif: a sense of joyful abandon, of singing to avoid crying, the willful summoning of mirth as an answer to horror. A different kind of Istanbul was already rising. Buffalo carts shared the streets with electric trams and automobiles. Circles of radical nationalists held meetings in the same districts where socialist agents plotted world revolution. New music drifted up from quiet neighborhoods: orchestral jazz, slithery and daring; the staccato plectrum work of a blind Armenian lute player; the torch songs of the Levantine underworld. You could have a drink at Maxim, a club owned by a black Russian American, or dance to the Palm Beach Seven playing nightly at the Garden Bar.

  The minarets and dervishes were still there, but Istanbul was becoming a novel version of an Islamic city: an island of outcasts and the self-made, the cosmopolitan ex-capital of an Islamic empire that dreamed itself into a nation-state, and a place that—then as now—was struggling to shape its own way of being Muslim and modern at the same time. In these years of movement and change, if you squinted into the winter sun setting low over the Grande Rue, past the beggars and grifters, it was not hard to dream up a different kind of country and a different kind of life—one that, by force of will and dint of circumstance, you got to remake.

  For more than half a millennium, the West’s image of the Islamic world has been shaped by its encounter with Istanbul: the grandeur of its golden age, the swiftness of its decline, the apparent choice between the bad alternatives of authoritarian rule and religious extremism. But in the interwar years, Istanbullus embraced Western ideals with a zeal that no one could have imagined. The city whose very geography united Europe and Asia became the world’s greatest experiment in purposeful reinvention in the Western mold.

  In the process, the former Ottoman capital came to reflect both the best and the worst of what the West had to offer: its optimism and its obsessive ideologies, human rights and the overbearing state, the desire to escape the past and the drive to erase it altogether. When visitors complained that the old Istanbul seemed to be slipping away, what they meant was that Istanbul was coming to look more and more like them. “[W]e civilised people of the West,” wrote the historian Arnold J. Toynbee on a visit to Turkey in the 1920s, “glance with pity or contempt at our non-Western contemporaries lying under the shadow of some stronger power, which seems to paralyse their energies by depriving them of light. . . . Yet if we paused to examine that dim gigantic overshadowing figure . . . we should be startled to find that its features are ours.”

  Europeans who came to Istanbul understood the dark side of their own civilization precisely because many of them were its victims. After the First World War, in the parallel universes created by the collapse of empires across Europe and the Near East, Westerners were sometimes the needy immigrants and Easterners their reluctant hosts. Wave after wave of Europeans landed in Istanbul in ways they could never have imagined—not as conquerors or bearers of enlightenment but as the displaced, impoverished, and desperate. They wandered Istanbul’s streets and were shooed away from the Pera Palace’s doorstep: drunken sailors and ruined businessmen; former nobles flogging family silver and moth-eaten furs; unwanted ethnic minorities cast off by some European government; the losers of a civil war, palace intrigue, or world-changing revolution.

  No one understood this history better than a man who turned out to be an unexpected traveling companion in my journey into the thicket of the hidden Islamic jazz age. I first came across Selahattin Giz in a series of limited-edition Turkish photograph albums published in the early 1990s. He was a bootstrap newsman whose job was to record daily life as he saw it, often in blurry, motion-filled detail. When I visited his archive, now owned by a Turkish bank, I found that one of the biggest collections of images was filed under the category “Kaza”—Accident. They included the grisly and sensational photos you would expect to see on the front page of any newspaper eager to shift copies: car wrecks, pedestrian deaths, and the aftermath of a nightmarish day when the cable on the Tünel funicular snapped, sending the wooden carriage careening through the front of the downhill station. There were also the private experiments of a man with a camera on some lazy afternoon: alley cats, interesting shadows, some tentative erotica.

  As I made my way through Giz’s collection, I realized that I had stumbled upon the person who had helped chronicle the vanished world I wanted to understand. I also knew that his own life mirrored the story of exile and rejuvenation that defined his adopted city.

  Giz was born to a Muslim family in Salonica (modern Thessaloniki, Greece) in 1914. His hometown was Greek by origin, largely Sephardic Jewish by population, and—until just two years before he was born—Ottoman by government. Salonica passed to Hellenic control as a result of the Balkan Wars, a kind of regional dress rehearsal for the devastation of the First World War, and the new government worked hard to erase the centuries of multiculturalism that had defined urban life there. Minarets were pulled down. Mosques became churches. Muslim homes and businesses passed to Christian ownership.

  The Giz family joined hundreds of thousands of other Muslims pushed out of southeastern Europe. They settled in the Beylerbeyi neighborhood of Istanbul, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, an area whose Greek Orthodox, Jewish, and Armenian inhabitants replicated the mixed world the Gizes had known in Salonica. But the young Selahattin spent most of his life and career on the other side of the water, amid the cinemas, street performers, and cabarets of Pera. An uncle gave him a camera on the occasion of his sünnet, the Muslim circumcision ceremony typically performed a few years before a boy reaches adolescence. As a student at the prestigious Galatasaray Lycée in the late 1920s, he threw himself into photography, wandering the city with his Zeiss Ikon and talking his way into the darkroom of the city’s largest daily, Cumhuriyet (The Republic). He formally joined the newspaper’s staff in 1933 and spent the next forty years as one of its premier photojournalists. He died, at eighty, in 1994.

  Looking at his photographs—and those of many unknown photographers that he slipped into his collection—is like visiting an Istanbul that few people, whether Turks or tourists, can imagine ever existed. There are towheaded Russian chorus girls, arms flailing and cheekily self-aware. There is a meeting of the alumni association of the eunuchs of the sultan’s imperial harem. A crowd of Muslim men sacrifices two rams to bless a trolley car. There are firemen in otherworldly gas masks during an air-raid drill and schoolgirls caught up in a frenzy of grief on the death of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s founding president. Grown women skip rope to the delight of a child or zip down a street on a bicycle, their dark hair and summer dresses blowing in the breeze. And there is Giz himself, smiling, snapped by a friend in an Istanbul winter, the wet snow piling up on the brim of his fedora. If journalism is the first draft of history, it is also sometimes a salutary shock: a way of forcing us to recall a mode of being that made sense at the time, of lives lived messily among neighbors who prayed and ate differ
ently—Muslims, Christians, and Jews; religious and secular; refugees and natives—with everyone, in one way or another, starting over.

  Selahattin Giz in an Istanbul winter.

  Istanbul is today a global city, a sprawling urban space of more than thirteen million people, making it more populous than Greece, Austria, or Sweden—larger, in fact, than two-thirds of the world’s countries. Old fishing villages have become fashionable suburbs, and old suburbs have become city centers in their own right, with glass-clad skyscrapers rising above new mosques and malls. Even during Muslim holy days, the Arabic-language call to prayer competes with Turkish-language pop music pounding through the thin walls of café-bars. In an afternoon, you can visit the universal seat of the Greek Orthodox faith, a headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic Church, the office of Turkey’s chief rabbi, and the mausoleum of one of Muhammad’s closest companions. It is home to people who feel their first identity to be Turkish and others who might list Kurdish, Alevi, Armenian, or Circassian, and who are now more freely confident in doing so than at any time in recent history.

  Istanbul’s rise began with the journey away from a place that visitors often knew as Constantinople. The new city was the product of immigrants as well as emigrants—women and men who, by choice or necessity, had come to Istanbul as well as those who had left it, the first generation of republican Istanbullus or the last generation of imperial Constantinopolitans. In an era of leave-taking and restlessness, a time we now call the interwar years, the Pera Palace was not the only place where these transients and newcomers began their reinvention. But for wave after wave of refugees, migrants, and exiles, the storied old hotel was a symbol of the transition from a past age to a new one—a place that embodied the ties between East and West, between empire and republic, and between nostalgia and experiment in the only place on earth to have been the epicenter of both Christendom and global Islam.