Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  The journey was a publicity stunt organized by Georges Nagelmackers, a Belgian engineer. His nemesis—and, in a way, the reason for the journey—was a man named George Pullman. To railway enthusiasts, Nagelmackers is a well-known figure in the history of trans-European travel, but Pullman’s fame was genuinely worldwide. Pullman’s innovation had been to develop carriages designed for sleeping—the famous Pullman cars. His design, unveiled in the United States in the early 1860s, featured twenty berths per carriage, arranged in upper and lower rows. It was now possible for passengers to make long journeys by train in the comfort of something approaching a real bed, even if the rail car was really no more than a bunkhouse on wheels.

  Pullman’s idea might have taken some time to catch on—after all, getting undressed and sleeping amid strangers was a novel idea for the time—had it not been for the fortuitous use to which his experimental carriage was put in 1865. When John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln, a grand journey seemed the only proper way to commemorate the death of a president. A week later, a black-draped train departed from Washington, DC, and crawled to Springfield, Illinois, carrying Lincoln’s body and offering mourners a chance to see the president on his final journey. Pullman cars were hitched to the back of the train, allowing family members and scores of attendants to make the trip along with the presidential cadaver. Even in the middle of a national tragedy, Pullman had shown that a train ride could be more than a dusty, cinder-strewn ordeal. It could also be, in the words of one railway historian, “a means of travel which could be memorable (and therefore profitable) as an example of gracious living on wheels.”

  Within only a few years, Pullman cars were beginning to take over not only the American market but also the European one. Nagelmackers had visited the United States in 1870 and returned to Europe determined to edge out Pullman’s model and install himself as the leading manufacturer of sleeping cars in Europe. He relentlessly pursued railway companies and governments to convince them of the usefulness of his version of the sleeping car, or wagon-lit in French. He incorporated a new German-designed suspension system, known as a bogie, which cradled the cars on separate, removable-axle assemblages and served as a kind of shock absorber, providing an easier ride and potentially a more restful sleep.

  In December 1876, Nagelmackers formally incorporated his Brussels-based firm. A few years later, he unveiled a logo that would become synonymous with luxury long-distance travel on the continent: the intertwined calligraphic letters WL, supported by lions rampant and surrounded by the company’s French name—Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands-Express Européens. No one before had imagined that a single rail company could operate lines running across the entire continent. Railroads were not only symbols of national prestige. They were also critical parts of the national security infrastructure of European kingdoms and empires, and allowing a foreign train—especially one also filled with foreigners—to navigate across the continent with only minimal interference from passport and customs officers was something of a novelty. But having secured the patronage of Belgium’s King Leopold II, the Wagons-Lits service managed to connect Paris with Vienna by the early 1880s, with plans for moving on to Bulgaria. The addition of yet another of Nagelmackers’s innovations—the dining car—meant that long journeys could be completed without having to depend on the offerings of faraway stationmasters or the unorthodox foodways of strangers. The cars themselves were works of art, full of polished brass and wood inlay, wing chairs and leather banquettes, with the designs for foldaway tables and hidden compartments modeled on the tight-space solutions worked out by naval architects.

  By 1883, the inaugural expedition of the Orient Express was meant to showcase how far the Wagons-Lits Company had come in only a few short years and to look toward the next great goal of extending the service all the way to the edge of Europe itself, to Istanbul. Nagelmackers invited a who’s who of minor European dignitaries to go along for the ride: travel writers and essayists, French and Belgian ministers, German newspapermen, the first secretary of the Ottoman Embassy, Austrians and Romanians, a correspondent from the London Times. At the frontier between Austria-Hungary and Romania, a troupe of eleven musicians joined the group, set themselves up in the dining car, and played waltzes and other songs as the train sped toward the Black Sea.

  The first journey only made it partway, however. The travelers had to alight in the Bulgarian port of Varna and then travel the rest of the way to Istanbul by ship. The entire journey took eighty-one hours and forty minutes, including fifteen hours steaming on the Black Sea. The reason was that Nagelmackers’s ambition had outstripped the realities of Ottoman infrastructure.

  By 1850, the Ottoman Empire had not a single mile of track, compared with more than eight hundred in Austria-Hungary and around six thousand in Great Britain. A burst of railway construction came later in the century, but even then the focus was on connecting outlying parts of the Ottomans’ vast empire with each other, not on connecting the capital to European centers. Still, despite its inauspicious beginnings, Nagelmackers’ project had its desired effect. Within five years, Ottoman railway projects had extended full service to Istanbul and connected trunk lines with the European network. By the time Nagelmackers died, in 1905, it was possible to board a train in Paris and not relinquish your sleeping berth until you reached the sultan’s capital. When the Simplon Tunnel opened through the Alps a year later, it became easier than ever to get from the heart of Christendom to the heart of the Islamic world by rail. Passengers were deposited only steps from the geographical limit of Europe and a short walk from the major historical and tourist sites in the city. It was, said an observer at the time, “the annexation of Constantinople to the Western world.” Even for seasoned continental 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.

  The first Orient Express travelers had been lodged in a string of hotels in Pera, the normal destination for visiting Europeans, but the overall quality and the paucity of available space in many of them provided both a problem and an opportunity for the Wagons-Lits Company. The firm had acquired a plot of land at the edge of the territory scorched by the great Pera fire of 1870. The site looked out on a municipal garden called Les Petits-Champs, which city planners had created after the blaze. The park had a somewhat grisly past. It was sited on top of a former cemetery, as were several of Istanbul’s public parks. But within a few years, the street had become the city’s newest hotel row, with a range of Parisian-style buildings overlooking the green space. Few visitors were aware that the exotic-sounding street to which they were directed by their guides and interpreters—Kabristan—actually meant Graveyard.

  In 1892, the Wagons-Lits Company decided to build its own hotel there, at the intersection of Kabristan and Çapulcular, or Thugs, Streets. The property had once belonged to a Muslim religious foundation established through a benefaction from the sultan. In 1881 it had been purchased by a family of Armenian merchants and bankers, the Esaians, whose roots lay in both the Ottoman and Russian Empires. The Esaians might well have regretted selling to the Wagons-Lits firm, because when the Pera Palace finally opened a few years later, business was brisk.

  The hotel had a considerable advantage over the other first-class facilities nearby, such as the Hôtel de Londres, the Bristol, the Continental, the Angleterre, and—its perennial rival—the Tokatlian, situated right on the Grande Rue. It was the only hotel that was part of a pan-European network owned and operated by a single company. Its sister establishments in Nice, Monte Carlo, and other cities offered unprecedented luxury to a new generation of trans-European travelers, and staying at each of the Wagons-Lits facilities became a collect-them-all game, at least for those wealthy enough to afford it. Like the Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton hotels of later eras, the Pera Palace provided an
exclusive experience not because it was wholly unique but precisely because it was part of a chain—a grand community of properties such as the Avenida Palace in Lisbon or the Odyssée Palace in Paris that promised luxury, safety, and a certain degree of predictability in major destinations, all built to a similar style and standard. As the Guide Bleu later noted, the Pera Palace was equipped with “all the modern comforts: elevator, bathrooms, showers, radiator heat, and electric lighting, with a magnificent view over the Golden Horn.”

  Insurance maps from the period—one of the best sources for understanding Istanbul’s changing landscape—show whole tracts of European Istanbul in ruins, the result of old fires that had never given way to rebuilding. The Pera Palace, however, stood at the center of the city’s new commercial and financial district created in the wake of the Pera fire. A string of four- and five-story buildings, many constructed by local Greek and Armenian business leaders and financiers, gave a radically new look to the neighborhood. Their well-proportioned façades and expansive windows would have been at home in contemporary Paris. They faced Petits-Champs Park and looked out on the western outskirts of the city, making them among the best places to watch the sunset, when the blazing late-day light made the marble façades glow bright and otherworldly. Architects had also made sure the buildings were connected with Pera’s traditional promenade, the Grande Rue, through a series of internal passageways.

  Few people could have foreseen that, in only two decades after the Pera fire, the neighborhood would have not one but two prominent avenues, the Grande Rue and the newer Graveyard Street, both sporting horse-drawn trolleys and knitted together by the city’s most splendid internal passages and arcades. When Le Corbusier visited in the first decade of the twentieth century, he found the relatively new streetscape on the heights above the Golden Horn to be a revelation. Istanbul now had, he pronounced, its own kind of allure new-yorkaise.

  THE GRAY FLEET

  A water view: A man and woman cross the Bosphorus on one of Istanbul’s iconic ferries, with the old city and Galata Bridge in the background.

  AT THE TIME THE PERA PALACE was founded, signs of progress and optimism were abundant in the Ottoman capital. Steamships carried passengers across the city’s waterways. Luxury goods from Europe were displayed behind gilt vitrines along the Grande Rue. The new soccer clubs of Beikta, Galatasaray, and Fenerbahçe—the teams that would later come to define some of the fundamental divisions within Istanbul’s citizenry—sponsored gala matches and league championships. A Greek shipper, a Jewish cloth merchant, an Arab pearl diver, a Kurdish caravan master, and an Armenian financier could all regard themselves as subjects of a single sovereign, the Ottoman sultan.

  But no future had a longer past than that of 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. Russia’s Tsar Nicholas I was credited with labeling the empire “the sick man of Europe,” and, in strategic terms, the Ottomans had in fact been in slow retreat since 1683, when the sultan’s armies were pushed back from the gates of Vienna. But virtually any Ottoman official—from the sultan’s senior advisers to regional governors on restive frontiers in the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Arabian Peninsula—could sense that the decline was accelerating.

  Since the 1850s, the so-called Eastern Question—a conglomeration of territorial disputes, nationalist movements, and international standoffs—had roiled the empire and sparked muscular diplomacy and armed interventions by Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia. In the early 1860s, Russian attacks on Muslim highlanders in the Caucasus sent hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees pouring across the frontier to seek the sultan’s protection. In 1877–1878, a devastating war involving the Ottomans, Russia, and the Balkan states led to a peace settlement that removed Ottoman control from much of southeastern Europe, an area that Istanbul had ruled for centuries. More than half a million Muslim migrants again sought refuge in the sultan’s shrinking domains. An entire generation of new Ottoman subjects, many concentrated in Istanbul, came directly from these consecutive waves of forced migrants, or muhacirs. Untroubled about their own Muslim subjects and citizens whom they had put to flight, Christian governments remained concerned about Christian coreligionists still inside the empire. They pressured the Ottomans to exempt Greeks, Armenians, and other non-Muslims from local criminal and civil law.

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, no major power—not even European monarchs who worried about instability in their own overseas empires—faced the near-constant uprisings, rebellions, and guerrilla campaigns that confronted the aging Sultan Abdülhamid II. He had begun his reign in the 1870s as heir to the Tanzimat, the great midcentury Ottoman reform movement that sought to catch up to European powers by streamlining the state administration, instituting modern schooling, building new roads and railways, and modernizing the army and navy. But he had since retreated into reaction and suspicion. He owed his state budget to foreign creditors, his military power to British and German advisers, and his sense of personal security to a network of domestic spies whose written reports flooded daily into his Yıldız Palace complex, nestled in a forest overlooking the Bosphorus. The number of informants was so great that a sign in the Pera Palace reportedly requested government agents to yield seats in the lounge to paying guests.

  In 1908, a conspiracy of military officers known as the Committee of Union and Progress, also called the Unionists or Young Turks, forced Abdülhamid to accept a constitutional monarchy and restore the imperial parliament, which he had earlier abrogated. The Unionists were part of a new generation of Ottoman officers painfully aware of the gulf that separated their own empire from the great powers. Many hailed from families who had been displaced in the Balkan territorial changes of the 1870s. Their movement for change had emerged in the western city of Salonica, an outpost of liberal ideas that had long been the empire’s window onto the rest of Europe. The Unionists had witnessed one military defeat after another and had watched as their empire succumbed to crippling foreign debt. They were the first wave of the revolutionary impulse that would shake many countries over the course of the twentieth century, a revolt of ambitious majors and colonels against an establishment of decrepit generals and flaccid politicians. They were convinced that the restored constitution would return the empire to the faded ideals of the Tanzimat era.

  For several months, Istanbul was full of optimism and a sense of relief. “The motley rabble, the lowest pariahs, were going about in a sublime emotion, with tears running down their unwashed faces, the shopkeepers joining the procession without any concern for their goods,” recalled Halide Edip, a Muslim writer and feminist. “There seemed to be no thieves and no criminals. . . . It looked like the millennium.” But newfound liberties soon became an excuse for license of all kinds. Newspaper workers demanded higher wages, citing the constitution. Smugglers openly sold tobacco in the street, pointing to the constitution as justification for breaking the state monopoly. Young boys threw rocks at passing automobiles, yelling “Hürriyet var!”—“There’s freedom now!” Socialists and nationalists of every stripe—Armenian, Kurdish, Arab, Albanian, Turkish—advocated transformation of the empire into a multinational monarchy, its breakup into sovereign countries, or its evolution into a nation-state for ethnic Turks.

  In 1909, a counter-coup attempted to undo the constitutional changes, but the Unionists struck back, sending military units marching on Istanbul to defend the reforms. Abdülhamid—thin, stooped, and weary, the emblem of the dwindling empire that his own conservatism had helped to unmake—was placed on a train and exiled to Salonica, where he could be easily monitored by Unionist sympathizers. His brother, Mehmed V, was elevated to the throne, and Unionists eventually took control of key ministries, government departments, and regional administrations. Factions ranging from staunch monarchists to political elites
in favor of a decentralized empire vied for influence in Istanbul, but in time a triumvirate of three Unionist leaders—the military officers Enver and Cemal, along with the civilian Talât—emerged as the effective power behind the throne.

  With Istanbul consumed by domestic upheaval, opposition movements and foreign powers began to pick away at the edges of the empire. Bulgaria declared its independence under a self-styled king. Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, an Ottoman territory it had administered under an international mandate for the previous three decades. In the autumn of 1911, Italy announced that it would extend its territory across the Mediterranean by annexing the Ottoman province of Tripolitania (now in Libya). In 1912 and 1913, two wars in the Balkans led to the independence of Albania, the loss of Macedonia and Crete, and the almost complete withdrawal of Ottoman power from continental Europe. The frontlines were little more than twenty miles from Istanbul, and windows rattled from the boom of artillery fire along the earthwork defenses on the landward side of the city. Muslim refugees flooded in from the countryside, pushed out by local reprisals and bivouacking soldiers.

  By the summer of 1914, Ottoman subjects had already experienced more years of war, civilian flight, and economic crisis than the inhabitants of any other great power. In the brewing conflict in Europe, the sultan at first expressed neutrality, but economic disputes with Britain and inducements from Germany pushed ministers and commanders loyal to the Unionists toward the German camp. The Ottoman army was restructured by a German adviser, Otto Liman von Sanders, who assumed operational control. Two German cruisers, the Goeben and the Breslau, steamed into the Sea of Marmara as the core of a newly modernized naval force, captained and crewed by German personnel. In October, the warships sailed across the Black Sea and launched a preemptive bombardment of Sevastopol, the seat of Russia’s southern fleet. Within days, the Allied governments of Russia, France, and Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire, which now fell into the camp of the Central Powers alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary. In turn, Mehmed V, in his role as caliph—the purported leader of global Islam, a title his predecessors had carried for more than four centuries—declared jihad against the Allies. It was the last time that a universal Islamic ruler would be in the position to issue a call to holy war on behalf of all Muslims.