Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  At first Ziya took lodgings for his family in Pera, but they rather quickly shifted to the other side of the Golden Horn, to a house near Topkapı Palace. Pera might have offered more spacious accommodation, but the district’s foreign embassies were like magnets for refugees seeking jobs, visas, or food. “Prostitution, dishonesty, misery and drunkenness are openly flaunted in this section of the city,” he recalled, “which revives all the vices of Byzance coupled with those of Sodom.” Ottoman police officers had been restricted to dealing only with traffic matters in that part of the city, while Allied soldiers marching along in multinational platoons were believed to favor foreigners over locals when a dispute arose.

  By Ziya’s estimate, no more than one out of every fifteen people on the street was a Muslim. The Allied troops were the vanguard of what was intended to be a permanent international force that would usher in a new era of good governance in the defunct Ottoman capital. The Ottoman Empire still existed in theory. The royal house would in fact outlast many of its historic friends and rivals. The Romanovs had already fallen in the Russian Revolution, and the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs would soon be ousted by the creation of republics in Germany and Austria. Mehmed VI, still the acknowledged head of state, sat in enforced silence in the dilapidated Yıldız Palace complex, surrounded by retainers and turbaned cavalrymen. “[W]hat will happen to Constantinople if all these foreigners . . . remain here and spread their propaganda of discontent, restlessness and lawlessness?” a local Muslim asked Ziya. No one—neither the occupiers nor the occupied—was quite sure what was supposed to come next.

  OCCUPATION

  A group of men in a small Istanbul café, some smoking a traditional water pipe.

  “PERA HAS THREE THINGS to curse,” went an Istanbul saying, “plague, fire, and interpreters.” In the Middle Ages, Italian merchants and financiers had been given wide-ranging commercial rights in the Byzantine Empire. The Genoese had governed a string of overseas trading centers around the Black Sea from the heights of Pera and the slopes of Galata. They enclosed portions of the neighborhoods behind thick, crenellated walls. These defenses decayed under the Ottomans, but even centuries later, when Greek, Armenian, Jewish, and Muslim proprietors supplanted the Italians, businesses still operated in the shadow of the imposing Galata Tower, a remnant of the old Genoese fortifications. French—the language of diplomacy and international commerce—came to fill the district’s street signs, window placards, and hotel advertisements. By the winter of 1918, with Allied powers making Pera the center of their growing administration, Istanbul looked more than ever like a foreign city within a native one. The former—which seemed to be welcoming invaders rather than standing against them—was winning out.

  The newer avenues and promenades, populated by non-Muslim minorities and foreign administrators, were a world away from the older districts south of the Golden Horn around Topkapı Palace, the Grand Bazaar, and the soaring imperial mosque complexes. Muslim refugees from the Balkans and Anatolia tended to concentrate in the south, among the traditional bazaars and commercial houses, or hans, where goods from the countryside were bought and sold. But the sultan himself had long ago decamped to new residences north of the inlet. Palaces such as Yıldız, a collection of small European-style pavilions, and Çıraan and Dolmabahçe, both grand piles of carved marble, reflected the sense of optimism and modernity that rulers had once hoped to impress into the city’s landscape. Along the coast road, mosques and clock towers in a version of Ottoman Baroque copied the excesses and curlicues of their European counterparts, minus the winged cherubs.

  “To catalogue completely the different types of humanity to be found in a half-hour stroll would take pages,” M. M. Carus Wilson, a British lieutenant, wrote to his father in England. “A walk is a continual kaleidoscope of the nations. . . ,” he added, as he described the scene:

  Among the representatives of the Allied forces, for instance, passing over the common ruck of British, French and Italian soldiery, we may fasten upon the white combination hat of the American sailor and the white skirt-kilt of an occasional Greek warrior as being specially worthy of notice. . . . Without the war influx, of course, the streets present a sufficiently diverse spectacle, drawn from the various races, Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Jews and many others who form the permanent population and form about as homogeneous a whole as a mixture of oil and water. Many of these are dressed like a London crowd, though the Fez with the European lounge suit strikes a different note. Amid the straw hats and flappers’ frocks, however, move strange figures: bearded porters, with turbans and sashes two feet broad, staggering along beneath incredibly mountainous loads; mysterious green robed mullahs clicking their rosaries as they deign to accept the contributions of the faithful; kaffedjis armed with brightly polished brass coffee urns . . . ; the black-garbed Turkish women shrouded in veils of various efficacy, some dutifully quite opaque, others the merest apology of a whisp [sic] or possibly non-existent; and finally and perhaps the most diverting of all the whiskered jovial Greek monks and priests in their long robes stretching to their feet and sometimes . . . wearing such curiously incongruous headgear as a Homburg or a Panama.

  Each Friday the selâmlık—the sultan’s public procession to a mosque for prayer—featured gilded carriages and horse guards clopping past pious onlookers. Prayers at an imperial mosque could attract ten thousand worshippers, with the bespectacled Mehmed VI arriving on a white horse surrounded by torchbearers. Among the city’s non-Muslim residents, the Hissar Players staged plays with a multicultural cast of Armenian, Greek, and other Christian young ladies. The annual Yuletide recital was held at Robert College, an illustrious institution founded in 1863 by Protestant missionaries and situated on a beautiful hilltop overlooking the Bosphorus, with piano performances of Bach and seasonal carols. Its sister institution, the American College for Girls, held commencement exercises featuring an address by the American high commissioner, Admiral Mark Bristol, on “The Life Work of Women” and music provided by the band of the British flagship Iron Duke.

  General George Milne presided over the city like a latter-day proconsul dispatched to govern a rebellious province. The king he served, Britain’s George V, had almost by accident become de facto ruler of the world’s two largest Muslim empires: by perceived right, his own—which included the vast Muslim populations of the Indian subcontinent—and by might, that of the Ottomans, which still stretched in theory from Thrace to Arabia. Milne and his French and Italian colleagues were now cast in a role that no foreigners had enjoyed since 1453: coequal governors of ancient Constantinople. Allied soldiers underscored the point by patrolling three abreast, one from each of the occupying powers.

  Milne was a dutiful soldier, a cliché of a British officer in jodhpurs and carefully trimmed gray mustache, but much of his career had been a sideshow. He had commanded troops on the battlefields of France and arrived in the Balkans to try to recoup the losses his country had sustained three years earlier in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. He had most recently led a ragtag outfit known as the Salonica Army, whose exploits had helped win the war on the eastern front but were just as quickly forgotten.

  All this was poor preparation for governing a postwar city. The economy was in ruins. Inflation was rampant. Speculation and hoarding of scarce goods, from coal to food, were widespread. Disgruntled Ottoman soldiers were pulling weapons from arms depots or dragging their feet on complying with disarmament orders. The restive fringes of one empire came into bizarre contact with those of another. A British Punjabi detachment might be sent to guard a cache of weapons against a raiding party of Ottoman volunteers. French-uniformed Moroccan cavalry might struggle to remove the bolts from rifles before criminals could lay their hands on the decommissioned weapons. Istanbul was the capital of a country that still existed on paper but in reality seemed to have blown away like an Anatolian dust storm.

  On the same day the Allies began their occupation, an Ottoman field commander named Mustafa Kemal checked i
nto a room in the Pera Palace. At the time of the armistice, he had found himself in southern Anatolia in command of an army group arrayed against British forces pressing northward from Palestine. With the fighting over and his units preparing to be demobilized, he decided to make the long train journey to the capital. He hoped to convince the Ottoman ministry of war to mount an underground resistance to the Allies or perhaps even to appoint him as war minister. At a minimum, he might offer himself as an agent for organizing military units in eastern Anatolia, a region where the reach of the Allies barely extended.

  He arrived at Haydarpaa station and, with his aide-de-camp, took the short ferry ride to the European shore. En route, he could look out on the choppy Bosphorus and see the strait full of Allied warships and launches unloading men, horses, and equipment. He had lived in Istanbul as a young man and knew the city well. Three years earlier, as commander of a frontline division at Gallipoli, he had fought hard to save it. Now, in defeat, the empire had given up the very prize that he and hundreds of thousands of “Little Mehmeds”—the Ottoman version of British Tommies and American Doughboys—had vowed to keep out of foreign hands.

  Born at some point in the winter of 1880–1881—his birth date, like that of many Ottoman subjects of the era, was uncertain—Mustafa Kemal was a native of the liberal and multicultural city of Salonica, the birthplace of the 1908 revolution. He was part of the younger generation of Ottoman officers schooled in professional military colleges and shaped by the experience of the Unionist movement that had deposed Abdülhamid II. Older officers within the Unionist ranks could recall a time when the empire had embraced modernization and reform, but Mustafa Kemal’s generation had known little besides violence and defeat. By the time the First World War began, he had already fought the Italians in Libya and the Bulgarians in Thrace. In each instance, he had seen the empire whittled away by the nationalism of religious and ethnic minorities, often abetted by foreign powers. Now, after the Mudros armistice, he and his brother officers were witnessing its wholesale destruction.

  Mustafa Kemal’s credentials as a reform-minded and patriotic soldier were impeccable, if not exceptional. If he needed convincing of how much Istanbul had changed since his last visit, the Pera Palace provided ample evidence. Always filled with foreign guests, the lobby and restaurant were now overrun with British and other Allied officers in uniform. Members of foreign delegations, travelers, and local women, including unveiled Muslims, congregated at the Orient Bar. Even Grigoris Balakian, the Armenian priest and genocide survivor, found the streets around the hotel to be a shocking testament to Istanbul’s newfound libertinism. “The rich, having made money easily during the war, ate, drank, and enjoyed life to the hilt, buying properties and spending recklessly,” he recalled. “The ridiculous styles and dress of the women with their made-up faces, half-exposed breasts, and immodest manners occupied my special attention. . . . [T]he Turkish capital had become a Babylon.”

  General Milne was staying in the hotel while he waited for more permanent accommodation, and even defeated German officers such as Otto Liman von Sanders—who had discreetly moved a short distance away to the Hôtel de Londres to avoid any unpleasant meetings in the Pera Palace’s lounge—could be seen walking along Graveyard Street. The Allies and the Central Powers were no longer in a state of war, even though no permanent peace treaty had been signed, and custom demanded that belligerents accord one another the standard military courtesies.

  A later story told of Mustafa Kemal’s encounter with a group of British officers enjoying a drink in the hotel. When the officers invited him to their table, Mustafa Kemal refused. A host should not be in the position of going to the table of a guest, he said, and the officers could come to him if they wanted to share a drink. The account was probably apocryphal, designed to show a young officer’s vigilant resistance to British rule. But Mustafa Kemal was at base a pragmatist, and evidence suggests that he went to the Pera Palace precisely because it was the epicenter of the Allied occupation.

  G. Ward Price, a correspondent for the British Daily Mail, had arrived in the city on board the Agamemnon. He caught up with Mustafa Kemal a few days after he checked in—or, rather, Mustafa Kemal caught up with him. Price received a note from the hotel manager saying that an Ottoman officer wished to speak with him. Price had never heard of Mustafa Kemal but agreed to have a conversation. When they met, Price found that the Ottoman officer had left behind his military uniform and appeared in a frock coat and fez, the standard civilian attire for well-to-do Ottoman men—“a handsome and virile figure, restrained in his gestures, with a low, deliberate voice,” Price recalled.

  Mustafa Kemal complained that the Ottomans had chosen the wrong side in the war and had mistakenly turned against their old friends, the British, largely because of the baleful influence of Enver and other pro-German leaders among the Unionists. He imagined that the Allies would choose to divide up Anatolia among themselves, and his wish was for Britain to play a major role. The British were likely to be friendlier to Muslims than the French, who had their own rocky history with governing Muslims in North Africa. 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 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. Few people seemed to know who this Mustafa Kemal was, and in any case Ottoman officers were coming out of the woodwork to offer help to the Allied cause. “There will be a lot of these Turkish generals looking for jobs before long,” responded a senior intelligence officer.

  Later historians skipped over the incident or claimed that it was an effort to undermine the British from within. But the fact remains that Mustafa Kemal spent much of the next six months behaving like a man in search of a future. He moved out of the Pera Palace and rented a house farther north in Osmanbey. He met with virtually anyone who would receive him: military officers, cabinet ministers, disgruntled parliamentarians, and on four occasions Sultan Mehmed VI himself. What he found was a great deal of dissatisfaction with the Allies but very little unity among their opponents. The occupation had sharpened divisions among various factions in the city—the palace, the parliament, businessmen, and the army’s general staff—with each group seeking mainly to avoid a wrong move rather than to strike out boldly and shape their country’s fate.

  Although the triumvirate of leading pashas was no longer in the city, they had left behind an underground organization, Karakol (Sentry), which might have provided the germ for organized resistance. But Mustafa Kemal found that Karakol was only one of a number of subversive groups then operating in the city, with little coordination among them. Once the British began to arrest and deport suspected Unionist militants, in the spring of 1919, secret plots became an even less sure way of realizing the liberation of the city and the old empire. That same spring, the Ottoman government, pressed by the occupation authorities, began arresting and trying members of the Committee of Union and Progress who had been involved in the Armenian massacres. Any officers like Mustafa Kemal who might have once been part of the Unionist cause now had an incentive to distance themselves from that legacy and find routes other than secret meetings and underground plots to press their case.

  The house in Osmanbey became one of the centers for informal gatherings of officers searching for a way both to reverse the Allied occupation and to steer clear of the Ottoman government, which seemed prepared to imprison any military men who were perceived as internal threats. The sultan’s loyalists were keenly aware of the fact that the Allies were the real power in the city, and the palace was disinclined to have upstart soldiers spark a crackdown that might well end with the sultan’s being packed off to Malta, where the British had already sent prominent Ottoman officials and potential troublemakers. But dissension among the Allies was also acute in a city that had been divided into geographical thirds, each governed b
y a separate Allied military command. From officers’ messes to the rank and file, Allied soldiers’ disdain for local Muslims was matched only by their suspicion of each other. Italians passed intelligence to the Ottomans. The French countermanded British orders. The British kept crucial information from them both.

  Frustrated by the squabbling among the underground opposition and the bumbling Allies, Mustafa Kemal managed at last to secure an official position as inspector of the Ottoman armed forces in eastern Anatolia. The job was largely nominal, given that much of the Ottoman army was in disarray, with widespread desertions and no unit at full fighting strength. His task was to assist in the orderly implementation of the Mudros armistice, in effect supervising the dismantling of what remained of the imperial army. The post at least afforded him the one thing that most Ottoman officers coveted at that stage: an actual job, reporting to virtually the only government official whose existence was not yet in question, the sultan. 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.

  Before the order could be executed, however, he managed to leave the city. With his letter of appointment from the sultan in hand, he boarded the steamer Bandırma on May 16, 1919, and headed for the Black Sea port of Samsun, a logical place to begin the overland journey toward the remnants of Ottoman forces in the east. Few people noticed his arrival in the provincial city on May 19, but today every Turkish schoolchild can name the date. It marked the beginning of what would come to be called the war of independence, and it was the first step on Mustafa Kemal’s journey toward becoming the founding president of the Turkish Republic.