Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  Bodosakis had managed to thrive by negotiating several different economic and political worlds, but for many local Greeks, the arrival of the Allies posed more questions about the future than it answered. While the patriarch was the spiritual leader of Greek Orthodox Christians, there was a competing political authority emanating from Athens—the government of the Greek mainland, or the Kingdom of the Hellenes—that was now asserting its influence east of the Aegean Sea. The Hellenic presence among the Allies was relatively small: four warships out of dozens in the entire fleet, a few foot soldiers on patrol, and a detachment of Cretans guarding the Greek patriarchate in Phanar. But the presence of troops from Greece raised the fundamental issue of the future relationship between Istanbul’s age-old Greek community and the relatively young Hellenic state.

  Less than a century earlier, the territory of Greece had itself been part of the Ottoman Empire. In the 1820s, a revolt on the Greek mainland sought to throw off Ottoman power and create an independent country. Hellenic revolutionaries were often little different from other anti-imperial movements of the era—a combination of liberal politicians, overblown romantics, and profiteers looking to rid themselves of a faraway sovereign—but sympathizers in Europe saw them as living relics of the glorious Athenian past: the noble, freedom-loving ur-source of Western civilization as a whole. Philhellenism—support for Hellenic culture and the political cause that sprang from it—swept across Europe and aided the revolutionaries in creating their own state in 1832. The new country eventually expanded to include neighboring areas populated by Greek-speakers as well as by Slavs, Albanians, and Turkish-speaking Muslims.

  King Constantine, the reigning monarch at the outbreak of the First World War, was well aware of the British and French interest in pulling his country to the Allied side. Greece’s strategic position in the Mediterranean would be critical to the Allied war effort in the Balkans and the Near East. But as a brother-in-law of Kaiser Wilhelm II, he chose the middle path of keeping Greece neutral. As the war wound on and a German victory appeared less secure, however, pro-Allied factions within the Hellenic parliament rose against the king and, in 1917, forced him from the throne and into exile. Constantine’s son, Alexander, was elevated to the monarchy, and Greece entered the war on the Allied side. The war seemed at last to provide an opportunity to realize the Megali Idea, or “Grand Idea,” dear to pan-Greek nationalists: the dream of retaking Istanbul and restoring the Byzantine Empire under a Hellenic crown.

  The power behind Alexander’s throne was Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, an experienced politician who had stage-managed the royal transition in order to bring Greece into the war. Venizelos was both visionary and pragmatic, and he saw clearly that an Allied victory would be in the long-term interests of Greece. To press its case for acquiring Ottoman territory, the Hellenic government launched its own occupation farther down the Aegean coast. On May 15, 1919, Venizelos’s troops marched into the major Ottoman port of Smyrna (Izmir). The British and French offered tacit support, mainly as a way of keeping the city out of the hands of the Italians, another Allied power with designs on Ottoman territory. But unlike the Allies’ arrival in Istanbul, the landing in Smyrna was a disaster. Disorder swept through the city as local Muslims tried briefly to fight off the occupiers. Stores were looted and the city’s many religious communities—Greek, Armenian, and Muslim—briefly descended into violence before Hellenic soldiers imposed martial law.

  For local Greeks as well as Hellenes on the mainland, the seizure of Smyrna was a triumph, the first step toward the Megali Idea. (There were, in fact, more ethnic Greeks in Smyrna than in Athens at the time.) When news of Smyrna’s capture reached Istanbul, the streets of Pera were draped with the blue-and-white flag of the Hellenic kingdom, and a huge portrait of Venizelos was unveiled in Taksim Square. For Ottoman Muslims, however, it was a heart-stopping tragedy. Not only was the imperial capital now administered by the Allies, but in clear contravention of the Mudros armistice, Hellenic forces had seized the empire’s most important Aegean port. Unlike Milne’s troops in Istanbul, the Hellenes seemed intent on annexing, not just administering, their prize.

  While Bodosakis was weighing up his own possible futures in the wake of the Hellenic advance, Mustafa Kemal, the Ottoman field commander, was on his way to Anatolia. He had arrived in Istanbul on an inauspicious day—November 13, 1918, the moment when Allied ships sailed into the city—and he departed for Samsun the following May 16, only a day after the Hellenes took Smyrna. Both events galvanized the growing opposition movement that he managed to organize in the east.

  Abandoning the pretext for his army inspection tour, Mustafa Kemal set about rallying officers and field units dissatisfied with the inaction of the Istanbul government. Within a few months of reaching Samsun, he had enlivened colleagues among the Ottoman officer class. He had also helped stage two large-scale congresses in the eastern cities of Erzurum and Sivas, where delegates from military units and other sympathizers rallied around the anti-occupation cause. The congresses denounced the Hellenic invasion and proclaimed the creation of a national resistance to the Allies. By the end of 1919, Mustafa Kemal had established his headquarters in Ankara, a town in central Anatolia that was far enough away from Allied positions to be defensible and, with its own railway station, in easy contact with the remnants of the Ottoman armies still regrouping after the armistice. For the Allies, Mustafa Kemal’s expanding forces were a new and unexpected addition to an already complicated strategic and political environment.

  With Ankara now becoming a rival pole to Istanbul, Allied observers came to describe the growing resistance movement as “Kemalists” or Turkish nationalists. The idea that Turks represented a distinct nation, rather than just part of the governing elite of a multinational empire, had been part of the Unionist cause earlier in the century, but under Mustafa Kemal, the nationalist message was married to the concrete political and military program of resisting the occupation and bucking up the enfeebled sultan. The Kemalists first turned their attention to the east, launching attacks on Armenians and other armed groups returning to areas from which they had been deported by the Unionists during the war. Over the next year and a half, violence spread to central and western Anatolia as well. Hellenic forces moved out of their enclave around Smyrna and extended their zone of control along the Aegean Sea. The sultan’s government looked on these events with powerless detachment. While Mehmed VI was still the legal authority in Istanbul and the wider empire, he watched as his officers and soldiers organized their own defense of the fatherland without royal aid or sanction. Muslim politicians and intellectuals soon flocked to Ankara. Thefts from arms depots in Istanbul and smuggling of guns to the Kemalists increased.

  The feckless Ottoman parliament, which continued to meet through the spring of 1920, wavered between tacitly supporting the Kemalists and seeming to acquiesce to the Allied authorities, who still recognized the sultan and parliament as the only legitimate government. The preferences of Muslim Istanbullus were clear, however. In February 1920, a rally in the Sultanahmet district brought out perhaps 150,000 people to demand that the Turkish heartland remain part of a unified state with guaranteed control over Istanbul and the Straits. Later in the month, in its boldest act to date, the parliament adopted a declaration known as the National Pact, which set out the Ottomans’ core demands vis-à-vis the Allies—ranging from asserting the freedom and independence of the sultan’s state to insisting that the future status of controversial border regions be settled by referendum. Crucially, it was the first document produced by the Ottoman government that used the word Türkiye—Turkey—for the country previously known as the Ottoman Empire.

  The growing disorder—as well as the fear that the sultan’s government, the Kemalists, and Istanbullus might eventually unite against the occupation—pushed the Allies into a fateful decision. On March 16, 1920, General Milne extended full military occupation over the city, a technical change to the status that Allied forces had enjoyed
since 1918. In a move not sanctioned by the Mudros armistice, the new arrangement subjected all civilian and military institutions to Allied oversight. British soldiers walked down the Grande Rue with bayonets fixed and swords drawn. They were prepared for resistance, but in most instances detachments of Allied guards simply walked into government ministries and stood post outside office doors. Local police and military units were disarmed. Villages in outlying districts were searched for weapons caches. Further rounds of uncooperative Ottoman bureaucrats were shipped to British-controlled Malta.

  The occupation came as no surprise to anyone. Rumors of it had circulated in the Pera Palace bar, and the French had shared the plans with select Ottoman officials, who were able to leave the city rather than face arrest or deportation by the British. But it was a rash decision and ultimately a foolhardy one. Mustafa Kemal’s associates in Anatolia could now argue that they represented the only truly national government, since the sultan had stood by quietly as Allied troops launched their formal seizure of the capital. In Ankara the next month, the nationalists opened their own parliament, the Grand National Assembly, which included some representatives from the defunct Ottoman parliament in Istanbul. Mustafa Kemal was elected its first president, becoming in effect the head of government of an as-yet-unrecognized country. The assembly issued a proclamation declaring that it had no intention of deposing the sultan, but, as with the Unionists’ attempt to save the Ottoman state from itself in 1908, relations were tense between the established regime and its alleged saviors. The Ankara assembly prescribed execution for anyone who challenged its legitimacy, while the sultan proclaimed the same punishment for Mustafa Kemal and his closest supporters.

  The Allies had taken over Istanbul because of the threat posed by a unified Turkish Muslim front, but within only a month, the prospect of a multisided, fractious, and internationalized civil war seemed closer than ever. Ottoman loyalists denounced the Turkish nationalists. Turkish soldiers targeted religious minorities, believing that all Greeks and Armenians were potential supporters of the Allied occupation. Hellenic troops clashed with armed Turks. Brigands and local warlords threw their weight behind whoever seemed to be on top.

  A continent away, diplomats were meeting in the Paris suburb of Sèvres to create a document that was intended to transform the shaky Mudros armistice into a lasting peace. In May 1920, Allied negotiators presented Ottoman officials with the draft of a final peace treaty. The terms were shocking. Syria, Mesopotamia, and Palestine were to be taken away from Ottoman control, paving the way for a system of mandates that would administer these territories under the French and the British. Much of eastern Anatolia was to be divided between an independent Armenia and a future Kurdistan. Egypt and Cyprus were confirmed as free of Ottoman control. Portions of the Aegean coastline around Smyrna were ceded to Greece. Istanbul and the Straits were to be governed by an international commission composed of representatives from Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Russia, Greece, the United States, and other countries.

  These were precisely the arrangements that Allied representatives in Istanbul had urged negotiators not to put forward. The American high commissioner in the city, Admiral Mark Bristol, had sent a raft of telegrams and memoranda arguing that the partition of the country would inflame local sentiment against the occupation and provide yet another specific cause around which the nationalists could coalesce. It would also ensconce Britain as the dominant power in the region, to the exclusion of the other Allies and to the detriment of the Turks themselves. “The United States entered the war and sacrificed men and money to overcome the imperialism of Germany,” he wrote to Washington from his office next to the Pera Palace. “I must call attention to the evident imperialistic tendencies of Great Britain.” Allied negotiators, however, saw themselves as playing a continual game of catch-up, drafting terms of a final peace that were moot almost as soon as they were proposed, given the fast-changing military situation across Anatolia. The Hellenes were carving up the old empire already, and there seemed little hope of reversing that course. The best outcome, negotiators reasoned, would be a treaty that would at least bring some order to the Ottoman breakup and give its various pieces a kind of international blessing.

  In August 1920, the sultan reluctantly accepted the deal. The occupation had dismantled the country de facto, but Sèvres divided it up de jure. Like the Byzantine Empire it had displaced nearly half a millennium earlier, the Ottoman state was now whittled down to a tiny, insignificant, and largely demilitarized power at the edge of Europe. News of the Sèvres 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—letting the Arab lands go, for example—but agreeing to the effective partition of Anatolia and the elimination of local control over Istanbul and the Straits was a monumental concession. The Allies were no longer temporary occupiers seeking to ease the transition from armistice to peace. They had become acquisitive victors dividing up the spoils of war, all with the sultan’s blessing.

  Lines on maps, international mandates, orderly population movements, and grand schemes for reforming governance were debated and redrafted by diplomats with little understanding of what was happening in the Ottomans’ old domains. After the Sèvres accord, Mustafa Kemal’s supporters were bolder and more convinced than ever of the justice of their cause. Hellenic troops continued to advance, pressing toward Istanbul overland through Thrace and up the Aegean coast from Smyrna. Each side—British, French, Italian, Hellenic, and Turkish—worked to create facts on the ground before the treaty could be fully implemented. The outcome, however, would be shaped by a bizarre event that unfolded more than three hundred miles away, in a garden outside of Athens. It turned out that Istanbul’s fate, and the Ottoman Empire’s, hung on a monkey bite.

  Many people saw the affair as a bizarre form of cosmic justice, and it was wrapped up in one of the most complicated royal successions of the era. In early October 1920, King Alexander of Greece—the monarch who had ousted his father, led his kingdom to victory in the First World War, and now oversaw the troops marching toward Istanbul and Ankara—went walking with his German shepherd on his royal estate in the suburbs of Athens. Along the way, the 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 had turned septic. The king took to his bed and died before the month was out.

  “It is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite,” Winston Churchill later observed. The political effects were enormous. With Alexander dead, the losers of the 1917 palace coup invited Constantine to return from exile and resume his reign. New elections were called, and in the political bargaining that followed, Venizelos was dismissed as prime minister. The turmoil in Athens was felt most deeply across the Aegean, but the results were not what anyone might have predicted at the time.

  Given the turbulent politics of Constantine’s sudden return, the momentum behind Hellenic advances in Anatolia might have dissipated; grand plans for seizing the coastline and eastern Thrace, and perhaps even pressuring the other Allies to hand Istanbul over to the Hellenic government, might have fallen away. But in this critical moment, Britain, the major occupying power, remained resolute. Islamophobic and philhellenic in equal measure, the British broadly endorsed Hellenic ambitions, tacitly urging Constantine to finish the job begun by Alexander and Venizelos. There was now a formal treaty in place—the Sèvres accord—and London dispatched a new commander, General Charles Harington, to take over from General Milne and implement the treaty that the sultan’s government had approved. The French and Italians, by contrast, wary of the return to power of the pro-German Constantine, began to pull back their support for the Hellenic cause. These fissures within the Allied side emboldened the newly restored Hellenic monarch, who was eager to display
his ability to win the peace by winning yet another war. Newspapers in Athens featured pictures of Constantine slaying a Turkish dragon and marching into a reclaimed Constantinople, flanked by his namesake, the long-dead Constantine XI Palaeologus, the last Byzantine emperor.

  More than ever before, Turkish nationalists now had a mission: preventing the Hellenic soldiers from threatening the core areas in central Anatolia, blocking their march on Ankara, and gradually pushing them back toward the coast. In January 1921, Kemalist troops, led by the talented tactician smet Bey, defeated Hellenic forces at the first battle of nönü, south of the Sea of Marmara. Another Turkish victory followed on the same spot in April. In response, the Hellenic army launched a major offensive in the late summer, but that too was repulsed, this time at the Sakarya River near Ankara.

  Turkish fighters were beginning to see the conflict as their own war of liberation—ironically, following the example that Hellenes, Bulgarians, Albanians, Arabs, and other non-Turks had already set in their drive for freedom from the Ottoman Empire—and Sakarya became the signature moment of that struggle. The victory also propelled Mustafa Kemal, who had assumed the role of commander in chief of Turkish forces, to the position of unrivaled leader of the nationalist movement. It allowed him to outmaneuver other potential contenders, such as the successful general Kâzım Karabekir, whose credentials as a member of the Istanbul elite and a seasoned field commander outshone virtually all others. Mustafa Kemal was elevated to the rank of marshal and given the honorific title of gazi, a term formerly applied to the most illustrious of Islamic holy warriors. “The retreat that started in Vienna,” said a Turkish observer in 1921, referring to the zenith of Ottoman incursions into Europe in 1683, “stopped 238 years later.”