by Charles King
Had history unwound differently, Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiades—the proprietor of the Pera Palace in the first years of the Allied occupation—would have been among this protected few. But like tens of thousands of others who feared reprisals by the new Turkish government, Bodosakis decided to leave Istanbul at some point in the early 1920s and fled to Athens. The Pera Palace continued to operate, as did many other minority-owned businesses in the city, even with an absent owner. Once the Allies departed the city, however, properties such as these naturally became the principal targets of Turkey’s effort to undo the economic power of non-Muslims. At the time, there were perhaps 40,000 “non-exchangeable” Greeks living abroad, people who had voluntarily left Turkey but were not legally subject to mandatory removal. Their absence was now deemed a sign of disloyalty. They had voted with their feet, the Turkish government declared, and had clearly decided to make their lives elsewhere. In the spring of 1923, new legislation passed by the parliament in Ankara allowed for the state to seize the properties “abandoned” by these nonresident citizens, even if the owners had made provisions for transferring their assets to a local relative or business partner.
On the eve of the Allied occupation, Istanbul’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry had been cochaired by a Muslim and an Armenian, with eleven of its fourteen core members drawn from Istanbul’s Christian and Jewish minorities. By early 1921, the cochairs were both Muslim, as were thirteen of its nineteen members. In 1923, the government established the National Turkish Commercial Union to represent the interests of Muslim merchants and coordinate the acquisition of industries, import–export firms, and financial institutions formerly held by non-Muslims. Foreign banks and businesses were pressured to fire their minority employees and hire Muslims instead.
Two-thirds of the Greek barristers in the Istanbul bar were dismissed. Greek trade unions were shuttered. Greek-owned businesses were threatened with legal action for small infractions or encouraged—sometimes forced—to take on a Muslim partner. These new associates could then petition the government to have a Greek co-owner designated as “exchangeable” under the Lausanne accord, with that co-owner’s share of the business then going to the Muslim partner who remained behind. In 1925 and 1926 meetings of local Greeks, Armenians, and Jews formally renounced any collective rights afforded to these communities under the Lausanne treaty. The renunciations came only after significant pressure from the Turkish government, but they represented the definitive end of any claim to special treatment based on religious confession or ethnic category. 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 landowner—was declared the property of the state. The move was nominally meant to provide compensation to the national treasury for Bodosakis’s unpaid tax bills. However, four years later, in May 1927, a new law declared that all former Ottoman subjects who had not returned to Turkey since the war of independence—including the hotel’s old Greek proprietor—were not to be considered Turkish citizens. For Bodosakis, this change meant that his own position was in some ways worse than that of the “exchangeable” Greeks who had lived outside Istanbul. While the latter were able in theory to gain compensation for the property they left behind—in some cases, even being assigned new farmland or housing in Greece—the “non-exchangeable” people who left Istanbul of their own accord had none. Lausanne had removed a million Greeks from the Turkish population on ships and trains. The 1927 law removed tens of thousands more with the stroke of a pen.
These reforms were part of an entire package of legislation, public campaigns, and city ordinances that intentionally reduced the public visibility and economic power of minorities. The new Turkish Republic rejected the confessional, multiethnic, and imperial structures of the Ottomans in favor of those of a nation-state. At best, that vision enabled equal citizenship before the law by doing away with the stovepiping system of religious self-government favored by the Ottomans. At worst, it involved making Muslim Turks the core nation within the new state and relegating everyone else to second-class status. Schools operated by non-Muslim religious institutions or private foundations were required to employ a specific percentage of Muslim teachers and were prevented from including references to religion in their curriculum. Boy Scout troops formed by minority communities were outlawed. Placards in public venues proclaimed Citizen, Speak Turkish! For most of the 1920s, non-Muslims living in Istanbul were prevented from traveling outside the city, an attempt to sequester ethnic differences inside the old capital. Armenians in particular were expressly prohibited from settling in eastern Anatolia, the region that had been the ancient center of Armenian culture and the heart of darkness during the genocide. In 1934, a new law required all Turkish citizens to take surnames—something few Turkish Muslims had used before—but expressly forbade people from registering names that had recognizably non-Turkish endings, such as “-poulos” for Greeks, “-ian” for Armenians, and “-off” or “-vich” for Slavs and Jews.
The former Greek patriarch, Meletios, compared Ankara’s policies to “Moscow-style Bolshevik Communism,” and in some ways he was not far wrong. The Ankara government had taken a lesson from the Bolshevik experience. Just as the new Soviet Union had declared White Russians to be outside the protection of the new state, so too the Turkish Republic cut ties with its old rivals—Greeks and other minorities—now living abroad. Both expropriations stemmed from common sources: the belief that the victors were leading a world-changing political movement, that to the victors belong the spoils, and that the vanquished were little more than spongers and parasites—leftovers from an old and decrepit social order who were now getting their just deserts.
For the Turkish government, and for plenty of average Muslims, the forced expropriations provided a moment of cosmic justice. From their perspective, the rapacious minorities who had bled the Ottomans dry, collaborated with the Allied occupiers, and turned their backs on the war of independence would at last be supplanted by true patriots. To the minorities, it could seem like the end of the world. “I stood on the dusty, rubbish-strewn hillside of Pera . . . and looked down at the harbor, forested with masts and grimy with smoky funnels. . . . It all looked unreal and impossible,” Ernest Hemingway wrote in the Toronto Daily Star. “But it was very real to the people who were looking back at the city where they were leaving their homes and business, all their associations and their livelihoods. . . .”
Fortunes were lost, and Greeks and other business leaders were ruined. Some were left penniless, wandering the unfamiliar streets of Athens and Thessaloniki. Others, despondent, took their own lives. Turkish newspapers regularly ran sensational stories of desperation and revenge. Just up the street from the Pera Palace, at Hemingway’s old haunt, the Hôtel de Londres, the Greek operator, Kofakos, was pushed into bankruptcy in 1928. Some time later, he showed up on the hotel’s doorstep, by then a beggar, and was sent away. He returned with a pistol and shot one of the hotel employees dead.
Unlike these cases, however, Bodosakis landed on his feet. The Pera Palace was only one part of his considerable wealth, much of which he had managed to move out of Turkey. In Athens he started new businesses that, in time, would make him one of Greece’s most formidable industrialists, with interests in virtually every sector of the economy. Many of the contacts he had made in the lobby of the Pera Palace—not least the British soldiers, German businessmen, and French merchants who inevitably stayed there while in Istanbul—may have fueled his meteoric rise from migrant to magnate. As proprietor of the Greek Powder and Cartridge Company, Bodosakis became the largest arms manufacturer in Greece, producing rifle cartridges of all calibers, explosives, antiaircraft grenades, gas masks, and boilers for naval vessels.
In the late 1930s, his busine
ss expanded to include silk and wool production, shipbuilding, and wine and liquor sales. During the Spanish Civil War, he supplied weapons to both the Left and the Right. In the run-up to the Second World War, he assiduously balanced his business interests by supplying both British and German war machines. “He was renowned as a keen-brained businessman who knew how best to turn a keg of dynamite, a block of foreign exchange or a parcel of real estate to his economic and political advantage,” said an exposé in Collier’s magazine in 1940. “He is to this war what the goateed late Sir Basil Zaharoff”—the arms-dealing Istanbul Greek and a generation Bodosakis’s elder—“was to the last World War.” When Bodosakis 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,” according to a historian of the subject, and the charitable foundation established by his family became one of the country’s most illustrious philanthropic organizations, dedicated to rewarding work in the sciences and medicine and spreading Hellenic culture.
Meanwhile, the Pera Palace languished in a legal netherworld. In the summer of 1927, at the time when absentee property owners were being stripped of their Turkish citizenship, the hotel was transferred from the treasury to the state-controlled Emlak Bank. A few months later, in December 1927, it seems to have been purchased by a Muslim businessman, Misbah Muhayye, who formally registered his ownership in the municipal property records in 1928. Originally from Beirut and, like Bodosakis, a relative newcomer to Istanbul, Muhayye was an early supporter of the Turkish nationalists, with ties to Mustafa Kemal that stretched back before the First World War. During the war of independence, Muhayye had turned his old family business—textiles—toward the Kemalist cause, supplying uniforms to the struggling nationalist army. Those connections allowed Muhayye to be granted Turkish citizenship and, with a clear understanding of which way the political winds were blowing, he managed to acquire the nominally abandoned hotel.
He picked up where the Greek family had left off, sprucing up the bar, polishing the brass on the elevator, and restoring something of the hotel’s reputation as the obvious place to stay for travelers from Europe or farther afield. The old address, which people had previously known as the corner of Graveyard and Thugs Streets, had undergone a makeover as well. The city authorities had given the road outside the front door the more stately name of Merutiyet (Constitution) Avenue. The hotel was now in Muslim hands, and in the alchemy of personal identity and republican politics, Muhayye—despite being an Arab—also became a Turk, someone who had demonstrated loyalty to the nation and was now reaping the appropriate rewards. Bespectacled and balding, with a devil-may-care bow tie and pocket square, he was the very image of the new generation of Istanbullus taking over from the Greeks. His family’s summer home in the surburb of Yeniköy, an Orientalist fantasy of cupolas and mitered eaves, is still one of the grandest residences on the Bosphorus.
Istanbul’s non-Muslim minorities fell from an estimated 56 percent in 1900 to 35 percent by the late 1920s. Other cities had more dramatic decreases. Izmir, the former Smyrna, went from 62 percent non-Muslim to 14 percent. Erzurum, in far eastern Anatolia, a city almost wholly emptied of Armenians by the genocide, fell from 32 percent non-Muslim to 0.1 percent. But the demographic revolution changed virtually everything in the old minority neighborhoods of Istanbul. In the rush to leave, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews dumped the contents of their houses and apartments onto the secondhand market, hoping to gain at least a small amount of cash before boarding a ship or train. The flood of furniture, dishware, phonographs, and pianos was so great that importers of new household items found public demand at a standstill, swamped by the easy availability of cheap used goods.
Turkey as a whole became more Muslim, more Turkish, more homogeneous, and more rural—because of the flight of non-Muslim minorities from the cities—than it had ever been. Some of the families who would go on to become the mainstays of Istanbul’s economy emerged in ways not dissimilar to that of Muhayye: keeping an eye on changing fortunes and translating political connections into economic advantage once the Greek and other minority businesses went up for sale. There was nothing necessarily dishonest in their dealings, at least at the level of individual transactions, but they rested on a massive transfer of wealth whose origins lay in the republic’s preference for national purity over the old cosmopolitanism of the imperial capital. Where a generation earlier the power elite of Istanbul would have stressed magnificence and splendor as their defining traits, clad in brocaded uniforms and luxurious silks, the new Turkish mandarins emphasized the very thing that the old Ottomans had lacked: quiet confidence and a sense of easy superiority. These men and their families now sat for portraits in tailored suits and fashionable Western-style dresses, looking out at the viewer and, like bourgeois everywhere, eager to record themselves at their most attractive and secure.
The seizure of minority properties was an intentional policy, but it was treated by generations of average Istanbullus and their historians as a windfall. If the owners had left during the Allied occupation, they were remembered as having simply abandoned their homes and businesses, quietly locking the door and walking away from the wealth that had taken generations to acquire. In reality, of course, they had been legally prevented from returning to claim their holdings. For visitors today, the entire history of this transformation is on display in the lobby of the Pera Palace itself. Portraits of Bodosakis and Muhayye, the two proprietors who took the hotel from empire to republic, hang across from each other outside the Orient Bar—one the target of state policies, the other their roundabout beneficiary, and each clearly confident, in the moment he was captured on canvas or on film, that the city belonged to people like him.
“THE POST-WAR WORLD WAS JAZZING”
The old guard: Former “black eunuchs” of the Ottoman imperial harem, at a meeting in the late 1920s or 1930s.
THE CHOICEST ROOMS IN the Pera Palace were located near the southwestern corner of the building. From there, the windows looked out on the Golden Horn and the thin neighborhoods that had once marked the farthest reaches of the Ottoman city. In the distance, a dark band of parkland had been a favorite picnic spot for Ottoman beys and their families. Veiled ladies had once sat demurely on the grass while children frolicked amid wiry acacia trees or splashed in the twin creeks that emptied into the Golden Horn.
After the end of the empire, ferries still chugged upstream to deposit weekenders. Some were headed to the village of Eyüp and the türbe, or mausoleum, of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, one of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad, which had long been a pilgrimage site for devout Muslims. Others could be seen making for the trees of Kaıthane, which offered picnic spots and seclusion for courting lovers. Over the years, the city had crept into the sparsely wooded areas. Sunset at the Pera Palace made these newer neighborhoods glow. The fading pink and orange sunlight reflected off red tile roofs and plaster façades as lanterns and houselights came up after the late-afternoon call to prayer.
It wasn’t only the view that made the southwest side of the Pera Palace the most desirable, however. Since it was the farthest away from the bars and clubs of the old Graveyard Street, it was also the only part of the hotel where a patron could expect a decent night’s sleep. At the time of the Allied occupation, Ernest Hemingway had worried about what would happen to Istanbul’s nightlife once the Muslims took over the city from the British, French, and Italians. Rumor had it that the Turkish nationalists, bowing to Islamic convention, had outlawed cardplaying and upended backgammon tables in the areas already under their control. “The man who raises a thirst somewhere east of Suez is going to be unable to slake it in Constantinople once Kemal enters the city,” Hemingway predicted.
But in fact the city seemed to sprout new bars, restaurants, variety theaters, and cafés chantants by the week. “Beauty and wit and laughter and song were exalted and worshipped,” recalled an American visitor. Small beer halls o
pened in the tiniest of venues. Even a room that could fit only a few tables featured its own small orchestra. Local entrepreneurs knew an opportunity when they saw it, and the shifts in Istanbul’s population could be gauged by the drinking spots that arose to service specific subcategories of newcomers. Tom’s Lancashire Bar, run by an immigrant from Salonica, made a play for British clients from the north of England, while St. James’s Brasserie sought to attract a more refined English crowd. With the elimination of the sultanate in 1922, even the Yıldız Palace complex—where Abdülhamid II had busily spied on his restive capital—was repurposed. An Italian entrepreneur, Mario Serra, transformed the compound’s wood-and-stone chalet, set in a grove of pine, magnolia, and linden trees, into a casino. The facility was able to accommodate three hundred players at its gaming tables and featured restaurants, tearooms, a horse-riding arena, tennis courts, and a shooting range.
The Pera Palace offered dinner with musical accompaniment every evening, plus a thé concert on Fridays and Sundays at five o’clock. But just to the north of the hotel stood one of Istanbul’s premier nightspots, the Garden Bar, which occupied part of the Petits-Champs park. The bar had been opened by a Jewish immigrant from Bulgaria as a watering hole for artists performing at the nearby Winter Garden Theater. Like many buildings in the city, it went through several iterations, leveled by fire and then rebuilt by a new owner, but by the early 1920s it was drawing crowds of Muslims and foreigners, as well as plenty of visiting patrons from the Pera Palace next door. A musical matinee was available every afternoon and early evening from five to eight o’clock, plus a full variety extravaganza from nine to eleven. Musical touring companies from Vienna, Paris, and other European cities put on revues. A high-wire walker or trapeze artist might even swoop overhead, to the gasps of the crowd. Boxing matches were staged with local and international sportsmen, while drag queens on occasion would entertain the crowd with song and dance.
