Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  Cinemas, like the city overall, were noisy, with people reading the subtitles aloud, standing up, walking out, stamping their feet to the musical score, or arguing with the main character. They were places where all of Istanbul’s social classes could, in theory, come together. That was a novel phenomenon that took some adjustments. In the past, most public gathering places in the city had made clear distinctions in terms of rank, with preferred positions or the best seating awarded not just to those who could afford it but also to those whose family ties and government station placed them above the hoi polloi. The Ottoman Turkish language had a multitude of ways of expressing rank, and that hierarchy was made concrete every time two of the sultan’s subjects happened to meet in the same place. But in a democratizing, republican city, this way of handling things was on the way out.

  A widely reported legal case confirmed the transition. In March 1928, three assistant public prosecutors—Baha, Nesuhi, and Midhat—presented themselves at the Opera Cinema and demanded to be admitted, presumably free of charge, to the film then playing there. They further demanded to be seated in a box, the only location they believed appropriate to their position as government officials. The proprietor, Cevad, refused. A heated altercation ensued. The police were eventually called, and Cevad was arrested for insulting the prosecutors and obstructing them in the performance of their official duties. The Istanbul press came to Cevad’s defense, pointing out how ludicrous the charges were and objecting to the existing practice of requiring cinema owners to reserve box seats for high officials. The next month, Cevad stood trial. Given that he was going up against three government men, his prospects looked slim. Much to everyone’s surprise, however, he was acquitted. One of the pushy assistant prosecutors was removed from his post, and Cevad reported to the press that he intended to sue all three. Cinemas had become one of the republic’s great equalizers.

  Movie houses were both public spaces and private ones, which is why Cevad believed there was no reason for him to cave to the demands of petty bureaucrats. The element of privacy was also important to people who went there precisely because they wanted to hide. The traditional separation of the sexes had never been an obstacle to determined lovers, even under the Ottomans, but with the rise of dark and comfortable cinemas, there was now a new environment in which the amorous could meet. Depending on their layout and the opportunities for concealment, certain cinemas became well known as rendezvous zones. Those with balconies and closed boxes were the most desirable, especially when tickets were discounted during matinees. After painstaking research in the six leading cinemas, one observer concluded that nearly all the audiences “contained couples who were ostentatiously love making and in many cases kissing and making obvious advances to each other.” The average number of amorous couples at each performance was determined to be just over six, while the total number for the twenty-seven surveyed performances was 177. In three cases, “professional women”—that is, prostitutes—were reportedly involved.

  The popularity of Western films made Istanbul one of the first destinations outside the major European capitals that came onto the touring agenda of movie stars. Greta Garbo and Betty Blythe (one of the first mainstream actresses to appear on screen in a near-nude scene) made visits to the city, as did Charles Boyer and Marie Bell, both of whom were already famous for their performances with French stage companies. When Josephine Baker made a short personal appearance at the Glorya, the press seemed less worried about the content of her famously risqué performances than thrilled that another celebrity had come to town. Predictably, seeing these stars of stage and screen in the flesh affected the fashion sense and social aspirations of young people. The same report that counted up kissing couples in darkened cinemas also observed that girls in Istanbul could now be neatly divided into three types: sporty, intellectual, and “movie,” with the last of these typically appearing on the Grande Rue dressed like their favorite film stars.

  Unlike stage acts, however, film had the power not only to bring audiences into a performance venue but also to keep their attention long after they had left. People didn’t just watch films. They could imagine themselves inside the screen—having a passionate affair, whistling a signature tune, twirling through the lobby of a grand hotel. “For a city of its size and cosmopolitanism Constantinople is one of the most poorly equipped in the world for satisfying the aesthetic cravings of its population,” reported a foreign resident in 1923. But in relatively short order, film, popular songsheets, and recorded music were all within easy reach. Virtually any upper-class Muslim or non-Muslim family had long considered a phonograph to be an essential piece of parlor furniture, and after the arrival of the White Russians, the city was awash in the devices. Victrolas with large metal listening horns were dumped on the market by Russian families who had spirited them out of Crimea as part of their valued belongings. By the early 1920s, they could be had for as little as twenty to thirty lira, easily within reach of many families.

  Throughout the decade, importers brought in more and more machines, and at music shops along the Grande Rue—Max Friedman’s, the Papadopoulos Brothers, Sigmund Weinberg’s—the proprietors found a ready market for mechanical players, recorded disks, and printed music from Europe and the United States. Pirated sheet music became such a large-scale industry that Western embassies increasingly regarded Istanbul as one of the prime offenders in the violation of intellectual property rights. Barely had a dance tune made it onto the market in New York or Paris than a low-priced version could be picked up in Pera.

  The advent of international stardom, home entertainment, and recorded sound transformed street life in Istanbul. It also created a new set of careers. In the past, the fame of professional musicians had been limited by geography. Musicians might be highly regarded in a particular neighborhood or sought out for a wedding or other celebration across town, but national or international acclaim was hard to imagine. Now an audience could love someone they had never met and cry at a song they had never heard performed live. Music also came to be divided into clear genres, each with its own artists, fans, and expert critics: a folk song, or türkü, from Anatolia; a lyrical air, or arkı, based on Ottoman classical music; a kanto that emerged from everyday urban life and mixed in melodies and tonalities from the West.

  Turks were eagerly borrowing forms of public entertainment from Europe. New words flowed easily into spoken Turkish, especially from French and English. A young man could spend an evening at a gardenparti while being served by a garson and imagine himself a member of the burjuazi before relieving himself at the pisuvar. In the late 1920s, ordinances proscribing signs in foreign languages did little to prevent Turkish businesses from simply altering the spelling without ruining their own reputation. That is why so many of the famous clubs and restaurants of the era had names that seemed utterly nonsensical in Turkish until you pronounced them phonetically: the Türkuvaz (or Turquoise), the Rejans (or Régence), the Roznuvar (or Rose Noire), the Mulenruj (or Moulin Rouge).

  Turks also adopted a way of describing a feeling. It was now possible to remember, even pine for, a specific and imagined world at the exact moment when it seemed to be slipping into the irretrievable past. There was little that was Ottoman about these memories, at least not in the sense of thinking wistfully about sultans, harems, and the recumbent life of pashas and beys. Its themes were, rather, a northerly breeze on the Bosphorus, a furtive love, an old wooden house, sheep on a high meadow, or a faraway city to which it was impossible to return. Turks borrowed yet another French word and called the whole thing nostalji—nostalgia. It was the stock-in-trade of three musicians who came to embody the sonic landscape of a changing city.

  Roza Eskenazi, Hrant Kenkulian, and Seyyan were all members of the last generation of Istanbullus to call themselves subjects of the sultan. They never shared a stage, and at the time they were born—at some point between about 1895 and 1915; they were coy about, or ignorant of, their actual birth dates—the social dividing lines wi
thin Ottoman society would have defined the directions and possibilities available to them. Roza was Jewish, Hrant an Armenian, and Seyyan a Muslim, and had it not been for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, their lives might have been mapped out mainly within the confines of those religiously defined communities.

  But in the early Turkish Republic, their reputations were deeply intertwined. If you knew one, you probably knew all three. What they had in common was an ability to encapsulate loss and longing in a single vocal phrase or pluck of a string. In their own ways, they had a better claim than many artists to capturing the essence of an era—a time when coming to Istanbul, or leaving it, was the defining journey for hundreds of thousands of old Ottoman subjects and new Turkish citizens.

  Roza Eskenazi was a native Istanbullu, the daughter of a poor Jewish rag merchant. While still a girl, she found herself caught up in the movement of refugees and opportunity-seekers occasioned by the Young Turk revolution and the Balkan Wars. At roughly the same time that the family of the photographer Selahattin Giz was moving from provincial Salonica to the Ottoman capital, Roza’s family set out in the opposite direction, toward a city where Jews were the single largest ethnic and religious group in a mix that included Greeks, Turkish-speaking Muslims, Bulgarians, and others. For a Jewish family looking to move up in the world, resettling in Salonica was a reasonable idea. Roza’s father seems to have found work in a textile mill, her mother as a domestic servant, and Roza grew up amid the street life of a city that was in many ways Istanbul in miniature—a cosmopolitan port, Muslim in its political identity, but where mosques shared space with Sephardic synagogues and Greek Orthodox churches in the maze of small streets and avenues winding down to the Aegean Sea.

  The family remained there even after the Hellenic kingdom assumed formal control of the city in 1912, but five years later, an enormous fire reduced much of Salonica’s docklands and lower city to ashes. Jewish neighborhoods near the port were especially affected, and families had to think hard about whether, and where, to start over. Roza’s talent as a singer was noticed while she was still a girl, and through marriage and motherhood, she seems to have nursed the desire to appear on the stage. In the early 1920s, by then a young widow, she moved to Athens and began to work the cabaret circuit. She teamed up with Greek and Armenian musicians, some of them newly arrived “exchangees” from Turkey or migrants from the charred ruins of Salonica. She was already developing her signature style: the rough-hewn and smoky voice, the freewheeling sense of meter, the lyrics that seem to be pronounced with a cigarette hanging from her lips. Plump and almond-eyed, with a shock of curly hair oiled into dark waves, Roza quickly made a name for herself in Athens, but she owed her musical essence to the cities of the Turkish coast, to Istanbul and especially Smyrna, the homeland of the musical genre known as rebetiko.

  The Greek word rebetiko has no clear derivation, but even at the start of Roza’s career, anyone in her audience would have known what it meant. It was the torch song of the urban gangster, the lyrical reminiscence of a down-and-out hustler, the soundtrack of a world in which people overspent in poverty and sometimes killed the person they loved the most. It was an Aegean version of the blues, sung in both Greek and Turkish, with hashish dens standing in for American juke joints and the Mediterranean coast taking the place of the Mississippi Delta. Rebetiko had been brought to Greece by the people displaced in the great emptying of Smyrna in 1922. Roza had never experienced this world directly; she was an Istanbullu, after all, and was probably only a teenager when she left the Ottoman capital. But she was on the leading edge of westward migration out of the faltering empire. In both Salonica and Athens, she was surrounded by Greeks, Armenians, and Jews who had left everything behind in cities that were now part of a new and foreign republic.

  Roza’s genius lay not in the quality of her voice. She had the odd habit of speaking in falsetto and singing in a solid alto. Her voice sounds so much like a clarinet, slightly nasal and pinched, that it is easy to forget that the instrument appears in only a few of her recordings. Unlike classically trained singers, her sense of pitch is often approximate, even in an Eastern musical tradition that prizes microtones and unusual modes. But she was unrivaled in her ability to reflect the experience of immigrants still totaling up the lives and fortunes they had lost. It is not too much to say that she had become, by 1930 or so, the truest voice of the Greek diaspora, and as she toured the world—even returning for a string of concerts in Istanbul after the Second World War—her fame only grew. By the time of her death in 1980, she had lived not only through the real birth of rebetiko as a concert genre—rather than something to be heard only in dives and meyhanes—but also through its second life in the folk revival of the 1960s. She could make people wish they could fly across the sea, leaving behind everything new and settling back into a half-forgotten past. “My soul, that’s enough now,” she sang, “leave my body / don’t make me suffer / give up your hope.”

  Rebetiko sounds improvised and loose, but it actually owes a great deal to the musical scales and structure of Ottoman classical music. It is intentionally impure, a product of multiethnic cities and mixed urban neighborhoods. The vocal slides and bravura wailing repeat many of the scales and tonalities that would have been familiar to performers and composers who staged command performances for the sultan and other dignitaries in ages past. Musical styles never stay inside their proper lines; they jump over into new and unexpected venues.

  The instrument that became the vehicle for these creative transgressions was also the mainstay of the small band that typically backed Roza Eskenazi. It is an eleven-string, fretless instrument called an oud, or ud in Turkish. Its closest equivalent is the Western lute. The lute is an eccentricity, a bulbous-backed and short-necked oddity today found mainly in ensembles specializing in Renaissance court music or Shakespearean love ballads. But the oud has a vibrant and widespread, at times even fanatical, following all the way from Morocco to Iran. Children take classes in it. Old men pick it up as a retirement project. Pop stars compete for deals with renowned players who might sit in on a recording session. It is in no sense a folk instrument, nor is it just a curiosity of “world music,” a catchall and essentially meaningless category. Its sound is something that hundreds of millions of people across the Muslim world and beyond find instantly familiar.

  Among professional as well as amateur oud players, there is no more recognizable name than that of Hrant Kenkulian, or Udi Hrant, as he was generally known. (“Udi” was an honorific title that indicated his position as a master of the instrument.) Blind from birth, Hrant grew up in Istanbul in an Armenian family who had managed to negotiate the multiple transitions from empire to occupation to republic. The massacres and starvation that had emptied parts of Anatolia of its Armenians had been less marked in Istanbul, and the dwindling of the urban community was much like the loss of Greeks—a slow draining of difference, neighborhood by neighborhood, rather than wholesale eradication. The Armenian patriarch, one of several leaders of Armenian Apostolic Christians, remained in place in the neighborhood of Kumkapı, along the Sea of Marmara, and elders within Armenians’ other religious communities sought ways of shielding their flocks by demonstrating loyalty to the state. In 1933, when the Austrian writer Franz Werfel published his famous Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a novel depicting the Armenian genocide, Armenian Catholics in Istanbul responded by burning the author in effigy, an attempt to win favor with the Turkish government. Even within a political system that put a premium on Turkishness, living as an Armenian was still possible, especially if one avoided politics, spoke only Turkish in public, and embraced silence as a way of dealing with the past.

  Little is known about Hrant’s early life, but he emerged in the 1920s as one of the city’s most popular oud players, with a surprising set of innovations that expanded the limits of the instrument. He could play double-stops, or two strings at the same time, in the style of a violinist. He could pluck the strings with both his left and his right
hands, and, like a guitarist, use both sides of the plectrum, sounding a note on the upstroke as well as the downstroke of his right hand. This might seem like scant reason for renown, but few people had thought of playing the oud in this way, and it was no accident that Hrant developed these techniques at a time when jazz guitarists and violinists, with their free-form styles, could be heard all along the Grande Rue.

  Jazz depends on improvisation, which is why it has been described as not just a musical form but an ethical system. It demands that a player really listen to his comrades, with the bravery to step forward when he has something to say and the self-possession to know when he has said enough. It requires virtuosity but also humility. All this was a revelation to musicians such as Hrant, since they had come from a sonic world that by and large kept these virtues separate. A renowned singer might be applauded for his vocal agility or the memorization of a long musical sequence, such as the famed hafizes who managed to commit the entire Qur’an to melodic memory. In Turkish classical music, however, ensembles typically played in unison, with multiple instruments carrying the same melodic line and everyone playing all the time.

  But Hrant was able to gather the best of these traditions and merge them with the sounds and techniques that would have swirled around him in interwar Istanbul. He was a master of indigenous improvisation, the spiraling and nearly out-of-control music called a taksim. Improvisations are musical one-offs, made up on the spot and by nature fleeting and daring. A good taksim can never be repeated note for note, because even an accomplished instrumentalist would be hard-pressed to re-create exactly the same bend of a string or precisely the same plectrum stroke. A bad one, though, can wreck a career. It is a species of instrumental music that always threatens to fall flat.

  That is why listening to Hrant was both thrilling and nail-biting. He ran up the oud’s neck and back down it. He plunked on the lower strings to give himself a steady bass line while laying down a cascade of high notes above. He had rivals among the city’s oud players, but no one developed quite the international following that Hrant enjoyed. He toured abroad and, after the Second World War, recorded some of his work in live sessions in New York. Like Roza Eskenazi, he was a multilingual artist, easily moving between Turkish and Armenian and composing his own songs in both languages. He still appeared regularly in Pera nightclubs until his death in the late 1970s.