Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  Turkishness—Türklük—became not just an identity but an entire way of being, a disembodied essence of the nation that both infused individuals and floated above them, an aspiration to self-improvement and a totem of the mythical collective will. In the past, insulting the sultan had been a crime, in the same way that most absolutist monarchies deemed lèse-majesté a punishable offense. Now, Turkishness took the sultan’s place. Writing the wrong kind of newspaper article, making the wrong kind of comment, even wearing the wrong kind of clothes could be an insult to Turkishness, with the transgressor fined or brought up before a judge. The same offense, in altered form, has remained enshrined in Turkish law ever since.

  The Ottomans had ruled an empire that was tradition-bound and dynastic, stretching from the Balkans to the border with Iran, but much of its population and wealth had lain squarely in geographic Europe: the fertile plains along the Danube River, the vineyards of upland Bulgaria, the valley pastures of southern Albania, the silver mines of Bosnia and Macedonia. The Turkish Republic, by contrast, was a country that stressed modernity and progress, but given the territorial changes created by the First World War, ninety-seven percent of the country’s land area now lay in Anatolia, the heartland that was poorer and more sparsely populated than many of the regions once ruled by the sultan. The Turkish mind may have shifted west, but the Turkish state had shifted east.

  For Istanbul the most important evidence of that change came in 1927. Early on the morning of October 28, a leaden calm settled over the city. Galata Bridge, normally black with pedestrians, was bare. Only a few people could be seen staring nervously from their doorways. At the Pera Palace, an American diplomat found himself held captive. “I awoke . . . to an oppressive silence; there was no sound of people on the streets, of automobile horns, or of tramcars,” he reported, “and on looking out of the window I saw armed sailors patrolling the streets.” For most of that Friday, Istanbul was a city of the dead.

  At precisely 10:15 p.m., three cannon shots rang out. People poured from their houses and apartment buildings. Taxis rushed along the avenues. Cinemas and cafés opened, and stores threw up their shutters. Within half an hour, the Grande Rue was thronged. The din of urban life quickly returned, and Istanbullus walked about like liberated prisoners.

  The whole day had in fact been meticulously planned. The Turkish government had hired a Belgian statistician, Camille Jacquart, to conduct the first-ever national census. Never before had the inhabitants of the country been systematically counted. On Jacquart’s orders, copies of the census questionnaire were published in the press, along with explicit rules governing behavior. Between the zero hour of six o’clock in the morning and the all-clear cannonade in the evening, no one was allowed to leave home, even for Friday prayers. People were prohibited from helping a neighbor put out a fire, visiting shops or restaurants, traveling in cars or trains, or casting off a mooring cable in the port. Thousands of volunteer census-takers swarmed up staircases and down cul-de-sacs, urging people to do their patriotic duty and report honestly and thoroughly on their age, gender, native language, religion, infirmities, profession, nationality, and other traits.

  Within a week, the initial results were in, and they were astonishing. Previous estimates had put Turkey’s population at seven to nine million, but the census counted many more: some 13,648,270 people. Istanbul was revealed to have a population of a little over 690,000, with around another 300,000 people living in other parts of Thrace, the wedge of Turkish territory west of the Bosphorus. The city was smaller than it had been in the late Ottoman period; the country as a whole had lost about a quarter of its population through war-related death and disease, deportation, and migration since 1914. But Istanbul still dwarfed every other urban center in the republic. Only two cities had more than a hundred thousand people, and Istanbul’s closest competitor, Izmir, was less than a quarter of its size. Ankara, already the seat of government for four years, had persuaded only 74,553 people to live there.

  Journalists hailed the census as a milestone in Turkey’s development. The statistical bureau had demonstrated its ability to carry out a complex feat of modern statecraft. More important, the loss of so much territory in Europe, the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula had actually increased the Turkish component of the population. As the newspaper Milliyet (The Nation) claimed, the census had shown that the vast majority of the republic’s citizens—11.7 million people—were “pure Turks”—that is, ethnically Turkish as opposed to Kurdish, Arab, Greek, Armenian, or another identity. That was a dubious conclusion; after centuries of empire and more than a decade of intense war and population movement, Turkey’s genetic pool was a swirling mix of ancestries. But the fact that the republic had convinced so many people to claim they were Turks in an ethnic sense was a testament to the power of Kemalist nation-building.

  In greater Istanbul, the census counted around 448,000 Muslims living alongside 99,000 Orthodox Christians (mainly Greeks), 53,000 Armenians, and 47,000 Jews, along with nearly 45,000 other non-Muslims. With the exception of Kurdish areas in southeastern Anatolia, Istanbul was now the only place in the entire republic with a sizable minority presence. It contained virtually all of the republic’s functioning Greek and Armenian churches, its synagogues, its monasteries, its minority-language schools and presses. Armenian monuments in eastern Anatolia had been dynamited or allowed to fall into ruin, a conscious effort to erase the remnants of communities destroyed in the genocide. Greek properties along the Aegean coast were taken over by Muslim owners. Even the Kurds, with their unique languages and traditions, would eventually be classed by republican ideologues as simply a type of Turk. Less than a decade after the war of independence began, the enormous imperial legacy—the long history of multiple confessions, many languages, origins, and heritages—had been distilled into a single city.

  The Kemalist project became the world’s largest experiment in squeezing the entirety of modern European history—from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution—into a few decades. Life was accelerating, and Turks were urged to run as they built the new fatherland. National life was centered in Ankara, which had been formally announced as the new capital almost two weeks before the Turkish Republic was proclaimed. Radio broadcasting; the opera, ballet, and symphony; the most powerful newspapers; and in time the embassies of foreign governments all decamped there. New government buildings rose on wide avenues and expansive squares.

  City planners in Istanbul understood the former capital’s core dilemma—not how to build a city from scratch, which was already taking place in Ankara, but how to modernize a place that, as American tourists were fond of saying, just had so much history to it. While new government offices were still rising in Ankara, the Turkish government organized an international design competition to solicit proposals for solving the problem of Istanbul’s future development. The French urban engineer Henri Prost was selected as Istanbul’s director of urban planning. Many years of pencil sketches, scale models, and bureaucratic infighting followed, but Prost’s vision was finally approved by government ministers in 1939.

  Prost’s plan called for cutting highways around the Grand Bazaar, demolishing most buildings along the Grande Rue, making the shores of the Golden Horn into an industrial park, and building high-rise apartment blocks along the Sea of Marmara. Half the windows in the Pera Palace were to open onto a highway interchange. Prost included green spaces in his designs, but these were by and large orderly promenades created by the bulldozing of things he considered “parasitical”—old structures deemed to be less important than an idealized image of monumental buildings defining the city’s silhouette. A level esplanade designed for military processions and centered on a massive new “monument to the republic” was meant to replace the jumble of buildings around the Hagia Sophia and Sultanahmet mosques.

  Prost did have the inspired idea of keeping intact the skyline of the old city, the peninsula where most of the Byzantine- and Ottoman-era architecture stands. His insis
tence on preservation, at least in that part of the city, secured the area against high-rise development and meant that the city’s signature profile of domes and minarets, especially when viewed from the sea, would remain undisturbed. But a better place to get some idea of Prost’s overall vision is Taksim Square, which was intended to serve as the new heart of the republican city. When John Dos Passos went to a cabaret near Taksim in the early 1920s, he found a Russian lady on stage doing a peasant dance, two English girls crooning in knee socks and sweaters, a troupe of Greek acrobats, and a French woman singing selections from Lucia di Lammermoor. In 1928, however, city planners cleaned up part of the square and created a bronze-and-marble monument to the republic’s founders. One side showed Mustafa Kemal, smet Pasha, and other makers of the new country in astrakhan hats and the military garb of the war of independence. The other side portrayed them as modern statesmen in Western-style suits and ties. Prost’s idea was not to continue with the monument-building in Taksim but rather to make way for more automobiles. What resulted was an expansive flatland of asphalt and concrete serving as a subway stop, a major road hub, and an open-air bus terminal. Until radical traffic engineering began to reshape the square in 2013, it took some bravery to cross Taksim on foot.

  Prost probably would have cringed at the modern hodgepodge that his planning eventually produced, but his method of leveling and redesigning bits of the city he declared architecturally insignificant was copied by later builders. Taksim was eventually burdened with the Atatürk Cultural Center, which looks rather like the backside of a window air-conditioning unit, and the Marmara Taksim, a slightly more stylish take on a Soviet Intourist hotel. The space is saved only by the area known today as Gezi Park, a swath of green off to one side, which Prost had intended as a formal garden built on the site of an Ottoman-era military barracks that he had deemed parasitical.

  The advent of the Second World War halted the full implementation of the Prost plan. Prost himself was let go as chief planner in 1951. The Grande Rue was saved, as was much of the area around the old Petits-Champs Park. After the war, however, urban improvers returned, cutting highways deep into the heart of the old city and pulling down Ottoman-era wooden houses to make way for cheap multistory apartment blocks, especially in poorer districts. Petits-Champs was gone, and the Pera Palace was hemmed in by taller buildings wrapped in reflective glass. Prost’s defenders blamed the losses on the piecemeal implementation of his master plan, especially in the 1950s, an era overseen by a bulldozer-friendly prime minister, Adnan Menderes. But had the revolutionary urge to erase and rebuild been visited on Istanbul in the years when Mustafa Kemal himself was around to supervise it, one can only imagine what would have become of the architectural treasures and intimate, messy neighborhoods it still has to offer. It was not until the early 2000s that a Turkish government would turn to remaking Istanbul with something approaching Prostian zeal—and then without Prost’s redeeming virtue of preserving the ancient skyline.

  Modernity and civilization were the watchwords of the early republic, and the local press took great offense when it learned of representations of the city that failed to remark on its sophistication and seriousness. A large ball organized for tourists in 1929, for example, featured prostitutes doing belly dances around braziers, waterpipes, and divans. The newspaper Milliyet condemned the affair and urged the city administration to put a stop to such faux-Ottoman frivolity. “Presenting the Turkish nation, which has made its customs conform to those of the most civilized occidental nations, in such an unfavorable light is an insolent attack,” an editorial thundered. “The republican police and republican laws are made to deal with whoever admits having organized such a money-grabbing masquerade.” The problem was not sexual license but rather the sense that dredging up the past was an affront to the values of progress and renewal promised by Kemalism. Nowhere were these values more fervently preached than in the campaign to transform the lives of Turkish women.

  BEYOND THE VEIL

  Two women jump rope in an impromptu session on an Istanbul street.

  FOR MUSLIM WOMEN, THE CREATION of the secular state was often said to have ushered in liberation from the double yoke of tradition and religion. “The shape of social life changed,” recalled Mîna Urgan, a prominent Turkish writer and academic. “Women were no longer kept at home. They could go out with boys, have fun together, eat and drink together.”

  Unlike the fez for men, Islamic head coverings for women were never fully banned, although official discourse discouraged them as retrograde and uncivilized. Headscarves and veils were not allowed inside state institutions—which included everything from schools to government ministries—and within short order, Istanbul’s Muslim elite adopted styles of female dress little different from those in other parts of Europe. Window screens, which had secluded many Muslim women from public view, finally came down in 1930 as part of a national hygiene law to let more light and air into dank interior apartments. That reform alone ended what must once have been a brisk clandestine economy. Travelers’ accounts of surreptitious visits behind the screened-off world of feminine Istanbul are so numerous that the Ottoman city must have enjoyed a roaring trade in harem tourism—in reality, probably visits to disguised brothels—for gullible Europeans.

  All these practices had already begun to fade by the beginning of the twentieth century, however. The full seclusion of women under the Ottomans was largely a middle- and upper-class Muslim phenomenon, as was the wearing of elaborate veils or other coverings. The types and sizes of veils were matters of adornment and style, not just a marker of religious piety. Women from rural or working-class backgrounds might wear long scarves that could be pulled over their faces in the presence of male strangers, but the full-length çaraf—a large, circular piece of fabric covering the head, face, and clothing—was generally a fashion of the wives and daughters of the elite. The idea of Muslim women being carted through the streets in servant-borne sedan chairs, or gesturing coyly through their window screens at passersby, were likewise already part of the distant—and largely imagined—past.

  But the real innovation under Mustafa Kemal was to formalize women’s rights in a system of legal equality, in theory making Muslim women genuine partners in building the republic. The new Swiss-inspired civil code abolished polygamy, ended the preferential treatment of men in the inheritance of property, and affirmed a woman’s right to divorce her husband. Public harassment was made a criminal offense, and in 1930 women were given the vote in municipal elections. Four years later, the franchise was extended to elections for the Grand National Assembly, and eighteen women were soon elected to the legislature—more than double the number in the US Congress at the time.

  Legal rights for women were secured, but the emerging state was traditionalist when it came to their real place in public life. Women were by and large written into the new republic’s history as a group but written out of it as individuals. When they did appear, it was usually as cardboard heroines, women who sacrificed themselves for the nationalist cause or took up patriotic professions in service to the republic. Newspapers were filled with stories of female firsts. The first Muslim female lawyer to appear before a court in Istanbul, Beyhan Hanım, approached the bar in 1928 and was later elevated to a judgeship. The first surgeon, Suad Hanım, was accredited in 1931, and the first pharmacist, Belkıs Hanım, accepted her license the same year. The first wrestler, Emine Hanım, stepped forward in 1932 to take on any male competitor who dared accept her standing challenge. The first female tramway conductors did not appear until 1941, but a satisfied public deemed them more polite than their male counterparts.

  Like much of Kemalism, however, the world did not change suddenly with the proclamation of the republic, nor did the gains achieved by women erase old social habits. Even in the last days of the sultans, Istanbul women tended to marry later, have fewer children, and divorce more readily than in other Islamic societies. Women were already very much part of social space. They attended publ
ic entertainments. They could be seen transacting business in the arcades off the Petits-Champs or dining in the Pera Palace restaurant. By 1920, more than a third of the employees in Pera’s department stores were women, and even in the more conservative areas south of the Golden Horn, women accounted for nearly twenty percent of sales clerks. Many of these women were Christians and Jews who led lives little different from those of women in other European cities at the same time, but sizable numbers of Muslim women were clearly in the public eye as well. Tramcars accommodated both genders (even though curtains separated the men’s section from the women’s), and during the Allied occupation, Muslim men and women appeared together in theaters, cinemas, and other gathering places.

  The first women’s organizations had been formed soon after the Young Turk revolution, part of the general upsurge in liberal and reform-oriented groups that sprang up in the city in the relative freedom afforded by the restoration of the constitution. Like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, these associations often sought to liberate women by elevating them. Their leaders—chiefly from prominent Ottoman families—regarded increasing literacy and opening a new range of educational opportunities as essential to preparing women to take a more active role in public life.