Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  As both a neutral country and one with a geographical position at the intersection of Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East, Turkey was never short of strategic suitors. Trying to figure out which direction Turkish public opinion was moving and seeking to use it to the advantage of either the Axis or the Allies became one of the great parlor games of the war. It was also a project pursued by countless freelance agents, paid operatives, and professional intelligence services, all energetically spying on one another and hoping to turn Turkey toward their cause.

  “You could almost throw a stone out of the window of any leading hotel and hit an agent,” recalled an American official about wartime Istanbul. “In fact, we should have.” Foreign embassies had left behind their ornate Ottoman-era buildings in Pera and their summertime residences on the Bosphorus for more utilitarian quarters in Ankara. But the easy accessibility of Istanbul and its status as the largest urban center in the republic still made it a vital arena for gathering information on Turks as well as enemies.

  That task was aided by the city’s large number of foreigners, a population that had grown over the course of the 1930s. Virtually every European language was represented in Istanbul, and among each of these communities it was not difficult to find someone—a business leader, a banker, a shopkeeper, a professor, a bar attendant—dissatisfied enough with his old homeland to provide information to a rival power. German politics in particular had produced a tide of refugees eager to work against Nazi rule. Just as Istanbul had been the way station for White Russians pushed out of Bolshevik Russia, it now served as a lifeline for academics, especially Jews, dismissed from their posts by the Nazis.

  Through Swiss intercessors, German and Austrian scholars made contact with the Turkish Ministry of Education and managed to secure posts as lecturers in Istanbul. The desire to rid German universities of the racially impure and politically suspect was to Turkey’s immediate benefit. The republic had recently established its first real Western-style institution of higher education, Istanbul University. German-speaking professors became its principal teaching cadre, delivering lectures with the assistance of local translators and helping to structure the new institution’s departments along European lines. When the first German professor stepped into a lecture hall, in November 1933, Yunus Nadi ran a front-page headline in his newspaper to announce the fact. Turkish higher education, he claimed, had finally joined the Western world.

  University students suddenly had access to some of the continent’s leading lights in virtually every field of study. Philosophy and geography were taught by Alexander Rustow from Nuremberg, the noted socialist activist (and the father of political scientist Dankwart Rustow). Leo Spitzer, the comparative philologist, moved from Cologne to head up the faculty of foreign languages. Walter Gottschalk, one of Berlin’s greatest Orientalists, organized the university library and catalogued the substantial scholarly collection that Sultan Abdülhamid II had amassed at Yıldız Palace. Erich Auerbach, the literary theorist, moved from Marburg to teach philology. He began one of his masterpieces, Mimesis—a study of the fluidity of representation and reality in Western literature—while teaching on the Bosphorus. Albert Einstein might have been part of the cohort as well, if an invitation from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, had not come through before he was able to move to Istanbul.

  These scholars were not just out of work in their home countries. They were also without home countries. Many would eventually have their citizenship revoked by the Nazi regime. They were known as Heimatlose—legally homeless—much as the White Russians had been after the advent of Bolshevism. But they were also living in a city that, as in the 1920s, placed victors and victims in close quarters. In addition to the refugee professors, there were perhaps a thousand German citizens in Turkey, most in Istanbul. Many of these expatriates were organized into Landesgruppen, or regional organizations, of the Nazi Party. The party organization was headquartered in Moda, a fashionable neighborhood on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. On Sundays, local Germans and their sympathizers working for the party would gather there at the local affiliate of Kraft durch Freude—or Strength through Joy, the Nazi tourist agency—to receive instructions for the coming week. Many of the senior officers had their lodgings at the Deutsche Schule, the prestigious German-language high school just off the Grande Rue, which was also a short stroll from the Teutonia Club, the principal meeting place for the party elite.

  Nazi race laws tended to reproduce themselves abroad, and German citizens were instructed to conduct business only with firms that had been vetted as both politically and racially pure by the German Consulate—that is, no commerce with anti-Nazi sympathizers among the German-speaking diaspora, or with businesses thought to be in the pocket of the Allies, or of course with Istanbul’s Jews. The Tokatlian Hotel, run by an Austrian, Nicolaus Medovi, was on the approved list, as were the bookstores on the Grande Rue run by Erich Kalis and Andres Kapps, the rug shop owned by Josef Krauss in the Grand Bazaar, and the travel bureau in Galata run by Hans Walter Feustel. Local Jews, in turn, responded with their own boycott. In 1938, when Medovi; began to fly the Nazi flag outside his establishment—a nod to the Anschluss between Germany and his native Austria—Jewish Istanbullus organized a campaign to convince fellow citizens to avoid the hotel and its restaurant. The Tokatlian had been one of the premier establishments in the city, a favorite venue for everything from society weddings to receptions for Yunus Nadi’s Miss Turkey competition. With the boycott, however, the Tokatlian’s fortunes plummeted, much to the advantage of other locales such as the Pera Palace.

  The presence of such a large, vocal, and politically committed German community also made Istanbul the ideal site for clandestine intelligence-gathering by all sides. It was the natural route of communication between Europe and the Middle East. A long history of German ties to the Turkish military, going back to the late Ottoman period, meant that many educated and successful Turks had sympathies for the German cause. Moreover, the presence of White Russians who were reliably anti-Soviet, Armenians who were potentially anti-Turkish (and could therefore be enlisted to provide information on Turkish affairs), and a Turkish policy establishment with long experience in spying on its own population meant that Istanbul was fertile ground for both Axis and Allied spycraft.

  By one count, seventeen separate foreign intelligence agencies were active in Istanbul during the war. The problem was not that operatives from many countries were conducting work inside Turkey. That was to be expected in a neutral state, and Istanbul had been prime ground for collecting information since the days when the sultan’s own agents had been politely asked to vacate their tables to paying customers at the Pera Palace. As long as a foreign country kept its activities discreet and at a level that did not inconvenience the host, Turkish officials were generally content to allow the clandestine derring-do to flourish. On occasion, however, the shadow war moved into the light, and when that happened, it became evident to many Istanbullus just how vulnerable their city had become.

  In the crush of passengers and station touts that accompanied the arrival of the Sunday evening train from the Balkans, diplomats scrambled to find their luggage and hail a fleet of taxis. It was March 11, 1941, and the entire British mission to Bulgaria had been expelled. Bulgaria was a German ally now—just as it had been in 1914—and no longer welcoming to officials whose country was being targeted by German bombers. Sixty British diplomats were being evacuated to the safety of Istanbul. The last time so many Allied officials had arrived in the city at once had been aboard the Superb and other British vessels during the occupation. Now they were arriving as guests of the Turkish government.

  It was not the way they had expected to leave their posting. On March 1, German advance troops had entered Sofia. Soon afterward, the British ambassador, George Rendel, visited the Bulgarian prime minister, Bogdan Filov, and in a sharp exchange delivered his country’s note severing diplomatic ties. Rendel’s daughter, Anne, made a
point of driving around town with a Union Jack fluttering behind her car.

  Rendel returned to the embassy and ordered all the documents burned. A huge pile of trunks, suitcases, and parcels accumulated in the embassy’s drawing room. American diplomats, still nonbelligerents in the war, were on hand to take the building keys and receive the ambassador’s thanks for looking after the property in the Britons’ absence. The luggage at last sorted, the diplomats formed a long convoy of cars and lorries toward a suburban station. Two German security officers were on hand to watch the departure from the sidelines. To keep up the evacuees’ spirits, the American ambassador and a few pro-British Bulgarians accompanied the group on board the train as far as the Bulgarian border. Farewells were toasted with champagne, and then the extra passengers disembarked just before the train crossed the Maritsa River and continued toward Turkey.

  Looking out the train windows at the undulating countryside of Thrace, Rendel fell into a gray mood. In Sofia, he had seen the disciplined German soldiers, the mechanized transports, the crisp uniforms. Now he could see Turkish soldiers being sent to reinforce the border: an army of oxcarts and ponies, and men armed with what looked like antique muskets. “My impression was strengthened that, if the Germans decided to attack and occupy Turkey, there would certainly be nothing to oppose them until they got to the Bosphorus, if then,” Rendel recalled.

  The British diplomats arrived in Istanbul around six o’clock in the evening. Sirkeci station was humming. Friends from the British Consulate were there to welcome the group, along with representatives of the governments-in-exile of Nazi-occupied Poland, Belgium, and the Netherlands. As they made their way down the quay and out through the brick-and-granite façade, they had their first glimpse of the heights of Pera, with house lights just coming on around the Galata Tower and fishing boats bobbing on the Golden Horn.

  The taxis left the station and crossed Galata Bridge, heading out of the forest of minarets in the city center and toward Tepebaı and then onto Merutiyet Avenue, the former Graveyard Street. After a few blocks, the cars swung around a corner and pulled up at the Pera Palace. Porters unloaded the steamer trunks and leather suitcases into the marble foyer. Clerks rushed to take down passport details. Once the formalities were completed, Rendel accompanied his daughter to their room and began to unpack. Other members of the mission took the short flight of steps toward a nightcap in the velvety darkness of the Orient Bar.

  A flash of light, then a deafening boom suddenly shook the hotel. The elevator creaked on its cables and plummeted to the bottom of its shaft. The glass canopy collapsed, showering shards on the reception hall. Inlaid cabinets and mahogany chairs slid in pieces across the parquet. Blood spattered the marble stairs and plaster walls, and small fires erupted from the wood paneling.

  An eerie silence followed, soon broken by the moans of the injured emerging from the smoke and plaster dust. A jagged canyon had been cut through the ground floor into the cellar; in the darkness, dazed guests tumbled into it unaware. Two British Embassy employees lay in agony and would soon succumb to their wounds. Several Turkish hotel workers and bystanders were also either dead or dying, while others were missing limbs or covered with excruciating burns. Two local Jewish doormen, the hotel’s Greek general manager, Mr. Karantinos, a Muslim chauffeur, two Turkish policemen, the Greek head clerk, a Muslim night watchman, and a range of other workers and guests all sustained injuries. In all, six adults and the unborn child of an embassy staffer would be listed as fatalities. Outside, people lay unconscious or wandered up the avenue in shock. Windows and storefronts were blown out in the surrounding streets, and upstairs, guests rushed from their rooms, certain that German planes had launched an air raid.

  Some of the survivors knew immediately that the cause lay elsewhere. Their thoughts raced back to the busy train station in Sofia. The owners of two pieces of stray luggage had not been identified before the train left Bulgaria, but in the rush to depart, officers with the legation had decided simply to load the suitcases with the others and sort out the ownership once everyone arrived in Istanbul. As soon as the explosion rocked the Pera Palace, one of the diplomats raced to a nearby hotel where other members of the party were checking in. He identified the second stray suitcase, ran with it outside, and flung it onto a patch of open ground. There was no explosion, but when the police arrived soon afterward, they realized there well could have been. The bag contained a fuse and a powerful charge of TNT.

  An explosion’s aftermath, March 1941: The lounge of the Pera Palace after the detonation of a suitcase bomb.

  Only sometime later was the entire chain of events put together. Bulgarian agents, working in league with the Germans, had placed the explosive luggage in the British pile. It was a shoddy and fruitless piece of sabotage, aimed at little more than creating a sensational mass assassination of enemy diplomats. The Turkish government remained diffident, worried about escalating a crisis whose target was apparently not Turkey itself. The public prosecutor, who issued a report the next month, was officiously clear: “Having come to the conclusion that the event . . . is an attempt against the staff of the British Legation and prepared at Sofia by a German or Bulgarian organization or an organization dependent on them, and as no proof whatever has been found to the effect that this attempt has been organized and prepared within the frontiers and by a person or an organization residing in Turkey, our Office has decided that there was no room to undertake any legal proceedings against anybody.”

  That was the end of the affair, at least as far as diplomacy was concerned. The Pera Palace had not been intentionally targeted by the bombers. Its fate was a function of its reputation. Neither of the two bombs had exploded in the way they were apparently intended, on the train; the devices only arrived at the hotels because the British legation had selected them as comfortable places to stay. The British government eventually paid out benefits to the families of the two embassy personnel killed in the Pera Palace blast—typists Gertrude Ellis and Therese Armstrong—along with several other British subjects who were injured. London also compensated the Turkish government for the death benefits and medical expenses of a substantial group of local individuals killed or injured by the fire and flying debris.

  As Misbah Muhayye, the hotel’s unlucky proprietor, began making plans for rebuilding, the bombed-out Pera Palace stood as a reminder of just how close the war was coming. German troops were already in Bulgaria, and in April and May 1941, the Wehrmacht began its campaign in the Balkans, quickly occupying Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete. Istanbul was on the front line, and more than ever before, Turkey would have to be prepared to defend its borders, noted Yunus Nadi in Cumhuriyet. Istanbullus had already been practicing air-raid drills and blackouts since the previous November. Trees, sidewalks, and electric poles had been painted white so people could navigate them more easily in the moonlight. During the drills, firemen lined the Grande Rue in gas masks that made them look like creatures from another world, as three hundred sirens blared throughout the city. To conserve fuel, private automobiles were banned from the streets, and half of the nearly two thousand taxis were pulled out of commission.

  For foreign governments, the expansion of the war meant that Istanbul was more important than ever, not just as a venue for gathering intelligence but also as a station for organizing multiple underground campaigns: to shift Turkish public opinion toward one side or the other, to organize operations against Germany and its allies in southeastern Europe, and to funnel money and arms to resistance fighters holding out in the rugged uplands of Greece and Yugoslavia. Once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Turks were surrounded by active military campaigns on virtually every side. For the Turkish government, being neutral was no longer just about refusing to enter the fray. It entailed buying friends and understanding potential enemies—in other words, playing the spy game as actively as the belligerents themselves.

  Mahmut Ardıç and Reat Mutlugün were two of the six people killed by the blast at the Per
a Palace. Both men were Turkish Muslims, judging by their first names, and they probably were the first people in a long line of ancestors to have family names that could be passed down from father to children. Ardıç and Mutlugün were variously identified as detectives or gendarmes, but a grand hotel would have been an unusual place to find a beat cop or a gumshoe investigator, especially since there is no record of any significant crime having been committed there in the days leading up to the explosion. What is more likely is that the two men—whose surnames made them the unlikely duo of Officers Juniper and Happy Day—were members of the Turkish secret police, the Emniyet. Their untimely deaths, a result of nothing more than the ill fortune of being at the Pera Palace when the rigged suitcase exploded, were emblematic of the intertwined worlds of foreign intelligence, diplomacy, and business in the wartime city.

  Emniyet officers would have been expected to be on hand to supervise the arrival of a large foreign delegation, especially one that was being evacuated from an enemy country aboard a special train. Keeping tabs on visitors was part of the organization’s job, along with surveilling political dissidents, poets, journalists, religious zealots, subversives, terrorists, militants, revolutionaries, communists, socialists, and virtually any other category that the Emniyet perceived to be a present or possible threat to the state.