Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  These were substantial achievements, but the economy soon turned sluggish. Debt grew and inflation spiked. The Republican People’s Party saw an opportunity and began to hammer at Menderes, the first real show of parliamentary defiance. The prime minister was outraged. The Democrats were as unaccustomed to the idea of a loyal opposition as their predecessors had been. Criticism looked like ingratitude and sniping, not constructive assistance. Menderes retreated into suspicion and pique, convinced that the people, regardless of the views of the nattering politicians in Ankara, were really on his side. When a foreign policy crisis loomed—another round of controversy with Greece, this time over the vexed issue of Cyprus—he appealed to the nation directly. His plan was to call for public rallies where the people would speak with one voice in support of the government. The result was a new pogrom.

  In the early autumn of 1955, a rumor was circulating that Hellenic radicals had torched the Turkish Consulate in Thessaloniki. The consulate happened to be located in the childhood home of Atatürk, which the government had purchased during one of the periods of good relations between the two countries. The rumor raced through the back streets of Istanbul. Crowds soon converged along the old Grande Rue, which had long ago been renamed stiklâl, or Independence, Avenue. On September 6–7, looters stormed into shops and homes owned by Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and other non-Muslims, seeking revenge for the supposed desecration of a spot sacred to Kemalism. At least eleven people were killed, and more than 5,600 shops, homes, restaurants, churches, and schools were damaged. stiklâl and the side streets leading toward the Pera Palace were littered with debris and overturned vehicles. Crowds crunched through broken glass as they surveyed the destruction.

  The “September events,” as they are still called in Turkey, were the last straw for many of Istanbul’s minorities. Each year marked a retreat. Armenian churches sealed themselves behind metal gates. Greek congregations disappeared, turning over the keys to a Turkish doorman to keep watch on a sacred spring and pay the electric bill. The government built guardhouses outside synagogues to discourage vandals and terrorists, but the smoked-glass boxes made the places of worship look more like foreign embassies than longtime neighbors. Menderes—after leveling portions of Istanbul in grand public-works projects—was ousted in a military coup in 1960 and, along with two of his ministers, hanged. Two more military coups, for different reasons and involving different sets of players, followed in 1971 and 1980. The threat of another brought down a government as late as 1997.

  After the turmoil of the 1950s, shops reopened under new owners, and Muslim immigrants from Anatolian towns and villages moved in to take over abandoned apartments. But the heart seemed to have been dragged out of old neighborhoods. Grand plans for urban renewal were proposed by the city government and then only partially implemented. A new building might pop up in Pera, too big for its plot but not big enough to hide the peeling plaster and sagging rooflines around it. Tourists preferred the bed-and-breakfasts in Sultanahmet, with its carpet shops and Byzantine antiquities. In 1979, a California psychic, Tamara Rand, revealed her vision that Agatha Christie had left some deep secret hidden in Room 411 of the Pera Palace. The story made good copy and boosted business for a while, as people looked for what the secret might be, but it was in the end a confused fabrication. Nothing turned up but an old key, and the lore that Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express while staying in the hotel has remained one of its most delicious myths.

  Since the Pera Palace was one of the few historic hotels left in Istanbul, it began vacuuming up famous people, regardless of whether they had in fact ever signed the registry books. One who actually did was the poet Joseph Brodsky, but by the time he checked in, in the 1980s, most business travelers and wedding parties had decamped to the Hilton, the Swissôtel, and other chains. The neighborhood streets, observed Brodsky, were “crooked, filthy, dreadfully cobbled, and piled up with refuse.” He reported having a nightmare in which three stray cats tore apart a giant rat at the base of the Pera Palace’s marble staircase.

  The American Consulate next door had hidden itself behind a rough cinder-block wall. The British Consulate up the street was a gated greensward with little connection to the rough streets around it. Few outsiders came to Pera and its outskirts—the small plateau of Tepebaı, the steep inclines of ihane and Tarlabaı, the dark canyons of Galata leading down from the former Grande Rue. You were best to stay on the ridges in that part of Istanbul, especially at night, and the Pera Palace was on the downhill slope.

  Modern European history has two dominant modes, the national and the elegiac. Both are, in their way, fictions. National history asks that we take the impossibly large variety of human experience, stacked up like a deck of playing cards, and pull out only the national one—the rare moments in time when people raise a flag and misremember a collective past—as the most worthy of our attention. The elegiac asks that we end every story by fading to black, leaving off at a point when an old world is lost, with a set of ellipses pointing back toward what once had been.

  Neither is an adequate way of thinking about the rest of the story: the blindingly familiar moments when the nation matters less than families and neighborhoods, or the arc of a single lifetime when, on the lee side of awfulness, someone wills into existence an instant of starting over. People live the present as a grand improvisation—misunderstanding their predicaments, laughing when they ought to mourn, staying when they should leave, and packing up their belongings when it would be better to stay at home. They rarely experience life as rushing toward something. More often, it seems like a ship jerkily pulling away from a pier. You see the docklands slide out of view, then the trees and buildings, until home is a gray thread between water and sky.

  Ottoman bourgeois became ardent Turkish republicans. Muslim villagers remade themselves as apartment-dwelling Istanbullus. White Russians became Parisians. Greeks started new lives in Athens and Thessaloniki. Some of their grandchildren no doubt rolled their eyes at old stories about a shop on a long-forgotten foreign avenue. Armenians went to America or, in their tens of thousands, stayed put in their old homeland, living quietly as Turkish citizens and, sometimes, as self-declared ethnic Turks. Scrub trees grew in old Jewish graveyards, but the small remaining community built new ones, with headstones that memorialized a recent death in Turkish rather than in the once-familiar Ladino.

  Possibility is sometimes tragedy’s unexpected gift. The Park Hotel was eventually torn down to make way for urban renewal. The Tokatlian Hotel became an unrecognizable box destined for bad redevelopment. The Grand Cercle Moscovite, the Garden Bar, and the Turquoise are gone. The old community of Muslim émigrés from cosmopolitan Salonica—the builders of modern Turkey from Nâzım Hikmet to Atatürk—has been replaced by new waves of hopeful migrants from the cities of eastern Anatolia and the Black Sea coast. Where Halide Edip and Keriman Halis took off their head coverings in a demonstration of modernity, some Istanbullu women today wear theirs as a declaration of Islamic feminism—a freedom of choice enabled by the secular reformers of the early republic. Russians still walk up and down the boulevards, but they are more likely to be curious tourists than needy refugees. Istanbul’s Greek, Armenian, Jewish, and Levantine societies are all diminished from the days when questions were asked on the Grande Rue in one language and answered in another. In old Christian neighborhoods, gatekeepers still ring the church bells at eight in the morning and five in the afternoon, not to call so much as to remind.

  But in the city’s dawning moment as a global hub and polished metropolis, the last of the grand old establishments that defined Istanbul’s era of jazz and exile is still there. The Pera Palace is now a reinvented version of its old self. The dazzling white ballroom has been refreshed, the cast-iron elevator has been rehung, and the faux marble has been repainted, all under the stewardship of a luxury firm from Dubai. It is a stunning reminder of the fact that all of us—the natives who become immigrants and the newcomers who become natives—are, in
the end, only custodians.

  On most days, Istanbul can be a city of harsh and dazzling light. Even at dusk the fading sun glints painfully off the water. Millions of lamps flick on in houses and apartments on both sides of the Bosphorus. Illuminated billboards flash their messages in the major squares. With medieval towers floodlit and prominent, and the minarets of imperial mosques strung with light bulbs during Ramadan, it is easy to retrace the entire history of the city’s skyline, from Byzantine churches to the Ottoman royal residences to the skyscrapers of Turkish megafirms, even after dark. From Eminönü at the foot of the old city to Kadıköy on the Asian side, up the Bosphorus past the milky marble palaces at Çıraan and Dolmabahçe to the crenellated castle at Rumelihisarı, across the bridges and highways with their red brake lights and soul-killing traffic jams, to the green bulb of an oil tanker’s starboard sidelight reflecting off the black water, Istanbul always shines.

  Even in the gray and quiet winter, tired ferry commuters clamber for an outside seat near the railings, taking in the dappled light on a ship’s hull or the black arrow of a cormorant skimming beak-high off the water. When the sky is bruise-blue and cold, crowds of gulls and pigeons still bounce along the shoreline. Sparkle-headed grackles and magpies strut deliberately beneath the dormant oleander. Snow-covered Judas trees share the coastal hills with evergreen cypresses. On blustery mornings, the Sea of Marmara is a dull sapphire, with leaden domes and gilded spires muted on the shore, everything radiating a cool blue light once the early mist burns away.

  Over the last two decades, Istanbul has again become one of the world’s great cities, both in terms of its sheer size and because of the vibrancy and ambition of its businesses and creative classes. No place can ever again become the capital of the world, but at least today—unlike in the years of the Pera Palace’s decline—you can see how someone might once have thought of Istanbul in that role. Yet in the race toward a bright future full of hypermarts and earnest entrepreneurs, it is easy to skip over the city’s earliest experiments with modernity and renewal—an era when the old cosmopolitanism of empire began to drift away just as new immigrants were finding in the city a permanent home or temporary haven. The hidden origins of modern Istanbul are there in one grand hotel standing on a single plot of land: the Muslim foundation that first owned it, the Armenians who marked it out for development, the Belgian multinational firm that made it famous, the Greek businessman who bought and lost it, and the Arab-born Turkish Muslim who guided it, somewhat the worse for wear, through the Second World War.

  It does not take too much effort to imagine people like these on an ordinary Istanbul day, at an hour when new arrivals are checking in, for example, in the spring of 1941, a Tuesday—the moment just before the flash comes through the wood-frame doors and the gilded windows, before the boom calls people out onto the Grande Rue and the Pera Palace’s glass canopy falls, before the floor opens up and the six deaths, before the shock wave throws shards and fire across the former Graveyard Street. From the correspondence and casualty lists of those caught up in the Pera Palace bombing, we know their names.

  Here are the hotel’s two Jewish doormen, Muiz and Avram, standing not far from two Greek drivers, both named Constantine. Three English women are at the reception desk—Miss Ellis and Miss Armstrong, who have just arrived on the train from the Balkans, and Mrs. McDermott, visibly pregnant, whose baby will not survive the night. Mahmut and Reat, the two Emniyet officers, are near the stack of luggage, and a Muslim chauffeur, ükrü, is sorting valises from trunks. Mr. Karantinos, the hotel’s general manager, is watching Costas, the head clerk from Greece, who is supervising Mehmet, the Turkish passport officer, who is rushing to take down everyone’s details. Süleyman, a Muslim night watchman, has to pitch in, too.

  Down the hill, Madame de Téhige, whose brother was once the chief procurator of the Holy Synod of Russia and is now, she will write to the British consul in a few weeks, a “begar,” worries that her landlady will soon “poot me in the street.” Talât, a Muslim villager, broke and unmarried and just arrived that day from Giresun, his hometown on the Black Sea, has come up from the docklands, perhaps looking for work. In an apartment nearby, a Muslim musician, the son of Balkan immigrants, is practicing his contrabass. And around the corner, on the street named for the little vine-covered mosque, someone the neighbors call Shalom, Mordecai’s son, has come out for an evening walk.

  NOTES

  Abbreviations used in notes

  CERYE Committee for the Education of Russian Youth in Exile Records, Bakhmeteff Archive, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

  DBIA Dünden Bugüne stanbul Ansiklopedisi

  DO-ICFA Dumbarton Oaks Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives

  FDR Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library

  GUL Georgetown University Library, Special Collections Research Center

  HIA Hoover Institution Archives

  IWM Imperial War Museum Archives

  JAP-IDI Jewish Agency for Palestine Records, Immigration Department Office in Istanbul, USHMM

  JOINT Selected Records from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1937–1966, USHMM

  LC Library of Congress

  LTEP Leon Trotsky Exile Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University

  NARA National Archives and Records Administration

  NAUK National Archives of the United Kingdom

  USHMM United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives

  WRB Papers of the War Refugee Board, USHMM

  Note: Archival citations use p./pp. to refer to running page numbers of a printed text or manuscript and f./ff. to refer to sheet numbers, if given, within a particular file. Citations to WRB sources refer to the digitized collection compiled by Rebecca Erbelding of the USHMM.

  PROLOGUE

  4“From all I had seen”: “Constantinople, Dirty White, Not Glistening and Sinister,” Toronto Daily Star, Oct. 18, 1922; idem, “Waiting for an Orgy,” Toronto Daily Star, Oct. 19, 1922; and idem, “A Silent, Ghastly Procession,” Toronto Daily Star, Oct. 20, 1922, all reprinted in Hemingway, Dateline: Toronto, 227–32.

  6“[W]e civilised people”: Toynbee, Western Questions, 1.

  GRAND HOTEL

  13“As for the site”: Busbecq, Turkish Letters, 34.

  14One way to preserve: Price, Extra-Special Correspondent, 38. “I am willing to run”: Quoted in Dalal, “At the Crossroads of Modernity,” 135. See also Gül, Emergence of Modern Istanbul, 54. Trains slowed to a crawl: Christie, Come, Tell Me How You Live, 12. “Is it? No, yes, it must be”: Dos Passos, Orient Express, in Travel Books and Other Writings, 133.

  15Only a blind man: Herodotus, The Histories, 4.144.

  16But according to the contemporary chronicler: Procopius, Secret History, in Procopius, 25.2–6. When Sultan Mehmed II took the city: George Makris, “Ships,” in Laiou, ed., Economic History of Byzantium, 99. The number of oars: White, Three Years in Constantinople, 1:38–41.

  17“[T]he limpid freshness”: White, Three Years in Constantinople, 1:51. By his day: White, Three Years in Constantinople, 1:51–52. But foreign sailors could still watch: Private Papers of G. Calverley Papers, p. 36, IWM.

  18“Do not suppose”: Pirî Reis, Kitab-ı bahriye, 1:59. Massive earthquakes: DBIA, 3:33–35.

  19It was all so familiar: DBIA, 7:425–26. “As soon as it gets dark”: Bibesco, Eight Paradises, 229. Huge fires occurred: DBIA, 7:426–38. “I have walked over”: Pears, Forty Years in Constantinople, 314.

  20On his first visit: Herbert, Ben Kendim, 26–27. Even the Divanyolu: Çelik, Remaking of Istanbul, 4.

  21Photographs from the time: DBIA, 7:426–38. The airy, open vistas: Gül, Emergence of Modern Istanbul, 49–51.

  23It could also be: Barsley, Orient Express, 20. Nagelmackers had visited: Behrend, History of the Wagons-Lits, 3.

  24At the frontier: Behrend, History of the Wagons-Lits, 7. The entire journey: Cookridge, Orient Express, 86. By 1850, the Ottoman Empire: nalcık
with Quataert, eds., Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 2:804.

  25It was, said an observer: A. Van Milligen, Constantinople (1906), 205, quoted in Çelik, Remaking of Istanbul, 102. “I am going by it!”: Christie, Come, Tell Me How You Live, 12.

  26The property had once belonged: Çelik, Tepebaı, 172–74. Its sister establishments: Behrend, History of the Wagons-Lits, 12. Like the Four Seasons: Sperco, Istanbul indiscret, 80. As the Guide Bleu later noted: De Paris à Constantinople, 178. Insurance maps from the period: See Jacques Pervititch Sigorta Haritalarında stanbul and Dadalen, ed., Charles Edouard Goad’ın stanbul Sigorta Haritaları.

  27When Le Corbusier visited: Quoted in Mansel, Constantinople, 354.

  THE GRAY FLEET

  32More than half a million Muslim migrants: Zürcher, Young Turk Legacy, 287. The number of informants: Price, Extra-Special Correspondent, 40.

  33“The motley rabble”: Edib, Memoirs, 259. Young boys threw rocks: Pears, Forty Years in Constantinople, 249.

  36“Ayesha, angel of beauty”: Letter from a Turkish Officer, IWM.

  38By March, Unionist leaders: Akçam, From Empire to Republic, 166. The Unionist sons of Muslim refugees: See Zürcher, Young Turk Legacy, 285–95. On the night of April 24–25: Akçam, Young Turks’ Crimes, 183–93. He was among the fortunate: Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, 77. Tripod scaffolds: See C. J. Brunell Photograph Collection, IWM.

  39However, over the course of the war: Reynolds, Shattering Empires, 155. For a detailed discussion of evidence regarding the Istanbul deportations, see Akçam, Young Turks’ Crimes, 399–406; and Kévorkian, Armenian Genocide, 251–54, 533–43. This description comes from Charles and Louisa Vinicombe to Hélène Philippe, Oct. 25, 1920, C. Vinicombe Papers, IWM.