1913

by Charles Emmerson

  The Western world, as they saw it, was something to be admired, and to be learned from – though with the ultimate aim of protecting the Ottoman Empire from foreign powers. For a few years at the beginning of the twentieth century the intellectual headquarters of the Young Turk movement had been Paris, with Cairo and Geneva playing a secondary role, though Salonica – a mixed Jewish, Turkish and Greek city in Ottoman Macedonia – became its forward operating base. (It was also the city of birth of Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk.) Others saw an alliance with the German Empire as a strategic necessity for Ottoman survival, at least in the short run. In terms of a model, perhaps Japan was the most appropriate: a country which had managed to modernise itself using Western techniques while retaining the essentials of its distinctive culture (and striking an alliance with the British Empire into the bargain). Young Turks spoke of the Ottoman Empire becoming the ‘Japan of the Near East’.15 Could they pull off the same trick?

  In 1908, the Young Turks achieved their first objective, the restoration of the constitution, with barely a shot being fired. Army units loyal to the Young Turk leadership began to march towards Constantinople from Macedonia in mid June, threatening to take the city by force. In early July, the military commander sent out to oppose them, Şemsi Pasha, was assassinated in broad daylight by a member of the Committee of Union and Progress. Uncertain of the loyalties of his army, Abdül Hamid decided to cut his losses and reinstate the constitution. Thirty years of tyranny were, in theory, over.

  In Constantinople, the news was greeted joyfully. ‘Indoors or out one can hear the cheers of the people’, Mary Poynter wrote in her diary:

  Abdul Hamid’s spies have disappeared as if by magic, newspapers [previously heavily censored, and forbidden from writing about the true state of political affairs] cannot be published fast enough to meet the demand for them and have doubled in price. The towns up and down the Bosporus are lined with people who cheer the steamers as they pass.16

  The restoration of the constitution, coming hand in hand with the release of political prisoners, was widely welcomed. Armenians, for whom Abdül Hamid was a butcher, saw a restored constitution as a guarantee of their rights. Ottoman Greeks saw an opportunity to convert their economic power in the empire into a political role in the Ottoman parliament. (And, asked the nationalists amongst them, might not this provide the first step towards the realisation of the Great Idea: the reunification of all Greek-speakers in a single Greek state?) Turkish women appeared in the street to celebrate, in anticipation of the relaxation of the male chauvinist codes which had received imperial sanction under Abdül Hamid (that Muslim women should not leave the home without male relatives, for example). Across the empire an election was called for a new parliament, providing an excuse for yet more processions in Constantinople. Mary Poynter described a march from the polling stations to the counting houses bearing ballot boxes as if they were holy objects:

  … always headed by a band, mounted troops, and carriages filled with brightly-dressed little Turkish girls, followed by the populace on foot, waving the star and crescent and holy green flags, and all singing (when the band is not playing) the new patriotic song called ‘Vatan’ … Turkish women accompany the procession, often in numbers. The ballot box, completely covered in flowers, is carried high in the midst of this enthusiastic multitude.17

  Out of 288 deputies elected, there were 147 Turks, 60 Arabs, 27 Albanians, 26 Greeks, 14 Armenians, 10 Slavs and 4 Jews.18

  Not everything was so positive, however. Abdül Hamid had been forced to replace his Grand Vizier and allow elections, but he was still Sultan. The political uncertainty generated by events in Constantinople was exploited by others: Bulgaria declared its formal independence with Ferdinand as Tsar (later downgraded to King), the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed Bosnia, Crete united with Greece. Conservatives opposed the social reforms which accompanied the re-establishment of the constitution. In April 1909, a counter-coup led by those who had lost position in the change of regime and carried out by disgruntled Turkish troops in the name of Islam and the restoration of Shari’a law, forced many Young Turks to flee Constantinople.

  The counter-coup did not last. A so-called Army of Deliverance, loyal to the Young Turks, marched back to the capital to take it by force. ‘The quick tramp of infantry, the rush of the cavalry, and the roar of artillery-wagons over the pavements’ left an impression on locals and foreigners alike, reminding them that the Young Turks’ power base, ultimately, was the army.19 Fighting in Constantinople temporarily closed down communications with the outside world. The shutters of the city were pulled down, the steamers normally plying their trade along the Bosphorus motionless but for the swell of the sea. Buildings caught in the crossfire were scarred by bullets, including the residence of the Persian Ambassador – ‘he must have thought himself in Persia when the bullets and shells were whizzing past his door’, one local commented.20 But more important than the physical damage to the city was the political fallout. Turks and Muslims had now fought and killed each other. The Young Turks had learned that Islam could be turned against them by religious and political conservatives.

  At least Abdül Hamid was gone. At 2.45 a.m. on 29 April 1909, the Sultan boarded the imperial train for the first time – and headed into internal exile in Salonica, the headquarters of his enemies. A few months previously ‘the interior of Tibet was easy to reach in comparison’ to the Yildiz palace, wrote Mary Poynter in her diary.21 Now the palace was a sort of tourist attraction for those picking over the remnants of a discredited regime, with a motor car at its gate offering to drive visitors around for a small sum. The gardens, once tended by 400, rapidly fell into a state of neglect. Large safes lay in the courtyard, their doors wide open and contents long gone (some embezzled by the army, it was alleged, other pieces of jewellery sold by the Ottoman government in Paris in 1911).22 One account, published in English with the support of Mahmud Shevket Pasha – the general who had led the Army of Deliverance into Constantinople and who had been made war minister as a result – described the Sultan’s bedroom in the Yildiz palace, left exactly as it had been on the morning of his departure:

  Tossed and tumbled about on the couch were a soft Turkish quilt … and some half-dozen soft silk cushions. Over a long chair nearby hung a white night-dress and a cincture bearing the letter ‘A’ both belonging probably to Abdurrahman Effendi, the Sultan’s favourite son, who was continually with his father during their last few days in Yildiz. Near the Sultan’s bed was a little rest for a coffee-cup or, more probably, for a revolver. In a recess cut into the wall in a corner of a room was a wash-stand and basin hidden by a lacquer screen. On the wall above the couch hung a large Japanese kakemono [scroll painting] bearing the figure of a bird, I think an eagle.23

  Mahomet, the new Sultan, lived quietly in the Dolmabahçe palace, attending prayers at Ayasofya mosque and, for the time being, scrupulously avoiding any political entanglements.

  Over the next year or so, with the Young Turks back in the saddle, parliament passed dozens of bills, some liberal, many attempting to put the genie of counter-coup firmly back in the bottle: the slave trade was abolished, the constitution reformed (so as to cement parliamentary rule), laws were passed to provide for new censorship of the press, to restrict public meetings, to allow for the conscription of non-Muslims (for the first time) and to prevent strikes.24 G. F. Abbott described how the topics of conversation in Constantinople’s cafés, ‘once temples of thoughtless meditation’, were now filled with a single word: change, not of the weather, but of ministers.25 A reliable budget was drawn up for perhaps the first time, showing Ottoman expenditure to be just one-quarter of that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and one-sixth of that of the Russian Empire.26 The tax system was reformed, a process which by 1910 was beginning to bear fruit in the form of increased revenues, albeit below the level of government spending. The fire service was revamped; so was the police. Was the Ottoman Empire finally receiving the shock therapy of reform which
it required?

  All the while, Constantinople itself was changing. ‘Electric lights and telephones are springing up, the streets are being paved’, wrote Poynter in the years after the Young Turk revolution, ‘and the dogs seem to be disappearing’ (in fact they were removed to an island and collectively dispatched).27 The city welcomed a renewed flood of foreign visitors coming to see what the Young Turk fuss was all about: Le Corbusier, André Gide, and Leon Trotsky amongst them.28 ‘Constantinople’, wrote Abbott, ‘outwardly the same great city of magnificent mosques, amorphous palaces, and dirty streets, is essentially a city transformed’.29

  That was to say too much. The Ottoman Empire could not be reformed overnight; the city of Constantinople would not become London, or Berlin, or Vienna just by cleaning it up a bit at the edges, installing a new mayor, or killing the dogs. Such things would take time. Constantinople had been changing slowly for some time before the Young Turks got hold of it. It would continue to change long after they had gone. But change in Constantinople would never be at a pace which was anything other than stately, befitting a city whose lineage was far more ancient than that of even the Ottomans, let alone their new upstart political leaders.

  In 1913, Stamboul in particular – the old city on the southern side of the Golden Horn – was still a rather ramshackle place. English writer Robert Hichens described it as ‘a city of wood and of marble, of dusty, frail houses that look as if they had been run up in a night and might tumble to pieces at any moment’ and, alongside these, ‘magnificent mosques, centuries old, huge, superb, great monuments of the sultans’.30 To Stamboul’s inhabitants, their lives and deaths not much different to those of their grandfathers or their grandfathers’ grandfathers, each uneven paving stone was well known, the sound of each creaking gate familiar, their local mosque, or church, or hamam all within easy reach. To most Europeans Stamboul was a mystery, the beginning of the East. Wandering its crowded streets, and getting lost in them, they were intoxicated by it – or repelled by it.

  The old city of Stamboul was largely unplanned and, despite attempts at civic reform in the nineteenth century, had largely been unmanaged. Garbage piled up in the streets, fresh water was provided from occasional pumps and fountains, the smell of rotting fish lingered by the quayside, pigeons flapped around the yards of mosques. Dogs, fed by local Turks with scraps from their table, fiercely guarded their patches of territory, symbols of Eastern filth or good-luck charms depending on one’s perspective. For some visitors, clutching a copy of Pierre Loti’s latest book to their breast, the very name Stamboul evoked grand ideas of beauty and tragedy, of exquisite poetry and music, stimulating images of twisting dervishes, or of harems of Turkish beauties and Circassian women from the Caucasus. For others the narrow and crooked streets of Stamboul suggested closed medieval minds, more informed by Eastern mysticism than by modern science, and of a people but a short step away from unfathomable barbarity. It would take more than the ambitions of a Young Turk official or two to replace the practices of centuries.

  Walking through Stamboul, Robert Hichens found himself transported by a sense of the city’s history: ‘What it has seen, Stamboul! What it has known’.31 Others were carried away more by its degeneration. Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, a British journalist for the Daily Telegraph come to cover the Balkan wars in 1912, described a ‘city which nature designed to be a paradise on earth and which man has transformed into a cesspool of vice, decay and blood’:

  … a city which from the Bosporus looks like a dream of marble hanging on the slopes of purple hills, and which on closer inspection turns out to be a hopeless jumble of tumble-down houses with gangrened and mouldering walls, built along the sides of badly-paved precipitous streets, down which tired horses glide and stumble, with here and there some beautiful mosque rising above the gaudy rubbish-heap of an out-worn faith. The Turks have done nothing constructive to beautify the city since their irruption in 1453. They have merely added minarets to the old Byzantine churches, or erected mosques in garish imitations of the Greek buildings. For the rest, they have allowed the city to fall into hopeless decay.32

  In late November 1913 the new American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau arrived in Constantinople. Two days later he went to visit the Grand Bazaar, recording his telegraphic judgement in his diary on returning home to the ambassador’s residence: ‘very odd’.33

  Things in Pera were rather more modern and, to the American or European eye, more familiar. The foreign embassies were here, the British occupying a large classical block on the crest of the hill above the water. So too the foreign-owned banks. (One of which, the Ottoman Bank, had famously been occupied by the Dashnak Armenian nationalist group in 1896, threatening to blow it and its foreign employees up if demands for greater freedom were not met.) It was in Pera that technological innovations from the West had always been first introduced: the city’s first gas lamps in 1856, the city’s first film in 1895 and, in 1875, the city’s first underground line, the suitably named Tünel, burrowing from the Galata quayside to the top of Pera Hill.

  On either side of the Grande Rue de Pera, and down adjoining streets and alleys, lay Constantinople’s European bars, dance halls, and shops – an Italian circus, a French theatre, the Pazar Alman (German Market) department store and the Bon Marché, where shopfloor assistants would call out the prices in French. Here, at one of its 349 outlets across the Ottoman Empire, one could buy a Singer sewing machine and obtain lessons in how to use it to follow the latest Parisian fashions.34 Mothers could buy tinned Nestlé condensed milk, advertised in the English and French-language papers, for the protection it offered against both cholera and adulterated local milk. On display behind plate-glass windows, or stacked high on shop shelves, one might find Russian Treugolnik galoshes, by appointment to the Romanov court, or ‘Parisian’ scarves made in Manchester, or bright red Ottoman fezzes with long black tassels (though, in a sign of the times, these were as likely to have been made in an Austro-Hungarian factory as anywhere within a hundred miles of the Ottoman capital).

  In Pera one might meet the city’s French, German or Russian governesses, a trend which conservative Muslims criticised, worrying that Christian women were being hired by Muslim households.35 It was inevitably the part of the city where Ottomans would go to drink, or to buy a foreign newspaper or a foreign book. This was where the Young Turk military officer Mustafa Kamal – posted in late 1913 as the Ottoman military attaché in Sofia – would choose to come on leave, to practise his French and demonstrate his flair for dancing.36 Expatriates and Western-minded locals could send their children to the French Lycée, which had occupied a large area of the district since the 1860s, providing education to Muslims, Christians and Jews alike. A more recent addition to the area, finished only in 1912 and set back a little from the main street, was the Roman Catholic church of St Anthony of Padua, run by Italian monks. The city’s leading hotels were all in Pera – the Pera Palace first amongst them – and then those of the second rank, such as the Khedival Palace or the Hotel de Saint Pétersbourg or the Armenian-owned Hotel Tokatliyan. ‘Foreigners may only live in Pera’, warned Baedeker sternly.37

  Some found the ostentatious Western modernity of Pera unattractive. Robert Hichens railed against its ‘cafés glittering with plate-glass through which crafty, impudent eyes are forever staring out upon passers-by’ and its ‘pretentious, painted women from second-rate European music-halls’, ghostly pale under electric lights.38 American Harry Griswold Dwight feared the ‘deadly levelling of Western civilisation’, making the city over to ‘German Liebespaar, the British old maid, the American mother and daughter who insist on making one place exactly like another’.39 G. F. Abbott laughed at the ‘ostentatious banality of a pseudo-European civilisation … all those exotic abominations which, here as elsewhere, are fast turning the East into a colossal, comico-tragic caricature of the West’.40

  Indeed, it was not just cultured Westerners who found Pera rather fake. The Turkish historian Ahmed Cevdet Paşa w
arned a foreign acquaintance that Pera gave an entirely inaccurate image of the Ottoman Empire as a whole. ‘From here’, he said, ‘you see Istanbul through a telescope, but the telescopes which you used were always warped’.41 Turks sniggered at their compatriots who pretended to be more European than the Europeans. The writer Ahmed Rasim lampooned the affectations of a Turk who:

  … jumping in his mind from Paris, passing mentally through Vienna, casting a glance at Berlin, having seen a map of the Italian cities of Milan, Rome and Naples, having sent a regretful sigh in the direction of London, having read about the American provinces such as New York, Washington and Philadelphia during the time of the exhibitions from guidebooks, had actually only been as far as Izmir [in western Turkey] and promenaded up and down the corniche.42

  But was this really just a laughing matter? Was not there something pernicious, dangerous even, in the way in which Western mores were invading Pera, and thereby infecting the city as a whole? ‘Do not underestimate the bicycle’, wrote Rasim, ‘for it has many vices’.43 It could be used, for example, in the theft of goods and in the seduction of women and young girls. Other Turks commented on the racy European habit of swimming openly in the Bosphorus in skimpy swimsuits, whereas Turks would rather take to the waters, if at all, behind the discreet protection of bamboo shields, in separate men’s and women’s sea-hamams. Some noted the change in Ottoman women’s dress over the last few years, and even the change in their walk, from a slow gait to a brisk, assertive, European pace – something which they ascribed to Western influence. This struck at the very heart of Muslim society, for it suggested a dangerous liberation of women from their male masters. Where would it end?