Victor Eskenazi - Beyond Constantinople: The Memoirs of an Ottoman Jew

VICTOR ESKENAZI was born in 1906 and raised in Ottoman Istanbul. He travelled throughout Europe in the 1920s, settling in Vienna and Italy. During World War II, he moved to London and worked for the British Intelligence Corps. An antique dealer by profession, he died in Milan in 1987.

the book gives off a sense of goodness and honour and one thing I found especially moving was his pride in being Jewish, in that it gave him a moral centre and code of ethics rather than [making] him part of a group possessed with special qualities. In fact, one senses strongly that he sees himself as part of a common humanity which aims at the pursuit of good.
DONNA LEON author of the Commissario Guido Brunetti crime novels.

Published in 2016 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London New York
www.ibtauris.com

When I was young there was a song called
Thanks for the Buggy Ride.

It had a joyful lilt.

The wonderment of a city dweller strolling
through beautiful countryside.

It sounded to me like a thanksgiving
for Gods nature.

A hymn to life.

This epigraph is taken from the previous edition of this book, titled Thanks for the Buggy Ride: Memoirs of an Ottoman Jew .

Victor Eskenazi, stanbul, 1929

View of the Golden Horn and Topkap, stanbul, 1906, year Victor Eskenazi was born

View of the Bosphorous, stanbul, 1906

The Galata Bridge from Eminn, stanbul, 1906

The Galata Bridge as seen from Beyolu, stanbul, 1906

Victor aged seven during his time as a student at the German School, stanbul, 1913

Victor at the tennis club, stanbul, 1924

Laure Roditi Eskenazi (back left) on her way to school, stanbul, 1924

Laure (centre), English School for Girls, stanbul, 1930

Laure and Victor on their wedding day, Milan, 27 December 1936

Skiing on the Uluda, 1937

Victor and Laure (standing), Bykada, 1937

Laure, Isaac Roditi, Victor, Rachel Roditi and unknown, Bykada, 1937

Victor (left) with his brother-in-law Alfredo Roditi, on the terrace of his in-laws home, Ayazpasha, 1937

Victor and Laure, Manchester, 1940

Captain Eskenazi, Cairo, 1942

Captain Eskenazi in front of the pyramids, Cairo, 1943

Victor and colleagues of British Intelligence, stanbul, 1944

Victor, stanbul, 1945

Victor with his children Johnny and Peggy, Milan, 1955

Victor in his gallery in Milan, 1976

Victor and Laure, London, 1982

Victor with his son Johnny at their gallery in Milan, 1986

O n a luminous dawn, one day in July 1965, I was standing on the prow of a cruise ship sailing majestically into the golden mist of the Bosphorus, straining my sleepy eyes in order to get my first glimpse of the fabled Istanbul, or Stamboul, or better still Constantinople as my elders would say, with a beatific smile on their face. This mythical realm, home to my family for centuries, was now only a few miles away and, although I had never been there, I felt like Ulysses returning to Ithaca.

My father came up to me silently, put his arm around my shoulder, hugged me and whispered, Finally, here we are! All together in one of the most beautiful cities of the world, one of the great centres of civilisation, certainly the centre of our world for generations. He had tears in his eyes, and I knew it was not the wind.

Captain V.H. Eskenazi had not been back since he had been stationed here during World War II as a British Intelligence officer and this was going to be the first of many return visits right up to the time of his death.

Victor, or Victoriko as his mother called him or Tori as his sister would address him, was the product of a world that has now disappeared. He was a typical representative of the religious and ethnic minorities that thrived in an urban milieu during Ottoman times and that were of fundamental importance to the success of the Empire because of their role in commerce, administration, culture, science and international relations. These groups tended to include very interesting people, frequently eccentrics (we had many such examples in our family), eager to make a better life for themselves. They were also entrepreneurial and inventive, with a great sense of belonging to their community and the city that was their home.

Young Victor was born in 1906 and lived with his mother and father, and his sister, Jenny, in a huge yali in Beylerbey, with his extended family of almost fifty members ruled over by their grandfather. He used to recount how on Saturdays, the whole family would eat together and the children would go in turn to kiss the hand of the wise old man. After his grandfather died the family dispersed and mostly settled in Galata, and the yali has sadly since burned down.

The beginning of the twentieth century was a very critical period in Ottoman history. It witnessed not only the end of the Empire and the defeat in World War I, but also the presence of the victorious allied armies and the wave of White Russians fleeing the Revolution, which added to the already highly cosmopolitan nature of Constantinople. Victor breathed the complex air of this budding new Turkey with its ideals, contradictions, demagogies and hopes. He always felt blessed to have been born at such an extraordinary moment in history and was obsessed with the idea of narrating his colourful experiences as a young man in Istanbul in order to pass them on to the next generations. I thank him for having done so.

If I really had to define my father, a man of various facets and many incarnations, I would primarily identify him as an Ottoman seigneur. Ottoman because of his inbred cosmopolitanism, his wide vision of the world, his insatiable intellectual curiosity, his instinctive understanding and respect of other peoples, cultures and behaviours, and when required also a determination and assertiveness that is so prevalent in the Ottoman personality and in the history of its Empire. Seigneur and I insist on this slightly obsolete French term not only because he was from a francophone milieu, but also because of his savoir faire , charm, elegance and the ability to be at ease with everybody and make everybody else feel at ease in his presence. Moreover, I cannot forget his love for French literature Cyrano de Bergerac being a particular favourite which he would recite too emphatically, causing deep embarrassment to us children.