Charles King - Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul

MIDNIGHT
AT THE
PERA PALACE

The Birth of Modern Istanbul

Charles King

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

New York London

The main entrance to the Pera Palace Hotel, on the corner of Graveyard and Thugs Streets.

For
Ctlin Partenie,
teacher and friend

CONTENTS

Pera / Beyolu circa 1935

Istanbul Today

In writing about a complex past, inconsistency of language is inevitable. I use the name Istanbul throughout this book, even though before 1930 or so, many locals and most foreigners knew it as a version of Constantinople. I use the word Muslims to describe people who would have used that label in the Ottoman era, regardless of their level of religious devotion. Many of these people would later come to call themselves Turks. People of Greek Orthodox heritage in Istanbul have long distinguished themselves from Greek-speakers who live in Greece, and I make a similar distinction in English. I call the former Greeks and the latter Hellenes. I refer to the present stikll (Independence) Avenue as the Grande Rue, a term that many people continued to use in the interwar years, even after the street had officially been given its current name.

I generally spell Turkish words in the Turkish fashion. I make exceptions for idiosyncratic spellings found in written sources, which I have left unaltered, and for terms and names that have English equivalents (hence, pasha rather than paa). I refer to some historical charactersespecially Turkish Muslimsby one or more given names up until the time they adopted an inheritable family name, around 1934. Before then, individuals were normally referred to by a first name plus an honorific, such as Pasha for generals or senior administrators, Bey or Efendi for men of rank, and Hanm for similarly placed women. smet Pasha would therefore be the equivalent of General smet, while Halis Bey would be something like Mr. Halis.

I mainly use the cardinal directions to describe the layout of Istanbul, even though a glance at a map will show this to be inaccurate; there are few geographical features that run strictly eastwest or northsouth. The hilltop neighborhood once called Pera can be subdivided into many different subsections today, and most of them are now contained within the municipal district of Beyolu.

Of course, if a reader is trying to track down the characters and locales in this book, these finer points of usage need not be a hindrance. Istanbul is, after all, a very forgiving place.

But Istanbul is so vast a city, that if a thousand die in it, the want of them is not felt in such an ocean of men.

EVLYA ELEB,
Seyahatname (Book of Travels), seventeenth century

The palace is empty, its fountain silent,

The ancient trees have grown brittle and dry...

Istanbul, Istanbul! The last dead encampment

Of the last great migration.

IVAN BUNIN,
Stambul, 1905

Constantinople and the narrow straits upon which it stands have occasioned the world more trouble, have cost humanity more in blood and suffering during the last five hundred years, than any other single spot upon the earth.... It is not improbable that when Europe in her last ditch has fought the last great battle of the Great War, we shall find that what we have again been fighting about is really Constantinople.

LEONARD WOOLF,
The Future of Constantinople, 1917

MIDNIGHT
AT THE
PERA PALACE

A bartender pouring a glass of raki at an Istanbul establishment.

W HEN I FIRST SAW THE Pera Palace, nearly twenty years ago, you had to have a rather specific reason for being in that section of Istanbul, like getting a lamp rewired or calling on a transgender prostitute. The old hotel was squat and square, wrapped in dirty, green-plastered marble. Its faded fin-de-sicle grandeur was out of place amid the seedy mid-rises that had grown up pell-mell in the 1970s and 1980s. Inside, the red-velvet chairs in the Orient Bar were always empty. The bartender seemed surprised whenever I stopped in for a cocktail and a bowl of stale leblebi, tooth-cracking roasted chickpeas.

Things had once been different. The Pera Palace was established in 1892 to service clients arriving on the Orient Express in the capital of the Ottoman Empire. For decades afterward, it was the obvious place for out-of-towners to stay. The wood-and-iron elevator, which rose up like a birdcage through the marble staircase, had been only the second one installed in Europe (after the Eiffel Towers). A baroque dining hall stood next to a lounge of faux-marble inlay and filigreed screens, covered by a soaring glass canopy. Beyond the buildings stately faade lay Pera, Istanbuls most fashionable neighborhood. A short walk along the main street, known to many Istanbullus in the nineteenth century and after as the Grande Rue, led to the embassies of most of the major world powers. Next door to the hotel, American diplomats shared the street with both the YMCA and legal brothels, and not far away, the British, Russians, and Germans could entertain government officials in gilded restaurants and dark clubs.

The Pera Palace was meant to be the last whisper of the Occident on the way to the Orient, the grandest Western-style hotel in the seat of the worlds greatest Islamic empire. Like Istanbul itself, the hotel was Europeans first major port of call when they went east into a travelers fantasy of sultans, harems, and dervishes. But before the Pera Palace had celebrated its twentieth year in business, all of that had begun to change.

A revolution deposed a long-reigning Ottoman sultan and ushered in more than a decade of political turmoil and communal violence. The First World War brought military defeat and foreign occupation. And in 1923, in one of modern historys most profound exercises in political self-creation, Turks made a purposeful break with their Ottoman past, rejecting an Islamic and multireligious empire and declaring in its place a secular, more homogeneous republic. Turkeys new leaders shifted their capital two hundred miles to the east, to the wind-whipped hills of Ankara, far from the corrupting memories of the old center.