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
C t lin Partenie,
teacher and friend
CONTENTS

Maps
Author’s Note

PROLOGUE
GRAND HOTEL
THE GRAY FLEET
OCCUPATION
RESISTANCE
MOSCOW ON THE BOSPHORUS
KONSTANTINOUPOLIS
“THE POST-WAR WORLD WAS JAZZING”
“THE PAST IS A WOUND IN MY HEART”
MODERN TIMES
BEYOND THE VEIL
LIVING LIKE A SQUIRREL
ISLAND LIFE
QUEEN
HOLY WISDOM
SHADOW WARS
PAPER TRAILS
AT THE GATE OF FELICITY
EPILOGUE

Acknowledgments
Chronology
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Pera / Beyo lu circa 1935
Istanbul Today
AUTHOR’S NOTE

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 stiklâl (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 pa a). I refer to some historical characters—
especially Turkish Muslims—by 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 “Hanım” 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 east–west or north–south. 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 Beyo lu.
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.
EVL YA ÇELEB ,
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
PROLOGUE
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-siècle 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 Tower’s). A baroque dining hall stood
next to a lounge of faux-marble inlay and filigreed screens, covered by a
soaring glass canopy. Beyond the building’s stately façade lay Pera,
Istanbul’s 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 world’s
greatest Islamic empire. Like Istanbul itself, the hotel was Europeans’ first
major port of call when they went east into a traveler’s 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 history’s 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. Turkey’s 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.
A young reporter named Ernest Hemingway saw the beginning. “From
all I had seen in the movies, Stamboul ought to have been white and
glistening and sinister,” he wrote in the Toronto Daily Star in the late
autumn of 1922. He had arrived from the Balkans by train, rolling past
brick-red Byzantine land walls and children splashing in the water, into a
tumble of small mosques and wooden houses with dusty domes and sprung
clapboards rubbed gray by salt and wind. He had seen roads choked with
colorfully dressed peasants trudging behind muddy, bristle-haired water
buffaloes. Queues of migrants in damp overcoats snaked around foreign
embassies. Demobilized officers strutted in frayed tunics. From a plaza near
the Pera Palace, he looked through a spyglass at refugee families pressed
tight against the railings of a steamer spewing ash. Everything white was
dirty white, he observed, and the mood was hopeless and resigned, like the
feeling of waiting while a doctor and nurse are upstairs with someone you
love.
Veils and harems, fezzes and frockcoats were disappearing. The sultan
and the caliphate—the institution that embodied Muslims’ understanding of
God’s will on earth—would soon be declared defunct. Hours and dates
would be reckoned the way they were in Paris or New York, not as in
Mecca and Medina. Ministers and generals were moving to Ankara.
Foreign embassies and their entourages would follow. Istanbul was settling
into a self-absorbed sense of hüzün, the hollowed-out melancholy that
Turkish intellectuals said infused the crumbling walls, tumbledown
mansions, and rotting seaside villas.
But between the two world wars, displacement and disorientation
opened up a set of opportunities that no one could have foreseen. Loss was
also a serviceable kind of possibility. The antidote to hüzün was what the
Turks called keyif: a sense of joyful abandon, of singing to avoid crying, the
willful summoning of mirth as an answer to horror. A different kind of
Istanbul was already rising. Buffalo carts shared the streets with electric
trams and automobiles. Circles of radical nationalists held meetings in the
same districts where socialist agents plotted world revolution. New music
drifted up from quiet neighborhoods: orchestral jazz, slithery and daring;
the staccato plectrum work of a blind Armenian lute player; the torch songs
of the Levantine underworld. You could have a drink at Maxim, a club
owned by a black Russian American, or dance to the Palm Beach Seven
playing nightly at the Garden Bar.
The minarets and dervishes were still there, but Istanbul was becoming
a novel version of an Islamic city: an island of outcasts and the self-made,
the cosmopolitan ex-capital of an Islamic empire that dreamed itself into a
nation-state, and a place that—then as now—was struggling to shape its
own way of being Muslim and modern at the same time. In these years of
movement and change, if you squinted into the winter sun setting low over
the Grande Rue, past the beggars and grifters, it was not hard to dream up a
different kind of country and a different kind of life—one that, by force of
will and dint of circumstance, you got to remake.

For more than half a millennium, the West’s image of the Islamic world has
been shaped by its encounter with Istanbul: the grandeur of its golden age,
the swiftness of its decline, the apparent choice between the bad alternatives
of authoritarian rule and religious extremism. But in the interwar years,
Istanbullus embraced Western ideals with a zeal that no one could have
imagined. The city whose very geography united Europe and Asia became
the world’s greatest experiment in purposeful reinvention in the Western
mold.
In the process, the former Ottoman capital came to reflect both the best
and the worst of what the West had to offer: its optimism and its obsessive
ideologies, human rights and the overbearing state, the desire to escape the
past and the drive to erase it altogether. When visitors complained that the
old Istanbul seemed to be slipping away, what they meant was that Istanbul
was coming to look more and more like them. “[W]e civilised people of the
West,” wrote the historian Arnold J. Toynbee on a visit to Turkey in the
1920s, “glance with pity or contempt at our non-Western contemporaries
lying under the shadow of some stronger power, which seems to paralyse
their energies by depriving them of light. . . . Yet if we paused to examine
that dim gigantic overshadowing figure . . . we should be startled to find
that its features are ours.”
Europeans who came to Istanbul understood the dark side of their own
civilization precisely because many of them were its victims. After the First
World War, in the parallel universes created by the collapse of empires
across Europe and the Near East, Westerners were sometimes the needy
immigrants and Easterners their reluctant hosts. Wave after wave of
Europeans landed in Istanbul in ways they could never have imagined—not
as conquerors or bearers of enlightenment but as the displaced,
impoverished, and desperate. They wandered Istanbul’s streets and were
shooed away from the Pera Palace’s doorstep: drunken sailors and ruined
businessmen; former nobles flogging family silver and moth-eaten furs;
unwanted ethnic minorities cast off by some European government; the
losers of a civil war, palace intrigue, or world-changing revolution.
No one understood this history better than a man who turned out to be
an unexpected traveling companion in my journey into the thicket of the
hidden Islamic jazz age. I first came across Selahattin Giz in a series of
limited-edition Turkish photograph albums published in the early 1990s. He
was a bootstrap newsman whose job was to record daily life as he saw it,
often in blurry, motion-filled detail. When I visited his archive, now owned
by a Turkish bank, I found that one of the biggest collections of images was
filed under the category “Kaza”—Accident. They included the grisly and
sensational photos you would expect to see on the front page of any
newspaper eager to shift copies: car wrecks, pedestrian deaths, and the
aftermath of a nightmarish day when the cable on the Tünel funicular
snapped, sending the wooden carriage careening through the front of the
downhill station. There were also the private experiments of a man with a
camera on some lazy afternoon: alley cats, interesting shadows, some
tentative erotica.
As I made my way through Giz’s collection, I realized that I had
stumbled upon the person who had helped chronicle the vanished world I
wanted to understand. I also knew that his own life mirrored the story of
exile and rejuvenation that defined his adopted city.
Giz was born to a Muslim family in Salonica (modern Thessaloniki,
Greece) in 1914. His hometown was Greek by origin, largely Sephardic
Jewish by population, and—until just two years before he was born—
Ottoman by government. Salonica passed to Hellenic control as a result of
the Balkan Wars, a kind of regional dress rehearsal for the devastation of
the First World War, and the new government worked hard to erase the
centuries of multiculturalism that had defined urban life there. Minarets
were pulled down. Mosques became churches. Muslim homes and
businesses passed to Christian ownership.
The Giz family joined hundreds of thousands of other Muslims pushed
out of southeastern Europe. They settled in the Beylerbeyi neighborhood of
Istanbul, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, an area whose Greek
Orthodox, Jewish, and Armenian inhabitants replicated the mixed world the
Gizes had known in Salonica. But the young Selahattin spent most of his
life and career on the other side of the water, amid the cinemas, street
performers, and cabarets of Pera. An uncle gave him a camera on the
occasion of his sünnet, the Muslim circumcision ceremony typically
performed a few years before a boy reaches adolescence. As a student at the
prestigious Galatasaray Lycée in the late 1920s, he threw himself into
photography, wandering the city with his Zeiss Ikon and talking his way
into the darkroom of the city’s largest daily, Cumhuriyet (The Republic). He
formally joined the newspaper’s staff in 1933 and spent the next forty years
as one of its premier photojournalists. He died, at eighty, in 1994.
Looking at his photographs—and those of many unknown
photographers that he slipped into his collection—is like visiting an
Istanbul that few people, whether Turks or tourists, can imagine ever
existed. There are towheaded Russian chorus girls, arms flailing and
cheekily self-aware. There is a meeting of the alumni association of the
eunuchs of the sultan’s imperial harem. A crowd of Muslim men sacrifices
two rams to bless a trolley car. There are firemen in otherworldly gas masks
during an air-raid drill and schoolgirls caught up in a frenzy of grief on the
death of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s founding president. Grown
women skip rope to the delight of a child or zip down a street on a bicycle,
their dark hair and summer dresses blowing in the breeze. And there is Giz
himself, smiling, snapped by a friend in an Istanbul winter, the wet snow
piling up on the brim of his fedora. If journalism is the first draft of history,
it is also sometimes a salutary shock: a way of forcing us to recall a mode
of being that made sense at the time, of lives lived messily among
neighbors who prayed and ate differently—Muslims, Christians, and Jews;
religious and secular; refugees and natives—with everyone, in one way or
another, starting over.

Selahattin Giz in an Istanbul winter.

Istanbul is today a global city, a sprawling urban space of more than

thirteen million people, making it more populous than Greece, Austria, or
Sweden—larger, in fact, than two-thirds of the world’s countries. Old
fishing villages have become fashionable suburbs, and old suburbs have
become city centers in their own right, with glass-clad skyscrapers rising
above new mosques and malls. Even during Muslim holy days, the Arabic-
language call to prayer competes with Turkish-language pop music
pounding through the thin walls of café-bars. In an afternoon, you can visit
the universal seat of the Greek Orthodox faith, a headquarters of the
Armenian Apostolic Church, the office of Turkey’s chief rabbi, and the
mausoleum of one of Muhammad’s closest companions. It is home to
people who feel their first identity to be Turkish and others who might list
Kurdish, Alevi, Armenian, or Circassian, and who are now more freely
confident in doing so than at any time in recent history.
Istanbul’s rise began with the journey away from a place that visitors
often knew as Constantinople. The new city was the product of immigrants
as well as emigrants—women and men who, by choice or necessity, had
come to Istanbul as well as those who had left it, the first generation of
republican Istanbullus or the last generation of imperial
Constantinopolitans. In an era of leave-taking and restlessness, a time we
now call the interwar years, the Pera Palace was not the only place where
these transients and newcomers began their reinvention. But for wave after
wave of refugees, migrants, and exiles, the storied old hotel was a symbol
of the transition from a past age to a new one—a place that embodied the
ties between East and West, between empire and republic, and between
nostalgia and experiment in the only place on earth to have been the
epicenter of both Christendom and global Islam.
GRAND HOTEL
Pigeons in flight: The Golden Horn with the sixteenth-century mosque complex of Sültan Süleyman
the Magnificent (or the Süleymaniye) in the background.
“A S FOR THE SITE OF the city itself, it seems to have been created by
nature for the capital of the world,” wrote Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a
Flemish diplomat and traveler, in the sixteenth century. Istanbul had been
founded as Byzantium, perhaps in the seventh century BC. It became New
Rome when the Roman emperor Constantine the Great inaugurated it as his
capital in 330 AD. In 1453, Ottoman Muslims wrested it from Constantine’s
political descendants, the Byzantines. Turkish-speakers knew it officially as
Kostantiniyye, a name derived from the popular Greek term
Konstantinoupolis, or “Constantine’s city.” Local Jews borrowed the first
two syllables from the Greeks and called it Kushta. Local Armenians
borrowed the last two and called it Bolis. Slavs used Tsarigrad, or “Caesar’s
city.”
Coming upon Istanbul from the sea is still one of the most breathtaking
experiences on earth—seductive and romantic, with the old city’s pointed
skyline shimmering above whitecaps and treetops. No other place can claim
to be more perfectly situated. But a hidden truth of the modern city—the
city of boulevards, Parisian-style shopping arcades, and tramcars, rather
than the one of Byzantine basilicas and Ottoman mosques—is that arriving
by land has always been something of an anticlimax. The twisting streets,
crowded highways, and small hills chockablock with buildings, all
unrolling in patches of red and brown like an Anatolian carpet, are poor
substitutes for a first sighting from aboard ship. One way to preserve the
enchantment, advised a visitor in 1910 emphatically, was simply “Never
step ashore.”
Unlike other great cities, Istanbul even hides its central railway
terminal. Sirkeci station is squeezed into the hillside below Sarayburnu, or
Seraglio Point, near the spot where Byzantine emperors and Ottoman
sultans chose to site their royal households. “I am willing to run the rails
through my body if it means a railway will be constructed in my domain,”
the reforming Sultan Abdülaziz was believed to have said in the 1860s.
When the station was built more than two decades later, it did require
running the rails through the territory of one of his successors, Sultan
Abdülhamid II. Bits of the Byzantine sea walls and the tiered gardens of the
sultan’s Topkapı Palace were removed to accommodate the tracks. A visitor
might have thrilled at the sight of smoke enveloping the sultan’s palace in
marvelous white clouds and think all this the height of Oriental fantasy until
it was pointed out that the mist was being produced by a steam engine
rounding the headland.
Sirkeci was opened in 1890, but even in its heyday, few remarked on the
experience of reaching it. In London’s St. Pancras or Budapest’s Keleti, a
rail journey ended with a crescendo and a cymbal crash. There, carriages
creaked to a halt inside soaring halls that gave way to even grander
streetside façades. Sirkeci, however, was more like a coda. Trains slowed to
a crawl once they reached the Ottoman border—going from an allegro con
furore to a definite legato, observed Agatha Christie on one of her journeys
aboard a transcontinental express—because of inferior rails and poorly
serviced lines. The Sea of Marmara gradually came into view as the
carriages jerked between windswept hills and the rocky coast, before
rounding the cape at the mouth of the Golden Horn and stopping with a
final sigh from the steam engine. When the American novelist John Dos
Passos arrived in the summer of 1921, he initially thought his train had
stopped at a siding, waiting for another engine to pass. “Is it? No, yes, it
must be . . . Constantinople,” he finally decided.
Istanbullus embraced the timetables and all-weather predictability of
rail travel only reluctantly. The reason was a matter of geography.
According to the ancient historian Herodotus, when Greek colonists from
the Aegean first settled the area, they planted themselves on the eastern side
of the Sea of Marmara at Chalcedon. A Persian commander visited the area
some time later and denounced the Chalcedonians for their poor planning.
Only a blind man, he said, would willingly choose to place a colony there
rather than on the strategic headland just across the water. Later builders
were savvier. Greek settlers moved across the Bosphorus and founded
Byzantium, a rather minor trading center but one well situated on the sea
route linking the Mediterranean with other Greek outposts on the Black Sea
to the north.
Nearly a millennium later, the Roman emperor Constantine the Great
was obscure about the reasons for naming Byzantium his new capital, citing
only the commands of the Christian God he had embraced as his empire’s
exclusive deity. But Byzantium did have the advantages of being well away
from the barbarians of the West and unsullied by the pagan traditions of the
old capital. Nova Roma, as it was first called, grew to encompass the cape
as well as the hills to the west and, centuries later, the highlands to the
north. Over time—from the collapse of the western empire through the rise
of Constantine’s political successors, the Byzantines—locals came to
inhabit the sea nearly as much as the land, scuttling back and forth between
two continents and three water systems: the brackish Golden Horn, rising
from two small streams in the west of the city; the saltier Bosphorus,
constantly exchanging water with the Black Sea; and the Sea of Marmara,
which leads on via the Dardanelles strait to the Mediterranean.
Byzantine legal codes enshrined the right to a property owner’s sea
view, and the expectation that daily affairs should naturally involve both
land and water remained central to urban life throughout the Byzantine
Empire’s existence. Sitting astride a north–south sea route also allowed the
Byzantines to build a local economy based on taxing shipping between the
Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The emperor Justinian I, in the sixth
century, established customs houses along the Bosphorus, with magistrates
paid from imperial coffers. But according to the contemporary chronicler
Procopius, officials were also free to charge ship captains whatever price
they wished. Merchants frequently complained that they were being bled
dry when their vessels passed the imperial capital. The spectacular growth
in the city under Justinian’s reign, with new churches and private houses
rising on the hills stretching out from the old quarter of Byzantium, was in
part fueled by what would now be called extortion.
Much the same approach to water and land characterized the inheritors
of the empire. The Ottomans had been in constant contact with the
Byzantines for roughly two centuries. Their distant roots stretched back to
Turkic tribal groups in Central Asia, pulled and pushed westward in several
rounds of migration, but by the early modern era they were as culturally and
genetically mixed as the Byzantines themselves: a patchwork of nomads,
warriors, converts, and natives united mainly by their loyalty to the sultan,
the Ottomans’ supreme ruler. When Sultan Mehmed II took the city in May
1453, he issued a special decree mandating that shipbuilders and sailors not
be harmed, and from that point the Ottomans developed a well-regulated
and infinitely complex system of rules and etiquette governing the use of
the city’s waterways.
Rowed caiques ferried passengers from shoreline to shoreline,
connecting the waterside summer villas, or yalıs, that Ottoman grandees
built amid fishermen’s cottages along the Bosphorus. The number of oars
on each caique was strictly regulated according to rank: eighteen for the
commander of the navy; ten for the grand vizier (prime minister), the
eyhülislam (chief Islamic cleric), and foreign ambassadors; eight for
regional governors and heads of major cities; six for mid-ranking military
officers and leading citizens. Watchmen along the water were on guard not
only for capsized boats but also for transgressions of oar-related propriety.
The grandest caiques were reserved for the sultan’s flotilla, which
featured twenty-four oarsmen, a gold-fringed canopy supported by gilded
poles, a prow with a gilded falcon, and a dais at the stern for the sultan
himself. During the summer months, when the sultan and his retinue took to
the water for the selâmlık, the weekly procession to Friday prayers, the
spectacle could be transporting. According to Charles White, one of the
most insightful nineteenth-century observers of the city:
[T]he limpid freshness of the waters, crowded with vessels and craft of all sizes and
countries—the beams of a mid-day sun, gilding the countless domes, minarets, and palaces,
and illuminating the rich and varied landscape—give to this spectacle an air of fairy
splendour, unequalled in reality, and not to be surpassed in the imagination but by the
creations of Aladin’s enchanted lamp. . . . It is the only regal spectacle in Europe where the
points of attraction perfectly harmonise with surrounding objects.

It was not difficult to see, White said, why Bosphorus boatmen were
widely regarded as perfect specimens of Ottoman manliness and reputed by
locals to be Istanbul’s most skillful lovers. By his day, there were some
19,000 registered boatmen on the lower Bosphorus, mainly Greeks and
Armenians, in charge of 16,000 craft, as well as several thousand more in
the villages stretching toward the Black Sea. That number trailed off later in
the century, as steam-driven passenger ferries came to replace rowboats.
But foreign sailors could still watch from their ships as Ottoman royalty
used caiques to cross back and forth between their palaces on the European
and Asian shores. With gold-uniformed oarsmen in the royal barge, and
wives and concubines following in less ornately carved boats, all churning
up small wakes in the shadow of modern cruisers, it was like an old world
silently passing a new one on a calm sea.
Getting around the city required knowledge of not only streets and
squares but also quays, docklands, and ferry stations. A ferry ride was
needed to get from one rail terminus to the other. Sirkeci station serviced
points west—Thrace and the Balkans—while Haydarpa a station, built on
the Asian shore in 1908, led on to points east—Anatolia and Syria. It is a
cliché that Istanbul is the world’s only city sitting on two continents (joined
by two automobile bridges in 1973 and 1988, with another under
construction), but one only appreciates the implications of that statement on
the short sea journey from one railhead to the next. The situaton changed
only in 2013, when a sub-Bosphorus metro line was inaugurated. It was the
first time in history that anyone was able to make the intercontinental
journey entirely on dry land.
“Do not suppose that every man understands the sea,” warned the great
Ottoman seafaring manual, the Kitab-ı bahriye, of the sixteenth-century
naval commander Pirî Reis. Storms can turn the water black, with
whitecaps lashing against the sea walls and ferries slamming against their
berths. The standing waves and notorious currents on the Bosphorus, which
whip around headlands at speeds that make the strait seem more like a river
than an extension of the sea, frustrated sailors and rowers in earlier times.
Even in an age of satellite-assisted navigation, the Bosphorus can still make
harbor pilots and ship captains nervous.
Life on dry land was no less treacherous. Sited near one of the world’s
most active seismic zones, Istanbul rarely saw more than a decade without a
devastating earthquake. Byzantine chroniclers recorded the first major one
in 402 AD; after that, both minor and cataclysmic events were common. In
557, multiple churches were destroyed and the dome of Hagia Sophia was
extensively damaged. In 989 and 1346, the dome collapsed. The Ottomans
created a special government administration dedicated to post-earthquake
reconstruction, and officials were kept busy. Massive earthquakes in 1489,
1509, 1557, 1648, and 1659 leveled thousands of houses and snapped stone
minarets like matchsticks. In a huge series of earthquakes and aftershocks
in the summer of 1766, the domes of the magnificent Fatih and Kariye
mosques collapsed. The damage inflicted on Topkapı Palace caused Sultan
Mustafa III to flee the city for safer quarters. In 1894, most major public
buildings saw extensive damage, including the Grand Bazaar.
Under the Ottomans, regulations requiring wooden construction rather
than stone for private residences were intended to reduce the deaths caused
by earthquakes, but the solution to one problem abetted another. In the
warren of narrow streets leading down to the water, large-scale fires were
frequent and periodically devastating. A flame from a lamp or heating
brazier might end with entire neighborhoods laid waste. Rebellious
janissaries—the sultan’s corps of elite troops and bodyguards—might take
out their frustrations by deliberately reducing thousands of houses to ash,
leaving iron fixtures twisted, stone foundations exposed, and a third or more
of the city in ruins. For much of the nearly five centuries of Ottoman
governance, an Istanbullu could expect to experience at least two
cataclysmic blazes in a lifetime. It was all so familiar that “fire epics”—
long poems that narrated the terror of fire and the wonders of fate—have
been part of Istanbul’s folk literature since the seventeenth century.
“As soon as it gets dark, the town may be relied upon to burst into flame
at some point or another on the European or Asiatic side,” wrote one
observer. Huge fires occurred in 1569, 1633, 1660, 1693, 1718, 1782, 1826,
1833, 1856, 1865, 1870, 1908, 1911, 1912, 1915, and 1918, not counting
those limited to individual neighborhoods. The destruction of newer
buildings sometimes would reveal treasures from the ancient past. “I have
walked over the burnt districts many times and with many archaeological
friends,” noted a resident of the city in 1908, “because we soon found that
places which we had read of and had not been able to identify had now, in
their stony strength, survived this and doubtless other conflagrations and
gave us the information we wanted. The aspect . . . even now in many parts
reminds me strikingly of Pompeii.”
Brigades of firefighters, or tulumbacıs, were forced to negotiate the
narrow and hilly streets on foot, running along with water canisters hoisted
aloft like a pasha on a litter. Their cries of “Yangın var!”—“There’s a
fire!”—became part of the soundscape of the city, as predictable as the
Muslim call to prayer or the nighttime mewling of alley cats. On his first
visit to the city, the adventurer Aubrey Herbert was chased down the length
of the Grande Rue by a mob of screaming, half-dressed madmen, no doubt
bent on hammering an infidel, he thought. It was only when he arrived
breathless at his hotel that someone explained that the mob was in fact a
unit of firemen on their way to a blaze. Even then, for individual property
owners, the cure was sometimes worse than the disease. The tulumbacıs
were outfitted with a hand pump, which was useful for putting out small
house fires, but for anything larger, their standard technique was to use
hooks and chains to pull down adjacent structures before the fire could
spread. A fair amount of the damage inflicted by Istanbul’s frequent fires
was in fact wrought by the firemen themselves.
Despite the fire danger, migration from the countryside fueled urban
growth, so that by the early nineteenth century the city inside the old
Byzantine walls had very little open space. The doorways of private houses
opened directly onto the street and families managed to squeeze out
additional living space by projecting bay windows from the upper stories,
which turned the streets into dark tunnels. Even the Divanyolu, the grandest
thoroughfare south of the Golden Horn and the major processional route
from the western gates to the sultan’s palace at Topkapı, was only about
twenty feet across at its widest. Most of the old city’s seven hills were taken
up by monumental mosque complexes, such as the Baroque-style
Nuruosmaniye mosque on the second hill, the majestic Süleymaniye on the
third, and the Selimiye on the fifth, and this in turn reduced the space
available for housing the city’s burgeoning population. A small fire could
easily snake through these overcrowded districts and, growing street by
street, lay it to waste. Photographs from the time of one of the last great
fires of the Ottoman era, in 1912, show crowds of newly homeless
Istanbullus gathered with bedrolls and stacks of wooden furniture around
ancient stone obelisks near the Sultanahmet (or Blue) mosque.
These disasters also provided unique possibilities, however. They
leveled entire swaths of the city with such frequency that urban planners,
real estate speculators, and government administrators were able to reshape
the landscape according to their own grand designs. By the 1860s, the
Ottoman government had formed a commission to regularize streets, create
new public spaces, and install drainage systems. In fire-ravaged sections,
small parks and squares replaced shop-lined alleys and irregular wooden
houses with their characteristic bay windows. Today, tourists can get lost in
the maze of passageways around the Grand Bazaar, but the streetscape there
is in fact the product of Ottoman attempts to regularize the map a little more
than a century ago; the neighborhood is neat and gridlike compared to what
came before. The airy, open vistas around some of the signature monuments
of the old city, such as the Sultanahmet mosque and the Hagia Sophia, are
likewise the result of the frequent devastation suffered by earlier
generations.
Like other empires, the Ottoman government had long practiced a
policy of what it termed sürgün, or forced resettlement. Mehmed II had
used it as a way of repopulating Istanbul after the conquest of 1453, and his
successors applied it for purposes ranging from punishment against a
rebellious village to moving craftspeople or shepherds into areas of the
empire that needed their skills. But natural disasters were probably
responsible for the regular displacement of more Istanbullus than state
policy, war, or economic migration. In June 1870, a massive blaze swept
across the heights north of the Golden Horn and reduced parts of Pera to
rubble. By that stage, however, monied classes and foreign investors were
beginning to understand the profitability of this periodic rearrangement of
Istanbul’s cityscape. Their plans depended on another transformative
innovation—and the reason that Sirecki station had been built in the first
place: the coming of the age of rail.

On a Sunday evening in October 1883, a short train pulled out of the Gare
de l’Est in Paris. Under new electric lighting strung throughout the station,
huge crowds gathered to witness the departure. Hauled by a powerful steam
locomotive, the train consisted of a luggage car, two sleeping wagons, and a
brightly lit dining car, with a second baggage car for steamer trunks and
other oversize gear bringing up the rear. The passengers were settling in for
a trip covering eighteen hundred miles across the breadth of Europe. It was
the inaugural journey of the train that had been christened the Orient
Express.
The journey was a publicity stunt organized by Georges Nagelmackers,
a Belgian engineer. His nemesis—and, in a way, the reason for the journey
—was a man named George Pullman. To railway enthusiasts,
Nagelmackers is a well-known figure in the history of trans-European
travel, but Pullman’s fame was genuinely worldwide. Pullman’s innovation
had been to develop carriages designed for sleeping—the famous Pullman
cars. His design, unveiled in the United States in the early 1860s, featured
twenty berths per carriage, arranged in upper and lower rows. It was now
possible for passengers to make long journeys by train in the comfort of
something approaching a real bed, even if the rail car was really no more
than a bunkhouse on wheels.
Pullman’s idea might have taken some time to catch on—after all,
getting undressed and sleeping amid strangers was a novel idea for the time
—had it not been for the fortuitous use to which his experimental carriage
was put in 1865. When John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln,
a grand journey seemed the only proper way to commemorate the death of a
president. A week later, a black-draped train departed from Washington,
DC, and crawled to Springfield, Illinois, carrying Lincoln’s body and
offering mourners a chance to see the president on his final journey.
Pullman cars were hitched to the back of the train, allowing family
members and scores of attendants to make the trip along with the
presidential cadaver. Even in the middle of a national tragedy, Pullman had
shown that a train ride could be more than a dusty, cinder-strewn ordeal. It
could also be, in the words of one railway historian, “a means of travel
which could be memorable (and therefore profitable) as an example of
gracious living on wheels.”
Within only a few years, Pullman cars were beginning to take over not
only the American market but also the European one. Nagelmackers had
visited the United States in 1870 and returned to Europe determined to edge
out Pullman’s model and install himself as the leading manufacturer of
sleeping cars in Europe. He relentlessly pursued railway companies and
governments to convince them of the usefulness of his version of the
sleeping car, or wagon-lit in French. He incorporated a new German-
designed suspension system, known as a bogie, which cradled the cars on
separate, removable-axle assemblages and served as a kind of shock
absorber, providing an easier ride and potentially a more restful sleep.
In December 1876, Nagelmackers formally incorporated his Brussels-
based firm. A few years later, he unveiled a logo that would become
synonymous with luxury long-distance travel on the continent: the
intertwined calligraphic letters WL, supported by lions rampant and
surrounded by the company’s French name—Compagnie Internationale des
Wagons-Lits et des Grands-Express Européens. No one before had
imagined that a single rail company could operate lines running across the
entire continent. Railroads were not only symbols of national prestige. They
were also critical parts of the national security infrastructure of European
kingdoms and empires, and allowing a foreign train—especially one also
filled with foreigners—to navigate across the continent with only minimal
interference from passport and customs officers was something of a novelty.
But having secured the patronage of Belgium’s King Leopold II, the
Wagons-Lits service managed to connect Paris with Vienna by the early
1880s, with plans for moving on to Bulgaria. The addition of yet another of
Nagelmackers’s innovations—the dining car—meant that long journeys
could be completed without having to depend on the offerings of faraway
stationmasters or the unorthodox foodways of strangers. The cars
themselves were works of art, full of polished brass and wood inlay, wing
chairs and leather banquettes, with the designs for foldaway tables and
hidden compartments modeled on the tight-space solutions worked out by
naval architects.
By 1883, the inaugural expedition of the Orient Express was meant to
showcase how far the Wagons-Lits Company had come in only a few short
years and to look toward the next great goal of extending the service all the
way to the edge of Europe itself, to Istanbul. Nagelmackers invited a who’s
who of minor European dignitaries to go along for the ride: travel writers
and essayists, French and Belgian ministers, German newspapermen, the
first secretary of the Ottoman Embassy, Austrians and Romanians, a
correspondent from the London Times. At the frontier between Austria-
Hungary and Romania, a troupe of eleven musicians joined the group, set
themselves up in the dining car, and played waltzes and other songs as the
train sped toward the Black Sea.
The first journey only made it partway, however. The travelers had to
alight in the Bulgarian port of Varna and then travel the rest of the way to
Istanbul by ship. The entire journey took eighty-one hours and forty
minutes, including fifteen hours steaming on the Black Sea. The reason was
that Nagelmackers’s ambition had outstripped the realities of Ottoman
infrastructure.
By 1850, the Ottoman Empire had not a single mile of track, compared
with more than eight hundred in Austria-Hungary and around six thousand
in Great Britain. A burst of railway construction came later in the century,
but even then the focus was on connecting outlying parts of the Ottomans’
vast empire with each other, not on connecting the capital to European
centers. Still, despite its inauspicious beginnings, Nagelmackers’ project
had its desired effect. Within five years, Ottoman railway projects had
extended full service to Istanbul and connected trunk lines with the
European network. By the time Nagelmackers died, in 1905, it was possible
to board a train in Paris and not relinquish your sleeping berth until you
reached the sultan’s capital. When the Simplon Tunnel opened through the
Alps a year later, it became easier than ever to get from the heart of
Christendom to the heart of the Islamic world by rail. Passengers were
deposited only steps from the geographical limit of Europe and a short walk
from the major historical and tourist sites in the city. It was, said an
observer at the time, “the annexation of Constantinople to the Western
world.” Even for seasoned continental travelers, the excitement of
approaching the train in a French station never dulled. “I am going by it! I
am in it! I am actually in the blue coach with the simple legend outside:
CALAIS-ISTANBUL,” wrote Agatha Christie of one of her frequent
journeys by rail.
The first Orient Express travelers had been lodged in a string of hotels
in Pera, the normal destination for visiting Europeans, but the overall
quality and the paucity of available space in many of them provided both a
problem and an opportunity for the Wagons-Lits Company. The firm had
acquired a plot of land at the edge of the territory scorched by the great Pera
fire of 1870. The site looked out on a municipal garden called Les Petits-
Champs, which city planners had created after the blaze. The park had a
somewhat grisly past. It was sited on top of a former cemetery, as were
several of Istanbul’s public parks. But within a few years, the street had
become the city’s newest hotel row, with a range of Parisian-style buildings
overlooking the green space. Few visitors were aware that the exotic-
sounding street to which they were directed by their guides and interpreters
—Kabristan—actually meant Graveyard.
In 1892, the Wagons-Lits Company decided to build its own hotel there,
at the intersection of Kabristan and Çapulcular, or Thugs, Streets. The
property had once belonged to a Muslim religious foundation established
through a benefaction from the sultan. In 1881 it had been purchased by a
family of Armenian merchants and bankers, the Esaians, whose roots lay in
both the Ottoman and Russian Empires. The Esaians might well have
regretted selling to the Wagons-Lits firm, because when the Pera Palace
finally opened a few years later, business was brisk.
The hotel had a considerable advantage over the other first-class
facilities nearby, such as the Hôtel de Londres, the Bristol, the Continental,
the Angleterre, and—its perennial rival—the Tokatlian, situated right on the
Grande Rue. It was the only hotel that was part of a pan-European network
owned and operated by a single company. Its sister establishments in Nice,
Monte Carlo, and other cities offered unprecedented luxury to a new
generation of trans-European travelers, and staying at each of the Wagons-
Lits facilities became a collect-them-all game, at least for those wealthy
enough to afford it. Like the Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton hotels of later
eras, the Pera Palace provided an exclusive experience not because it was
wholly unique but precisely because it was part of a chain—a grand
community of properties such as the Avenida Palace in Lisbon or the
Odyssée Palace in Paris that promised luxury, safety, and a certain degree of
predictability in major destinations, all built to a similar style and standard.
As the Guide Bleu later noted, the Pera Palace was equipped with “all the
modern comforts: elevator, bathrooms, showers, radiator heat, and electric
lighting, with a magnificent view over the Golden Horn.”
Insurance maps from the period—one of the best sources for
understanding Istanbul’s changing landscape—show whole tracts of
European Istanbul in ruins, the result of old fires that had never given way
to rebuilding. The Pera Palace, however, stood at the center of the city’s
new commercial and financial district created in the wake of the Pera fire.
A string of four- and five-story buildings, many constructed by local Greek
and Armenian business leaders and financiers, gave a radically new look to
the neighborhood. Their well-proportioned façades and expansive windows
would have been at home in contemporary Paris. They faced Petits-Champs
Park and looked out on the western outskirts of the city, making them
among the best places to watch the sunset, when the blazing late-day light
made the marble façades glow bright and otherworldly. Architects had also
made sure the buildings were connected with Pera’s traditional promenade,
the Grande Rue, through a series of internal passageways.
Few people could have foreseen that, in only two decades after the Pera
fire, the neighborhood would have not one but two prominent avenues, the
Grande Rue and the newer Graveyard Street, both sporting horse-drawn
trolleys and knitted together by the city’s most splendid internal passages
and arcades. When Le Corbusier visited in the first decade of the twentieth
century, he found the relatively new streetscape on the heights above the
Golden Horn to be a revelation. Istanbul now had, he pronounced, its own
kind of allure new-yorkaise.
THE GRAY FLEET
A water view: A man and woman cross the Bosphorus on one of Istanbul’s iconic ferries, with the
old city and Galata Bridge in the background.
A T THE TIME THE PERA PALACE was founded, signs of progress and
optimism were abundant in the Ottoman capital. Steamships carried
passengers across the city’s waterways. Luxury goods from Europe were
displayed behind gilt vitrines along the Grande Rue. The new soccer clubs
of Be ikta , Galatasaray, and Fenerbahçe—the teams that would later come
to define some of the fundamental divisions within Istanbul’s citizenry—
sponsored gala matches and league championships. A Greek shipper, a
Jewish cloth merchant, an Arab pearl diver, a Kurdish caravan master, and
an Armenian financier could all regard themselves as subjects of a single
sovereign, the Ottoman sultan.
But no future had a longer past than that of the Ottoman Empire. Its
demise was the most overanticipated event in diplomatic history. Arguing
over how other countries and empires might profit from its end was one of
the fixtures of great-power diplomacy for much of the nineteenth century.
Russia’s Tsar Nicholas I was credited with labeling the empire “the sick
man of Europe,” and, in strategic terms, the Ottomans had in fact been in
slow retreat since 1683, when the sultan’s armies were pushed back from
the gates of Vienna. But virtually any Ottoman official—from the sultan’s
senior advisers to regional governors on restive frontiers in the Balkans,
Anatolia, and the Arabian Peninsula—could sense that the decline was
accelerating.
Since the 1850s, the so-called Eastern Question—a conglomeration of
territorial disputes, nationalist movements, and international standoffs—had
roiled the empire and sparked muscular diplomacy and armed interventions
by Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia. In the early
1860s, Russian attacks on Muslim highlanders in the Caucasus sent
hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees pouring across the frontier to
seek the sultan’s protection. In 1877–1878, a devastating war involving the
Ottomans, Russia, and the Balkan states led to a peace settlement that
removed Ottoman control from much of southeastern Europe, an area that
Istanbul had ruled for centuries. More than half a million Muslim migrants
again sought refuge in the sultan’s shrinking domains. An entire generation
of new Ottoman subjects, many concentrated in Istanbul, came directly
from these consecutive waves of forced migrants, or muhacirs. Untroubled
about their own Muslim subjects and citizens whom they had put to flight,
Christian governments remained concerned about Christian coreligionists
still inside the empire. They pressured the Ottomans to exempt Greeks,
Armenians, and other non-Muslims from local criminal and civil law.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, no major power—not even
European monarchs who worried about instability in their own overseas
empires—faced the near-constant uprisings, rebellions, and guerrilla
campaigns that confronted the aging Sultan Abdülhamid II. He had begun
his reign in the 1870s as heir to the Tanzimat, the great midcentury Ottoman
reform movement that sought to catch up to European powers by
streamlining the state administration, instituting modern schooling, building
new roads and railways, and modernizing the army and navy. But he had
since retreated into reaction and suspicion. He owed his state budget to
foreign creditors, his military power to British and German advisers, and his
sense of personal security to a network of domestic spies whose written
reports flooded daily into his Yıldız Palace complex, nestled in a forest
overlooking the Bosphorus. The number of informants was so great that a
sign in the Pera Palace reportedly requested government agents to yield
seats in the lounge to paying guests.
In 1908, a conspiracy of military officers known as the Committee of
Union and Progress, also called the Unionists or Young Turks, forced
Abdülhamid to accept a constitutional monarchy and restore the imperial
parliament, which he had earlier abrogated. The Unionists were part of a
new generation of Ottoman officers painfully aware of the gulf that
separated their own empire from the great powers. Many hailed from
families who had been displaced in the Balkan territorial changes of the
1870s. Their movement for change had emerged in the western city of
Salonica, an outpost of liberal ideas that had long been the empire’s window
onto the rest of Europe. The Unionists had witnessed one military defeat
after another and had watched as their empire succumbed to crippling
foreign debt. They were the first wave of the revolutionary impulse that
would shake many countries over the course of the twentieth century, a
revolt of ambitious majors and colonels against an establishment of decrepit
generals and flaccid politicians. They were convinced that the restored
constitution would return the empire to the faded ideals of the Tanzimat era.
For several months, Istanbul was full of optimism and a sense of relief.
“The motley rabble, the lowest pariahs, were going about in a sublime
emotion, with tears running down their unwashed faces, the shopkeepers
joining the procession without any concern for their goods,” recalled Halide
Edip, a Muslim writer and feminist. “There seemed to be no thieves and no
criminals. . . . It looked like the millennium.” But newfound liberties soon
became an excuse for license of all kinds. Newspaper workers demanded
higher wages, citing the constitution. Smugglers openly sold tobacco in the
street, pointing to the constitution as justification for breaking the state
monopoly. Young boys threw rocks at passing automobiles, yelling
“Hürriyet var!”—“There’s freedom now!” Socialists and nationalists of
every stripe—Armenian, Kurdish, Arab, Albanian, Turkish—advocated
transformation of the empire into a multinational monarchy, its breakup into
sovereign countries, or its evolution into a nation-state for ethnic Turks.
In 1909, a counter-coup attempted to undo the constitutional changes,
but the Unionists struck back, sending military units marching on Istanbul
to defend the reforms. Abdülhamid—thin, stooped, and weary, the emblem
of the dwindling empire that his own conservatism had helped to unmake—
was placed on a train and exiled to Salonica, where he could be easily
monitored by Unionist sympathizers. His brother, Mehmed V, was elevated
to the throne, and Unionists eventually took control of key ministries,
government departments, and regional administrations. Factions ranging
from staunch monarchists to political elites in favor of a decentralized
empire vied for influence in Istanbul, but in time a triumvirate of three
Unionist leaders—the military officers Enver and Cemal, along with the
civilian Talât—emerged as the effective power behind the throne.
With Istanbul consumed by domestic upheaval, opposition movements
and foreign powers began to pick away at the edges of the empire. Bulgaria
declared its independence under a self-styled king. Austria-Hungary
annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, an Ottoman territory it had administered
under an international mandate for the previous three decades. In the
autumn of 1911, Italy announced that it would extend its territory across the
Mediterranean by annexing the Ottoman province of Tripolitania (now in
Libya). In 1912 and 1913, two wars in the Balkans led to the independence
of Albania, the loss of Macedonia and Crete, and the almost complete
withdrawal of Ottoman power from continental Europe. The frontlines were
little more than twenty miles from Istanbul, and windows rattled from the
boom of artillery fire along the earthwork defenses on the landward side of
the city. Muslim refugees flooded in from the countryside, pushed out by
local reprisals and bivouacking soldiers.
By the summer of 1914, Ottoman subjects had already experienced
more years of war, civilian flight, and economic crisis than the inhabitants
of any other great power. In the brewing conflict in Europe, the sultan at
first expressed neutrality, but economic disputes with Britain and
inducements from Germany pushed ministers and commanders loyal to the
Unionists toward the German camp. The Ottoman army was restructured by
a German adviser, Otto Liman von Sanders, who assumed operational
control. Two German cruisers, the Goeben and the Breslau, steamed into
the Sea of Marmara as the core of a newly modernized naval force,
captained and crewed by German personnel. In October, the warships sailed
across the Black Sea and launched a preemptive bombardment of
Sevastopol, the seat of Russia’s southern fleet. Within days, the Allied
governments of Russia, France, and Britain declared war on the Ottoman
Empire, which now fell into the camp of the Central Powers alongside
Germany and Austria-Hungary. In turn, Mehmed V, in his role as caliph—
the purported leader of global Islam, a title his predecessors had carried for
more than four centuries—declared jihad against the Allies. It was the last
time that a universal Islamic ruler would be in the position to issue a call to
holy war on behalf of all Muslims.
In later years, Ottoman subjects would come to regret the slide toward
what became known as the First World War, blaming it on the machinations
of the Unionists and the prodding of Berlin. But war fever and a wave of
patriotism swept through the imperial capital. Ottoman soldiers were
mobilized on all fronts as the Allies laid plans for a two-pronged attack on
the empire: a rush through the Balkans to threaten Istanbul and a push
westward from the Russian Caucasus to engage Ottoman positions in
eastern Anatolia. Initial engagements on both fronts produced no lightning
victories for either side. The tumble toward war quickly became a scramble
for new allies, as the warring parties sought to persuade neutral countries—
Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania—to enter on their side.
The Allies and the Central Powers alike used the promise of territory
and postwar freedom as levers to win and keep support. The Arabs would
be free of the sultan’s control, the Allies declared. Russia would be awarded
Istanbul and strategic access to the Mediterranean via the Bosphorus and
Dardanelles Straits. Britain, France, and Russia would divide up much of
eastern Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia. Greece would have a share of
the Aegean coast. For average Ottoman soldiers, these prospective
territorial arrangements—made in secret but abundantly clear to everyone at
the time—quickly turned the war into a struggle for survival. The potential
costs were apparent: the end of the Ottoman Empire, the dismemberment of
the state, and perhaps even the loss of the imperial capital itself.
“Ayesha, angel of beauty,” an Ottoman infantry captain wrote to his
wife a few months after the war began.
We are bombarded here by the English. No rest we receive and very little food and our men
are dying by hundreds from disease. Discontent is also beginning to show itself among the
men, and I pray God to bring this all to an end. I can see lovely Constantinople in ruins and
our children put to the sword and nothing but some great favor from God can stop it. . . .
Oh, why did we join in this wicked war?

The letter was found on the captain’s body after the fighting between
Ottoman and British imperial forces in the campaign at Gallipoli, down the
western peninsula from Istanbul. Gallipoli had been intended as the first
phase of an Allied march on the capital, an effort to secure control of the
Dardanelles and slowly choke off Istanbul from resupply via the
Mediterranean. But for much of 1915, poor planning and heavy resistance
by Ottoman field commanders kept Allied soldiers pinned down in ravines
and scrubland along the coast, sometimes only steps away from their initial
landing sites. When the Allies finally called a halt to the operation, the
victory was a substantial one for the Ottomans, but it was extracted at a
brutal cost. As many as three-quarters of a million men on both sides had
been engaged at Gallipoli, and the grueling fighting illustrated the
vulnerability of the capital to land and sea attack. Mines had been floated in
the Straits, bringing the normally vibrant sea trade to a halt. The carcasses
of Allied battleships poked out of the water and clogged the sea-lane.
Throughout the war, the Unionists, working inside the Ottoman state
administration, sought to provoke Muslim revolts abroad, using the sultan’s
role as caliph to inspire Muslims in the Russian Caucasus, French North
Africa, and British India to rise up against their governments. The British
tried to do the same among the sultan’s Arab subjects, most famously
through the exploits of the adventurer T. E. Lawrence. None of these
projects fully succeeded, but the connection between domestic politics and
foreign intrigue remained a particular concern of Unionist leaders. Officials
were intent on uncovering alleged fifth columns sympathetic to the Allies’
territorial goals. In eastern Anatolia, military units and irregular militias
organized the roundup and deportation of entire villages of Armenians and
other Eastern Christians who were thought to be potentially loyal to Russia.
Armenian revolutionary groups had in fact organized uprisings in
Armenian-populated areas of the empire; some had even operated openly in
Istanbul and, in 1896, had staged a spectacular raid on the Imperial
Ottoman Bank, just downhill from the Grande Rue. But the military and
political establishment around the leaders Enver, Cemal, and Talât,
especially the so-called Special Organization within the Committee of
Union and Progress, responded with a mass campaign of death.
The Special Organization’s chief task was to organize paramilitary units
under the command of the army and eliminate potential enemies of the
state. Once Ottoman forces began to experience major defeats on the
eastern front, especially after the decisive battle with Russian forces at
Sarikamish in December 1914–January 1915, the Special Organization and
its sympathizers moved to eliminate Armenians who were thought
responsible for undermining the war effort. By March, Unionist leaders had
taken the decision to kill or deport hundreds of thousands of Armenians in
sensitive border regions and to arrest or assassinate key civic and political
leaders within the Armenian community. The Unionist sons of Muslim
refugees from the Balkans, pushed out of former Ottoman lands in the
1870s, now orchestrated a similar fate for Ottoman Christians. On the night
of April 24–25, 1915, more than two hundred Armenian intellectuals and
community leaders were deported from Istanbul to the Anatolian
countryside. Some were already refugees from anti-Armenian violence in
the east and had come to the capital to seek refuge and redress with the
central government. Grigoris Balakian, an Armenian priest, recalled sitting
in the central prison with many of the major figures in Istanbul’s Armenian
community—parliamentarians, editors, teachers, doctors, dentists, and
bankers—along with average men and boys caught up in the frenzy of
violence. He was soon sent to central Anatolia, where he began a long
odyssey of forced marches, imprisonment, and abuse. He managed to return
to Istanbul three years later but then only in the disguise of a German
soldier.
Balakian compiled a record of his sufferings and the fates of friends,
victims, and collaborators. He was among the fortunate ones, he said, who,
“thanks to large bribes or powerful and influential connections, succeeded
in returning to Constantinople and were saved.” Many of the others
perished. Even for the escapees, however, scars remained. Gomidas
Vardabed, the premier Armenian liturgical composer and choral master, was
allowed to return to the capital, but he soon fled to Paris and, year by year,
descended into madness. He died in a French psychiatric hospital.
Meanwhile, more roundups followed in Istanbul. Tripod scaffolds were
set up outside the grand Kılıç Ali Pasha mosque near the Bosphorus, where
Armenians and others were hanged for sedition as crowds of men, women,
children, and a few German soldiers looked on. In the end, it was perhaps
only because of pressure from German officials—who feared the impact
that disorderly lynchings and deportations would have on the war effort—
that the rest of Istanbul’s Armenian population was spared from removal.
However, over the course of the war, anti-Armenian violence and
deportation policies led to the near-wholesale elimination of the Armenian
presence in Anatolia and the deaths of somewhere between six hundred
thousand and more than a million Ottoman Christians.
The genocidal attacks were meant to facilitate a new wave of Ottoman
battlefield victories, but military losses over the next three years whittled
away at Ottoman positions. New offensives against Greece in the Balkans
and Russia in the Caucasus ground to a halt. To the south, in Mesopotamia
and Palestine, Ottoman armies were in disarray, facing the loss of
Damascus and outgunned by British imperial troops. Germany was bogged
down on the western front, besieged by a new Allied offensive there.
In Istanbul, raids increased on houses belonging to British and French
expatriates. The harbor remained empty, with shipping blocked by the
effective closure of the Dardanelles and Russian patrols on the Black Sea.
Coal was scarce, and the gasworks were closed, often leaving the city in
blackness at night. Police permits were required to buy more than one loaf
of bread per day, and fights frequently erupted at bakeries. Even then, the
loaves on offer were sometimes made from a rank mixture of flour and
straw. An infestation of venomous lice sickened thousands and kept people
out of crowded tramcars or other enclosed spaces.
Earlier in the war, the empire’s neighbor to the west, Bulgaria, had
opted to join the Ottomans on the side of the Central Powers. But in
September 1918, Istanbul newspapers carried stunning news. Facing its
own battlefield losses and hemmed in on nearly all sides, Bulgaria agreed to
sign a separate armistice with the Allies. The Ottomans’ western shield was
now gone, and Istanbul lay within easy marching distance of the Hellenic
border, where Allied troops were already massed. The Ottoman government
soon approached the British with a desire to negotiate an end to hostilities.
Over three days in October, representatives of the British War Office
met with their Ottoman counterparts on the battleship Agamemnon,
anchored off Mudros in the Aegean Sea. On October 30, they signed the
armistice that ended the fighting between the sultan’s empire and the major
Allied powers. Just under two weeks later—at the eleventh hour, of the
eleventh day, of the eleventh month—Germany signed an armistice as well,
bringing the First World War to a close. News of the full cessation of
hostilities raced through the streets of Istanbul, but locals barely had time to
contemplate what lay ahead for their defeated country. The Allies had
arrived to tell them.

On the overcast morning of November 13, 1918, a fleet of steel-hulled

battleships sailed into the Bosphorus from the south. Large naval ensigns,
specially unfurled for the event, flew from their mainmasts. At the front
came the British flagship Superb, followed by the Temeraire, Lord Nelson,
and Agamemnon, along with five British cruisers and several destroyers.
French dreadnoughts followed close behind, while Italian cruisers and
Hellenic destroyers brought up the rear.
As far as one could see, the water was choked with gray ships. “The
grand sight of the combined British-French-Italian and Greek Naval
Squadrons slowly and majestically steaming into the Bosphorus, thus
breaking (I trust for ever) Turkish tyranny—men and women met and shook
hands but could not speak—the joyous excitement was immense amongst
the Christian population,” wrote a British eyewitness. It was the largest and
deadliest contingent of armed foreign vessels ever to reach the city.
Around 8:00 a.m., admirals and captains ordered the anchors dropped.
Sailors on board looked out and saw the impressive line of coastal guns and
other defenses behind the ancient sea walls. Although the ships were within
easy artillery range of four of the sultan’s palaces, they met no resistance.
The victors were now making a show of force against their former
opponent, steaming straight into the heart of the Ottoman city. None of the
other enemy capitals in the war—Berlin, Vienna, Sofia—played host to so
much Allied firepower. The newcomers saw themselves not just as winners
but as liberators, sent on a providential mission to unburden the people of
Istanbul of their benighted government and free the Christians of the city
from Muslim rule. “It was a sight one was glad to have been privileged to
see,” said Able Seaman F. W. Turpin, a gunner aboard the Agamemnon.
Not everyone agreed. Musbah Haidar, the daughter of the emir of
Mecca, joined the tens of thousands crowding the heights above the
Bosphorus to witness the arrival of the Allied force. She was a relative of
the imperial family, and her father was the official guardian of the holiest
city in Islam. She watched from her family’s mansion as the Hellenic
flagship Averoff sailed right up to the imperial quay at the sultan’s
Dolmabahçe Palace. Local Greek Orthodox inhabitants “were in an ecstasy
of excitement,” Musbah recalled, while Muslims like herself “looked on
dazed . . . their empire broken.”
Muslim refugees fleeing from fighting in the Balkans had built a
shantytown around the footings of the ancient Aqueduct of Valens. Families
had flattened discarded oilcans and used them to build walls and roofs
against the winter rains, making entire neighborhoods look like giant
advertisements for Standard Oil. Grigoris Balakian, the disguised priest
who had been deported from the city during the Armenian genocide,
crossed the Bosphorus in a rowboat just as the ships were entering the strait.
“Effendi, what bad times we’re living in!” said his Muslim boatman. “Who
would have believed that a foreign fleet would enter Constantinople so
illustriously and that we Muslims would be simple spectators?”
Over the following days and weeks, French officers in blue-corded
kepis marched down the streets of the old city beside British comrades in
khaki field dress and steel helmets. Senegalese infantrymen and Italian
bersaglieri, the long plumes on their hats blowing in the breeze, patrolled
the Grande Rue. General George Milne, the senior officer in the British
contingent, took up residence at the Pera Palace before moving to a
waterfront house in the suburb of Tarabya requisitioned from Krupp, the
German steel conglomerate. Later, the French commander, General Louis
Franchet d’Espèrey, made a ceremonial entry into the city on a white horse,
only to discover that British General Edmund Allenby had trumped him by
doing the same thing the previous day. He consoled himself by moving into
an exiled pasha’s residence in the pleasant village of Ortaköy. “It was . . .
like having two prima donnas on the stage together,” recalled Tom Bridges,
a British liaison officer, “and the play went much better if we could keep
one in her dressing room.”
The city was soon divided into zones of control headed by
representatives of the principal Allied powers. The British were to oversee
Pera and Galata, the French the old city south of the Golden Horn, and the
Italians the Asian suburbs in Üsküdar. A combined force assumed control
of the city’s police. Allied high commissions would later be appointed to try
criminals, oversee port activity, inspect and maintain the prisons, provide
for public sanitation, govern hospital and convalescence facilities for Allied
troops, and supervise the demobilization and disarmament of Ottoman
soldiers.
By the time the Allies steamed into the Bosphorus, the Unionist
triumvirate of Enver, Cemal, and Talât had already fled the capital aboard a
German submarine. None would be around to witness the occupation. Three
years later, Talât was gunned down by an Armenian assassin on the streets
of Berlin, an act of revenge for his role in the genocide. Cemal was killed
the following year in Tbilisi, also by an Armenian, while Enver died
attempting to rouse Muslims against the Bolsheviks in Central Asia.
By the time the Superb dropped anchor, the Ottoman Empire had
existed for six hundred nineteen years. When the Allied fleet sailed into
port, the sitting monarch, Sultan Mehmed VI—who had ascended the
throne upon his brother’s death in July 1918—counted himself the thirty-
sixth member of a dynastic line running back to its founder, Osman (from
which Westerners had derived the mispronounced label “Ottoman”). He
shared his name with both the fifteenth-century conqueror of
Constantinople, Mehmed II, and the Prophet Muhammad. His distant
ancestors had been Turkic tribal leaders and Circassian slaves, but around
the world, hundreds of millions of Muslims looked to him as successor to
the Prophet and the earthly leader of the one true faith.
Istanbul had long been “the principal storm center of Europe and Asia,”
declared a briefing book for American naval personnel, who soon arrived in
the city as part of the Allied contingent. Muslims had “misguided the city
through a colorful and turbulent career, . . . giving it a more or less
malodorous reputation in international affairs.” Now it would be supervised
by benevolent Western powers until a final peace settlement could be
reached and the fate of the powerless Ottoman Empire determined.
As Allied officers worked to set up their administration, the coldest
winter in living memory descended on the city. The Spanish flu began to
sicken locals and foreigners alike. Looters ransacked unguarded mansions.
A Turkish-speaking Muslim, Ziya Bey, witnessed the first months of the
occupation. He was relatively new to Istanbul, but he would in no sense
have put himself in the same category as the refugees and Allied soldiers
who were streaming into the city. He was born in Ni anta ı, the fashionable
district to the north of Pera, surrounded by quiet avenues and ornate, fin-de-
siècle apartment buildings. His family spent summers on the Princes Islands
in the Sea of Marmara, an easy ferry ride from the docklands of central
Istanbul and a traditional summering spot for Greeks, Armenians, and the
few Muslims who were able to afford property there.
When Ziya was still a boy, shortly before the First World War, his father
collected the family and decamped for New York to look after his export
businesses. In America, Ziya met a young woman, originally from New
Orleans, and fell in love. The two were married a short time later. With the
war over and trade beginning to pick up again, new opportunities called the
family back to Istanbul. The political future was still uncertain, but Ziya
must have reckoned that being around for the beginning of whatever kind of
country would replace the old empire was a reasonable bet, especially for
an ambitious, cosmopolitan young man seeking to move out from under his
father’s shadow.
Istanbul was not the same city he had left, however. “Greedy or inviting
glances” followed him everywhere. Civilian refugees, skinny and often
clothed in little more than rags, mixed with maimed Ottoman soldiers, some
still wearing uniforms and battle decorations. Destitute people sold old
wooden toys, artificial flowers, candies, and newspapers to passersby. On
one corner, a young mother, sad-looking and visibly pregnant, leaned
against a wall and held out a bouquet of multicolored balloons. Children
slept on curbs and in doorways before being moved along by an Allied
patrol.
At first Ziya took lodgings for his family in Pera, but they rather quickly
shifted to the other side of the Golden Horn, to a house near Topkapı
Palace. Pera might have offered more spacious accommodation, but the
district’s foreign embassies were like magnets for refugees seeking jobs,
visas, or food. “Prostitution, dishonesty, misery and drunkenness are openly
flaunted in this section of the city,” he recalled, “which revives all the vices
of Byzance coupled with those of Sodom.” Ottoman police officers had
been restricted to dealing only with traffic matters in that part of the city,
while Allied soldiers marching along in multinational platoons were
believed to favor foreigners over locals when a dispute arose.
By Ziya’s estimate, no more than one out of every fifteen people on the
street was a Muslim. The Allied troops were the vanguard of what was
intended to be a permanent international force that would usher in a new era
of good governance in the defunct Ottoman capital. The Ottoman Empire
still existed in theory. The royal house would in fact outlast many of its
historic friends and rivals. The Romanovs had already fallen in the Russian
Revolution, and the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs would soon be ousted by
the creation of republics in Germany and Austria. Mehmed VI, still the
acknowledged head of state, sat in enforced silence in the dilapidated Yıldız
Palace complex, surrounded by retainers and turbaned cavalrymen. “[W]hat
will happen to Constantinople if all these foreigners . . . remain here and
spread their propaganda of discontent, restlessness and lawlessness?” a
local Muslim asked Ziya. No one—neither the occupiers nor the occupied
—was quite sure what was supposed to come next.
OCCUPATION
A group of men in a small Istanbul café, some smoking a traditional water pipe.
“P ERA HAS THREE THINGS to curse,” went an Istanbul saying, “plague, fire,
and interpreters.” In the Middle Ages, Italian merchants and financiers had
been given wide-ranging commercial rights in the Byzantine Empire. The
Genoese had governed a string of overseas trading centers around the Black
Sea from the heights of Pera and the slopes of Galata. They enclosed
portions of the neighborhoods behind thick, crenellated walls. These
defenses decayed under the Ottomans, but even centuries later, when Greek,
Armenian, Jewish, and Muslim proprietors supplanted the Italians,
businesses still operated in the shadow of the imposing Galata Tower, a
remnant of the old Genoese fortifications. French—the language of
diplomacy and international commerce—came to fill the district’s street
signs, window placards, and hotel advertisements. By the winter of 1918,
with Allied powers making Pera the center of their growing administration,
Istanbul looked more than ever like a foreign city within a native one. The
former—which seemed to be welcoming invaders rather than standing
against them—was winning out.
The newer avenues and promenades, populated by non-Muslim
minorities and foreign administrators, were a world away from the older
districts south of the Golden Horn around Topkapı Palace, the Grand
Bazaar, and the soaring imperial mosque complexes. Muslim refugees from
the Balkans and Anatolia tended to concentrate in the south, among the
traditional bazaars and commercial houses, or hans, where goods from the
countryside were bought and sold. But the sultan himself had long ago
decamped to new residences north of the inlet. Palaces such as Yıldız, a
collection of small European-style pavilions, and Çıra an and Dolmabahçe,
both grand piles of carved marble, reflected the sense of optimism and
modernity that rulers had once hoped to impress into the city’s landscape.
Along the coast road, mosques and clock towers in a version of Ottoman
Baroque copied the excesses and curlicues of their European counterparts,
minus the winged cherubs.
“To catalogue completely the different types of humanity to be found in
a half-hour stroll would take pages,” M. M. Carus Wilson, a British
lieutenant, wrote to his father in England. “A walk is a continual
kaleidoscope of the nations. . . ,” he added, as he described the scene:
Among the representatives of the Allied forces, for instance, passing over the common ruck
of British, French and Italian soldiery, we may fasten upon the white combination hat of
the American sailor and the white skirt-kilt of an occasional Greek warrior as being
specially worthy of notice. . . . Without the war influx, of course, the streets present a
sufficiently diverse spectacle, drawn from the various races, Turks, Armenians, Greeks,
Jews and many others who form the permanent population and form about as homogeneous
a whole as a mixture of oil and water. Many of these are dressed like a London crowd,
though the Fez with the European lounge suit strikes a different note. Amid the straw hats
and flappers’ frocks, however, move strange figures: bearded porters, with turbans and
sashes two feet broad, staggering along beneath incredibly mountainous loads; mysterious
green robed mullahs clicking their rosaries as they deign to accept the contributions of the
faithful; kaffedjis armed with brightly polished brass coffee urns . . . ; the black-garbed
Turkish women shrouded in veils of various efficacy, some dutifully quite opaque, others
the merest apology of a whisp [sic] or possibly non-existent; and finally and perhaps the
most diverting of all the whiskered jovial Greek monks and priests in their long robes
stretching to their feet and sometimes . . . wearing such curiously incongruous headgear as
a Homburg or a Panama.

Each Friday the selâmlık—the sultan’s public procession to a mosque

for prayer—featured gilded carriages and horse guards clopping past pious
onlookers. Prayers at an imperial mosque could attract ten thousand
worshippers, with the bespectacled Mehmed VI arriving on a white horse
surrounded by torchbearers. Among the city’s non-Muslim residents, the
Hissar Players staged plays with a multicultural cast of Armenian, Greek,
and other Christian young ladies. The annual Yuletide recital was held at
Robert College, an illustrious institution founded in 1863 by Protestant
missionaries and situated on a beautiful hilltop overlooking the Bosphorus,
with piano performances of Bach and seasonal carols. Its sister institution,
the American College for Girls, held commencement exercises featuring an
address by the American high commissioner, Admiral Mark Bristol, on
“The Life Work of Women” and music provided by the band of the British
flagship Iron Duke.
General George Milne presided over the city like a latter-day proconsul
dispatched to govern a rebellious province. The king he served, Britain’s
George V, had almost by accident become de facto ruler of the world’s two
largest Muslim empires: by perceived right, his own—which included the
vast Muslim populations of the Indian subcontinent—and by might, that of
the Ottomans, which still stretched in theory from Thrace to Arabia. Milne
and his French and Italian colleagues were now cast in a role that no
foreigners had enjoyed since 1453: coequal governors of ancient
Constantinople. Allied soldiers underscored the point by patrolling three
abreast, one from each of the occupying powers.
Milne was a dutiful soldier, a cliché of a British officer in jodhpurs and
carefully trimmed gray mustache, but much of his career had been a
sideshow. He had commanded troops on the battlefields of France and
arrived in the Balkans to try to recoup the losses his country had sustained
three years earlier in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. He had most
recently led a ragtag outfit known as the Salonica Army, whose exploits had
helped win the war on the eastern front but were just as quickly forgotten.
All this was poor preparation for governing a postwar city. The
economy was in ruins. Inflation was rampant. Speculation and hoarding of
scarce goods, from coal to food, were widespread. Disgruntled Ottoman
soldiers were pulling weapons from arms depots or dragging their feet on
complying with disarmament orders. The restive fringes of one empire
came into bizarre contact with those of another. A British Punjabi
detachment might be sent to guard a cache of weapons against a raiding
party of Ottoman volunteers. French-uniformed Moroccan cavalry might
struggle to remove the bolts from rifles before criminals could lay their
hands on the decommissioned weapons. Istanbul was the capital of a
country that still existed on paper but in reality seemed to have blown away
like an Anatolian dust storm.

On the same day the Allies began their occupation, an Ottoman field
commander named Mustafa Kemal checked into a room in the Pera Palace.
At the time of the armistice, he had found himself in southern Anatolia in
command of an army group arrayed against British forces pressing
northward from Palestine. With the fighting over and his units preparing to
be demobilized, he decided to make the long train journey to the capital. He
hoped to convince the Ottoman ministry of war to mount an underground
resistance to the Allies or perhaps even to appoint him as war minister. At a
minimum, he might offer himself as an agent for organizing military units
in eastern Anatolia, a region where the reach of the Allies barely extended.
He arrived at Haydarpa a station and, with his aide-de-camp, took the
short ferry ride to the European shore. En route, he could look out on the
choppy Bosphorus and see the strait full of Allied warships and launches
unloading men, horses, and equipment. He had lived in Istanbul as a young
man and knew the city well. Three years earlier, as commander of a
frontline division at Gallipoli, he had fought hard to save it. Now, in defeat,
the empire had given up the very prize that he and hundreds of thousands of
“Little Mehmeds”—the Ottoman version of British Tommies and American
Doughboys—had vowed to keep out of foreign hands.
Born at some point in the winter of 1880–1881—his birth date, like that
of many Ottoman subjects of the era, was uncertain—Mustafa Kemal was a
native of the liberal and multicultural city of Salonica, the birthplace of the
1908 revolution. He was part of the younger generation of Ottoman officers
schooled in professional military colleges and shaped by the experience of
the Unionist movement that had deposed Abdülhamid II. Older officers
within the Unionist ranks could recall a time when the empire had
embraced modernization and reform, but Mustafa Kemal’s generation had
known little besides violence and defeat. By the time the First World War
began, he had already fought the Italians in Libya and the Bulgarians in
Thrace. In each instance, he had seen the empire whittled away by the
nationalism of religious and ethnic minorities, often abetted by foreign
powers. Now, after the Mudros armistice, he and his brother officers were
witnessing its wholesale destruction.
Mustafa Kemal’s credentials as a reform-minded and patriotic soldier
were impeccable, if not exceptional. If he needed convincing of how much
Istanbul had changed since his last visit, the Pera Palace provided ample
evidence. Always filled with foreign guests, the lobby and restaurant were
now overrun with British and other Allied officers in uniform. Members of
foreign delegations, travelers, and local women, including unveiled
Muslims, congregated at the Orient Bar. Even Grigoris Balakian, the
Armenian priest and genocide survivor, found the streets around the hotel to
be a shocking testament to Istanbul’s newfound libertinism. “The rich,
having made money easily during the war, ate, drank, and enjoyed life to
the hilt, buying properties and spending recklessly,” he recalled. “The
ridiculous styles and dress of the women with their made-up faces, half-
exposed breasts, and immodest manners occupied my special attention. . . .
[T]he Turkish capital had become a Babylon.”
General Milne was staying in the hotel while he waited for more
permanent accommodation, and even defeated German officers such as Otto
Liman von Sanders—who had discreetly moved a short distance away to
the Hôtel de Londres to avoid any unpleasant meetings in the Pera Palace’s
lounge—could be seen walking along Graveyard Street. The Allies and the
Central Powers were no longer in a state of war, even though no permanent
peace treaty had been signed, and custom demanded that belligerents accord
one another the standard military courtesies.
A later story told of Mustafa Kemal’s encounter with a group of British
officers enjoying a drink in the hotel. When the officers invited him to their
table, Mustafa Kemal refused. A host should not be in the position of going
to the table of a guest, he said, and the officers could come to him if they
wanted to share a drink. The account was probably apocryphal, designed to
show a young officer’s vigilant resistance to British rule. But Mustafa
Kemal was at base a pragmatist, and evidence suggests that he went to the
Pera Palace precisely because it was the epicenter of the Allied occupation.
G. Ward Price, a correspondent for the British Daily Mail, had arrived
in the city on board the Agamemnon. He caught up with Mustafa Kemal a
few days after he checked in—or, rather, Mustafa Kemal caught up with
him. Price received a note from the hotel manager saying that an Ottoman
officer wished to speak with him. Price had never heard of Mustafa Kemal
but agreed to have a conversation. When they met, Price found that the
Ottoman officer had left behind his military uniform and appeared in a
frock coat and fez, the standard civilian attire for well-to-do Ottoman men
—“a handsome and virile figure, restrained in his gestures, with a low,
deliberate voice,” Price recalled.
Mustafa Kemal complained that the Ottomans had chosen the wrong
side in the war and had mistakenly turned against their old friends, the
British, largely because of the baleful influence of Enver and other pro-
German leaders among the Unionists. He imagined that the Allies would
choose to divide up Anatolia among themselves, and his wish was for
Britain to play a major role. The British were likely to be friendlier to
Muslims than the French, who had their own rocky history with governing
Muslims in North Africa. In that event, the British would need experienced
natives like himself to help manage the situation. “What I want to know,”
Mustafa Kemal said to Price, “is the proper quarter to which I can offer my
services in that capacity.” Price reported his conversation to British officers
at the Pera Palace, but the response was dismissive. Few people seemed to
know who this Mustafa Kemal was, and in any case Ottoman officers were
coming out of the woodwork to offer help to the Allied cause. “There will
be a lot of these Turkish generals looking for jobs before long,” responded a
senior intelligence officer.
Later historians skipped over the incident or claimed that it was an
effort to undermine the British from within. But the fact remains that
Mustafa Kemal spent much of the next six months behaving like a man in
search of a future. He moved out of the Pera Palace and rented a house
farther north in Osmanbey. He met with virtually anyone who would
receive him: military officers, cabinet ministers, disgruntled
parliamentarians, and on four occasions Sultan Mehmed VI himself. What
he found was a great deal of dissatisfaction with the Allies but very little
unity among their opponents. The occupation had sharpened divisions
among various factions in the city—the palace, the parliament,
businessmen, and the army’s general staff—with each group seeking mainly
to avoid a wrong move rather than to strike out boldly and shape their
country’s fate.
Although the triumvirate of leading pashas was no longer in the city,
they had left behind an underground organization, Karakol (Sentry), which
might have provided the germ for organized resistance. But Mustafa Kemal
found that Karakol was only one of a number of subversive groups then
operating in the city, with little coordination among them. Once the British
began to arrest and deport suspected Unionist militants, in the spring of
1919, secret plots became an even less sure way of realizing the liberation
of the city and the old empire. That same spring, the Ottoman government,
pressed by the occupation authorities, began arresting and trying members
of the Committee of Union and Progress who had been involved in the
Armenian massacres. Any officers like Mustafa Kemal who might have
once been part of the Unionist cause now had an incentive to distance
themselves from that legacy and find routes other than secret meetings and
underground plots to press their case.
The house in Osmanbey became one of the centers for informal
gatherings of officers searching for a way both to reverse the Allied
occupation and to steer clear of the Ottoman government, which seemed
prepared to imprison any military men who were perceived as internal
threats. The sultan’s loyalists were keenly aware of the fact that the Allies
were the real power in the city, and the palace was disinclined to have
upstart soldiers spark a crackdown that might well end with the sultan’s
being packed off to Malta, where the British had already sent prominent
Ottoman officials and potential troublemakers. But dissension among the
Allies was also acute in a city that had been divided into geographical
thirds, each governed by a separate Allied military command. From
officers’ messes to the rank and file, Allied soldiers’ disdain for local
Muslims was matched only by their suspicion of each other. Italians passed
intelligence to the Ottomans. The French countermanded British orders.
The British kept crucial information from them both.
Frustrated by the squabbling among the underground opposition and the
bumbling Allies, Mustafa Kemal managed at last to secure an official
position as inspector of the Ottoman armed forces in eastern Anatolia. The
job was largely nominal, given that much of the Ottoman army was in
disarray, with widespread desertions and no unit at full fighting strength.
His task was to assist in the orderly implementation of the Mudros
armistice, in effect supervising the dismantling of what remained of the
imperial army. The post at least afforded him the one thing that most
Ottoman officers coveted at that stage: an actual job, reporting to virtually
the only government official whose existence was not yet in question, the
sultan. His energetic job hunt had also made his name much better known
than when he first arrived in Istanbul. By early 1919, Mustafa Kemal seems
finally to have come to the attention of Allied authorities, with plans put in
place to arrest him and deport him to Malta as a subversive endangering the
armistice.
Before the order could be executed, however, he managed to leave the
city. With his letter of appointment from the sultan in hand, he boarded the
steamer Bandırma on May 16, 1919, and headed for the Black Sea port of
Samsun, a logical place to begin the overland journey toward the remnants
of Ottoman forces in the east. Few people noticed his arrival in the
provincial city on May 19, but today every Turkish schoolchild can name
the date. It marked the beginning of what would come to be called the war
of independence, and it was the first step on Mustafa Kemal’s journey
toward becoming the founding president of the Turkish Republic.

No one really knew how many people were living in Istanbul at the time the
Allies assumed control. The most recent prewar census had commenced in
1906 but was never completed, given the turmoil caused by the Young Turk
revolution. Just before the First World War, statisticians estimated that the
city had around 977,000 people, of whom perhaps 560,000 were Muslim by
religion, 206,000 Greek Orthodox, 84,000 Armenian Apostolic (or
Gregorian) Christian, along with smaller numbers of Jews, Roman
Catholics, and other minorities. Nearly 130,000 people were classed as
foreign subjects, most of them non-Muslims, working mainly in trade,
manufacturing, and finance. While Muslims had a slim majority over non-
Muslims, the foreign presence was already pronounced even before Allenby
and Franchet d’Espèrey paraded into the city on their chargers.
During the long Ottoman era, Muslims and non-Muslims had lived
within an administrative patchwork that established communal privileges
and regulated the relationship between confessional communities and the
state. Individual religious communities, known as millets, were granted
self-government in such matters as canon law, public order, contract
enforcement, and other legal, social, and economic areas. All Ottoman
subjects owed loyalty to the sultan, and Christians and Jews were required
to pay special state taxes that Muslims were able to avoid, but in general
people were born, wed, and died according to legal codes that were unique
to their specific religious category, the exact number and nature of which
changed over the centuries. In theory, it was impossible to be outside the
millet system if one were a subject of the sultan. The assumption was that,
at every stage of life, one would turn most frequently toward the
appropriate religious authority, not the state, for resolving matters ranging
from registering a birth to executing a will.
The entire hierarchy of state administration was built around this
stovepiped system of confessional self-rule, even if there were also plenty
of ways to transgress it. As caliph, the sultan stood at the top of the
religious hierarchy for Muslims, but he governed his non-Muslim subjects
only indirectly, working through established religious leaders such as the
Greek Orthodox patriarch, the Armenian Apostolic patriarch, and the
hahamba ı (chief rabbi) of the Jews. This arrangement in turn reinforced
the power of these earthly religious rulers over their flocks.
The millet system was a management strategy for handling a religiously
diverse empire, and it lasted in various forms for more than half a
millennium, a track record far longer than that of liberal democracy or the
nation-state. All three of the major non-Muslim millets—Greeks,
Armenians, and Jews—had roots that stretched back to the earliest
precursors of the modern city. Greeks had an unbroken presence in Istanbul
that went back to the seventh century BC, even though it was difficult for
any individual family to demonstrate such a long pedigree. From his
expansive cathedral in the Phanar (Fener) neighborhood south of the
Golden Horn, the Greek patriarch served as the administrative head of the
local Greek Orthodox community as well as the spiritual pole of the entire
Greek Orthodox world, stretching across the Mediterranean and beyond.
When Greeks abroad thought of the center of their cultural and religious
life, they turned naturally to Istanbul—or Konstantinoupolis—the place
where Greek schools were most renowned, Greek churches most
resplendent, and Greek businesses most vibrant.
Armenians likewise had an ancient existence in the city and formed a
similar bulwark in the worlds of commerce and banking. The Balian family,
for example, had produced some of the empire’s most revered architects,
designing public buildings ranging from ornate ferry stations to the sultan’s
palaces at Beylerbeyi and Dolmabahçe. The Abdullah Frères photographic
studio, owned by an Armenian family, provided the literal face of the
empire, serving as court photographers to Abdülhamid II and
memorializing the empire’s signature educational institutions and
government buildings via thousands of glass-plate images. By the 1890s,
the rise of Armenian nationalism, which sought a separate homeland for
Armenians in eastern Anatolia, both divided the community and brought
down the wrath of the imperial government. Pogroms rocked Istanbul’s
Armenian population, irrespective of age or position, just as the later
Armenian genocide emptied villages and put more than a million people to
flight in parts of Anatolia. Still, despite the deportation of key community
leaders in April 1915, thousands of Armenians found Istanbul something of
a refuge from the devastating violence that engulfed other parts of the
empire.
Jews, too, had historically found the city to be a haven—not from local
massacres but rather from the congenital antisemitism of Christian Europe.
Jews had lived in Istanbul since the Byzantine era, and after the Ottoman
conquest of 1453, the new Muslim rulers generally perceived the Jewish
community as being friendly to Ottoman interests. Synagogues and other
communal facilities were left unmolested or allowed to expand. What
sparked the transformation of community life was not so much the Muslim
invasion as a new Jewish one. Most Byzantine-era Jews, known as
Romaniotes, had spoken Greek and maintained traditions shaped by
centuries of coexistence with Eastern Christianity. But in 1492, on the other
side of the Mediterranean, Spain gave local Jews the choice of converting to
Christianity or leaving the kingdom. Many chose to decamp for the
Ottoman lands, where Jews were admitted into the sultan’s realm as
protected subjects. Over the next century, with the arrival of thousands of
Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, the community more than doubled in size
and became largely Sephardic in its traditions and practices. Ladino, or
Judeo-Spanish, replaced Greek; Spanish surnames soon appeared on
gravestones; and the Jewish foodways of the western Mediterranean—
Spanish bizcochos, North African meatballs, preserved lemons—made their
way east.
In the early twentieth century, most Istanbullus still experienced their
city not as a grand whole—an urban environment that sprawled over seven
hills south of the Golden Horn, through countless valleys and ridges to the
north, and up the steep hills of the Asian suburbs east of the Bosphorus—
but rather as an archipelago of hundreds of distinct neighborhoods, or
mahalles. Each had its own more or less self-contained local economy and
way of life, all lodged inside bigger concentric circles that tied individual
mahalles to wider neighborhoods and districts. The traditions of the
mahalle reinforced the distinctiveness of communal life but also ensured
that Muslims and non-Muslims were still connected in a network of mutual
dependence and welfare.
In Balat, for example, one of the major Jewish neighborhoods on the
south shore of the Golden Horn, neighbors might share gossip in Ladino,
Greek, Ottoman Turkish, or some combination of them all. Down a winding
street, Persian shopkeepers sold spices, Bulgarians supplied milk and
kaymak (sweet clotted cream), and Albanians dipped up tins of salep, a hot,
thick drink made from orchid root that was good for dulling a winter chill.
The doors of local bakeries were crowded with young boys sent by their
mothers with copper trays of homemade pastries to be fired in the bakeries’
ovens. Lines formed at public bathhouses on Friday mornings before the
start of the Jewish Sabbath, and even longer lines would later spill out of
the National, a cinemahouse that showed new releases on Sunday mornings.
Greeks and Armenians would pass through on their way to services in the
churches clustered in the nearby Phanar neighborhood. Families might
decamp to the heights above Eyüp for afternoon tea at the Pierre Loti Café,
with its panoramic view, or picnic along the waters of Ka ıthane, both of
which were also frequented by Muslims. Men, women, and children would
sit on the grass in chatty clusters, re-creating Istanbul’s patchwork
demography in miniature.
In the modern era, the minority mahalles were never self-contained.
They had already begun to weaken by the end of the seventeenth century,
when Muslims moved into the propertied classes and, with their expanding
wealth, into districts that formerly had been mainly Christian or Jewish. But
the idea of keeping to one’s own sphere remained one of the unwritten rules
of Istanbul urbanity down to the end of the empire. “Ni a fuego, ni a pleto,”
Jews said in Ladino—“Don’t go to a fire or to a fight.” The structure of
Istanbul’s mahalles was not just a result of the natural clustering of
religious communities around mosques, churches, and synagogues. It was
also a survival strategy: a way of minding your own business, keeping your
head down, and leaving the grand issues of politics and economics to the
powerful. Lintels with their distinctive mezuzahs in Balat, the florid cross
on an Armenian church in Kumkapı, or a Greek family name inscribed on
an apartment building in Beyo lu marked the geographical boundaries of
daily life in the city, but they also traced the contours of power among
communities that, until the Allied occupation, could all count themselves
subjects of a single emperor.
Non-Muslims were the warp and weft of Istanbul’s economy and
popular culture. They were its barkeeps and bankers, its brothel owners and
restaurateurs, its exporters and hoteliers. As late as 1922, Greeks still
owned 1,169 of 1,413 restaurants in the city, compared with 97 owned by
Muslim Turks, 57 by Armenians, and 44 by Russians. That social position
also made non-Muslims natural rivals. Greeks and Armenians “got along
like cats and dogs,” recalled the Jewish memoirist Eli Shaul, “that is, they
avoided each other, looked for opportunities to make fun of each other, and
sometimes got into fights.” A popular joke illustrated the wary circling and
one-upmanship that characterized Istanbul’s minority groups. Salomon, a
Jewish boy, goes to an Armenian church. “I’ve committed a terrible sin,” he
explains to the priest, who is surprised to see him there. “I’ve slept with a
girl and want to ask forgiveness.”
“Which girl was it?” the priest asks warily.
“I’m too ashamed to say, Father,” says Salomon.
“I know. It must have been Hagop’s daughter!”
“No, not her.”
“Then Mugerdich’s sister?”
“No, not her.”
“Wait, it must have been Sirapian’s young wife!”
“No, not her.”
Frustrated, the priest sends him away. Salomon’s friend, Mishon, sees
him leaving and asks what in the world he was doing in an Armenian
church.
“Getting three referrals,” Salomon replies.
In this complicated world, an Armenian family might be Catholic,
Protestant, or Apostolic Christian. They might profess deep loyalty to the
sultan or work secretly on behalf of a national liberation movement, which
might in turn lean in either the liberal direction or the socialist one. They
might be subjects of the sultan or enjoy citizenship of another country, even
if they had lived in the city for generations. Jews were likewise divided
among the Sephardim, descendants of immigrants from Spain, and the
Ashkenazim of eastern Europe, who moved into the city in increasing
numbers in the nineteenth century. Each might in turn identify as Zionists,
socialists, or liberals, and as either Ottoman subjects or foreigners.
Under the Ottomans, a non-Muslim subject could enjoy a spectacular
array of economic privileges as long as he could convince a foreign
government to take him under its protection. This so-called Capitulations
system had been part of the empire’s administrative structure from the
beginning of the Ottomans’ reign, a result of muscular negotiation by
foreign powers ranging from the Genoese to the British and French. It
effectively exempted local employees of international firms from Ottoman
law and provided foreign businesses with direct, protected access to the
Ottoman economy. Over time, however, the Capitulations system came to
define the domestic economy as well as foreign trade. Both were largely in
the hands of foreign “colonies,” as they were often called, which amassed
substantial wealth from their grand compounds and business offices in Pera,
Galata, and other areas north of the Golden Horn.
The most notable Greek families in particular were in the unusual
position of working on behalf of a foreign power while living and making
their fortunes inside the Ottoman domains. Individuals could use the
complex system of being in—but not of—the Ottoman state to their own
advantage, which could in turn work to the detriment of the state itself.
Basil Zaharoff grew up in Tatavla (Kurtulu ), a neighborhood to the north of
the Pera Palace, and despite his Russian-sounding name, his family was
Greek and of modest means. He spent his youth as a tour guide, milling
around the popular Café Lebon and offering visitors his expertise in
negotiating the streets and alleys of Pera. He may have made money on the
side as a paid arsonist for tulumbacıs, setting fires that the roving firemen
could then put out for a fee gratefully paid by their wealthy victims. In time,
he transformed a familiarity with foreigners and an eye for the double deal
into incredible success. From an initial contact with a Swedish arms dealer,
he took French citizenship and set himself up as one of Europe’s foremost
traders in weaponry, largely through the British-owned Vickers munitions
company. He reaped a fortune by selling to both sides in one after another
European conflict and offering the latest technology, such as the newly
invented machine gun, at prices too good for any country to pass up. During
the First World War, he reckoned that history was on the side of
nationalism, not Ottoman imperialism, and he spied an opportunity to profit
from the empire’s changing fortunes. He was instrumental in pulling Greece
into the conflict on the Allied side and almost single-handedly armed the
Hellenic army against the Ottomans. A globe-trotting roué and an instantly
recognizable name to every war ministry in Europe—with a good claim, in
his day, to being the most interesting man in the world—he exemplified for
many the seamier side of Istanbul’s cosmopolitanism.
After 1918, many Muslims felt that the Capitulations and the tradition
of freewheeling, minority-run commerce had reached their nadir, with non-
Muslims now preparing to carve up the empire among themselves with
foreign assistance. Allied officials had a clear preference for Greeks and
Armenians when filling jobs ranging from typists to auxiliary police, who
typically patrolled the streets in British uniforms distinguished only by
special armbands. After all, the Allies saw part of their mission to be
liberating Christians from the Muslim yoke, and they expected that a future
peace treaty would explicitly protect local Christians and force the sultan to
accept some degree of international oversight in the running of his own
country. “The Hellenic and Christian character” of Istanbul, said a petition
signed by Greek and Armenian leaders in 1920, “is confirmed today, even
after so many centuries of slavery, by the incomparably greater number of
its Greek and Armenian population [compared to Muslims] . . . and the
earth that once contained the bodies of our emperor-kings and the remains
of our patriarchs.” The Christian leaders’ statistics may have been
questionable, but to Muslims, the power dynamic was clear. Charles
Furlong, an American eyewitness in Istanbul in the spring of 1920, recorded
a list of grievances that his Muslim informants had expressed against the
Allies and against Istanbul’s non-Muslims:
The best Turkish homes commandeered, often with all their furnishings, for the use of
allied officers; evidence pointing to the commandeering of these homes for the purpose of
eventually looting their contents; there are no Turkish prostitutes on the streets of
Constantinople, but I was informed on good authority that on the entrance of the allies,
Greek and Armenian women donned the costume of the Turkish women in order to defile
them in the eyes of the allies; Greeks mocked the Muezzin when he called to prayer from
the minarets, and in the presence of Moslems, loudly call to strange street dogs—“come
here Mohammed”; every few weeks great conflagrations were set in Constantinople,
wiping out in a single fire sometimes thousands of Turkish homes, while Greek real estate
dealers were sometimes on the spot before the ashes cooled; thus has been going on under
the truce, the expulsion of the Turk from Constantinople.
For average Muslims, the city seemed to have been turned on its head.
Terrible stories were passed along from house to house. Senegalese soldiers
in the French contingent would attack women on the street, it was said, or
roast Muslim babies for their evening meals. Muslim women were pushed
roughly out of tramcars. British soldiers would scream at children in the
street, knock the fezzes from men’s heads, or tear off women’s veils. Much
of this was the folklore of resistance, common in societies resentful of
foreign rule, but if any Muslims needed a living symbol of the link between
occupation and the city’s non-Muslim minorities, they had only to speak
with the new person overseeing the check-in desk and entertaining arrivals
at the Pera Palace. At the end of the war, the hotel had undergone a striking
change of ownership.
RESISTANCE
A jumble of old wooden sailing boats on the Golden Horn, with the Süleymaniye in the background.
S VELTE AND WELL-DRESSED, with a tiny mustache and balding pate,
Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiades—or Bodosakis, as he was generally
known—was the very image of the urbane and confident Istanbullu Greek.
He had taken over the Pera Palace from the Wagons-Lits company in 1919,
in circumstances that remain unclear even in the Ottoman property records.
The timing turned out to be excellent, however. British officers, disaffected
Ottoman soldiers, and French and German businessmen found in Bodosakis
a proprietor willing to accommodate just about any kind of guest.
According to the memoirist Ziya Bey, the Pera Palace quickly established
itself as a place where “foreign officers and business men are fêted by
unscrupulous Levantine adventurers and drink and dance with fallen
Russian princesses or with Greek and Armenian girls whose morals are, to
say the least, as light as their flimsy gowns.”
Born to a Greek Orthodox family of modest means, and with barely a
primary school education, Bodosakis had started his working life as a
small-time trader in Adana and Mersin, two regional commercial centers
along the Mediterranean coast. After the First World War, he came to
Istanbul, throwing himself into the rough-and-tumble world of shipping and
industry and carrying with him a considerable record as a wartime
entrepreneur. As an Ottoman subject, he had moved relatively freely inside
the empire; as a Greek-speaker, he had immediate entrée into the city’s
commercial and financial elite. He also had family connections. He was
married to the daughter of an Austrian engineer who in turn was related to
Otto Liman von Sanders, head of the German military mission in Turkey.
Von Sanders had helped run the war effort on behalf of the Ottoman army,
and at least some of Bodosakis’s early wealth seems to have come from his
role as a supplier to the army’s quartermasters. Even after the German and
Ottoman defeat, knowing important people was still the first step in
furthering an already successful business career, especially in a city
crawling with foreign soldiers and émigrés.
Bodosakis had managed to thrive by negotiating several different
economic and political worlds, but for many local Greeks, the arrival of the
Allies posed more questions about the future than it answered. While the
patriarch was the spiritual leader of Greek Orthodox Christians, there was a
competing political authority emanating from Athens—the government of
the Greek mainland, or the Kingdom of the Hellenes—that was now
asserting its influence east of the Aegean Sea. The Hellenic presence among
the Allies was relatively small: four warships out of dozens in the entire
fleet, a few foot soldiers on patrol, and a detachment of Cretans guarding
the Greek patriarchate in Phanar. But the presence of troops from Greece
raised the fundamental issue of the future relationship between Istanbul’s
age-old Greek community and the relatively young Hellenic state.
Less than a century earlier, the territory of Greece had itself been part of
the Ottoman Empire. In the 1820s, a revolt on the Greek mainland sought to
throw off Ottoman power and create an independent country. Hellenic
revolutionaries were often little different from other anti-imperial
movements of the era—a combination of liberal politicians, overblown
romantics, and profiteers looking to rid themselves of a faraway sovereign
—but sympathizers in Europe saw them as living relics of the glorious
Athenian past: the noble, freedom-loving ur-source of Western civilization
as a whole. Philhellenism—support for Hellenic culture and the political
cause that sprang from it—swept across Europe and aided the
revolutionaries in creating their own state in 1832. The new country
eventually expanded to include neighboring areas populated by Greek-
speakers as well as by Slavs, Albanians, and Turkish-speaking Muslims.
King Constantine, the reigning monarch at the outbreak of the First
World War, was well aware of the British and French interest in pulling his
country to the Allied side. Greece’s strategic position in the Mediterranean
would be critical to the Allied war effort in the Balkans and the Near East.
But as a brother-in-law of Kaiser Wilhelm II, he chose the middle path of
keeping Greece neutral. As the war wound on and a German victory
appeared less secure, however, pro-Allied factions within the Hellenic
parliament rose against the king and, in 1917, forced him from the throne
and into exile. Constantine’s son, Alexander, was elevated to the monarchy,
and Greece entered the war on the Allied side. The war seemed at last to
provide an opportunity to realize the Megali Idea, or “Grand Idea,” dear to
pan-Greek nationalists: the dream of retaking Istanbul and restoring the
Byzantine Empire under a Hellenic crown.
The power behind Alexander’s throne was Prime Minister Eleftherios
Venizelos, an experienced politician who had stage-managed the royal
transition in order to bring Greece into the war. Venizelos was both
visionary and pragmatic, and he saw clearly that an Allied victory would be
in the long-term interests of Greece. To press its case for acquiring Ottoman
territory, the Hellenic government launched its own occupation farther
down the Aegean coast. On May 15, 1919, Venizelos’s troops marched into
the major Ottoman port of Smyrna (Izmir). The British and French offered
tacit support, mainly as a way of keeping the city out of the hands of the
Italians, another Allied power with designs on Ottoman territory. But unlike
the Allies’ arrival in Istanbul, the landing in Smyrna was a disaster.
Disorder swept through the city as local Muslims tried briefly to fight off
the occupiers. Stores were looted and the city’s many religious communities
—Greek, Armenian, and Muslim—briefly descended into violence before
Hellenic soldiers imposed martial law.
For local Greeks as well as Hellenes on the mainland, the seizure of
Smyrna was a triumph, the first step toward the Megali Idea. (There were,
in fact, more ethnic Greeks in Smyrna than in Athens at the time.) When
news of Smyrna’s capture reached Istanbul, the streets of Pera were draped
with the blue-and-white flag of the Hellenic kingdom, and a huge portrait of
Venizelos was unveiled in Taksim Square. For Ottoman Muslims, however,
it was a heart-stopping tragedy. Not only was the imperial capital now
administered by the Allies, but in clear contravention of the Mudros
armistice, Hellenic forces had seized the empire’s most important Aegean
port. Unlike Milne’s troops in Istanbul, the Hellenes seemed intent on
annexing, not just administering, their prize.

While Bodosakis was weighing up his own possible futures in the wake of
the Hellenic advance, Mustafa Kemal, the Ottoman field commander, was
on his way to Anatolia. He had arrived in Istanbul on an inauspicious day—
November 13, 1918, the moment when Allied ships sailed into the city—
and he departed for Samsun the following May 16, only a day after the
Hellenes took Smyrna. Both events galvanized the growing opposition
movement that he managed to organize in the east.
Abandoning the pretext for his army inspection tour, Mustafa Kemal set
about rallying officers and field units dissatisfied with the inaction of the
Istanbul government. Within a few months of reaching Samsun, he had
enlivened colleagues among the Ottoman officer class. He had also helped
stage two large-scale congresses in the eastern cities of Erzurum and Sivas,
where delegates from military units and other sympathizers rallied around
the anti-occupation cause. The congresses denounced the Hellenic invasion
and proclaimed the creation of a national resistance to the Allies. By the
end of 1919, Mustafa Kemal had established his headquarters in Ankara, a
town in central Anatolia that was far enough away from Allied positions to
be defensible and, with its own railway station, in easy contact with the
remnants of the Ottoman armies still regrouping after the armistice. For the
Allies, Mustafa Kemal’s expanding forces were a new and unexpected
addition to an already complicated strategic and political environment.
With Ankara now becoming a rival pole to Istanbul, Allied observers
came to describe the growing resistance movement as “Kemalists” or
Turkish nationalists. The idea that Turks represented a distinct nation, rather
than just part of the governing elite of a multinational empire, had been part
of the Unionist cause earlier in the century, but under Mustafa Kemal, the
nationalist message was married to the concrete political and military
program of resisting the occupation and bucking up the enfeebled sultan.
The Kemalists first turned their attention to the east, launching attacks on
Armenians and other armed groups returning to areas from which they had
been deported by the Unionists during the war. Over the next year and a
half, violence spread to central and western Anatolia as well. Hellenic
forces moved out of their enclave around Smyrna and extended their zone
of control along the Aegean Sea. The sultan’s government looked on these
events with powerless detachment. While Mehmed VI was still the legal
authority in Istanbul and the wider empire, he watched as his officers and
soldiers organized their own defense of the fatherland without royal aid or
sanction. Muslim politicians and intellectuals soon flocked to Ankara.
Thefts from arms depots in Istanbul and smuggling of guns to the Kemalists
increased.
The feckless Ottoman parliament, which continued to meet through the
spring of 1920, wavered between tacitly supporting the Kemalists and
seeming to acquiesce to the Allied authorities, who still recognized the
sultan and parliament as the only legitimate government. The preferences of
Muslim Istanbullus were clear, however. In February 1920, a rally in the
Sultanahmet district brought out perhaps 150,000 people to demand that the
Turkish heartland remain part of a unified state with guaranteed control
over Istanbul and the Straits. Later in the month, in its boldest act to date,
the parliament adopted a declaration known as the National Pact, which set
out the Ottomans’ core demands vis-à-vis the Allies—ranging from
asserting the freedom and independence of the sultan’s state to insisting that
the future status of controversial border regions be settled by referendum.
Crucially, it was the first document produced by the Ottoman government
that used the word Türkiye—Turkey—for the country previously known as
the Ottoman Empire.
The growing disorder—as well as the fear that the sultan’s government,
the Kemalists, and Istanbullus might eventually unite against the occupation
—pushed the Allies into a fateful decision. On March 16, 1920, General
Milne extended full military occupation over the city, a technical change to
the status that Allied forces had enjoyed since 1918. In a move not
sanctioned by the Mudros armistice, the new arrangement subjected all
civilian and military institutions to Allied oversight. British soldiers walked
down the Grande Rue with bayonets fixed and swords drawn. They were
prepared for resistance, but in most instances detachments of Allied guards
simply walked into government ministries and stood post outside office
doors. Local police and military units were disarmed. Villages in outlying
districts were searched for weapons caches. Further rounds of
uncooperative Ottoman bureaucrats were shipped to British-controlled
Malta.
The occupation came as no surprise to anyone. Rumors of it had
circulated in the Pera Palace bar, and the French had shared the plans with
select Ottoman officials, who were able to leave the city rather than face
arrest or deportation by the British. But it was a rash decision and
ultimately a foolhardy one. Mustafa Kemal’s associates in Anatolia could
now argue that they represented the only truly national government, since
the sultan had stood by quietly as Allied troops launched their formal
seizure of the capital. In Ankara the next month, the nationalists opened
their own parliament, the Grand National Assembly, which included some
representatives from the defunct Ottoman parliament in Istanbul. Mustafa
Kemal was elected its first president, becoming in effect the head of
government of an as-yet-unrecognized country. The assembly issued a
proclamation declaring that it had no intention of deposing the sultan, but,
as with the Unionists’ attempt to save the Ottoman state from itself in 1908,
relations were tense between the established regime and its alleged saviors.
The Ankara assembly prescribed execution for anyone who challenged its
legitimacy, while the sultan proclaimed the same punishment for Mustafa
Kemal and his closest supporters.
The Allies had taken over Istanbul because of the threat posed by a
unified Turkish Muslim front, but within only a month, the prospect of a
multisided, fractious, and internationalized civil war seemed closer than
ever. Ottoman loyalists denounced the Turkish nationalists. Turkish soldiers
targeted religious minorities, believing that all Greeks and Armenians were
potential supporters of the Allied occupation. Hellenic troops clashed with
armed Turks. Brigands and local warlords threw their weight behind
whoever seemed to be on top.
A continent away, diplomats were meeting in the Paris suburb of Sèvres
to create a document that was intended to transform the shaky Mudros
armistice into a lasting peace. In May 1920, Allied negotiators presented
Ottoman officials with the draft of a final peace treaty. The terms were
shocking. Syria, Mesopotamia, and Palestine were to be taken away from
Ottoman control, paving the way for a system of mandates that would
administer these territories under the French and the British. Much of
eastern Anatolia was to be divided between an independent Armenia and a
future Kurdistan. Egypt and Cyprus were confirmed as free of Ottoman
control. Portions of the Aegean coastline around Smyrna were ceded to
Greece. Istanbul and the Straits were to be governed by an international
commission composed of representatives from Britain, France, Italy, Japan,
Russia, Greece, the United States, and other countries.
These were precisely the arrangements that Allied representatives in
Istanbul had urged negotiators not to put forward. The American high
commissioner in the city, Admiral Mark Bristol, had sent a raft of telegrams
and memoranda arguing that the partition of the country would inflame
local sentiment against the occupation and provide yet another specific
cause around which the nationalists could coalesce. It would also ensconce
Britain as the dominant power in the region, to the exclusion of the other
Allies and to the detriment of the Turks themselves. “The United States
entered the war and sacrificed men and money to overcome the imperialism
of Germany,” he wrote to Washington from his office next to the Pera
Palace. “I must call attention to the evident imperialistic tendencies of Great
Britain.” Allied negotiators, however, saw themselves as playing a
continual game of catch-up, drafting terms of a final peace that were moot
almost as soon as they were proposed, given the fast-changing military
situation across Anatolia. The Hellenes were carving up the old empire
already, and there seemed little hope of reversing that course. The best
outcome, negotiators reasoned, would be a treaty that would at least bring
some order to the Ottoman breakup and give its various pieces a kind of
international blessing.
In August 1920, the sultan reluctantly accepted the deal. The occupation
had dismantled the country de facto, but Sèvres divided it up de jure. Like
the Byzantine Empire it had displaced nearly half a millennium earlier, the
Ottoman state was now whittled down to a tiny, insignificant, and largely
demilitarized power at the edge of Europe. News of the Sèvres accord had
precisely the effect that Admiral Bristol and others had predicted. It was
one thing for Ottoman officials to give up the outlying parts of the empire—
letting the Arab lands go, for example—but agreeing to the effective
partition of Anatolia and the elimination of local control over Istanbul and
the Straits was a monumental concession. The Allies were no longer
temporary occupiers seeking to ease the transition from armistice to peace.
They had become acquisitive victors dividing up the spoils of war, all with
the sultan’s blessing.
Lines on maps, international mandates, orderly population movements,
and grand schemes for reforming governance were debated and redrafted by
diplomats with little understanding of what was happening in the Ottomans’
old domains. After the Sèvres accord, Mustafa Kemal’s supporters were
bolder and more convinced than ever of the justice of their cause. Hellenic
troops continued to advance, pressing toward Istanbul overland through
Thrace and up the Aegean coast from Smyrna. Each side—British, French,
Italian, Hellenic, and Turkish—worked to create facts on the ground before
the treaty could be fully implemented. The outcome, however, would be
shaped by a bizarre event that unfolded more than three hundred miles
away, in a garden outside of Athens. It turned out that Istanbul’s fate, and
the Ottoman Empire’s, hung on a monkey bite.

Many people saw the affair as a bizarre form of cosmic justice, and it was
wrapped up in one of the most complicated royal successions of the era. In
early October 1920, King Alexander of Greece—the monarch who had
ousted his father, led his kingdom to victory in the First World War, and
now oversaw the troops marching toward Istanbul and Ankara—went
walking with his German shepherd on his royal estate in the suburbs of
Athens. Along the way, the dog leapt on a Barbary macaque, a monkey that
belonged to one of the palace gardeners. Another monkey rallied to the
defense, and the king ended up with a severe bite. He thought little of it at
the time, but within a few days the bite had turned septic. The king took to
his bed and died before the month was out.
“It is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million
persons died of this monkey’s bite,” Winston Churchill later observed. The
political effects were enormous. With Alexander dead, the losers of the
1917 palace coup invited Constantine to return from exile and resume his
reign. New elections were called, and in the political bargaining that
followed, Venizelos was dismissed as prime minister. The turmoil in Athens
was felt most deeply across the Aegean, but the results were not what
anyone might have predicted at the time.
Given the turbulent politics of Constantine’s sudden return, the
momentum behind Hellenic advances in Anatolia might have dissipated;
grand plans for seizing the coastline and eastern Thrace, and perhaps even
pressuring the other Allies to hand Istanbul over to the Hellenic
government, might have fallen away. But in this critical moment, Britain,
the major occupying power, remained resolute. Islamophobic and
philhellenic in equal measure, the British broadly endorsed Hellenic
ambitions, tacitly urging Constantine to finish the job begun by Alexander
and Venizelos. There was now a formal treaty in place—the Sèvres accord
—and London dispatched a new commander, General Charles Harington, to
take over from General Milne and implement the treaty that the sultan’s
government had approved. The French and Italians, by contrast, wary of the
return to power of the pro-German Constantine, began to pull back their
support for the Hellenic cause. These fissures within the Allied side
emboldened the newly restored Hellenic monarch, who was eager to display
his ability to win the peace by winning yet another war. Newspapers in
Athens featured pictures of Constantine slaying a Turkish dragon and
marching into a reclaimed Constantinople, flanked by his namesake, the
long-dead Constantine XI Palaeologus, the last Byzantine emperor.
More than ever before, Turkish nationalists now had a mission:
preventing the Hellenic soldiers from threatening the core areas in central
Anatolia, blocking their march on Ankara, and gradually pushing them back
toward the coast. In January 1921, Kemalist troops, led by the talented
tactician smet Bey, defeated Hellenic forces at the first battle of nönü,
south of the Sea of Marmara. Another Turkish victory followed on the same
spot in April. In response, the Hellenic army launched a major offensive in
the late summer, but that too was repulsed, this time at the Sakarya River
near Ankara.
Turkish fighters were beginning to see the conflict as their own war of
liberation—ironically, following the example that Hellenes, Bulgarians,
Albanians, Arabs, and other non-Turks had already set in their drive for
freedom from the Ottoman Empire—and Sakarya became the signature
moment of that struggle. The victory also propelled Mustafa Kemal, who
had assumed the role of commander in chief of Turkish forces, to the
position of unrivaled leader of the nationalist movement. It allowed him to
outmaneuver other potential contenders, such as the successful general
Kâzım Karabekir, whose credentials as a member of the Istanbul elite and a
seasoned field commander outshone virtually all others. Mustafa Kemal
was elevated to the rank of marshal and given the honorific title of gazi, a
term formerly applied to the most illustrious of Islamic holy warriors. “The
retreat that started in Vienna,” said a Turkish observer in 1921, referring to
the zenith of Ottoman incursions into Europe in 1683, “stopped 238 years
later.”
British diplomats tried desperately to salvage what remained of the
Sèvres treaty, but the Allies were by now largely spectators to the unfolding
violence. The cost of continued occupation was outstripping any strategic
benefits. By the summer of 1921, the Italians made a separate deal with the
Turkish nationalists and removed their troops from Anatolia. The French
followed suit in October. Late the next summer, Turkish nationalists began
an offensive against the remaining Hellenic positions, with the spearhead of
the advance pointed toward the key redoubt of Smyrna, the city from which
Greece had launched its bid for dominance three years earlier. The two
forces were roughly equal in size—some 225,000 Hellenic troops against
208,000 Turks—but Hellenic emplacements were stretched across virtually
the breadth of Anatolia, with nothing behind them but the sea.
Hellenic military detachments fled toward the coast. They left behind
rubble-strewn villages, burned croplands, and toppled minarets. “The
atrocities perpetrated by the Greeks, since they landed in Smyrna, exceed
all similar crimes recorded up to now in the annals of history,” declared a
Turkish report. “There is not the slightest doubt that the savageries
committed by the Greeks of Greece and by that section of the indigenous
Greeks, who sided with them, have been deliberately planned and carried
out under orders proceeding from the Commanders of the various Greek
military units.”
It took only days for the Turkish troops to reach Smyrna. On September
9, 1922, Turkish nationalists marched into the city and began pushing out
the last remnants of the foreign army. Local Greek Orthodox Christians,
fearing reprisals from the nationalists as well as from their Muslim
neighbors, rushed to join the Hellenic soldiers in retreat. Refugees crowded
the docklands. Mobs ruled the streets. The Greek archbishop was lynched
by a Muslim crowd whipped up by the Turkish commander in the city. A
fire broke out in the Armenian section of Smyrna and roared through other
neighborhoods, turning the sea the color of burnished copper and pushing
even more people toward the waterfront. In the panic and disorder,
thousands died before Hellenic and Allied ships arrived to ferry the
survivors to the Greek mainland. Some 213,000 people, mainly Greek
Orthodox and Armenian families who had lived in Smyrna for countless
generations, left it for good. Three-quarters of the city was in ruins.
As news of the Smyrna catastrophe reached Istanbul, locals and Allies
worried that it might well turn out to be a dress rehearsal for what could
happen in the old capital: a Turkish nationalist attack followed by the
chaotic emptying of the city’s minorities and a dash for the door by the
Allies. “Foreigners are nervous . . . remembering the fate of Smyrna,”
Ernest Hemingway reported from the scene, “and have booked outgoing
trains for the weeks ahead.” Processions of Turkish Muslims marched
through the streets shouting, “Down with the English.” Portraits of Mustafa
Kemal appeared in Muslim-majority districts throughout the city. Gone
were the Hellenic flags and blue-and-white streamers that had once adorned
the storefronts of Greek-owned businesses. “A fear of the future sits heavily
upon these poor people now,” a British lieutenant wrote in a letter home.
“What will become of them when we leave?”
A year before the fall of Smyrna, Allied generals had issued a directive
in Istanbul reminding Turkish soldiers that they were required to salute
uniformed officers of the Allied contingent. A special commission had been
created to study the problem of whether an Allied officer was required to
salute back. Now, power had clearly shifted to the Turkish side. General
Harington, the British commander, was reduced to issuing more and more
strident—and less and less effective—declarations to Istanbul’s civilian
population. Possible death sentences were authorized for people found
guilty of illegal possession of firearms, firing on Allied troops, destruction
of telephone or telegraph lines, receiving stolen Allied goods, or “any other
act or thing inimical to the interests or safety of the Allied Troops.” Few
people believed the sentences could be carried out.
The British, as the lead partner in the dwindling Allied force, faced a
common dilemma among occupiers. Their friendliest local partner—the
sultan—was the least legitimate among the native population, while the
most legitimate—the Kemalists—were making plans to march on Istanbul
and send the occupiers running. Mehmed VI was weak and unpopular, as
were the remaining ministers and advisers around him. Their acceptance of
the Hellenic occupation of Smyrna and the Treaty of Sèvres had diminished
the prestige of the old regime and made the Ottoman establishment even
less credible as a future government for post-occupation Istanbul. The
Allied powers had painted themselves into a corner.
Before the Smyrna offensive, Istanbul had been the only place in
Turkey where troops still loyal to the Ottoman government outnumbered
the nationalists: 1,200 Ottoman troops against 1,000 Kemalists. Over the
coming months, however, that balance shifted dramatically in favor of
Mustafa Kemal. In late September 1922, fresh from the fighting in Smyrna,
Turkish nationalist forces entered a neutral zone that the Allies had
established along the Straits. British and nationalist troops squared off
across their own entrenched positions, exchanging potshots that threatened
to destroy the armistice, which by now had dragged on for nearly four
years. “I know somebody will let his rifle off cleaning it, and then there will
be another European war!!!” wrote Billy Fox-Pitt, an officer in the Welsh
Guards, from the trenches.
The British government was inclined to stand up to the nationalists and
ordered General Harington to prepare to fight, but Harington astutely
ignored his direct orders. He proceeded with plans to meet Turkish
negotiators at Mudanya, a small town on the Sea of Marmara, to draft a new
agreement that would take into account the radically changed military
situation. “No humbler setting could have been chosen for the negotiations
of an agreement upon which depended the issue of peace or war between
the Allied Powers and the Turkish Nationalists,” wrote G. Ward Price, the
Daily Mail correspondent who covered the talks. The British delegation
arrived in force on the flagship Iron Duke. The Turks were led by smet, the
hero of the earlier battles of nönü against the Hellenes. smet had emerged
as one of the key military leaders under Mustafa Kemal and now held the
rank of pasha, or senior general. In driving rain and high winds, on October
11, 1922, Harington and smet Pasha crafted an accord that, in a roundabout
way, saved Istanbul from destruction.
The Mudanya document governed the evacuation of Hellenic troops
from eastern Thrace and their replacement by soldiers of the Grand
National Assembly, essentially providing a way for Turkish troops to
surround Istanbul on all sides in an orderly and peaceful manner. Mudanya
in 1922 was in many ways the bookend to Mudros in 1918—the moment
when the political and military advantage shifted from the Allies to the
Turks, with the latter now in a much stronger position to influence the terms
of a final peace. In a city that had seen rather few real heroes for some time,
the levelheadedness of Harington and smet prevented Istanbul from
repeating the horrors of Smyrna. The Sèvres treaty—signed but never
implemented—was now dead, and a new set of concerns began to occupy
both Harington in Istanbul and Allied diplomats farther afield: how to end
the occupation and turn over control of the city to the de facto rulers, the
Kemalists, who had marched steadily westward out of Anatolia over the
previous three years. Almost as soon as he left Mudanya and returned to
Istanbul, Harington was faced with a direct challenge to the embattled ruler
he had been trying to prop up: the Ottoman sultan.

General Charles Harington—or Tim, as he was known—was a professional

soldier of cool judgment and, like his predecessor, General Milne, of
considerable experience. But where Milne had the distinction of
superintending the Ottoman capital on behalf of Britain and the Allies,
Harington’s role was to figure out how to give it up.
Harington appeared at official functions in Sam Browne belt and
beribboned tunic, the image of duty and resolve with his swagger stick and
pencil mustache. Trained at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, he
had served in the King’s Regiment during the Boer War. After the First
World War, he was personally appointed by Winston Churchill, then
Britain’s secretary of state for war, to manage the delicate situation in
Istanbul. To foreigners and non-Muslims in the city, he had a reputation for
keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of rapid change and near-miss
calamities.
“Life went on gaily, especially at night,” Harington recalled in his
memoirs. Ceremonial parades featured infantry march-pasts and gun salutes
from ships on the Bosphorus. The British drank to the health of King
George V on his birthday and held seven-a-side rugby matches on
weekends. “There was something for everyone: hunting, polo, shooting,
fishing, yachting, golf, cricket, hockey, tennis, squash, etc., a good club and
good cafes.” The hounds ran at Maslak, in the European suburbs, chasing
any animal worthy of sport. A small bear, Mishu, had been liberated by
British soldiers from the Caucasus mountains and entertained the troops
with acrobatics. When officers helped him down a glass of port at
Christmas, Mishu attempted to walk along a railing at the edge of the
Bosphorus and promptly toppled into the water. He was rescued by
fishermen stunned at the odd catch they had drawn up from the swift
current.
But the Allied occupiers, as well as the sultan, were living on borrowed
time. “[T]he main preoccupation of the Allied Governments,” reported G.
Ward Price, “was to withdraw their troops from Turkey with the minimum
of humiliation.” The indecision regarding the final status of Istanbul and the
empire, coupled with the devastating terms finally forced on the sultan’s
government at Sèvres, had contributed to the disorder in Anatolia. Britain’s
support had emboldened King Constantine and sealed the fate of Smyrna.
The Turkish nationalist government was in a stronger position than ever,
with both the control of territory and the demonstrated military power to
press its advantage. Turkish soldiers were encamped east and west of
Istanbul, with Allied naval power the only obstacle to their taking the city
by force. In Ankara, the Grand National Assembly was increasingly
assertive, acting like the confident governing parliament of a real country,
even if no major power accepted it as such. The assembly retroactively
declared that Istanbul had ceased to be the capital from the moment the
Allies took control of it. On November 4, 1922, Refet Pasha, a
representative of the Grand National Assembly, arrived in Istanbul with the
news that he would be assuming control of the city’s gendarmerie and
police, customs houses, public sanitation, and other municipal functions.
Allied officials expressed frustration at the rapid erosion of their authority,
but they remained powerless to stop it as long as the city was surrounded by
thousands of Turkish troops whose presence was protected by the Mudanya
accord. “Measures now being taken by Nationalists simply aim at gradual
extraction of our means of control at every turn and reducing of our
occupation to a farce,” a British official cabled to London.
That was precisely what Refet Pasha, acting on behalf of Mustafa
Kemal, had in mind. “It certainly came as a surprise to us when we realised
we were passing through a revolution,” said Harington. Later in the month,
the Ankara government began the fundamental reorganization of the state
itself. The sultan had acquiesced to the occupation, signed a paper treaty
that would have apportioned his lands to Greece and the Allies, and
watched helplessly as the nationalists took the lead in pushing back the
Hellenic invaders. The monarchy was now formally abolished. The
emerging country was to be a republic.
This news was a particular problem for Mehmed VI, who remained
ensconced in Yıldız Palace. On November 16, 1922, almost four years to
the day after Allied troops first stepped ashore, General Harington received
a visit from the chief bandmaster of the sultan’s household. Harington knew
that the maestro was more than a court musician. He was in fact the sultan’s
most trusted confidant, and he carried startling news. Given the Grand
National Assembly’s recent declaration ending the monarchy, the sultan
was convinced that his life was in danger and that plans were afoot to
murder him during the next selâmlık. The Kemalists had done away with
the sultanate; now he feared they were preparing to do away with the sultan,
too.
Harington realized that the story, if true, would mark a turning point not
only in the occupation but also in the history of the Ottoman Empire. He
insisted on having the request in writing. Some time later the bandmaster
returned with a note. “Considering my life in danger in Constantinople,”
Mehmed wrote, “I take refuge with the British Government, and request my
transfer as soon as possible from Constantinople to another place.”
Harington and his senior officers were on the brink of achieving something
that no foreign power in five centuries had dreamed possible: They were
going to kidnap—at the monarch’s own request—the head of the Ottoman
Empire and caliph of the world’s Muslims. Working with a small group of
commanders, Harington devised a daring scheme to spirit Mehmed away
from the city.
On Friday morning, November 17, the general rose at four o’clock and
downed a breakfast of bacon and eggs. The late autumn rains had already
descended on Istanbul, so the officers and men of the Grenadier Guards
grumbled when Harington informed them that they would be conducting a
predawn drill in the barracks yard near Yıldız Palace. Around six o’clock,
the sultan, his son, and a small group of servants took an early morning
walk in the garden. When they reached the section of the garden adjacent to
the barracks yard, the servants threw open the back gate, exposing the
garden to the drilling guardsmen.
A select group of British soldiers who had been briefed on the mission
quickly bundled the sultan and his retinue into two waiting ambulances,
which accelerated out of the parade ground. A nest of machine gunners
covered the departure, while the rest of the surprised Grenadiers stood at
attention. The ambulances raced down the hill toward Dolmabahçe Palace
and pulled up at the quay. A small British naval detachment, supposedly on
an early morning drill, sat waiting.
The sultan was transferred to the boats and then to the dockyards farther
down the Bosphorus, where Harington stood waiting in his personal launch.
From there, Mehmed joined the British commander for his last crossing of
the Bosphorus, a short ride to the British battleship Malaya, and a long sea
journey toward voluntary exile. Harington had hoped the sultan would give
him a small token to commemorate the event—a cigarette case, perhaps—
but Mehmed instead entrusted him with looking after his five wives, whom
he had left at the palace. For some time thereafter, Harington acted as a
messenger between the sultan and his family. They were eventually reunited
in a haven for ousted monarchs and erstwhile nobles, San Remo on the
Italian Riviera.
Later that day, thousands of people came out as usual for the selâmlık
and waited patiently for the sultan’s carriage to appear. Hours went by, and
the crowds eventually dispersed, left to wonder why the ruler had skipped
the Friday service. The story of what had really happened soon spread
through the city. The sultan had abandoned Istanbul and the empire. A few
days later, the Grand National Assembly named the crown prince,
Mehmed’s cousin Abdülmecid, as caliph but without the additional title of
sultan. The roles of universal Islamic leader and imperial ruler were now
separated for the first time in centuries. The dynasty of the House of
Osman, which had governed an empire for more than six hundred years and
had commanded Istanbul for four hundred sixty-nine, was no more. The
sultan himself had become a refugee.
MOSCOW ON THE BOSPHORUS
Floor show: Two young women, probably Russians, working as dancers in an Istanbul club.
G ENERAL CHARLES HARINGTON HAD ARRIVED in Istanbul at what would
turn out to be a decisive moment in the fading history of the Ottoman
Empire. His tenure had begun with the Kemalist advance westward, and he
was on hand both to witness the fall of Smyrna and to spirit away the last
Ottoman sultan. At the time, however, it was hard to see these events as part
of a single grand narrative of imperial collapse and national revolution.
Harington was troubled by a more immediate set of concerns.
The fact that would have most impressed anyone living in Istanbul at
the time was that it was a city teeming with refugees, military deserters, and
out-of-work state employees. Some had been there since the early weeks of
the First World War. Others had arrived after fighting flared between
Hellenic troops and Turkish nationalists. Despite the Unionists’ deportation
of Armenian community leaders and intellectuals several years earlier, the
influx of Armenian refugees fleeing the warfare in Anatolia meant there
soon would be more Armenians in Istanbul than in all the rest of Turkey.
They now shared space with displaced Muslims—more than 400,000 in
Istanbul and western Anatolia combined—who had arrived from Greece
and the Balkans since 1912.
Caring for many of these people naturally fell to the Allies, the only
officials capable of wrangling adequate food, clothing, and medical care.
The Allies had agreed that the French forces would be responsible for
dealing with refugee issues, but the problem was so great that other
countries quickly joined in. The US Navy set up a canteen in the yard of
Sirkeci station, with open-air ovens and boilers turning out bread and hot
cocoa. Members of Britain’s Hampshire Regiment gave up their personal
rations, including locally requisitioned milk that was needed for thousands
of refugee children. Private charities ramped up their efforts. Within weeks
of his arrival, Harington organized his own program for housing and
feeding multitudes, even devising a ticket system to sort out the massive
numbers seeking assistance. Colored chits were issued that corresponded to
colored tubs from which families could retrieve soup and other meals. By
the end of 1920, Allied soup kitchens were feeding 165,000 people a day,
nearly a fifth of Istanbul’s prewar population.
Among the needy were local Christians as well as Muslims, individuals
pushed out of their homes in Thrace and Anatolia and now turning to the
one place that seemed relatively calm and secure amid the growing violence
in the provinces. But those who occupied most of Harington’s time—and
who came to define the refugee condition in Istanbul in the early 1920s—
were not natives at all. Like the Turks who surrounded them, they had lost
an empire, and its demise had not been of their own making. Yet it was
difficult for them to imagine a new country precisely because they had not
given up the idea of winning back their old one. They clung to memories of
a place called the Russian Empire and a monarch called the tsar, and they
were the exiles whose presence in the Ottoman capital was the most
unexpected. The influx of Russians would also turn out to have a profound
effect on the culture of their adopted refuge.

Turks and Russians had both experienced revolutions of a sort, and both
found ways of remembering them that treated the losers as not just morally
wrong but also deeply inconsequential. The triumphalist version of Soviet
history cast the Bolsheviks as predestined winners of the universal struggle
between the working class and its exploiters. A popular revolt in February
1917 toppled the tsar and installed a provisional government, which in turn
gave way to a workers’ revolution in October. But what began as a
Bolshevik coup, a quick seizure of power intended to quash the provisional
government in advance of parliamentary elections, evolved into a long and
bloody civil war that raged across the entire breadth of the Russian Empire.
It was all “a salad of warring communities and factions,” Tom Bridges, the
British liaison officer in Istanbul, reported at the time. Homes were burned,
people were put to flight, and livestock was left to wander masterless along
village roads, no matter the cap badges or ideologies.
In the autumn of 1917, the anti-Bolshevik opposition was concentrated
along the Don River, where Cossack communities refused to accept the
authority of the new socialist government in Petrograd. The Cossack
uprising turned out to be a magnet that attracted disaffected imperial
officers, old aristocrats, Russian nationalists, and adventure-seeking
schoolboys committed to turning back the Reds. They formed the so-called
Volunteer Army, a small force with no more than four thousand men under
arms at the outset. It grew to become the largest and most powerful of
several opposition groups opposing Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and
other Bolshevik leaders. Where the Bolsheviks had unity of mission and
ruthlessness of execution, however, their opponents—collectively known as
the Whites—had only a vague program: restoring the old order, protecting
their traditional privileges, and denying a revolution that seemed to have the
wind of history at its back. By February 1920 the Whites were in full
retreat, withdrawing to the shelter of the Black Sea coast. Russian subjects
streamed out of ports such as Odessa and Sevastopol, which were soon
overrun by Bolshevik troops. The commander of the Volunteer Army,
Anton Denikin, was forced into a chaotic evacuation from his redoubt in the
port of Novorossiisk.
Charles Strafford, a British naval aviator on board the warship Pegasus,
was part of the Allied contingent dispatched to cover Denikin’s retreat. The
tsar’s empire had been an ally during the First World War, and British,
French, and American forces made a halfhearted attempt to assist Russia’s
struggling loyalists against the socialists. Strafford was appalled by the
scenes of desperation and disorder. The docks were covered with Russian
soldiers and their families, all wearing a mix of uniforms and civilian
clothes caked with mud. The night sky glowed from fires raging through the
docklands, the searchlights of British and French vessels, and the flash of
naval and shore artillery. Cossack cavalry unbridled their horses and turned
them into the hills. As the fleeing army steamed away on a flotilla of
evacuation vessels under Allied escort, the Cossack horses reportedly
galloped into the sea, swimming toward their old masters on the departing
ships. From the railings, people watched the foamy wakes subside as the
horses drowned in the deep water.
As soon as the Novorossiisk refugees were safely in Crimea, an area
still under White control, Denikin stepped down in disgrace. “The things in
Russia are now very, very bad. Everybody who can is running away, but we
stay here,” seventeen-year-old Katya Tenner, a Russian in Crimea, wrote to
Strafford. Individuals were weighing up the costs and benefits of leaving.
Families of means could tilt fate in their favor, but everyone faced the
common problem of planning for uncertainty. Twenty-year-old Vladimir
Nabokov, the future novelist, had been packed off to Crimea by his father, a
prominent Petrograd lawyer and minister of justice in Denikin’s
government. The family cook had prepared a knapsack of caviar
sandwiches for the journey, and the family eventually settled on the grounds
of the tsar’s summer home, the Livadia Palace, near Yalta. Nabokov’s father
was able to secure places aboard a freighter carrying a cargo of dried fruit,
calling briefly at Istanbul and then Piraeus. Next came a long journey by
train and ferry to London, where the family began a new life as émigrés.
Tens of thousands of others were less fortunate. The remnants of the
Volunteer Army were wedged onto the Crimean Peninsula, hunkered down
between the mountains and the coast. The army was now under the
leadership of Pyotr “Piper” Wrangel. His nickname referenced his love of
Piper-Heidsieck champagne, but in the field he was ramrod-straight. Tall
and lithe, in his early forties, he was usually clad in an exotic Cossack
uniform, with a cherkeska tunic and fuzzy astrakhan hat. He exuded the
martial pedigree that extended through an ancestral line of imperial field
marshals.
On Wrangel’s estimate, his men were outnumbered more than three to
one, with the Bolsheviks counting as many as 600,000 men under arms. By
early November 1920, the Bolsheviks had pushed into Crimea, threatening
the coastal cities where Wrangel’s civilian administration and army were
concentrated. On November 11, 1920, facing a bitterly cold winter, Wrangel
issued a proclamation from his headquarters in Sevastopol, the old seat of
Russia’s southern naval force. The unequal contest was lost, he said, and the
last remnant of Russia on which law and order still prevailed was to be
evacuated as quickly as possible. For weeks, he had been collecting ships in
the Crimean ports for exactly this eventuality.
On a calm sea, Wrangel stepped aboard his flagship, the cruiser General
Kornilov. It was soon joined by the French cruiser Waldeck-Rousseau,
which fired a twenty-one-gun salute; the massive transport ship Don, its
decks a fuzzy mass of fur hats and horseflesh; and other coastal steamers,
icebreakers, cargo vessels, and warships of all tonnages—one hundred
twenty-six ships in all. As seagulls wheeled overhead and a pink haze
veiled the coast, Wrangel gave his last order in Russian waters: Make for
Istanbul.
Three days later, the flotilla limped into port and set anchor near Moda,
on the Asian side of the city within sight of Topkapı Palace. Since Russians
and Turks had been on opposite sides of four wars over the previous
century, this was not exactly the way generations of tsarist strategists had
dreamed of a Russian navy’s arrival in the Ottoman capital. Nor was it the
way that generations of Ottomans had expected to receive them. But times
had changed. The Russians were now refugees and the Turks were under
foreign occupation.
“The plight of those poor people was indescribable,” recalled General
Harington. Some of the larger ships carried thousands of passengers,
crammed onto decks and below, with no awnings or other covers to keep off
the wind and rain—“like cattle ships,” reported Admiral Bristol, the
American high commissioner. No one had adequate food or water. When a
small group of caiques and patrol boats approached from shore, women
threw their fur coats and pearls overboard in exchange for bread.
Harington boarded one of the vessels and found “a starving mass of
humanity.” Lice and vermin were common. Counting Wrangel’s flotilla, the
largest single group of evacuees, some 185,000 people had arrived from
Russia during the civil war, swelling Istanbul’s population by as much as
twenty percent. The harsh winter, the paucity of resources, and the potential
threat to public order posed by the influx—more than a hundred thousand
of the refugees were White Army soldiers, eager to regroup and launch a
new war against Bolshevism—prompted some diplomats to suggest sending
the Russians even farther southward, perhaps settling them in North Africa.
But as the ships sat off Moda, it was clear that, at least for the time being,
the only place the Russians were going to colonize was Istanbul.
Representatives from the Pera Palace and other hotels were on hand
when the ships arrived, hoping to snag a few well-to-do patrons. The hotel
owners seemed more than willing to evict their existing guests (including
entire bands of prostitutes whose business was booming with so many
foreign soldiers and sailors in the city) in order to charge even higher prices
to the desperate Russians. Less fortunate migrants had to rely on the
makeshift canteens and bunkhouses set up by occupation authorities.
Istanbul was probably outfitted with more barracks than any city in the
world, noted a British diplomatic report, but there had been so many waves
of arrivals that some people were forced to sleep rough on the street or curl
up in disused foxholes dug during the First World War. Dead bodies
sometimes went uncollected for days. There was barely time to disinfect an
old barracks or tent encampment before the next group struggled off ships
and onto land.
The Russian Embassy on the Grande Rue became the center for the
relief effort organized by the Russians themselves. As power shifted wildly
across the old empire—from the tsar, to a provisional government, to the
Bolsheviks, to the governments declared in southern Russia by Denikin and
Wrangel, and then back to the Bolsheviks—the ambassador and staff had
been left to fend for themselves, making up directives and determining
loyalties on the fly. Now, at least, there was a Russian government that the
embassy could claim to represent, even if it was a government-in-exile.
Baroness Wrangel, the army commander’s wife, organized a hospital on the
embassy grounds to treat the most seriously ill and injured, with her ever-
present fox terrier, Jack, providing entertainment. Camps were also set up
outside the city, at Tuzla and Gallipoli, to accommodate the refugees,
especially the soldiers who remained formally in their military units under
Wrangel’s command. It was no small irony that perhaps the greatest
flowering of civil society in Russian history—the energetic and coordinated
beneficence of volunteer groups, professional guilds, and charitable
foundations—came only after one version of Russia had ceased to exist.

“I think that one could say, without exaggeration, that nowhere else during
the period of immigration, even in the Slavic countries that welcomed us,
did the Russians feel more at home than in Constantinople,” recalled the
Russian lawyer and former senator Nikolai Chebyshev. Soviet
propagandists would later cast all these people as ousted aristocrats who
had oppressed the peasants, led Russia into a disastrous war, and dined on
caviar in the process. But the many refugees who arrived from the Black
Sea represented a host of political persuasions, social classes, and
ethnicities.
“Some seem to be better off than others,” wrote a British soldier to his
father, “and occupy their time by parading the Grande Rue de Pera in the
exotic finery of Cossack kit complete with diagonally placed breast
cartridge pockets, top boots, long black coats and elaborately decorated
silver daggers. Others, some evidently sadly descended in the world, eke
out a poor livelihood by selling things at the curbs.” Some had arrived after
Denikin’s defeat. Others had come with Wrangel. Still others had struggled
across the sea on their own from Crimea or the Caucasus. Noble families
shared space on ships with lawyers, circus performers, Cossack
cavalrymen, and household servants. The White leadership assiduously
avoided discussion of politics and ideology for fear that the many currents
within the movement—nationalist, liberal, agrarian, even antisemitic—
would strike out on their own or make a separate peace with Lenin’s
regime. They were united in exile by a desperate effort to get by in an
unfamiliar city that was itself still reeling from the privations of war.
Dmitri Shalikashvili was part of the tidal wave of nationalities that
descended on Istanbul after the Bolshevik Revolution. He was a Russian
subject but not a Russian, born into a princely Georgian family, educated in
St. Petersburg, and decorated as an Imperial Guards officer during the First
World War. When the Russian Empire collapsed, the mountainous Caucasus
region of Georgia declared itself independent and socialist, but not
Bolshevik. It was the only remnant of the old empire to be governed by the
Bolsheviks’ archenemies on the left, the Mensheviks. Although
Shalikashvili had little in common with the Mensheviks’ ideology of
workers’ rights and land reform, their commitment to building a national
Georgian state appealed to many people in his social class. He turned his
experience and military skills to the service of his ancestral country. Yet
when the Bolsheviks swooped into Georgia in 1921, ousting the
Mensheviks and putting the entire Georgian government to flight,
Shalikashvili ended up trapped in Istanbul.
“Thus, on one beautiful springtime day began our sad life of refugees,”
Shalikashvili recalled. He soon traded his cavalry uniform for civilian
clothes and moved out of the small camp that had been created for the
Georgian refugees on the outskirts of Istanbul. The streets were full of
people of all nationalities wearing all manner of clothes, often some
mixture of military uniforms and civilian attire. The refugees—Russians,
Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians, and others—had blown into Istanbul
carrying remnants of past lives and disappeared nations. Massive sheets of
paper imprinted with the Russian double-headed eagle could be seen pasted
onto walls, laid on tabletops at restaurants, wrapped around parcels, or on
offer in stationery shops. The sheets had been used for manufacturing
currency in the territories controlled by White Russian troops, but now the
money was literally worth only the paper on which it was printed.
For those who had managed to escape with jewels and gold in their
luggage, a small amount of capital and moderate ambition could yield a
good income. Sometime in 1921, a few months after Shalikashvili arrived,
Prince Gigusha Eristavi, Count Petya Zarnekow, and a Colonel Ladyzensky
managed to lease a strip of beach near Florya, on the Sea of Marmara not
far from central Istanbul. The site was overgrown and rocky, but with some
sprucing up, it made a good bathing spot. Using some old tents lent by the
British, they opened a ragged but welcoming beachfront resort.
Shalikashvili signed up as manager. He was provided food and lodging
on the beach, along with a small salary. He spent his time keeping the beach
clear of debris and supervising the building of changing cabins inside the
big canvas tents. Muslims had their own bathing areas elsewhere in the city,
with rectangles of water curtained off so that women could splash in the sea
without offending anyone’s sensibilities. Florya was open to both men and
women, with no sea curtains to separate the sexes, but it was chastely
placed under the sponsorship of the Princess Eristavi and the Countess
Zarnekow, the wives of its founders, whose titles lent respectability.
With Europeans providing a ready clientele—former Russian subjects
but also members of the Allied occupation forces and their families—
Florya was booming. A property dispute with the widow of a Cossack
general, who had hoped to open her own beachfront establishment on the
same spot, threatened to disrupt the trade, but things were worked out
amicably. The Cossacks supplied the food while the Georgians supervised
the changing rooms. Music was provided by the silken-voiced Snarsky
brothers, late of Georgia’s capital, Tiflis.
For the whole summer season, people arrived in droves, enjoying the
sea as if it were Yalta or one of the other holiday haunts in the old empire.
But as the weather cooled and the skies clouded over, the number of
customers dwindled. The tents were soon folded up and returned to the
British. Shalikashvili’s income likewise dipped, but he heard via a friend
about another venture that two Georgian princes had launched in Pera.
Koki Dadiani and Niko Nizharadze—scions of the princely houses of
Samegrelo and Imereti, one slender and clad in a well-tailored cherkeska,
the other stocky and exuding the air of a bon vivant—opened a small wine
cellar. Located on a Pera side street, Koki and Niko’s, as the place was
usually called, served up hearty soups, wine, and dollops of Georgian
hospitality, with table service provided by the middle-aged widow of a
Russian general and the sister of a storied Russian naval adventurer. Given
his experience in Florya, Shalikashvili was offered a bartending job,
chatting up customers and managing the cash flow.
Koki and Niko’s quickly became something of an unofficial welfare
office for a string of imperial down-and-outers. The Gypsy guitarist Sasha
Makarov, one of the legends of the St. Petersburg cabaret circuit, was
featured as a nightly entertainer. Grizzo, a dashing imperial naval officer,
was put to work roasting shish kebabs. A certain Nelidov, a ne’er-do-well
with apparently no marketable skills, was given the honorary post of legal
counsel, since the princes could not bear to turn him away. Soon, the
princes’ generosity threatened to bankrupt the establishment. Koki’s
gambling and Niko’s drinking hurt the bottom line as well, and the
restaurant was shuttered.
Shalikashvili—who recorded his travails in an unpublished memoir—
was at a loss. He moved out of Pera into inexpensive lodgings in a
predominantly Muslim section of the city. Food was still cheap and
plentiful: mackerel caught fresh and cooked streetside, tinned sardines,
olives, and sticky halva on good days or nothing more than Turkish
flatbread on bad ones. But steady work was hard to find. Some of his
friends found positions with the Allied authorities, serving as warehouse
guards or firefighters. Shalikashvili spent most days trading stories with
other Georgian men in a neighborhood teahouse. Days that had once been
taken up with hunting, cavalry drills, and society masquerades were now
passed just waiting for something to happen. Occasionally someone would
announce that he was going back to Georgia to join the partisan movement
against the Bolsheviks. News would arrive sometime later that he had been
killed. Other young men would leave the teahouse to find a drink and, after
a night of vodka and wine, lose their way in Istanbul’s twisting streets.
Shalikashvili had one skill he could fall back on—his soldiering—and
in time he managed to arrange a billet in the Polish army. Poland had fought
its own war against the Bolsheviks in 1919 and 1920; in fact, it was the
ceasefire in that conflict that had allowed the Red Army to pivot and turn its
full attention to defeating Wrangel’s Whites. Now, the Poles were eager to
entice Georgians, Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis, and others who had been ousted
from their homelands into a kind of anti-Bolshevik foreign legion, the
spearhead of an emerging alliance against Lenin.
None of the great powers had recognized the new Bolshevik regime,
and most were worried that the disease of socialism would spread from
Russia to their own class-bound societies. Revolutionaries had already tried
to topple governments in Germany and Hungary, and Poland was now on
the frontline, coordinating the backlash against the idea of world revolution.
In Istanbul, the Poles led the intelligence-gathering effort against the
Bolsheviks. They continually fed to the Allied authorities whatever bits of
news they could glean from White refugees. They also found plenty of
eager fighting men with very personal reasons for hating the Bolsheviks. In
the autumn of 1922, Shalikashvili left with his brother, David, who had
only recently arrived in Istanbul after being released from Bolshevik
internment in Georgia. They sailed for the Romanian port at Constan a. A
train took the two brothers on to Poland. Their mother and sister were still
in the Caucasus, and neither brother ever saw them—or Georgia, or Istanbul
—again.

Desperation and resourcefulness were the two defining qualities of the

White Russians in Istanbul. Secondhand shops in Pera were filled with the
detritus of past lives being sold on consignment: silver, china, and linen;
random family pictures taken in studios in St. Petersburg and Moscow;
snuff boxes bearing the Romanov crest; porcelain Easter eggs; military
decorations on silk ribbons; Cossack knives and filigreed necklaces; icons
in silver covers; embroidery cut from antique gowns; books and parchment
manuscripts on all topics; miniature portraits of the favorite courtiers of
Catherine the Great.
Like a great migration of souls from one world to the next, talents from
former lives were resurrected in new ways. A twelve-piece balalaika band
performed on the quarterdeck of a British warship in exchange for dinner in
the officers’ wardroom. A professor of mathematics might make an ideal
restaurant cashier. A voluble society matron might become a gossipy
nightclub hostess. Pretty ingénues, who in earlier social seasons would have
debuted at balls in St. Petersburg, could end up in a floor show with blonde
bobs and bare midriffs. From Graveyard Street across the Galata Bridge and
into the warren of alleys around the Grand Bazaar, Russian artists turned
entire neighborhoods into open-air galleries, displaying their landscapes and
portraits to passersby. Other people relied on more basic skills: washing
bodies at the city morgue, selling peppermint-flavored toothpicks, making
rag dolls painted with the face of Sultan Mehmed VI, even chasing down
dockyard rats and selling the skins to furriers.

Window shopping: A woman walking along the Grande Rue, with both an automobile and a
traditional porter, or hamal, in the background.
The Muslim memoirist Ziya Bey recalled being approached at his
export business by a Russian woman who introduced herself as a princess.
He was incredulous, especially once she started naming a string of business
propositions in which she hoped to interest him. Her family had once
controlled a tremendous estate in Crimea, she told him, along with the
rights to several oil wells in the Caucasus. She would gladly sell those
rights for a nominal fee. Ziya Bey explained to her that the offer was
worthless. The Bolshevik government had nationalized all the industrial
firms and recognized no previous owners or any foreign employers. She
tried again: perhaps he would be interested in purchasing some of the
jewels that she had hidden away before her quick departure from Crimea?
That, too, would be useless, Ziya replied, since it was doubtful they could
ever be found; the region had been crisscrossed by armies for years. Even if
they could be located, getting them out of the country would be impossible
because of Bolshevik restrictions on the export of valuable property. The
woman finally settled on one of the few things still in her power to control.
Would Ziya know someone interested in French lessons? That, he said,
might work, and he put the Russian woman in contact with his American
wife, who signed up for occasional conversation practice.
“Constantinople was a completely Russian city,” recalled Georgy
Fyodorov, a soldier in Wrangel’s forces. He remembered the streets of Pera
full of people flogging goods and calling out in Russian:
“Fresh full-flavored donuts!”
“Nuts from Lebanon!”
“Wouldn’t you like some artificial flowers?”
“The Evening Press—latest news in Russian!—get it here!”
“Selling a cheap shirt, completely new! Worn only twice!”
“I’m buying currency—Denikin banknotes, tsarist ones, too!”
Another old soldier remembered an open-air market near the Galata
Tower that offered refugees a chance to trade the many different banknotes
that had been printed by the White forces. Buyers and sellers, standing with
wads of paper in their hands, would call out names of the various types of
Russian money, which circulated as informal currencies among the
refugees.
“I’m buying and selling. Tsarist notes! Romanov ones! Kerenskys!
Dumas! Arkhangelskes! Astrakhans! Tashkents! Kolchaks! And others!”
“I’m selling only Nikolayevs!”
“I’m buying Wrangel and Don notes! I’m paying top price!”
At the Grand Cercle Moscovite, one of the most illustrious restaurants
in the city opened by Russian immigrants, an evening of dinner and dancing
brought a visitor into contact with a cavalcade of diminished lives. The
doorman was a former Cossack of the storied Atamansky Regiment once
commanded by the tsar’s mother. The manager was a former factory owner
from Kiev. The kitchen was run by the former chef at the tsar’s Livadia
Palace in Crimea. The sous-chef had cooked for the Russian governor-
general of the Caucasus. The maître d’ had worked at Yar, the most famous
restaurant in Moscow. His assistant had been an officer in the light infantry
of the Imperial Guards. All the waiters, serving dishes ranging from borscht
to côtelettes à l’Impératrice Catherine IIème, had been officers in the tsar’s
forces or the Volunteer Army. The orchestra played Glinka, Borodin, and
Tchaikovsky; struck up foxtrots, one-steps, tangoes, and waltzes; or ceded
the stage to guitarist Sasha Makarov, eager for work after the closing of
Koki and Niko’s. When you left, the man retrieving your coat or cape was
the former bodyguard of Tsar Nicholas II. “It is the best food I have ever
eaten,” said Billy Fox-Pitt, the Welsh Guardsman, in a letter to his mother,
“but it wouldn’t do to make a habit of it, as one would be very ill as well as
broke!!”

No one understood this world better than an American then living at the
Pera Palace. The French doors in his room opened onto a view of the
Golden Horn, but he had little time to appreciate it. Loose papers lay in
stacks on a small table. Boxes and valises were piled against a wall or
peeked out from under the bed. A typewriter rested on the dresser. He was
so busy that he sometimes appeared at meetings with mismatched socks. By
midmorning, a long line of Russians snaked up from the Orient Bar to his
room on the fourth floor.
Born in 1871 in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, Thomas Whittemore
was named for his grandfather, a prominent Universalist minister and New
England publisher. The pastor’s theology stressed not only the idea that
salvation was a gift eventually available to all people—a basic doctrine of
all Universalists—but also the more radical view that the entire idea of hell
was incompatible with an all-loving God. A belief in the universal
connectedness of humanity was also dear to his namesake. During the First
World War, the younger Whittemore had traveled through Bulgaria and the
Russian Empire—working for the Red Cross, running supply boats to
Crimea, and bringing coats and other clothing to refugee families escaping
the Bolsheviks. When the Russian crisis hit Istanbul, he found himself at
the center of the relief effort. Next to the Allied administration authorities,
he was probably the best-known foreigner in town, at least to the city’s
neediest. Friends called him “The Flying Mystery.” “Whittemore is never in
a place,” wrote one of his closest confidants, the curator and art historian
Matthew Prichard, “he was, he will be; he comes from and is going to; but
is never ‘here.’”
Whittemore was director of the Committee for the Education of Russian
Youth in Exile, which he had founded in 1914 to deal with the brewing
problem of refugees displaced by war. The committee had no offices, no
personnel except for Whittemore and those he could charm or cajole into
helping, and no headquarters other than whichever hotel room he happened
to be occupying. Whittemore’s experience in Russia before the Bolshevik
Revolution had given him a broad familiarity with the range of social
organizations that already existed throughout the empire. Many had quickly
reproduced themselves in exile, and Whittemore knew that they would be
essential to integrating the refugees into new societies. But he also knew
one thing that the Russians themselves had not yet come to understand:
They were in all likelihood never going back.
On most days, the lobby of the Pera Palace was filled with people
waiting to see Whittemore, from artists bringing new paintings for him to
consider for purchase to counts and barons hoping to enlist his aid for their
own charitable organizations. Like the hierarchical country they had fled,
the exiles held fast to the gradations of rank, privilege, and profession that
had framed their lives before the revolution. The hotel’s lounge was a
miniature map of old Russian society, with its many bits and pieces
clustered together in conversation around small tables and armchairs.
Cavalrymen from the Imperial Guards; officers of the Horse Artillery and
the Imperial Navy; veterans of the Russo-Japanese War; recipients of the
Order of St. George; bureaucrats from the ministries of justice, interior, and
foreign affairs; old parliamentarians; engineers, doctors, lawyers, novelists,
and sculptors; Russian Orthodox bishops; Cossacks from the Kuban, Don,
Terek, and Astrakhan regions; Caucasus mountaineers; Muslims from the
Black Sea coast; Buddhists from Siberia; and councilmen from local
administrative bodies, or zemstvos—all had regrouped in the months
following Wrangel’s retreat and were now competing for the limited
resources supplied by the Allies and other donors.
Left to their own devices, the leaders of each of these communities
would spend much of their time quarreling with one another, much as they
had done during the civil war. Part of Whittemore’s task was to stitch
together the competing factions, especially by mobilizing the energetic
countesses who daily streamed into the Pera Palace looking for things to do.
Only a few weeks after Wrangel’s exodus from Crimea, a registration
bureau had been set up to record the names of the refugees, list their
particular skills, and reconnect families. Ladies were assigned to go from
camp to camp collecting names and filing the information on cheap cards in
old cigar boxes.
Training was the key to starting new lives, and Whittemore set about
creating a purpose-built education system. Not far from the center of Pera,
he located a small plot of land on which several large tents could be erected.
Young Russian men were given bunks in the tents, where they could sleep
after coming home from their day jobs as hamals (porters), salesmen, or
deliverymen. Toward evening, the hamals would arrive with their special
backpacks on which they carried heavy loads. Street hawkers would return
carting unsold chocolates and paper flowers. Newsboys came in with papers
that they would sell the next day for half price. Water vendors brought in
clean Standard Oil cans that could be used in their trade, while fishermen
mended nets and street sweepers repaired their brooms.
But then the real work began. Whittemore had organized the tent
encampment not just as a refugee home but also as a placement center.
Through countless letters to foreign universities, he managed to secure
hundreds of places for Russian students who were sufficiently talented to
pass the basic entrance examinations. Each night, after a supper of soup and
bread, the tents became study halls, with Russian professors providing
tutoring in mathematics, engineering, physics, biology, and chemistry.
Students who had already had some university coursework assisted those
with only secondary education or military training.
In time, an attestation commission was organized among former
members of the prestigious Russian Imperial Academy, which certified that
the students had reached a level of expertise qualifying them for admission
to universities in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Germany,
Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. After weeks of waiting to hear about the
universities’ final decisions, the tents would fall silent when a letter for a
student arrived from Paris or Prague. At an annual awards ceremony held in
a former Ottoman army barracks, each student would don a makeshift
version of Russian national costume—a pair of white pajamas supplied by
the Red Cross, cinched at the waist with a belt—and cross the stage to
receive a diploma from a professor in a threadbare suit. They were now
graduates of an informal finishing school with its administrative offices in
the Pera Palace, and their diplomas entitled them to enroll in prestigious
institutions ranging from Charles University to the Sorbonne. By the
autumn of 1921, hundreds of students had made their way to Europe, some
traveling in boxcars, to start new lives. Many more would follow.
Whittemore’s records, diligently kept by archivists in New York down to
the present day, contain more than a thousand individual student files with
names that read like the guest list from a Russian imperial ball—
Volkonskys, Ostrogorskys, Kuznetsovs, Tolstoys, Ignatievs—the paper trail
of an entire world in the process of picking itself up and moving somewhere
else.
“[H]aving acquired useful learning while in exile, the young folk, upon
their return to Russia, will form the nucleus of educated workers, destined
to labour in the task of rebuilding our country,” Wrangel wrote to
Whittemore, expressing his profound gratitude for the committee’s work.
Even then, however, in the mid-1920s, this was optimistic boosterism.
Shortly before he gave the order to evacuate Crimea, Wrangel had reassured
his officers that the retreat would be only a period of rest and re-equipping,
to be followed by an “attempt to wrest victory from the hands of the
enemy.” A little belt-tightening now, and they would be home as soon as the
Bolsheviks had exhausted themselves—by the autumn of 1921 at the latest,
Dmitri Shalikashvili predicted. But soon the White Russians began to cross
the mental borderland between flight and exile. The extraordinary
circumstances of losing a war were now giving way to the heartbreaking
reality that the loss would be permanent.
Whittemore’s students were the last generation of the empire, and it was
gradually dawning on them that they might well be the first generation of
something else. They had become modern versions of les ci-devants, as
French revolutionaries had called the washed-up nobility in 1789. The
Bolsheviks had a similar name for them: byvshie, or “former people.”
Countess Vera Tolstoy, a cousin of Leo Tolstoy and one of Whittemore’s
supporters, summarized the situation in an essay for the Atlantic Monthly.
“If the . . . martyrs of the French Revolution showed their butchers how
nobles die,” she wrote from her small house on the outskirts of Istanbul,
“we, the victims of Bolshevist crime, who have yet escaped with our lives,
shall show them how to live.”
KONSTANTINOUPOLIS
A man running to catch an electrified Istanbul trolley car.
A FTER THE END OF the Russian civil war, there were perhaps around
860,000 former Russian subjects living abroad as refugees from war and
revolution, ethnic Russians as well as representatives of just about every
cultural group of the old empire. Many of them were concentrated in
Istanbul. The city had shrunk from nearly a million people before the First
World War to perhaps seven hundred thousand after the 1918 armistice.
Fears of a wartime invasion by Greece, followed by the prospect of Turkish
nationalists’ exacting revenge in the occupied city, on the model of their
reconquest of Smyrna, had pushed civilians—Muslims and non-Muslims
alike—to flee. As a result, the Russian invasion represented a staggering
increase in the city’s overall population. A refugee crisis had become a
demographic revolution.
Émigrés is the name societies give to immigrants they happen to like,
and it was the smallest of victories that White Russians managed to acquire
that label in Paris, New York, and just about everywhere else they landed.
In Istanbul, though, Turkish slang referred to them as the “Goodies,” the
hara olar, from the Russian term for “good” or “fine.” The Russian word is
a commonplace of everyday speech, but the Turkish variant was a cruel
joke. Russians were not doing fine at all. Throughout much of the 1920s, if
you encountered a beggar on the street in certain quarters of Istanbul, it was
almost certain that he or she would speak Russian.
Letters about individual cases flowed into relief organizations in the city
and to charitable groups as far afield as New York and Washington, DC.
Aleksei Sterladkin, a blind man who had made his living by playing the
harmonium on the Grande Rue, appealed for assistance when the police
accused him of illegal begging. A Mr. Tcherniavsky, formerly a singer with
the Russian imperial opera, requested that relief workers pass along
information about his upcoming concert in Istanbul. Father Michel
Vassilieff asked for a small contribution toward organizing an Easter meal
for destitute Russian-speaking Christians. A Princess Shakhovskaya wrote
to request a visa for getting herself and her husband, a musician with the
Tokatlian Hotel orchestra, to the United States.
The problem for the refugees was not simply Istanbul’s sluggish
postwar economy, which affected Turks and Russians alike, but rather the
peculiar way in which their prospects intersected with international politics.
On July 24, 1923, Allied and Turkish negotiators finally signed a peace
treaty ending the state of hostilities that had existed since 1914. Brokered
by the League of Nations, the Treaty of Lausanne allowed the Allies to
untangle themselves from the occupation, preserve some degree of dignity
in the exit, and legitimize Mustafa Kemal’s government as the successor to
the deposed sultan. Years had passed since the 1918 armistice, and during
that time the political and military situation in Turkey had changed
profoundly. The country was no longer ruled by a faltering emperor. It was
now headed by an elected parliament and a confident commander in chief
who had pushed out foreign invaders and encircled the former capital with
loyal troops. Unlike the treaties with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and
Bulgaria, Lausanne was the only peace accord negotiated with, rather than
simply imposed on, a belligerent power that the Allies had earlier defeated
on the battlefield.
The treaty confirmed the state of peace with Turkey, defined its
frontiers, and dealt with a range of arcane but vital issues left over from the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire, such as how old life insurance policies
were to be handled and which creditors could claim their share of the
Ottoman public debt. When the signing was announced, Istanbullus fired
rifles in the air and beat drums in the streets. Portraits of Mustafa Kemal
sprouted in windows and on walls. Allied soldiers found themselves in a
weaker position than ever before. “It is a humiliating business for any body
out here,” wrote Billy Fox-Pitt to his parents in England. “We are not
treated with the least respect now by the Turk, the French with still less, and
the Italians are ignored of course.”
The announcement of the Lausanne accord formally began the
countdown to the Allied departure, which took several months to
coordinate. There were still nearly 15,000 British soldiers in the city,
including Yorkshire infantrymen, Royal Marines, and kilted Scottish
highlanders, along with small contingents from other Allied powers. After
months of preparation, on October 2, 1923, General Harington and his wife
were joined by detachments of Grenadier, Coldstream, and Irish Guards as
they made their way to the port. Huge crowds had gathered at the quay to
watch the Allied commander inspect honor guards of British, French,
Italian, and Turkish troops. Harington saluted each national flag in turn,
ending with the Turkish crescent and star, which caused the crowd to surge
forward with cheers and hurrahs.
In short order, the general and his military escort boarded the flagship
Arabic and sailed south out of the Bosphorus, bound for Malta, Gibraltar,
and finally England. “It was a wonderful ‘send off’ from a so-called enemy
country,” he recalled. The only official reminder of the occupation was his
headquarters’ Union Jack, which Harington gave to the Anglican church in
Galata, where it remains on display today. Four days later, on October 6,
Turkish troops marched into the city and assumed full control. Later in the
month, on October 23, the Grand National Assembly in Ankara declared the
creation of the Turkish Republic, with Mustafa Kemal as president.
For the White Russians, all of this was unsettling, not least because the
new republic’s closest international partner was the government that had
caused them to flee their homeland in the first place. Lenin had been a
major supporter of Mustafa Kemal’s anti-occupation resistance. The
Bolsheviks had supplied arms during the war of independence, and Moscow
had been the first world capital to establish diplomatic relations with the
Turkish nationalists, sending a mission to Ankara while Istanbul was still
being patrolled by British troops.
But Russian loyalties were divided. By one estimate, perhaps ten
percent of the exiles were actively supportive of the Bolshevik cause, either
as paid agents or as sympathizers who believed it was possible, even
desirable, to reconcile with the de facto regime in Moscow. Prominent
members of the White Russian emigration decided to make their peace with
the Bolsheviks and returned to Russia. Some were promptly shot there, but
others became vocal proponents of the transformation that Lenin seemed to
be enacting.
In December 1922, the Bolshevik government had declared former
Russian subjects living abroad to be outside the protection of the emerging
Soviet state. Whites who had not managed to gain citizenship in their new
homelands were now officially stateless. A host government could expel
them as illegal immigrants, and no other government was obliged to receive
them. They were people with no official status in international law. The
League of Nations then stepped in, issuing so-called Nansen passports—
named for the Norwegian explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen, the
League’s high commissioner for refugees—to hundreds of thousands of
Russians around the world. That document provided them with a stopgap
status that prevented their being automatically deported. But for Russians in
Istanbul, the clock seemed to be running out. By 1923, the former Russian
Embassy on the Grande Rue had been transferred to Soviet control, and the
government in Ankara put increasing pressure on its White Russian guests
either to move out of the country or adopt Turkish citizenship. With the
arrival of trade delegations and diplomats from the Soviet Union, old
enemies were increasingly coming into contact. It was perfectly possible for
two people who had faced off across a battlefield during the Russian civil
war to be looking at one another across the dance floor of the Grand Cercle
Moscovite.
Over the course of the 1920s, Istanbul’s Russian community dwindled.
Wrangel’s Volunteer Army had spent the early part of the decade drilling at
Gallipoli with wooden weapons and white tunics made from hospital
gowns, their regimental insignia fashioned from velvet piping recycled
from ladies’ dresses. But arrangements were soon made to pack off the ex-
army to Bulgaria and Serbia, where former officers and men were put to
work building roads and manning other construction projects. Thomas
Whittemore’s students likewise left for Prague and other university towns
where faculties promised admission and stipends. Other people moved to
Hungary, France, Britain, or whatever country would supply a visa. Dmitri
Shalikashvili, the memoirist and soldier who had helped create the seaside
bathing establishment at Florya, first departed for Poland and then served
briefly in the German army. He later moved to the United States, where he
spent the remainder of his life. After his death, his body was returned to his
ancestral village in Georgia by his son, John Shalikashvili, by that time the
chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The old elites departed, too. The Tolstoys ended up in Paris. Wrangel
died in Brussels. Denikin—who had passed through Istanbul as he escaped
abroad—had a fatal heart attack while vacationing in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
He remained buried there for almost fifty years, until Russian president
Vladimir Putin had him dug up and reinterred in Moscow, an attempt to
appropriate an exiled nationalist for Putin’s own regime.

The departure of most of the Russians relieved Istanbul of the burden of

caring for them, but the end of the crisis did not transform the city into a
model of order. The daily pandemonium of urban life could still be
overwhelming. “[A]nything more like a lunatic asylum than Haidar Pasha
Station cannot be imagined,” recalled Agatha Christie on her first visit in
the 1920s. En route to visit her husband, Max Mallowan, an archaeologist
digging in Iraq, she bypassed the Pera Palace and stayed at the Tokatlian
Hotel on the Grande Rue, which had been recommended to her by a
dashing Dutch engineer she had met on the Orient Express. In fact, it was
the Tokatlian—not the Pera Palace—where she eventually chose to lodge
her Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, in Murder on the Orient Express,
which she published in 1934. The front door of the Pera Palace opened onto
narrow streets that quickly gave way to slums. The Tokatlian’s windows
faced the comparative order of nineteenth-century façades and a wide,
European-style avenue.
At that point, the city was part of an emerging nation-state, not an
empire, but any newsagent would have laughed at the idea that Istanbullus
might ever be squeezed into a single national identity. Just before the
foundation of the Turkish Republic, Istanbul had eleven newspapers in
Ottoman Turkish, seven in Greek, six in French, five in Armenian, four in
Ladino and other languages spoken by local Jews, and one in English—the
Orient News, which became the mouthpiece of the British administration. A
short stroll down the Grande Rue led past a Greek Orthodox cathedral, a
mosque, and two Roman Catholic churches. If you stepped into a few side
streets along the way, you would come across other churches belonging to
Armenian Catholics, Armenian Gregorians, Chaldeans, Anglicans, and
German Protestants. Four synagogues and several other mosques clung to
the slopes leading down through the Galata neighborhood.
A sense of outrage had propelled the Kemalists against Hellenic troops
in Anatolia, and it was matched by a sense of relief among Istanbul’s
Muslims when nationalist forces eventually took control of the city from the
Allies. But for local Christians, there was a growing fear that the new
Turkish government would exact revenge on those deemed disloyal to the
state. During the time of the effective dual Allied–Kemalist administration
of municipal affairs—from the autumn of 1922 through the end of the
occupation a year later—Turkish authorities had already begun arresting
Greeks who had either worked for the Allies or had actively supported
Hellenic territorial claims. Greeks were by no means the only targets;
antinationalist Muslims were also arrested and, in some cases, executed.
But with so much of the city’s commerce visibly in the hands of Greeks,
that community naturally came in for the bulk of nationalist ire. Greeks
might be accosted in the street or find their property spontaneously seized
by a Muslim mob. Many worried about what would happen once the city
came under full Turkish control. In response, some 50,000 non-Muslims,
including some of the city’s wealthiest families, departed at the end of
1922. Another exodus accompanied the 1923 withdrawal of the Allies, the
last stratum of protection that Greeks believed lay between them and the
new Turkish state.
The war and the occupation also deepened divisions within Istanbul’s
Greek community. Who properly spoke for the interests of the Greek nation
and its diaspora: the Hellenic state, centered in Athens, or the Greek
Orthodox patriarch in Istanbul, the clearest direct successor to Greek-
speaking Byzantium? Disputes between pro-Hellenic and pro-patriarchal
factions sometimes erupted into violence. In the summer of 1923, a band of
Hellenic nationalists broke into the patriarchate, interrupted a meeting with
other Orthodox leaders, and dragged the patriarch, Meletios IV, down a
staircase, leaving him bruised and bloodied, before the melee was stopped
by Allied police. After brushing himself off, the patriarch promptly
excommunicated the leaders of the invading mob. Fed up with the internal
fighting and rattled by the attack, Meletios soon left Istanbul aboard a
British ship and retired to a quiet monastery on Mount Athos. A new
patriarch was eventually elected from within the Istanbul Greek community,
but challenges from Hellenic nationalists and other rivals remained. In
1924, for example, secessionists established their own Turkish Orthodox
Church, an assemblage of Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians who
denied the authority of the Phanar patriarchate to govern them.
An even greater problem for non-Muslim religious leaders such as the
Greek Orthodox patriarch, as well as for their communities, lay in the
breakdown of the old millet system. Muslim and non-Muslim subjects of
the sultan had never been fully equal, but inequality and hierarchy were
multifaceted. One’s station in the complex society of the empire was
determined not just by religion but also by one’s gender, profession, and
many other categories. When Ottoman authorities looked out on their own
population, they saw a patchwork of many different kinds of authority,
status, and privilege.
The Turkish Republic was a different thing entirely, even if some of its
key features had their origins in the Ottoman era. The republic replaced the
concept of an imperial subject with modern citizenship, loyalty to the
person of the sultan with commitment to the ideals of a secular state, and
the crosscutting identities of the old empire with the singular concept of the
ethnically defined nation. When the republic adopted its first constitution,
in 1924, all citizens were guaranteed equal rights regardless of religion, but
in practice the differences were stark, thanks to the introduction of a new
legal concept—an ethnic minority—that had largely been absent from the
Ottoman imagination.
The new idea was enshrined deep inside the peace accord that had
ended the First World War. The Treaty of Lausanne had paved the way for
the Allied departure and the entry of Turkish troops into Istanbul, but a
major point of contention during the negotiations had been the status of
Greeks and other non-Muslims. Turkish negotiators had originally proposed
the expulsion of the entire Greek population of Istanbul. If allowed to
remain, Greeks would be “the means of importing corruption and disloyalty
into our country,” insisted the chief Turkish delegate, smet Pasha. The
Hellenic government, in turn, argued that it had already received massive
numbers of Greek refugees from the Ottoman Empire, and adding even
more would create a humanitarian disaster. Moreover, formally expelling
Greeks and other non-Muslims would reduce Istanbul to a shell—a great
center of civilization that would be denuded of its business elite and
Christian heritage.
In the end, negotiators reached a compromise. When the Lausanne
treaty was signed in July 1923, Article 142 confirmed a separate agreement
reached by the governments in Athens and Ankara. A mandatory expulsion
of minorities would take place, with the two countries agreeing to
“exchange” each other’s coreligionists. Certain categories of Greek
Orthodox living in Istanbul and on two small Aegean islands, along with
Muslims living in the Hellenic territory of western Thrace, would be
exempt—an exception that acknowledged the vital role of Greeks in
Istanbul’s economy and the age-old presence of Muslims in Greece. People
caught up in the exchange were compelled to leave their homelands and
resettle in the other state. They were legally prohibited from ever returning
to their homes without the express permission of their former government.
Special intergovernmental commissions were created to determine which
families were to be considered “exchangeable” and therefore subject to
forced migration—that is, to determine officially who was Greek Orthodox
and who Muslim, even if the families practiced no particular religion or
were of mixed heritage. The commissions also assessed the value of the
property they left behind, the sale of which was to be managed by the
Hellenic and Turkish states. Few people received adequate compensation,
however. “[T]oday thousands of once-prosperous people are walking the
streets of Constantinople and Athens without funds,” noted a contemporary
report, “and with only a slip of paper bearing an inventory for their
property, for which they were to be reimbursed in their new land.”
The exchange was meant to true up the lines of religion, ethnicity, and
citizenship, and historians sometimes refer to the refugees created by the
Lausanne accord with the shorthand labels of “Greeks” and “Turks.” But
those terms would have seemed bizarre to the refugees themselves. The
exchange commissions relied on essentially the same criteria for
determining personal identity as the Ottoman Empire had used—religious
confession—but pasted onto that old category a new, wholly ethnic label. In
this mash-up of imperial and national ways of seeing the world, the
mandatory exchange included a great many people whose identities had
little in common with the ethnic nationalism at the core of the Hellenic
kingdom and the emerging Turkish Republic. In this great unmixing of
peoples, individuals were assigned to one and only one identity. A Greek
Orthodox family might speak Turkish and have roots in the same Anatolian
village extending back many generations. A Greek- or Slavic-speaking
Muslim in Greece might similarly have had little in common with the
culture of the Turkish Republic. But in the exchange, the former was
declared a Greek and the latter a Turk, with both shipped off to a foreign
but allegedly co-ethnic home.
The same treaty that ended the First World War also sought to avert
future ones. Its method was to remove people from their homes so that no
future government could use the desire to liberate them as a reason for war
—a prophylactic form of reciprocal exile. “There appeared to be no doubt
that this plan would give good results in the future, by creating more
homogeneous populations and removing one chief cause of the endless
conflicts, often attended by massacres, in the Near East,” said one of the
plan’s originators, Fridtjof Nansen—the same League of Nations official
who had worked tirelessly to improve the plight of the exiled Russians.
If one includes the people who had already fled in both directions over
the previous year or so, the Lausanne treaty mandated the compulsory exile
of around a million Greek Orthodox and five hundred thousand Muslims. In
the short term, Lausanne did remove one of the major sources of conflict
between two neighbors whose brutal fighting had dragged on long after the
end of the First World War. Over the longer term, Lausanne remade the
demographic landscape—uprooting ancient communities, creating whole
villages of displaced refugees, and making both countries more ethnically
homogeneous than they had been in modern history.
Traces of the past survived, however. An inscription on a private
building in Istanbul might identify its Greek architect or former proprietor,
while one of Greece’s premier soccer teams, PAOK, still contains the name
Constantinople in its title, since it was originally founded in Ottoman-era
Istanbul. The passage of time has transformed mutual ethnic cleansing into
a version of homeland tourism, with Greeks going to visit the old family
apartment building in Pera and Turks seeking to find the destroyed walls of
a neighborhood mosque in the old city center of Thessaloniki, the former
Salonica. Today bus tours take aging Turks through the towns and villages
of northern Greece where their parents or grandparents once lived. Turkish
Airlines runs multiple daily flights between Istanbul and Thessaloniki,
where tens of thousands of Greeks began their new lives as Hellenes and
from where thousands of Muslims began their journey toward becoming
Turks. To Turks, the forced migration has come to be called the Büyük
Mübadele, or the “Great Exchange.” To Greeks, it is still known simply as
the Katastroph .
Lausanne was a schizophrenic treaty. Parts of it contained a blueprint for
uprooting a million and a half people. Other portions seemed a
multiculturalist’s model for protecting the rights of minorities. Since the
treaty allowed for some individuals and groups to remain behind in their old
homelands, an entire section was devoted to the reciprocal obligations that
Turkey and Greece undertook toward these legal holdouts—principally the
Greek Orthodox of Istanbul and the Muslims of western Thrace—such as
equality before the law, free exercise of religion, and primary-school
education in native languages. The duties of a modern state toward its
ethnic minorities replaced the old Ottoman concept of the religiously
defined millet.
Had history unwound differently, Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiades—
the proprietor of the Pera Palace in the first years of the Allied occupation
—would have been among this protected few. But like tens of thousands of
others who feared reprisals by the new Turkish government, Bodosakis
decided to leave Istanbul at some point in the early 1920s and fled to
Athens. The Pera Palace continued to operate, as did many other minority-
owned businesses in the city, even with an absent owner. Once the Allies
departed the city, however, properties such as these naturally became the
principal targets of Turkey’s effort to undo the economic power of non-
Muslims. At the time, there were perhaps 40,000 “non-exchangeable”
Greeks living abroad, people who had voluntarily left Turkey but were not
legally subject to mandatory removal. Their absence was now deemed a
sign of disloyalty. They had voted with their feet, the Turkish government
declared, and had clearly decided to make their lives elsewhere. In the
spring of 1923, new legislation passed by the parliament in Ankara allowed
for the state to seize the properties “abandoned” by these nonresident
citizens, even if the owners had made provisions for transferring their assets
to a local relative or business partner.
On the eve of the Allied occupation, Istanbul’s Chamber of Commerce
and Industry had been cochaired by a Muslim and an Armenian, with
eleven of its fourteen core members drawn from Istanbul’s Christian and
Jewish minorities. By early 1921, the cochairs were both Muslim, as were
thirteen of its nineteen members. In 1923, the government established the
National Turkish Commercial Union to represent the interests of Muslim
merchants and coordinate the acquisition of industries, import–export firms,
and financial institutions formerly held by non-Muslims. Foreign banks and
businesses were pressured to fire their minority employees and hire
Muslims instead.
Two-thirds of the Greek barristers in the Istanbul bar were dismissed.
Greek trade unions were shuttered. Greek-owned businesses were
threatened with legal action for small infractions or encouraged—
sometimes forced—to take on a Muslim partner. These new associates
could then petition the government to have a Greek co-owner designated as
“exchangeable” under the Lausanne accord, with that co-owner’s share of
the business then going to the Muslim partner who remained behind. In
1925 and 1926 meetings of local Greeks, Armenians, and Jews formally
renounced any collective rights afforded to these communities under the
Lausanne treaty. The renunciations came only after significant pressure
from the Turkish government, but they represented the definitive end of any
claim to special treatment based on religious confession or ethnic category.
When Ankara announced the creation of an alcohol monopoly in 1926,
putting the production and sale of intoxicants solely under the control of a
state-licensed firm, one of the major fields of non-Muslim commercial
activity in Istanbul also became fully nationalized.
In 1923, the Pera Palace—one of the city’s foremost properties with an
absentee landowner—was declared the property of the state. The move was
nominally meant to provide compensation to the national treasury for
Bodosakis’s unpaid tax bills. However, four years later, in May 1927, a new
law declared that all former Ottoman subjects who had not returned to
Turkey since the war of independence—including the hotel’s old Greek
proprietor—were not to be considered Turkish citizens. For Bodosakis, this
change meant that his own position was in some ways worse than that of
the “exchangeable” Greeks who had lived outside Istanbul. While the latter
were able in theory to gain compensation for the property they left behind
—in some cases, even being assigned new farmland or housing in Greece—
the “non-exchangeable” people who left Istanbul of their own accord had
none. Lausanne had removed a million Greeks from the Turkish population
on ships and trains. The 1927 law removed tens of thousands more with the
stroke of a pen.
These reforms were part of an entire package of legislation, public
campaigns, and city ordinances that intentionally reduced the public
visibility and economic power of minorities. The new Turkish Republic
rejected the confessional, multiethnic, and imperial structures of the
Ottomans in favor of those of a nation-state. At best, that vision enabled
equal citizenship before the law by doing away with the stovepiping system
of religious self-government favored by the Ottomans. At worst, it involved
making Muslim Turks the core nation within the new state and relegating
everyone else to second-class status. Schools operated by non-Muslim
religious institutions or private foundations were required to employ a
specific percentage of Muslim teachers and were prevented from including
references to religion in their curriculum. Boy Scout troops formed by
minority communities were outlawed. Placards in public venues proclaimed
Citizen, Speak Turkish! For most of the 1920s, non-Muslims living in
Istanbul were prevented from traveling outside the city, an attempt to
sequester ethnic differences inside the old capital. Armenians in particular
were expressly prohibited from settling in eastern Anatolia, the region that
had been the ancient center of Armenian culture and the heart of darkness
during the genocide. In 1934, a new law required all Turkish citizens to take
surnames—something few Turkish Muslims had used before—but
expressly forbade people from registering names that had recognizably non-
Turkish endings, such as “-poulos” for Greeks, “-ian” for Armenians, and “-
off” or “-vich” for Slavs and Jews.
The former Greek patriarch, Meletios, compared Ankara’s policies to
“Moscow-style Bolshevik Communism,” and in some ways he was not far
wrong. The Ankara government had taken a lesson from the Bolshevik
experience. Just as the new Soviet Union had declared White Russians to be
outside the protection of the new state, so too the Turkish Republic cut ties
with its old rivals—Greeks and other minorities—now living abroad. Both
expropriations stemmed from common sources: the belief that the victors
were leading a world-changing political movement, that to the victors
belong the spoils, and that the vanquished were little more than spongers
and parasites—leftovers from an old and decrepit social order who were
now getting their just deserts.
For the Turkish government, and for plenty of average Muslims, the forced
expropriations provided a moment of cosmic justice. From their
perspective, the rapacious minorities who had bled the Ottomans dry,
collaborated with the Allied occupiers, and turned their backs on the war of
independence would at last be supplanted by true patriots. To the minorities,
it could seem like the end of the world. “I stood on the dusty, rubbish-
strewn hillside of Pera . . . and looked down at the harbor, forested with
masts and grimy with smoky funnels. . . . It all looked unreal and
impossible,” Ernest Hemingway wrote in the Toronto Daily Star. “But it
was very real to the people who were looking back at the city where they
were leaving their homes and business, all their associations and their
livelihoods. . . .”
Fortunes were lost, and Greeks and other business leaders were ruined.
Some were left penniless, wandering the unfamiliar streets of Athens and
Thessaloniki. Others, despondent, took their own lives. Turkish newspapers
regularly ran sensational stories of desperation and revenge. Just up the
street from the Pera Palace, at Hemingway’s old haunt, the Hôtel de
Londres, the Greek operator, Kofakos, was pushed into bankruptcy in 1928.
Some time later, he showed up on the hotel’s doorstep, by then a beggar,
and was sent away. He returned with a pistol and shot one of the hotel
employees dead.
Unlike these cases, however, Bodosakis landed on his feet. The Pera
Palace was only one part of his considerable wealth, much of which he had
managed to move out of Turkey. In Athens he started new businesses that,
in time, would make him one of Greece’s most formidable industrialists,
with interests in virtually every sector of the economy. Many of the contacts
he had made in the lobby of the Pera Palace—not least the British soldiers,
German businessmen, and French merchants who inevitably stayed there
while in Istanbul—may have fueled his meteoric rise from migrant to
magnate. As proprietor of the Greek Powder and Cartridge Company,
Bodosakis became the largest arms manufacturer in Greece, producing rifle
cartridges of all calibers, explosives, antiaircraft grenades, gas masks, and
boilers for naval vessels.
In the late 1930s, his business expanded to include silk and wool
production, shipbuilding, and wine and liquor sales. During the Spanish
Civil War, he supplied weapons to both the Left and the Right. In the run-up
to the Second World War, he assiduously balanced his business interests by
supplying both British and German war machines. “He was renowned as a
keen-brained businessman who knew how best to turn a keg of dynamite, a
block of foreign exchange or a parcel of real estate to his economic and
political advantage,” said an exposé in Collier’s magazine in 1940. “He is to
this war what the goateed late Sir Basil Zaharoff”—the arms-dealing
Istanbul Greek and a generation Bodosakis’s elder—“was to the last World
War.” When Bodosakis died, in 1979, his business interests stretched from
the munitions industry to wine production, chemicals, and shipbuilding. He
was simply “the most powerful man in Greek industry,” according to a
historian of the subject, and the charitable foundation established by his
family became one of the country’s most illustrious philanthropic
organizations, dedicated to rewarding work in the sciences and medicine
and spreading Hellenic culture.
Meanwhile, the Pera Palace languished in a legal netherworld. In the
summer of 1927, at the time when absentee property owners were being
stripped of their Turkish citizenship, the hotel was transferred from the
treasury to the state-controlled Emlak Bank. A few months later, in
December 1927, it seems to have been purchased by a Muslim
businessman, Misbah Muhayye , who formally registered his ownership in
the municipal property records in 1928. Originally from Beirut and, like
Bodosakis, a relative newcomer to Istanbul, Muhayye was an early
supporter of the Turkish nationalists, with ties to Mustafa Kemal that
stretched back before the First World War. During the war of independence,
Muhayye had turned his old family business—textiles—toward the
Kemalist cause, supplying uniforms to the struggling nationalist army.
Those connections allowed Muhayye to be granted Turkish citizenship and,
with a clear understanding of which way the political winds were blowing,
he managed to acquire the nominally abandoned hotel.
He picked up where the Greek family had left off, sprucing up the bar,
polishing the brass on the elevator, and restoring something of the hotel’s
reputation as the obvious place to stay for travelers from Europe or farther
afield. The old address, which people had previously known as the corner
of Graveyard and Thugs Streets, had undergone a makeover as well. The
city authorities had given the road outside the front door the more stately
name of Me rutiyet (Constitution) Avenue. The hotel was now in Muslim
hands, and in the alchemy of personal identity and republican politics,
Muhayye —despite being an Arab—also became a Turk, someone who had
demonstrated loyalty to the nation and was now reaping the appropriate
rewards. Bespectacled and balding, with a devil-may-care bow tie and
pocket square, he was the very image of the new generation of Istanbullus
taking over from the Greeks. His family’s summer home in the surburb of
Yeniköy, an Orientalist fantasy of cupolas and mitered eaves, is still one of
the grandest residences on the Bosphorus.
Istanbul’s non-Muslim minorities fell from an estimated 56 percent in
1900 to 35 percent by the late 1920s. Other cities had more dramatic
decreases. Izmir, the former Smyrna, went from 62 percent non-Muslim to
14 percent. Erzurum, in far eastern Anatolia, a city almost wholly emptied
of Armenians by the genocide, fell from 32 percent non-Muslim to 0.1
percent. But the demographic revolution changed virtually everything in the
old minority neighborhoods of Istanbul. In the rush to leave, Greeks,
Armenians, and Jews dumped the contents of their houses and apartments
onto the secondhand market, hoping to gain at least a small amount of cash
before boarding a ship or train. The flood of furniture, dishware,
phonographs, and pianos was so great that importers of new household
items found public demand at a standstill, swamped by the easy availability
of cheap used goods.
Turkey as a whole became more Muslim, more Turkish, more
homogeneous, and more rural—because of the flight of non-Muslim
minorities from the cities—than it had ever been. Some of the families who
would go on to become the mainstays of Istanbul’s economy emerged in
ways not dissimilar to that of Muhayye : keeping an eye on changing
fortunes and translating political connections into economic advantage once
the Greek and other minority businesses went up for sale. There was
nothing necessarily dishonest in their dealings, at least at the level of
individual transactions, but they rested on a massive transfer of wealth
whose origins lay in the republic’s preference for national purity over the
old cosmopolitanism of the imperial capital. Where a generation earlier the
power elite of Istanbul would have stressed magnificence and splendor as
their defining traits, clad in brocaded uniforms and luxurious silks, the new
Turkish mandarins emphasized the very thing that the old Ottomans had
lacked: quiet confidence and a sense of easy superiority. These men and
their families now sat for portraits in tailored suits and fashionable Western-
style dresses, looking out at the viewer and, like bourgeois everywhere,
eager to record themselves at their most attractive and secure.
The seizure of minority properties was an intentional policy, but it was
treated by generations of average Istanbullus and their historians as a
windfall. If the owners had left during the Allied occupation, they were
remembered as having simply abandoned their homes and businesses,
quietly locking the door and walking away from the wealth that had taken
generations to acquire. In reality, of course, they had been legally prevented
from returning to claim their holdings. For visitors today, the entire history
of this transformation is on display in the lobby of the Pera Palace itself.
Portraits of Bodosakis and Muhayye , the two proprietors who took the
hotel from empire to republic, hang across from each other outside the
Orient Bar—one the target of state policies, the other their roundabout
beneficiary, and each clearly confident, in the moment he was captured on
canvas or on film, that the city belonged to people like him.
“THE POST-WAR WORLD WAS
JAZZING”
The old guard: Former “black eunuchs” of the Ottoman imperial harem, at a meeting in the late
1920s or 1930s.
T HE CHOICEST ROOMS IN the Pera Palace were located near the southwestern
corner of the building. From there, the windows looked out on the Golden
Horn and the thin neighborhoods that had once marked the farthest reaches
of the Ottoman city. In the distance, a dark band of parkland had been a
favorite picnic spot for Ottoman beys and their families. Veiled ladies had
once sat demurely on the grass while children frolicked amid wiry acacia
trees or splashed in the twin creeks that emptied into the Golden Horn.
After the end of the empire, ferries still chugged upstream to deposit
weekenders. Some were headed to the village of Eyüp and the türbe, or
mausoleum, of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, one of the companions of the Prophet
Muhammad, which had long been a pilgrimage site for devout Muslims.
Others could be seen making for the trees of Ka ıthane, which offered
picnic spots and seclusion for courting lovers. Over the years, the city had
crept into the sparsely wooded areas. Sunset at the Pera Palace made these
newer neighborhoods glow. The fading pink and orange sunlight reflected
off red tile roofs and plaster façades as lanterns and houselights came up
after the late-afternoon call to prayer.
It wasn’t only the view that made the southwest side of the Pera Palace
the most desirable, however. Since it was the farthest away from the bars
and clubs of the old Graveyard Street, it was also the only part of the hotel
where a patron could expect a decent night’s sleep. At the time of the Allied
occupation, Ernest Hemingway had worried about what would happen to
Istanbul’s nightlife once the Muslims took over the city from the British,
French, and Italians. Rumor had it that the Turkish nationalists, bowing to
Islamic convention, had outlawed cardplaying and upended backgammon
tables in the areas already under their control. “The man who raises a thirst
somewhere east of Suez is going to be unable to slake it in Constantinople
once Kemal enters the city,” Hemingway predicted.
But in fact the city seemed to sprout new bars, restaurants, variety
theaters, and cafés chantants by the week. “Beauty and wit and laughter and
song were exalted and worshipped,” recalled an American visitor. Small
beer halls opened in the tiniest of venues. Even a room that could fit only a
few tables featured its own small orchestra. Local entrepreneurs knew an
opportunity when they saw it, and the shifts in Istanbul’s population could
be gauged by the drinking spots that arose to service specific subcategories
of newcomers. Tom’s Lancashire Bar, run by an immigrant from Salonica,
made a play for British clients from the north of England, while St. James’s
Brasserie sought to attract a more refined English crowd. With the
elimination of the sultanate in 1922, even the Yıldız Palace complex—
where Abdülhamid II had busily spied on his restive capital—was
repurposed. An Italian entrepreneur, Mario Serra, transformed the
compound’s wood-and-stone chalet, set in a grove of pine, magnolia, and
linden trees, into a casino. The facility was able to accommodate three
hundred players at its gaming tables and featured restaurants, tearooms, a
horse-riding arena, tennis courts, and a shooting range.
The Pera Palace offered dinner with musical accompaniment every
evening, plus a thé concert on Fridays and Sundays at five o’clock. But just
to the north of the hotel stood one of Istanbul’s premier nightspots, the
Garden Bar, which occupied part of the Petits-Champs park. The bar had
been opened by a Jewish immigrant from Bulgaria as a watering hole for
artists performing at the nearby Winter Garden Theater. Like many
buildings in the city, it went through several iterations, leveled by fire and
then rebuilt by a new owner, but by the early 1920s it was drawing crowds
of Muslims and foreigners, as well as plenty of visiting patrons from the
Pera Palace next door. A musical matinee was available every afternoon
and early evening from five to eight o’clock, plus a full variety
extravaganza from nine to eleven. Musical touring companies from Vienna,
Paris, and other European cities put on revues. A high-wire walker or
trapeze artist might even swoop overhead, to the gasps of the crowd.
Boxing matches were staged with local and international sportsmen, while
drag queens on occasion would entertain the crowd with song and dance.
The Garden Bar’s proprietors had their pick of artists because the city
was crawling with out-of-work musicians and other performers, most of
them part of the bedraggled White Russian invasion of 1920. Boutnikoff’s
Symphony Orchestra, founded by a Russian émigré, offered concerts twice
daily, marking one of the first sustained efforts to bring European classical
music to the city. Popular music stars such as the singer Alexander
Vertinsky, along with future notables such as the young jazz composer
Vladimir Dukelsky—or Vernon Duke—performed at venues throughout the
city. Russian circus artists had also made their way south with Wrangel’s
forces, and Istanbul now saw a boom in knife juggling and acrobatics.
When jobs were scarce, the local Red Cross office was inundated with
requests for money. A troupe of eight Russian dwarfs applied for assistance
with developing a new revue. A man with a menagerie of trained rats, dogs,
and a pig requested help in placing his animal show in a suitable nightclub
or performance hall. “Artists cannot live in Russia now,” the rat trainer said
sadly. “The atmosphere is uncongenial to art.”
Art was probably not on the minds of most people who ventured north
of the Golden Horn, however. At the Garden Bar, the memoirist Ziya Bey
reported, “soliciting by both male and female pleasure-seekers is now so
aggressively indulged in that not even a self-respecting man dares any more
to venture in the place.” The whole neighborhood was like the slums of
Naples, recalled Alexis Gritchenko, a Russian painter. Misspelled signs in
many languages lured customers through dark doorways. The smell of sour
wine and rotten fruit wafted up from cellars and taverns. The windows of
legal brothels glowed golden. Shouts and laughter continued through the
night, broken only by the thunder of a giant hogshead of wine being rolled
over paving stones.
Outrageous entertainment and on-demand licentiousness had been part
of the city’s social order for centuries. The difference now was that it all
seemed to be so freely available—on display even—before crowds of
strangers packed together inside bars, public gardens, and theaters. As late
as 1916, when the first Viennese opera troupes began appearing in the city,
concert organizers had to stage special performances for women only, so
that the wives and daughters of pashas and beys would not have to interact
with other men. Princesses of the imperial household had rushed giggling
into the Tokatlian Hotel—the first time they had been allowed to enter a
hotel lobby, in fact—surrounded by guardian eunuchs who ushered them
through a back exit to the Petits-Champs Theater beyond. Now, in the
1920s, it was hard to imagine that such a chaste and naïve world had ever
existed. “At Petit Champs [sic] you could watch Cossack dancers, see
clean, U.S. tincan sailors piled out of arabas [trucks] into the stew of tarts
cadging for champagne,” recalled Robert Dunn, an American naval official.
The popularity of nightspots rose and fell, victims to changing fortunes,
evolving tastes, or a single dull performance that took the life out of the
party. That was the fate of one of the earliest sensations in the club life of
Istanbul and a major rival of the Garden Bar, a large and hopping dance
joint called Maxim.
The club’s proprietor was an unlikely impresario. Frederick Bruce
Thomas was the son of former Mississippi slaves. He had joined countless
other black men from the southern United States who sought jobs and
fortunes in Chicago and New York, waiting tables or working as valets. A
sense of adventure and a desire to escape the everyday racism of Gilded
Age America took him to London, Paris, and then, in 1899, to a place very
few African Americans had dreamed of visiting: the Russian Empire.
Within a few years, he had taken Russian citizenship, found a Russian wife,
and—as Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas—set himself up as one of the premier
maître d’s in Moscow. The establishment where he worked, Yar, was the
city’s most elegant eatery and a restaurant known across the continent. He
later opened his own Moscow nightspot, which debuted to rave reviews and
record crowds.

A chorus line: Female dancers at a revue in an Istanbul club.

Thomas had crossed the color line, achieving a status he never could
have reached had he remained in the United States, but the tide of politics
and revolution was harder to manage. After the autumn of 1917, when
Muscovites began taking sides in the emerging civil war, Thomas fled south
to the relative safety of areas controlled by the Volunteer Army. Like many
Russian subjects, he found a temporary refuge in Odessa, a port city that
had passed back and forth between rival armies. In 1919, he moved again,
joining thousands of former tsarist loyalists fleeing the Bolsheviks’
southward advance. He ended up in Istanbul, likely the only black White
Russian to arrive with the remnants of Denikin’s and Wrangel’s forces.
In short order, Thomas reestablished himself. He fell in with Bertha
Proctor, a Lancashire barkeep and sometime madam whose bar near the
Pera Palace was already regarded as one of the most successful in the city.
Together they opened a new establishment at the end of a tramline in the i
li neighborhood. Known by a variety of names—the Anglo-American Villa
and Garden, Bertha’s, and finally Stella—it became one of the favorite
haunts of Allied officers. Within a few years, business was so good that
Thomas was able to trade up, and in the autumn of 1921, he inaugurated a
new venue nearer the center of Pera on Sıraselviler Avenue. He christened
the new dancing and dinner club Maxim, the name of his old business in
Moscow and perhaps a clever rhyme with Istanbul’s nearby Taksim Square.
In the middle of the 1920s, the grande salle of Maxim was “the most
frequented locale not only for the Istanbul public but also for foreigners
who happened to be passing through,” said the memoirist Willy Sperco,
who was then living in the city. Even the acerbic Ziya Bey was moved to
check out the popular nightspot, visiting with his wife and a Greek friend,
Carayanni, who had become rich by jacking up prices on scarce food items
during the war. “Never before were Pera and Galata as disreputable as
now,” he wrote. He found Maxim full of Russian ex-nobles and amateur
bohemians, everyone smoking and drinking, with a black jazz band on
stage. People had begun to adopt the French habit of kissing women on the
hands, but beyond that, few of the more refined habits of Parisian life had
taken root in Istanbul. “[T]he only thing which this international crowd has
adopted from the Quartier Latin of Paris is free love,” he concluded.
Thomas was a talented survivor, and when the times demanded it, he
could shift gears. He could transform himself from Western-style clubman
to Turkish harem lord with literally the change of a hat. When a group of
American tourists wandered in, Thomas would don a fez and order his
chorus girls into Turkish pantaloons. The visitors were treated to an evening
in a splendid Ottoman harem, with lounging slave girls and obsequious
attendants serving a passable beefsteak with horseradish sauce. When the
evening was finished, the exotic proprietor would bow, press the guests’
hands congenially, and then usher them out the door with a warm “Good-
bye, effendi.”
The good times could not last, however. Thomas had expanded the
business too rapidly. The departure of the Russians took away both clients
and employees, and rivals were eager to copy what had been a novel and
brilliant model of drinking, eating, and dancing, all in one place, with
young women serving as the waitstaff. Other clubs were popping up along
the Grande Rue—the Rose Noire, the Turquoise, Karpich’s, the Kit-Kat.
After only five years in the new location, Thomas had racked up a mountain
of debt. His creditors forced him to pay up or declare the business bankrupt,
much in the way that all non-Muslim businesses were being squeezed at the
time. He closed the doors in 1927 and died the following summer. Turkish
businessmen later opened a new version of Maxim as a casino, but the life
had gone out of the party. “The post-war world was jazzing,” noted
Thomas’s obituary in the New York Times, “and [he] saw to it that
cosmopolitan Constantinople was not behind.” Newspapers labeled him
“the sultan of jazz,” and a few dozen old friends came out for the funeral,
but most of the former clientele had moved on to newer and more exciting
venues. It was all a sad affair, remembered Willy Sperco, as depressing as
the aftermath of an orgy.

Among Istanbul’s local historians, Thomas is often credited with

introducing Istanbullus to everything from Western-style dancing to the
entire concept of public nightlife. His Maxim probably did feature the first
black dance bands in the city, which Thomas brought on tour from France
and the United States. A mysterious group that contemporaries remembered
as the Palm Beach Seven may have been the first ensemble ever to mute a
trumpet or hit a rim shot in Istanbul’s history. Maxim’s dancing instructors,
mainly young Russian women, helped train an entire generation of
Istanbullus to do the foxtrot, the shimmy, and other fashionable steps. In
1926, municipal authorities issued orders banning the Charleston—not
because it offended Muslim sensibilities but because record numbers of
people were being admitted to the hospital for sprains and bruises. The ban
was impossible to enforce, of course, and it was mercilessly mocked by the
Turkish press, but it did reflect the rapid transformation of the city after the
White Russian influx. “They changed the shape of social life,” the Turkish
memoirist Mîna Urgan, then a young girl, recalled succinctly of the
Russians.
Newcomers such as Thomas, however, were actually slotting into a
well-worn groove: the habit of eating, drinking, and carousing that
Istanbullus themselves had already developed into a high art. European
émigrés typically thought of themselves as having pioneered public
entertainment in the city, and they probably were responsible for the idea of
a restaurant—a place where you could go in the evening, sit at a cloth-
covered table, and order from a limited but regularly changing menu, with
plated dishes being delivered by a trained server. Nothing quite like that had
existed in Istanbul before. But there was no shortage of public eateries and
other distractions, even under the Ottomans.
Rough wine and raki could be had at innumerable meyhanes, taverns
usually owned by Greeks or Armenians. According to the seventeenth-
century traveler Evliya Çelebi, the city boasted more than a thousand
meyhanes in his day—not necessarily an accurate count but still an
indication of how easy it was to procure alcohol in the capital of the Islamic
world. In fact, the sense that the number of bars and eateries was out of
control has been one of the constants in Istanbul’s social history. Anyone
“who can fry three stinky fish in a pan gets a permit to open a meyhane,”
complained a newspaper in the 1930s. The same sentiment repeated itself
just about every time city administrators contemplated how to corral
Istanbullus’ seemingly boundless desire to offer their neighbors something
to eat and drink.
Meyhanes were spread throughout the city, from Eyüp to Üsküdar, and,
like neighborhood pubs, each had its regular clientele. Small plates of meze
—assortments of sardines, fava beans, melon, white cheese, and other
dishes—were provided to soak up the Bulgarian and Greek wine, which
made slaves of those who drank it, according to Evliya Çelebi. On his own
visits to such establishments in the mid-1600s, he regularly came upon
drunken men complaining of their plight. “My foot takes no step but to the
tavern!” they called out to him. “My ear hears nothing but the bottle’s
glugging and the drunken cry!” He gave thanks to God that he himself
never took anything stronger than sherbet made from Athenian honey, yet
he was nevertheless able to recall eight of the most popular meyhanes by
name, which he listed helpfully in his famous book of travels, the
Seyahatname.
Despite the theoretical ban on alcohol consumption by Muslims, the
Ottoman Empire also developed an extensive alcohol industry, producing
everything from anise-flavored raki to wines and beers, again typically the
domain of non-Muslim proprietors. Being abstemious was a virtue observed
mainly in the breach, which is why Pera was such a useful thing to have in
Ottoman and republican Istanbul—an entire neighborhood, across the
Golden Horn from the sultan’s oldest palace, where just about any kind of
debauchery could be had at a price. It was almost as if Las Vegas were
always only a bridge away.
Eating and drinking involved being in the public eye. Until well into the
twentieth century, a home-cooked meal was a rarity. This mode of dining
was almost exclusively the purview of the wealthy, who could afford a
permanent kitchen in their villa or mansion, one or more servants to go to
the market, and a cook to prepare the food. Average Istanbullus got their
food in groups—from street vendors, neighborhood bakers, soup kitchens
attached to mosques, canteens associated with some professional class
(such as soldiers or the service staff at imperial palaces), or the ubiquitous
esnaf canteens, or tradesmen’s eateries, that serviced specific
neighborhoods. People traditionally ate where they worked and worked
where they lived, surrounded by other people just like them, such as
coreligionists or members of distinct professions, since specialized
workshops—coppersmiths, glassblowers, woodworkers—tended to be
concentrated in the same parts of the city. In the 1880s, for example, a little
over a quarter of Istanbul’s population—mainly unmarried men—did not
live in private homes but were accommodated in mosque complexes,
artisans’ shops, and other group lodgings. About eight percent of the people
in the city had no fixed abode at all.
Given the need for food that was easily prepared and easily served to
large groups, simplicity was key. Minute gradations of quality depended not
on doing something new but on doing something familiar particularly well.
That is why so many of the memoirists of everyday life in Istanbul are most
wistful when they recall a noted baker, the purveyor of an especially good
yogurt, or a well-shaded teahouse. A traveler today can today go from a
morning simit, a pretzel-like bread covered in sesame seeds, to a grilled fish
or stew at midday, to a sludge-bottomed coffee in the afternoon and still
approximate the foodways—and caloric intake—of average Istanbullus of
the past. Classical Ottoman dishes eventually made their way into the city’s
restaurants, but these concoctions with their whimsical names—such as the
lamb and eggplant in hünkârbe endi (The-Sultan-Enjoyed-It), or the
eggplant, tomato, and garlic in imambayıldı (The-Imam-Fainted)—would
have been foreign to the vast majority of the city’s population.

Beyond the variety of food and drink available in innumerable public

venues, Western visitors have long had a particular fascination with
Istanbul’s vices. “Narcotic stimulants such as Indian hemp and opium are
available,” the popular Meyers Guide told German travelers as late as 1914.
The enjoyment of marijuana and hashish enables one to continue working, erases pain,
cures various diseases, and creates a pleasant intoxication that stimulates the imagination
and increases both appetite and sex drive. . . . Opium smokers (mainly Persians and Arabs
rather than Turks) tend to gather only in a few hidden coffeehouses in Yedikule [south of
the Golden Horn] and indulge in this vice in secret. For Europeans, joining them is fraught
with difficulties since in recent years the government has intervened vigorously against
opium smoking.

Illicit drugs remained a part of the city’s entertainment after the First
World War, and styles and tastes came more in line with European
sensibilities. Turkey was not a signatory to conventions on the transport of
narcotics, and producers and traffickers flocked to Istanbul as the center of
the cross-Mediterranean trade. Newspapers and journals railed against the
scourge of one particular new import, cocaine. Because it required none of
the complex apparatus involved with smoking hashish or opium, cocaine
raced through Istanbul’s clubs and bars. New purveyors even set themselves
up in the lobbies of major hotels. The white powder was so easily
concealable that a vial of it could fit inside a woman’s high heel, an Istanbul
magazine reported, which meant that no small number of women doing the
Charleston or shimmy might also have been acting as well-dressed mules
for the drug underworld.
In the past, people interested in Istanbul’s seamier side had frequently
focused on the one institution they understood the least: the harem. In the
sultan’s court, the harem was the private and highly regulated world of the
sovereigns’ wives and concubines. It was guarded by eunuchs and
accessible only to a small stratum of men, typically the sultan and his
preadult sons. Foreigners imagined a world of supine odalisques, opium
pipes, and diaphanous gowns, but the imperial harem in fact was as
politically complicated—and often as boring—as the private household of
any other European monarch. Personal intrigues, family disputes, and
generational power struggles, not rampant seduction, were its dominant
idioms. The word “harem,” from the Arabic for “forbidden,” was originally
more architectural than sexual, referring to the portion of a Muslim home
reserved for private family use (the haremlik), as opposed to the areas
intended for meeting or entertaining guests (the selâmlık). Simply
substituting the word household would probably provide a more accurate
and less salacious vision of how sex, power, and private life intersected in
Ottoman Istanbul, both at court and in the lesser harems of Muslim high
officials and elites. “[D]elete forever that misunderstood word ‘harem’ . . .
and dispel the nasty atmosphere which a wrong meaning of that word has
cast over our lives,” a prominent Ottoman feminist begged of an American
journalist during the First World War.
When Sultan Mehmed VI embarked on a British warship in 1922, he
took a small retinue of servants with him, but most of the former guards of
the imperial harem—the kara a alar, or black eunuchs—stayed behind.
Like the castrati of Italian opera, these men, generally of Ethiopian or
Sudanese heritage, had exchanged their sex organs for a profession that
offered privilege and a certain degree of power—or, more frequently, such a
transaction was forced upon them in childhood. They had been brought into
slavery by middlemen on the far reaches of the sultan’s domains and
eventually found themselves at the epicenter of the imperial system. But in
a time of changing mores and political revolution, they were out of a job.
Many of them drifted into penury. They could sometimes be seen begging
on the street, their elongated limbs the visible signs of prepubescent
castration. “All that I have known have been big, fine-looking men, very
merry and good-natured, and useful mainly to go out with the automobile as
a kind of footman. In the same capacity they stood about palace doors,
preceded one into drawing-rooms, and served tea,” wrote one observer.
“Their day is over.”
In the late 1920s, as many as fifty of these men established a mutual-
assistance society to deal with their plight, setting up a headquarters in
Üsküdar and exchanging information on new employment opportunities.
Their old skills could be put to new uses. The harem, after all, had made
them experts in propriety and politesse, and many of them spent the next
several decades as museum guards, receptionists, ushers, and discreet
maître-d’s at Istanbul’s leading restaurants. One of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s
eunuchs, Nadir A a, spent his days with retired imperial officials at the
Café Lebon in Pera, speaking a painfully elegant version of Ottoman
Turkish full of refined circumlocutions and interminable pleasantries. Even
Mustafa Kemal reportedly employed a former imperial eunuch in his
household in Ankara.
Where sexual life more closely approximated Western fantasies was in
the same place those fantasies were frequently realized in the West—in
brothels. As part of the empire’s modernizing reforms under Abdülhamid II,
an entire system of regulated brothels was introduced in 1884, replacing the
informal houses and freelance prostitutes, both female and male, of earlier
eras. In the past, prostitution had been seen as mainly a moral problem, one
best dealt with via punishments meted out by Muslim kadıs (judges) or
through raids and banishments organized by individual neighborhoods.
Now it became a social issue to be legislated by the state. Brothels were
henceforth to be operated only with a government-approved license, with
regular inspections by police and health officials, and concentrated in
neighborhoods that had been specifically zoned for the sex trade.
This system disintegrated during the First World War. Refugeedom,
foreign occupation, and desperate times combined to push women and, in
some cases, children into sex work. Some were recruited by established
brothel owners, while others were forced to solicit clients on the street, their
oversize handbags and ribbon-covered parasols being the accepted
trademarks of streetwalkers. One story—apparently true—told of a young
Russian refugee who approached such a woman on the backstreets of Pera
only to discover that she was both a former baroness as well as his mother.
After 1918, Allied high commissions set about reestablishing a formal
system of brothel licensing and inspections, essentially re-creating some of
the legal framework that had decayed at the end of Ottoman power. The
French, a bit too predictably, were assigned the task of overseeing licensed
brothels. They demarcated those reserved for officers and for ordinary
soldiers, fixed prices in all the establishments, and arranged weekly medical
inspections by French doctors. The British took a different tack. At the
YMCA, an Anglican vicar organized Sunday afternoon teas designed to
distract the minds of enlisted men, while women from the English
community were invited along for conversation and music. (The French
system, one suspects, worked rather better.)
Despite these efforts, Allied commanders were very much a product of
their era when it came to the organization of sex. Regular sexual encounters
for officers and men were seen to be a basic right as well as a useful tool for
relieving boredom and maintaining morale. Especially for occupying armies
—lodged far from home amid a tense and delicate political situation—
providing opportunities for recreational sex was as much a part of a
commander’s job as ensuring a steady supply of food and adequate
equipment. The chief problem, however, was ensuring that Istanbul’s well-
established industry of available sexuality did not at the same time weaken
military units through illnesses acquired in the process.
Venereal disease was “rampant,” General Harington reported during the
occupation, and he estimated there were perhaps 40,000 prostitutes in
Istanbul. A contemporary survey revealed a total of 175 brothels operating
throughout the city, most concentrated in Pera and adjacent neighborhoods,
with as many as 4,500 women employed there—nearly an order of
magnitude smaller than Harington’s figure and probably closer to the truth.
In another survey, police counted 2,125 registered prostitutes, with another
979 unregistered, although “the number of women whose moral condition
has changed for a variety of reasons, can be said to be in the thousands.”
The majority of both proprietors and prostitutes were Greek and Armenian,
but it was estimated that Russians accounted for up to a quarter of the
women working there. It was the occupiers, however, who were both the
main clients as well as the major vectors of disease, even if plenty of
Muslim men probably also availed themselves of the women’s services. A
two-week snapshot of hospital records in 1919 showed Ottoman soldiers
mainly suffering from typhus or smallpox, while British and French troops
reported two cases of typhus, one of pneumonia, six of influenza, and
eighty-four of gonorrhea and syphilis.
Fortunately, there was a surfeit of doctors available to treat the problem,
and their advertisements in the local press were a perfect reflection of the
city’s multicultural kaleidoscope of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish
professionals. From his offices in Kadıköy, Dr. Isaac Samanon promised to
“treat all internal and venereal maladies using the newest discoveries of
Science.” Drs. Mokin and Maxoud, situated in the Tünel Passage,
specialized in venereal ailments as well as diseases of the skin. Dr. Ali Riza,
a graduate of one of Paris’s finest teaching hospitals, received patients at his
clinic off the Grande Rue. Dr. A. Schwartzer, late of Petrograd, relieved the
distressed “according to the latest methods.” Dr. Yervant Tachdjian was
available for consultations in Karaköy regarding syphilis, gonorrhea, and
other genitourinary infections. Conveniently for many Allied officers, Dr.
Djelal Chukri of the Clinique de Péra assisted with the treatment of
venereal disease as well as female disorders at his clinic right across the
street from the Pera Palace. Since the bar run by the sometime madame
Bertha Proctor was just down Graveyard Street from Dr. Chukri’s office—a
bar that employed women whose names are recorded in history only as
Frying Pan, Square Ass, Mother’s Ruin, Fornicating Fannie, and Skinny Liz
—it was possible for men and women to acquire a disease and be relieved
of it on the same city block.
Regardless of the realities of the sex trade in the early 1920s—relatively
small, geographically concentrated, and focused in large measure on
servicing Allied soldiers and sailors—the image of Istanbul as a haven for
vice and venality only grew. Ernest Hemingway and other correspondents
reported on the seediness of Pera, where the mewlings of street prostitutes
enticed foreign sailors to their doom. Ziya Bey, who had had some
experience in New Orleans, San Francisco, and other notorious port cities,
was nevertheless scandalized by what Istanbul had become. “Intoxicated
sailors rock from side to side and disappear in little streets,” he recalled,
“where organs grind their nasal notes of antiquated French, Italian, yes,
even American popular songs and where harsh feminine voices greet
prospective friends in an international vernacular.”
Observers were convinced that prostitution was only one part, although
the most scandalous, of the continuing “white slave” trade in Istanbul.
Forcible servitude had been common in the Ottoman Empire, even though
the last open market for slaves, near the Grand Bazaar, had been closed
down even before the abolition of slavery in the United States. In the new
language of international law, however, outsiders came to decry the
“trafficking” of women, a term invented at the beginning of the twentieth
century. In a series of reports published in 1927, the League of Nations
identified Istanbul as one of the major centers for the forced movement of
women out of Europe and into the Near East. Women were being held
against their will, the League said, with a wide network of brothel owners,
shippers, and government officials complicit in the sex industry.
The Turkish government repeatedly protested the charges, claiming that
much of the recent increase in prostitution could be blamed on the
economic plight of the itinerant Russians. The government pointed to the
League’s own findings that any commerce in women seemed to begin and
end in countries such as France and Egypt, with Istanbul serving only as an
unfortunate pass-through. Even under the Ottomans, “white slavers” had
been regularly deported from the city, and police records showed most of
them inhabiting the slippery professional world at the intersection of music-
making, saloon-keeping, café-owning, and brothel-running. Officials had
listed one deportee’s job title, for example, as “pianist/pimp.” But the
increasing international attention prompted republican officials to act more
decisively. In 1930, a government directive prohibited the opening of new
brothels and placed the administration of licensed houses under the care of
the police. A round of raids and closings followed. The writer Fikret Adil
dated the decline of Istanbul’s jazz scene to the initial shuttering of the free-
form sex trade after the republic’s new edict, and he probably had a point—
an analytical one if not a moral one.
Three years later, the government backed away from an outright ban
and issued a new directive that created a state bureaucracy to oversee the
licensing, inspection, and regulation of brothels in the city. “Most of the
people in our country are, in terms of culture, still quite primitive,”
President Mustafa Kemal declared at the time. “The opening of brothels
shall be permitted where necessary and according to law, and it is thus
necessary that prostitutes be regulated.” The venues that were blessed as the
new sites of acceptable vice were largely in the same places as during the
Allied occupation, a fact that deepened the divisions between the old city
south of the Golden Horn and Pera to the north. Travelers from Evliya
Çelebi forward had taken for granted that the former was the domain of
propriety and Islamic virtue while the latter was the realm of experiment
and abandon. Rather than knitting together the former imperial capital, the
new republic’s drive to modernize social and sexual life actually reinforced
the canyon separating the two worlds on both sides of the water. Having a
part of the city where anything goes had served the Ottomans well, and in a
newly modernizing republic, Pera was beginning to play an even greater
role as both the designated red-light district and the avant-garde of popular
culture.
That connection certainly continued into the interwar years and beyond.
The mutual parasitism of nightlife and vice was in essence little different in
Istanbul from that in any large city. To anyone expecting a certain version
of Islamic propriety in a country overwhelmingly Muslim by religion and
cultural orientation, the enduring affection in Turkish popular culture for
Istanbul’s drag queens, its famous madames, and its professional roués can
come as a shock. Even today, family-friendly eateries share alleyways with
transvestite prostitutes who toss down joking hellos from the windows of
their second-story aeries.
Pious Turkish Muslims, by contrast, came to see the source of Istanbul’s
loose behavior and pragmatic ethics as, in one form or another, aliens—at
first the occupying Allies, then the refugee Russians, then the local
Christians and Jews who, despite the shift in property ownership toward
Muslims, still staffed the gin joints and cabarets north of the Golden Horn.
Turkish nationalists tended to share that view, seeing Istanbul as a
“Byzantine whore”—a common label for the city—that had offered itself up
to the occupiers while patriots were dying to save the rest of the country
from the Hellenes.
But an underground transformation was happening as well. The very
values that many Istanbullus had long taken for granted—a certain cultural
openness; an ability to embrace religious conviction and moral license at
the same time; and a belief that modernity actually demanded a tolerance
for raunchiness—were being written into the informal codes of public
behavior then emerging in republican Turkey. In fact, unlike in the past,
when the business of public entertainment had been dominated by European
performers or down-and-out Russians, a new generation of native
Istanbullus was emerging to record the city’s darker side in song.
“THE PAST IS A WOUND IN MY HEART”
Istanbul jazz: A four-piece band, probably in the 1920s, with the female vocalist using a megaphone,
a typical amplification device of the period.
T HERE IS NO WELL-DEVELOPED field of study called sonic history, but the
changes in the audible world would have impressed themselves on anyone
living in Istanbul in the interwar years. The first automobile in the city’s
history had been exhibited in a showroom window on the Grande Rue
during the reign of Abdülhamid II and attracted crowds of spectators for
months, but now the vroom and sputter of motorcars filled the streets and
alleyways. A trolley clanged its way up the Grande Rue. A horn announced
the approach of a pilot boat on the Bosphorus. A train screamed as it came
around the bend toward Sirkeci station. The low buzz of an airplane’s
propeller droned overhead.
“At Pera, where I live, a perfect inferno of music is let loose from
sunset until two o’clock in the morning,” said Marthe Bibesco, a Romanian
princess and society maven. She watched weary-faced men and women
drag themselves beneath the gaslights from bandstand to bandstand like a
flock of sheep. Rival concerts were struck up downhill on the appropriately
named Tomtom Kaptan Street, while phonographs wailed from open
windows and organ-grinders passed by on the street below. As the night
wore on, shouts drifted up from the harbor when sailors were bounced out
of bars and made their way back to ship.
Istanbul was, in a way it never had been before, loud. Music spilled
from clubs. The sirens of ambulances, military automobiles, and fire
engines—a novelty introduced during the Allied occupation—shrieked and
howled. “They exasperate and deafen,” said an editorial in the Orient News
in 1919, “but they are probably not so effective in clearing the way as the
ordinary horn.” Messages and annoyances that had been delivered by the
naked human voice—the curses of a frustrated hamal or the insistent
solicitations from a vendor in the Spice Bazaar—competed with sounds
made from afar and conveyed through new technologies. It was now
possible for Istanbullus to feel themselves intimately acquainted with
people they had never met.
That change was evident in an industry that genuinely took the city by
storm in the 1920s. Movies had been screened since the turn of the century,
but they were mainly time-fillers between stage acts, one-reel shorts that
could be cast on a wall or a makeshift screen while actors were changing
costumes or assembling in the wings. Istanbul had its own well-established
street theater and an indigenous form of kinetic art, the famous Karagöz, in
which a puppeteer cast the shadows of flat, semitransparent figures onto a
backlit screen. Especially popular during Ramadan and other holidays,
Karagöz held its own against film until the First World War, when the first
permanent movie venue—little more than a converted coffeehouse, in fact
—opened opposite the British Embassy off the Grande Rue. In short order,
the city’s elite politicians, businessmen, and military figures came out to see
first-run films, often imported German or French productions. Men and
women were kept chastely separate by a partition, but mixed crowds
became more common during the occupation years. The venues were still
rough coffeehouses that might double as bars and were generally unsuited
to the genteel public. “There are a lot of ‘movie’ shows,” reported Billy
Fox-Pitt, the Welsh Guardsman, “but they all look pretty bug-ridden!”
Proper cinemas soon sprang up around the city, however. Istanbullus
could see French, Italian, and American films, distributed by companies
such as Fox, Paramount, and MGM, at any number of often ornate and
inviting establishments—the Melek, the Alhambra, the Magic, the
Artistique, or the enormous Glorya, seating 1,400 people and opened in
November 1930. By the beginning of that decade, the city had thirty-nine
cinemas offering both silent films and talkies.
The huge popularity of imported films—and the lucrative job of
distributing them—meant that developing a local film industry took time.
The first talkie in Turkish, On the Streets of Istanbul, appeared in 1931,
created by the firm that would become one of the principal film producers
in the early republic, the pekçi brothers. Migrants from Salonica, the five
brothers had owned a prominent department store in the Eminönü
neighborhood before moving into the cinema business. On the Streets of
Istanbul was crude, a romp about two men in love with the same woman,
and it owed its soundtrack to Paris, where the film was produced, but its
popularity did help finance a new Istanbul-based company. Two years later,
pek Film debuted its first locally produced talkie, A Nation Awakes.
Directed by Muhsin Ertu rul and with a score by the noted composer
Muhlis Sabahattin, the film was a hyperbolic account of the occupation
period, with Senegalese infantrymen molesting Muslim girls and Allied
soldiers bayoneting Turks in their beds. For the first time, Istanbullus, and
Turkish citizens in general, could see a sound-enhanced version of their
own recent history flashing before them on the screen. Its impact on popular
memory was immense. When later generations of Muslim Istanbullus
looked back on the occupation, the uninvited gropings of French African
soldiers became a common refrain, even though few people of the era
probably ever encountered a Senegalese rifleman at all.
As in other parts of the world, film was emerging as an important
medium for communicating exactly the messages that states wanted to get
across—the duty of patriotism, the lineaments of civic virtue, the demands
of national loyalty—but audiences inevitably voted with their pocketbooks.
Tickets were reasonably expensive, as much as a quarter of an ordinary
laborer’s daily wage, so visits to the cinema had to be worthwhile.
Distributors seemed to understand that Istanbullus preferred exactly the
same kind of content as their counterparts in western Europe and the United
States. A detailed survey of first-run films in the summer of 1932 revealed
the range of Istanbul’s viewing preferences: 96 percent of films showed
characters using alcohol, 74 percent had a plot concerned with wealth or
luxury, 70 percent centered on a love affair, 67 percent had actresses clad in
suggestive clothing, 52 percent showed passionate romance, and 37 percent
featured sexy dancing. Most of the movies—63 percent—were also
determined to have an implausible plot.
Cinemas, like the city overall, were noisy, with people reading the
subtitles aloud, standing up, walking out, stamping their feet to the musical
score, or arguing with the main character. They were places where all of
Istanbul’s social classes could, in theory, come together. That was a novel
phenomenon that took some adjustments. In the past, most public gathering
places in the city had made clear distinctions in terms of rank, with
preferred positions or the best seating awarded not just to those who could
afford it but also to those whose family ties and government station placed
them above the hoi polloi. The Ottoman Turkish language had a multitude
of ways of expressing rank, and that hierarchy was made concrete every
time two of the sultan’s subjects happened to meet in the same place. But in
a democratizing, republican city, this way of handling things was on the
way out.
A widely reported legal case confirmed the transition. In March 1928,
three assistant public prosecutors—Baha, Nesuhi, and Midhat—presented
themselves at the Opera Cinema and demanded to be admitted, presumably
free of charge, to the film then playing there. They further demanded to be
seated in a box, the only location they believed appropriate to their position
as government officials. The proprietor, Cevad, refused. A heated
altercation ensued. The police were eventually called, and Cevad was
arrested for insulting the prosecutors and obstructing them in the
performance of their official duties. The Istanbul press came to Cevad’s
defense, pointing out how ludicrous the charges were and objecting to the
existing practice of requiring cinema owners to reserve box seats for high
officials. The next month, Cevad stood trial. Given that he was going up
against three government men, his prospects looked slim. Much to
everyone’s surprise, however, he was acquitted. One of the pushy assistant
prosecutors was removed from his post, and Cevad reported to the press
that he intended to sue all three. Cinemas had become one of the republic’s
great equalizers.
Movie houses were both public spaces and private ones, which is why
Cevad believed there was no reason for him to cave to the demands of petty
bureaucrats. The element of privacy was also important to people who went
there precisely because they wanted to hide. The traditional separation of
the sexes had never been an obstacle to determined lovers, even under the
Ottomans, but with the rise of dark and comfortable cinemas, there was
now a new environment in which the amorous could meet. Depending on
their layout and the opportunities for concealment, certain cinemas became
well known as rendezvous zones. Those with balconies and closed boxes
were the most desirable, especially when tickets were discounted during
matinees. After painstaking research in the six leading cinemas, one
observer concluded that nearly all the audiences “contained couples who
were ostentatiously love making and in many cases kissing and making
obvious advances to each other.” The average number of amorous couples
at each performance was determined to be just over six, while the total
number for the twenty-seven surveyed performances was 177. In three
cases, “professional women”—that is, prostitutes—were reportedly
involved.
The popularity of Western films made Istanbul one of the first
destinations outside the major European capitals that came onto the touring
agenda of movie stars. Greta Garbo and Betty Blythe (one of the first
mainstream actresses to appear on screen in a near-nude scene) made visits
to the city, as did Charles Boyer and Marie Bell, both of whom were
already famous for their performances with French stage companies. When
Josephine Baker made a short personal appearance at the Glorya, the press
seemed less worried about the content of her famously risqué performances
than thrilled that another celebrity had come to town. Predictably, seeing
these stars of stage and screen in the flesh affected the fashion sense and
social aspirations of young people. The same report that counted up kissing
couples in darkened cinemas also observed that girls in Istanbul could now
be neatly divided into three types: sporty, intellectual, and “movie,” with
the last of these typically appearing on the Grande Rue dressed like their
favorite film stars.
Unlike stage acts, however, film had the power not only to bring
audiences into a performance venue but also to keep their attention long
after they had left. People didn’t just watch films. They could imagine
themselves inside the screen—having a passionate affair, whistling a
signature tune, twirling through the lobby of a grand hotel. “For a city of its
size and cosmopolitanism Constantinople is one of the most poorly
equipped in the world for satisfying the aesthetic cravings of its
population,” reported a foreign resident in 1923. But in relatively short
order, film, popular songsheets, and recorded music were all within easy
reach. Virtually any upper-class Muslim or non-Muslim family had long
considered a phonograph to be an essential piece of parlor furniture, and
after the arrival of the White Russians, the city was awash in the devices.
Victrolas with large metal listening horns were dumped on the market by
Russian families who had spirited them out of Crimea as part of their
valued belongings. By the early 1920s, they could be had for as little as
twenty to thirty lira, easily within reach of many families.
Throughout the decade, importers brought in more and more machines,
and at music shops along the Grande Rue—Max Friedman’s, the
Papadopoulos Brothers, Sigmund Weinberg’s—the proprietors found a
ready market for mechanical players, recorded disks, and printed music
from Europe and the United States. Pirated sheet music became such a
large-scale industry that Western embassies increasingly regarded Istanbul
as one of the prime offenders in the violation of intellectual property rights.
Barely had a dance tune made it onto the market in New York or Paris than
a low-priced version could be picked up in Pera.
The advent of international stardom, home entertainment, and recorded
sound transformed street life in Istanbul. It also created a new set of careers.
In the past, the fame of professional musicians had been limited by
geography. Musicians might be highly regarded in a particular
neighborhood or sought out for a wedding or other celebration across town,
but national or international acclaim was hard to imagine. Now an audience
could love someone they had never met and cry at a song they had never
heard performed live. Music also came to be divided into clear genres, each
with its own artists, fans, and expert critics: a folk song, or türkü, from
Anatolia; a lyrical air, or arkı, based on Ottoman classical music; a kanto
that emerged from everyday urban life and mixed in melodies and tonalities
from the West.
Turks were eagerly borrowing forms of public entertainment from
Europe. New words flowed easily into spoken Turkish, especially from
French and English. A young man could spend an evening at a gardenparti
while being served by a garson and imagine himself a member of the
burjuazi before relieving himself at the pisuvar. In the late 1920s,
ordinances proscribing signs in foreign languages did little to prevent
Turkish businesses from simply altering the spelling without ruining their
own reputation. That is why so many of the famous clubs and restaurants of
the era had names that seemed utterly nonsensical in Turkish until you
pronounced them phonetically: the Türkuvaz (or Turquoise), the Rejans (or
Régence), the Roznuvar (or Rose Noire), the Mulenruj (or Moulin Rouge).
Turks also adopted a way of describing a feeling. It was now possible to
remember, even pine for, a specific and imagined world at the exact
moment when it seemed to be slipping into the irretrievable past. There was
little that was Ottoman about these memories, at least not in the sense of
thinking wistfully about sultans, harems, and the recumbent life of pashas
and beys. Its themes were, rather, a northerly breeze on the Bosphorus, a
furtive love, an old wooden house, sheep on a high meadow, or a faraway
city to which it was impossible to return. Turks borrowed yet another
French word and called the whole thing nostalji—nostalgia. It was the
stock-in-trade of three musicians who came to embody the sonic landscape
of a changing city.

Roza Eskenazi, Hrant Kenkulian, and Seyyan were all members of the last
generation of Istanbullus to call themselves subjects of the sultan. They
never shared a stage, and at the time they were born—at some point
between about 1895 and 1915; they were coy about, or ignorant of, their
actual birth dates—the social dividing lines within Ottoman society would
have defined the directions and possibilities available to them. Roza was
Jewish, Hrant an Armenian, and Seyyan a Muslim, and had it not been for
the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, their lives might have been mapped out
mainly within the confines of those religiously defined communities.
But in the early Turkish Republic, their reputations were deeply
intertwined. If you knew one, you probably knew all three. What they had
in common was an ability to encapsulate loss and longing in a single vocal
phrase or pluck of a string. In their own ways, they had a better claim than
many artists to capturing the essence of an era—a time when coming to
Istanbul, or leaving it, was the defining journey for hundreds of thousands
of old Ottoman subjects and new Turkish citizens.
Roza Eskenazi was a native Istanbullu, the daughter of a poor Jewish
rag merchant. While still a girl, she found herself caught up in the
movement of refugees and opportunity-seekers occasioned by the Young
Turk revolution and the Balkan Wars. At roughly the same time that the
family of the photographer Selahattin Giz was moving from provincial
Salonica to the Ottoman capital, Roza’s family set out in the opposite
direction, toward a city where Jews were the single largest ethnic and
religious group in a mix that included Greeks, Turkish-speaking Muslims,
Bulgarians, and others. For a Jewish family looking to move up in the
world, resettling in Salonica was a reasonable idea. Roza’s father seems to
have found work in a textile mill, her mother as a domestic servant, and
Roza grew up amid the street life of a city that was in many ways Istanbul
in miniature—a cosmopolitan port, Muslim in its political identity, but
where mosques shared space with Sephardic synagogues and Greek
Orthodox churches in the maze of small streets and avenues winding down
to the Aegean Sea.
The family remained there even after the Hellenic kingdom assumed
formal control of the city in 1912, but five years later, an enormous fire
reduced much of Salonica’s docklands and lower city to ashes. Jewish
neighborhoods near the port were especially affected, and families had to
think hard about whether, and where, to start over. Roza’s talent as a singer
was noticed while she was still a girl, and through marriage and
motherhood, she seems to have nursed the desire to appear on the stage. In
the early 1920s, by then a young widow, she moved to Athens and began to
work the cabaret circuit. She teamed up with Greek and Armenian
musicians, some of them newly arrived “exchangees” from Turkey or
migrants from the charred ruins of Salonica. She was already developing
her signature style: the rough-hewn and smoky voice, the freewheeling
sense of meter, the lyrics that seem to be pronounced with a cigarette
hanging from her lips. Plump and almond-eyed, with a shock of curly hair
oiled into dark waves, Roza quickly made a name for herself in Athens, but
she owed her musical essence to the cities of the Turkish coast, to Istanbul
and especially Smyrna, the homeland of the musical genre known as
rebetiko.
The Greek word rebetiko has no clear derivation, but even at the start of
Roza’s career, anyone in her audience would have known what it meant. It
was the torch song of the urban gangster, the lyrical reminiscence of a
down-and-out hustler, the soundtrack of a world in which people overspent
in poverty and sometimes killed the person they loved the most. It was an
Aegean version of the blues, sung in both Greek and Turkish, with hashish
dens standing in for American juke joints and the Mediterranean coast
taking the place of the Mississippi Delta. Rebetiko had been brought to
Greece by the people displaced in the great emptying of Smyrna in 1922.
Roza had never experienced this world directly; she was an Istanbullu, after
all, and was probably only a teenager when she left the Ottoman capital.
But she was on the leading edge of westward migration out of the faltering
empire. In both Salonica and Athens, she was surrounded by Greeks,
Armenians, and Jews who had left everything behind in cities that were
now part of a new and foreign republic.
Roza’s genius lay not in the quality of her voice. She had the odd habit
of speaking in falsetto and singing in a solid alto. Her voice sounds so much
like a clarinet, slightly nasal and pinched, that it is easy to forget that the
instrument appears in only a few of her recordings. Unlike classically
trained singers, her sense of pitch is often approximate, even in an Eastern
musical tradition that prizes microtones and unusual modes. But she was
unrivaled in her ability to reflect the experience of immigrants still totaling
up the lives and fortunes they had lost. It is not too much to say that she had
become, by 1930 or so, the truest voice of the Greek diaspora, and as she
toured the world—even returning for a string of concerts in Istanbul after
the Second World War—her fame only grew. By the time of her death in
1980, she had lived not only through the real birth of rebetiko as a concert
genre—rather than something to be heard only in dives and meyhanes—but
also through its second life in the folk revival of the 1960s. She could make
people wish they could fly across the sea, leaving behind everything new
and settling back into a half-forgotten past. “My soul, that’s enough now,”
she sang, “leave my body / don’t make me suffer / give up your hope.”
Rebetiko sounds improvised and loose, but it actually owes a great deal
to the musical scales and structure of Ottoman classical music. It is
intentionally impure, a product of multiethnic cities and mixed urban
neighborhoods. The vocal slides and bravura wailing repeat many of the
scales and tonalities that would have been familiar to performers and
composers who staged command performances for the sultan and other
dignitaries in ages past. Musical styles never stay inside their proper lines;
they jump over into new and unexpected venues.
The instrument that became the vehicle for these creative transgressions
was also the mainstay of the small band that typically backed Roza
Eskenazi. It is an eleven-string, fretless instrument called an oud, or ud in
Turkish. Its closest equivalent is the Western lute. The lute is an
eccentricity, a bulbous-backed and short-necked oddity today found mainly
in ensembles specializing in Renaissance court music or Shakespearean
love ballads. But the oud has a vibrant and widespread, at times even
fanatical, following all the way from Morocco to Iran. Children take classes
in it. Old men pick it up as a retirement project. Pop stars compete for deals
with renowned players who might sit in on a recording session. It is in no
sense a folk instrument, nor is it just a curiosity of “world music,” a catchall
and essentially meaningless category. Its sound is something that hundreds
of millions of people across the Muslim world and beyond find instantly
familiar.
Among professional as well as amateur oud players, there is no more
recognizable name than that of Hrant Kenkulian, or Udi Hrant, as he was
generally known. (“Udi” was an honorific title that indicated his position as
a master of the instrument.) Blind from birth, Hrant grew up in Istanbul in
an Armenian family who had managed to negotiate the multiple transitions
from empire to occupation to republic. The massacres and starvation that
had emptied parts of Anatolia of its Armenians had been less marked in
Istanbul, and the dwindling of the urban community was much like the loss
of Greeks—a slow draining of difference, neighborhood by neighborhood,
rather than wholesale eradication. The Armenian patriarch, one of several
leaders of Armenian Apostolic Christians, remained in place in the
neighborhood of Kumkapı, along the Sea of Marmara, and elders within
Armenians’ other religious communities sought ways of shielding their
flocks by demonstrating loyalty to the state. In 1933, when the Austrian
writer Franz Werfel published his famous Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a
novel depicting the Armenian genocide, Armenian Catholics in Istanbul
responded by burning the author in effigy, an attempt to win favor with the
Turkish government. Even within a political system that put a premium on
Turkishness, living as an Armenian was still possible, especially if one
avoided politics, spoke only Turkish in public, and embraced silence as a
way of dealing with the past.
Little is known about Hrant’s early life, but he emerged in the 1920s as
one of the city’s most popular oud players, with a surprising set of
innovations that expanded the limits of the instrument. He could play
double-stops, or two strings at the same time, in the style of a violinist. He
could pluck the strings with both his left and his right hands, and, like a
guitarist, use both sides of the plectrum, sounding a note on the upstroke as
well as the downstroke of his right hand. This might seem like scant reason
for renown, but few people had thought of playing the oud in this way, and
it was no accident that Hrant developed these techniques at a time when
jazz guitarists and violinists, with their free-form styles, could be heard all
along the Grande Rue.
Jazz depends on improvisation, which is why it has been described as
not just a musical form but an ethical system. It demands that a player really
listen to his comrades, with the bravery to step forward when he has
something to say and the self-possession to know when he has said enough.
It requires virtuosity but also humility. All this was a revelation to
musicians such as Hrant, since they had come from a sonic world that by
and large kept these virtues separate. A renowned singer might be
applauded for his vocal agility or the memorization of a long musical
sequence, such as the famed hafizes who managed to commit the entire
Qur’an to melodic memory. In Turkish classical music, however, ensembles
typically played in unison, with multiple instruments carrying the same
melodic line and everyone playing all the time.
But Hrant was able to gather the best of these traditions and merge them
with the sounds and techniques that would have swirled around him in
interwar Istanbul. He was a master of indigenous improvisation, the
spiraling and nearly out-of-control music called a taksim. Improvisations
are musical one-offs, made up on the spot and by nature fleeting and daring.
A good taksim can never be repeated note for note, because even an
accomplished instrumentalist would be hard-pressed to re-create exactly the
same bend of a string or precisely the same plectrum stroke. A bad one,
though, can wreck a career. It is a species of instrumental music that always
threatens to fall flat.
That is why listening to Hrant was both thrilling and nail-biting. He ran
up the oud’s neck and back down it. He plunked on the lower strings to give
himself a steady bass line while laying down a cascade of high notes above.
He had rivals among the city’s oud players, but no one developed quite the
international following that Hrant enjoyed. He toured abroad and, after the
Second World War, recorded some of his work in live sessions in New
York. Like Roza Eskenazi, he was a multilingual artist, easily moving
between Turkish and Armenian and composing his own songs in both
languages. He still appeared regularly in Pera nightclubs until his death in
the late 1970s.
There was nothing unusual about a world in which a Greek-speaking
Jew became the voice of the Greek diaspora or a blind Armenian could
revolutionize the playing of an instrument that Turks, Arabs, and Persians
all think of as their own. People always somehow manage to lead messier
lives than nationalists would like. Artistic genius depends on that fact. What
was truly new in this era, however, was not just the emergence of widely
known artists but rather the appearance of a very specific type of one: a
Muslim woman, her hair and face uncovered, performing before a paying
and mixed-gender audience.
Muslim women were studying in theater schools in Istanbul already at
the end of the First World War, but a city ordinance in 1921 prevented them
from appearing on stage. It was not until eight years later that the first
female actress, Afife Jale, took part in a stage play, and even then it was
only as a stand-in for an Armenian actress who had fled the country. After
that point, however, Turkish Muslim women took to the stage and began to
create their own versions of musical styles, from classical to cabaret, which
had previously been the purview of minority artists or foreign touring
companies. Local singers competed to be the first to indigenize an
international musical style, to make a borrowed object into a rooted and
Turkish one. The first to do it for the tango was Seyyan.
Like many female performers of the day, she was known only by her
given name, with perhaps the title “Hanım,” or Madam, suffixed to it. With
her flapper bob and kohl-lined eyes, Seyyan was among the earliest singers
to reject classical styles in favor of her own interpretation of Western forms.
The Turkish Republic was obsessed with trumpeting its modernity by
seeking the help of leading practitioners in a variety of fields, especially
music. The composer Paul Hindemith arrived in 1935 to set up the first
national conservatory; the next year, Béla Bartók was invited to collect
Anatolian folk songs and render them into symphonic form, much as he had
done in his native Hungary. But while classically trained and an
accomplished concert performer herself, Seyyan Hanım developed an
interest in tango, which had made its way to Istanbul following the same
path that had brought the foxtrot and the shimmy to dance halls over the
previous decade. In 1932, she began to debut a tune by Istanbul composer
Necip Celal and lyricist Necdet Rü tü that was quickly labeled the first of
its genre, a truly original and certifiably Turkish tango.
The song had an over-the-top title—“The Past Is a Wound in My
Heart”—and the words were pure melodrama:
I, too, suffered from love.
My life was destroyed because of this love.
I knew that the price of this love
Was my youth slipping away. . . .
Finally I fell and drowned
In the green sea of her eyes. . . .
My heart became a ruined land.

But in Seyyan’s hands, the song became something more: a simple and
heartrending recollection of loss and regret. She ended each of the lines
with an upward lilt of her warbly falsetto, hanging there like an outstretched
hand, before sliding down to the repeated chorus: “The past is a wound in
my heart / My fate is darker than my hair / The thing that makes me cry
from time to time / Is this sad memory.” A piano provided the backing
chords and rhythm, while a violin repeated her vocal line, a nod to the
classical tradition of multiple players plodding through a melody in unison.
It was derivative, of course, a style that owed more to Buenos Aires
than to Istanbul, but the melody and lyrics were an immediate sensation.
“The Past,” as it was known, became her signature tune. In a fleeting song,
barely three minutes long, she managed to crystallize a set of familiar
feelings—that you carried your past with you, that you could change your
home without changing your condition, that some journeys never really
come to an end. And since “The Past” was also at base a dance tune,
Seyyan had pulled off the remarkable feat of helping an audience hear the
past while also seeing it enacted before them, a man and woman
intertwined, rooted in place for a moment and then propelling themselves
somewhere new, a memory floating on the dance floor.

Roza, Hrant, and Seyyan were part of a vibrant and fast-moving world of
popular artists in interwar Istanbul and in its urban diaspora. Given
changing tastes, demographics, and politics, their fame was sometimes
eclipsed by that of other performers. Connoisseurs differed on the ranking
of Turkey’s greats. The real queen of the stage was perhaps Safiye Ayla, a
Muslim who is usually acknowledged as the first female singer to perform
for President Mustafa Kemal. Steeped in both Ottoman classical music and
Anatolian folk idioms, she helped create a taste for wistful laments about
village love and long caravans, with an essential sweetness and modernity
to her voice that is unmatched in Turkish music. The sisters Lale and
Nerkis, Muslim immigrants from Salonica, helped revive Ottoman classical
music and fuse it with Western-style operatic forms. Yorgos Bacanos, a
Greek oud player born near Istanbul, rivaled Hrant as a player and probably
surpassed him in technical proficiency on the instrument. Each of these
artists is well known to the cognoscenti of Middle Eastern music. They are
genuine obsessions to a relatively small band of aficionados, who keep their
memory alive, update their Wikipedia entries, and one-up each other in
Internet chat rooms. Their tunes can still silence a boisterous bar crowd in
Istanbul today. But the fact that their music survived at all is an accident of
history and a unique product of Istanbul’s age of jazz and exile.
Many of these artists were among the core group of musicians to appear
on a record label known in Turkish as Sahibinin Sesi, the literal translation
of one of the oldest and most storied labels in recording history—HMV, or
His Master’s Voice. HMV was marketed by the Gramophone Company, the
British firm that was one of the first businesses to offer recorded music on
flat records, which had gradually replaced cylinder recordings at the
beginning of the twentieth century. Its trademark image—a black and white
terrier, head cocked in front of the sound cone of a phonograph—is still
among the world’s most effective and long-lasting corporate symbols. In the
early 1930s, after a string of mergers and splits in the recording industry,
the company joined with a rival, Columbia Gramophone, to form the British
giant EMI. Under a variety of names, the company would continue to be a
powerhouse of global popular music up to the present.
HMV had been recording in Istanbul since the late Ottoman period, part
of the label’s strategy of scooping up popular artists from around the world.
Local singers and instrumentalists were recorded on wax cylinders, which
were then translated into 78s that could be played on a variety of different
gramophone brands. By the late 1920s, HMV executives realized that, with
the growing music scene in Istanbul, a new generation of artists was arising
whose fame could easily reach beyond local cafés and cabarets. The result
was a recording boom. The company’s local affiliate was headed by Aram
and Vahram Gesarian, Armenian brothers who signed up virtually all of the
major talent of the day.
None of this would have existed, however, had it not been for the
experience of migration. The movement of Muslims to Istanbul from
Salonica and other Greek and Balkan cities brought a penchant for
European musical styles and a long tradition of urban folk singing. The
arrival of Muslims from Anatolia brought memories of village life and the
folk songs of the countryside. The departure of Greeks from Istanbul and
Smyrna made rebetiko a genuinely transnational musical form, a style of
singing fused with a sense of longing that was itself the product of the
Hellenic invasion and the Turkish war of independence. HMV stepped in to
record Roza Eskenazi and Seyyan Hanım precisely because there were now
people inside and outside Istanbul—exiles, refugees, and migrants—who
thought of the work of these artists as the background music of their own
lives. They were willing to pay for the chance to hear it all again in the
comfort of their living rooms.
The sounds of Istanbul cabarets, nightclubs, and dive bars now had an
international influence that previous generations could never have
imagined. As more people listened to the recorded music, more also tried to
play it, which is why Istanbul also experienced an upsurge in pirated sheet
music around the same time that HMV started releasing its new disks. Even
instrument manufacturers found an increasing interest in their creations,
given that the oud and other regional instruments were being grouped
together with pianos and violins in the HMV recordings. Music was not just
a profession but also increasingly a hobby, with amateur instrumentalists
and record collectors specializing in Istanbul’s unique amalgam of classical
music, jazz, tango, and other styles. In the case of one family of instrument-
makers, the heightened interest in these artistic products helped create
Istanbul’s first truly global musical brand.
The Zildjians were a family of Armenians whose roots in the city went
back centuries. Over time they had developed what can only be called a
microniche market. Since the early seventeenth century, they had been the
principal supplier of cymbals to Ottoman military bands. (The surname was
simply an Armenianized version of the Turkish word for cymbal-maker.)
As prominent Armenians, the family was a potential target during the
rolling violence of the First World War, and, unlike Udi Hrant’s family,
whose poverty probably allowed them to avoid deportation, the Zildjians
chose to flee rather than wait for the police to knock on the door.
Some members of the Zildjian clan moved to Romania; others went to
the United States. During the Allied occupation, it was reasonably safe to
return, and by the early 1920s, their business was again in full swing,
employing about half a dozen skilled workmen in Istanbul and producing
three thousand pairs of cymbals a year. Since Ottoman bands were in
decline, the business now focused on the export market, and the Zildjian
name rather quickly acquired a stellar reputation among cymbal-fanciers.
“The [manufacturing] process is a secret one,” noted a diplomatic report on
the Turkish music industry, “which is said to impart a peculiar resonant
quality.” Later in the decade, the family patriarch, Aram Zildjian, decided to
move the entire business from Istanbul to Massachusetts, where some
members of the family had already settled before the war. There the firm re-
created the process of transforming a brass alloy into a cymbal that rang
with a clear tone and adequate volume.
The quality of the Zildjian cymbal made an almost immediate impact in
the United States. The company began transforming its manufacturing style
to meet the needs of jazz orchestras and small ensembles, with cymbals that
were lighter and more resonant, to give a muffled stinger slap or a hi-hat
shuffle. No longer just a flashy addendum to the beat, saved up and finally
spent as a loud crash at the end of an orchestral crescendo or martial
fanfare, cymbals became an essential punctuation mark in every phrase of a
tune. It was the one piece of equipment that jazz ensembles borrowed whole
cloth from military bands and perhaps the only one besides a string bass
that it is nearly impossible to imagine a rhythm section without. Over time,
the immigrant cymbal-makers acquired a reputation unmatched in the world
of percussionists. The Zildjian name, curling over a shiny cymbal in faux-
Oriental script, is still one of the most respected brands in the business.
The Zildjians were a direct link between the musical traditions of the
Ottoman Empire and Istanbul’s emerging jazz era, as well as ambassadors
of a cultural scene that was becoming increasingly international. The
hushed slap of a closed hi-hat or the zing of a ride cymbal would have been
deeply familiar to two other Istanbul migrants, Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegün.
The Ertegün brothers were too young to have experienced some of the great
nightspots such as Maxim or the Grand Cercle Moscovite. Both were born
in Istanbul in the tumultuous era of war and revolution—in 1917 and 1923,
respectively—but they spent most of their lives outside the city. Their
father, Münir, was a diplomat in the service of the sultan, but, like many in
his profession and social class in the early 1920s, he had to make a difficult
choice about whether to continue supporting the flailing Mehmed VI or
throw in his lot with Mustafa Kemal’s nationalists. He chose the latter and
was rewarded with two premier diplomatic posts, first in London and then,
by 1935, in Washington, DC, where he served as the Turkish Republic’s
first accredited ambassador.
His two sons had developed a penchant for jazz while living in Europe,
and they jumped eagerly into Washington’s raucous music scene, pioneered
by the city’s foremost performer, Duke Ellington. They spent their weekend
evenings along U Street, DC’s version of Harlem, and took occasional trips
to New York, with its reefer-filled clubs and late-night music sessions. They
became avid collectors of obscure 78s, featuring black dance bands from
the South or jazz singers who might have cut only one twin-sided disk in
their careers. As sons of a diplomat, they had the social standing and
resources to indulge their passions, and even though they were far from
Istanbul, they were uniquely representative of the world that the political
and cultural changes in the city had produced: a new generation of well-
traveled and confident Turkish Muslims who were putting ever more
distance between themselves and the old empire. At their age, Münir had
worn a fez and a frock coat. His sons wore shoulder pads and saddle shoes.
Within a few years, the brothers had decided to turn their musical tastes
into a business. With financial support from a family friend, in 1947 they
launched their own recording label, which they called Atlantic Records.
The rest, of course, is music history. The label would become one of the
principal vehicles for everything from Motown to rock, from Ray Charles
to the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, and Led Zeppelin. Ahmet in
particular was numbered among the greatest impresarios of the recording
world, ever present above the mixing table with his trademark goatee and
thick-rimmed glasses.
The Ertegüns were products of a moment when Istanbullus were
becoming worldly, experimental, and modern in ways that would have
shocked their grandparents. The Ottomans had been obsessed with catching
up to the rest of Europe, but Istanbullus were now reworking global art
forms to reflect their unique circumstances. They bent art to fit their own
experience of kaleidoscopic cultures and reveled in the possibilities of self-
invention. They were not just envying Western culture. Like Hrant and
Seyyan, they were also making it. “[A] younger generation that knew not
Thomas, Sultan of Jazz,” wrote the New York Times about Frederick Bruce
Thomas, the American-Russian-Turkish barkeep and clubland impresario,
“is dancing steps it never recognized as anything but Turkish republican.”
All of that was possible only because plenty of people like the Ertegüns and
Zildjians were of Istanbul but, for reasons prosaic or tragic, no longer in it.
MODERN TIMES
A group of partygoers in black tie at an Istanbul club, probably Maxim; with Selahattin Giz second
from right.
W HEN REVELERS GATHERED at the Pera Palace on New Year’s Eve 1925,
they were celebrating something of a first. Never before had all Istanbullus
marked exactly the same hour, month, and year. A calendar change in the
late empire had introduced Western-style months, at least for dating
financial transactions and train schedules, but the republican government
still numbered the year from the Prophet Muhammad’s flight from Mecca.
Greek Orthodox used the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind
the Western, or Gregorian, one. Observant Jews followed their own lunar
reckoning. Pious Muslims counted days according to sunrise, sunset, and
the calls to prayer.
Guidebooks included impenetrable tables converting dates and hours
from the Ottoman system to the more familiar international style. As the
Guide Bleu explained in 1920:
Let us suppose that on August 22, for example, we wish to know the Western-style hour
that corresponds to 6:45 in the Turkish system. We follow the horizontal line [on the
accompanying table] beginning with the number 6 to the column marked August 22 and
there we find the number 12:47. Adding 45 minutes to this figure, we have 12:92, that is,
1:32. In other words, 6:45 in the Turkish system corresponds, on August 22, to 1:32 in the
Western system.

Because of the changing moment of sunrise, the calculation would be

different for any other day of the year, and more than a few travelers
probably found that by the time they had figured out the hour, they had to
start all over again. Even during the Allied occupation, it was possible for a
traveler on the Orient Express to depart Paris, arrive in Istanbul, and find a
newspaper declaring that the date was half a millennium earlier than the day
he left. But as streamers unfurled and corks popped, marking the start of
January 1, 1926, people were stepping into both a new year and a new era.
It was the first time that all Istanbullus had technically agreed on a thing
called midnight.
Old clock towers erected by the Ottomans had their faces changed to
reflect the Western system. New ones soon rose in outlying districts to
encourage locals to reorient their days appropriately. When Turks later
looked back on the early republic, the transformation of time itself seemed
to be a grand metaphor for the changes initiated by Mustafa Kemal’s
government. The celebrated writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, for example,
parodied the obsession with timekeeping in his sprawling novel The Time
Regulation Institute (1962), in which an overenthusiastic bureaucracy levies
fines for clocks that run too slow or too fast—reprimanding those who fail
to keep up with the new world as well as those who get too far ahead of it.
The new clock and calendar were only one part of a long series of
reforms. The institution of the caliphate had continued to exist even after
the flight of Sultan Mehmed VI in 1922, but the Grand National Assembly
voted to abolish the religious office altogether in March 1924. Mehmed’s
successor as caliph, Abdülmecid, and a few of his family members were
delivered to a suburban station, placed on the Orient Express, and packed
off to Switzerland. His claim to being the universal leader of Islam came to
a sudden end, and with it, Istanbul’s place at the center of the Islamic world.
The republican government underscored the point by banning
Abdülmecid’s descendants from ever entering Turkey, a restriction that was
kept in place for male heirs for the following half century.
The end of the caliphate resounded across the world. It sparked outrage
from pious Muslims, who regarded the caliph’s role as a sacred trust that no
earthly power could possibly break. In Turkey, however, the steamroller of
reforms, both sacred and profane, continued. In a nod toward modernizing
the physical appearance of Turkish citizens, beginning in 1925 all men were
required to wear brimmed hats, not the red felt fez that had become popular
in the late empire. Little boys threw rocks to try to ping the old headgear off
recalcitrant fez-wearers.Since the regulation did not affect any other
element of clothing, for some time later Muslim men could be seen in the
streets wearing a fedora with baggy Ottoman-era trousers.
In 1926 a new civil code, based on Switzerland’s, replaced the empire’s
complex amalgam of Islamic sharia law, several varieties of Christian canon
law, rabbinical decisions, royal decrees, and tribal custom. The same year,
drinking liquor in public was officially permitted—although the theoretical
ban had never before impeded private club owners—and buffalo-drawn
carts were prohibited from Istanbul’s streets. In 1928, Islam was
disestablished as the state religion, and the Arabic alphabet was rejected in
favor of the Latin one for writing Turkish. All over Istanbul, street signs
came down, with the whirls and swishes of Arabic-style lettering
supplanted by labels wholly foreign to most local Muslims. Popular
photographs from the period show President Mustafa Kemal in front of
chalkboards, instructing the new nation in writing and spelling.
These changes were often collectively referred to as an inkılâp—a
revolution. Like many revolutionaries, the Kemalists had started out as
reformers, seeking to save the sultanate from invaders and occupiers, until it
became clear that the old system was beyond repair. But in most other
ways, this was a revolution of an unusual type. The Turks legislated their
monarch out of existence without ever marching on a royal palace. They
conquered no territory but their own. They embraced the idea of a
parliamentary republic but just as quickly enveloped their supreme leader in
a cult of personality that exceeded that of the Ottoman sultans. Mustafa
Kemal’s portrait appeared in every government building, and the press
chronicled his every gesture and utterance. He became the father of the
nation, the first citizen, and the supreme example of what a good Turk
should be. Briefly married and then divorced, he had no “first lady” for
most of his long tenure as president and no biological heirs, but he
considered as many as seven people his adopted children. The full list of
these individuals, as opposed to those merely under his express protection
or patronage, is still debated today, but most of them were young women
who seem to have impressed the president as especially ambitious, able, and
exemplary of the new Turkish woman.
His blue eyes and charismatic personality made him one of the most
swooned-over heads of state in the world. He appeared on the covers of
major international magazines more often than almost any leader of his
time, always dressed with a nattiness bordering on dandyism. His habits of
late-night drinking and all-hours conversation gave him a reputation as a
seemingly indefatigable transformer—a model for how to wrench an
ancient and recondite empire into the twentieth century. Today private
businesses no longer feel compelled to keep an image of him on display, but
shopowners and restaurateurs might tack up a photograph of Mustafa
Kemal in a bathing suit or on the dance floor, a cheeky nod to the maker of
a rolling revolution that is nearly a century old and, in a way, still going.
Even today, when antigovernment protesters take to Istanbul’s streets, they
still carry flags with his image and tie on headbands that proclaim “Atam
izindeyiz!”—“Father, we are following in your footsteps!” It is a supreme
testament to his legacy that young, middle-class urbanites can see
themselves as conservative and revolutionary at the same time. They
oppose the strictures of Islamic morality—increasingly promoted by
Turkey’s religious-leaning governing party after 2003—by looking back to
the traditions of the early secular republic under Mustafa Kemal. Not even
the Bolsheviks could have dreamed of a revolution that would turn out to be
so permanent.

Mustafa Kemal (center) at a New Year’s Eve ball in Ankara, 1929.

During the independence struggle, Mustafa Kemal carried the title of

gazi, a kind of Islamic generalissimo, but Kemalism as an ideology
developed in ways less martial than civic and political. It contained six
pillars, symbolized by the six arrows on the flag of the Republican People’s
Party, the movement he founded: republicanism, nationalism, populism,
secularism, statism, and revolutionism. The first five of these principles
owed a great deal to the French republican tradition, the model for the
Young Turks after 1908 as well as for Mustafa Kemal and his associates in
the transition from war-making to state-building. Turkey was not the
world’s first Islamic republic—that distinction belonged to Azerbaijan,
which had been briefly independent before the Bolsheviks reconquered it
during the Russian civil war—but it was nevertheless committed to building
a representative government, if not a fully democratic one. For most of the
interwar years, the Republican People’s Party was the only legal party, and
voters never directly elected their parliamentarians until more than a decade
after Mustafa Kemal’s death. The government was also given responsibility
for guarding against any privileged role for religion, looking out for the true
interests of the people, and making state institutions the engine of economic
and social development.
Like other revolutionaries, Kemalists wrote their history with an eraser
in hand. In the emerging story of their own triumph, their only opponents
were held to be the Allies, abetted by treacherous local Greeks and
Armenians. The Kemalist revolution was believed to have unfolded
naturally and unproblematically across Anatolia, save for minor hiccups
produced by the disgruntled and the unenlightened. The army was
remembered as traipsing heroically westward from Ankara to the sea,
restoring local sovereignty within Turkey’s natural frontiers, which
happened to coincide, more or less, with those the Ottomans controlled at
the time of the Mudros armistice in 1918.
In reality, however, Kemalism was a product of—not the cause of—
Mustafa Kemal’s hard-won victory over a range of internal opponents. The
arrows on his party’s flag became principles for building a new state, but
they were more importantly weapons aimed at a very specific set of
interests. As a diplomatic observer noted in 1923, a partial list of Mustafa
Kemal’s enemies at the time included:

All Old Turks and Sultanites.

All the Generals who have been set aside by Kemal.
All the deputies of the old who have not been elected to the new
Assembly.
All the old C.U.P. [Committee of Union and Progress] stalwarts . . . .
All those with whom Mustafa [Kemal] has quarreled or of whom he is
jealous or who are jealous of him. . . .
All those who prefer Constantinople to Angora [Ankara] as the capital.
All Ulema, Imams, and Hojas [Muslim clerics]. . . .
All civilians who get no pay, all demobilised soldiers who have no
other occupation and can find none. . . .

Anyone in Istanbul could have compiled his own similar list. The
brilliance of Mustafa Kemal’s strategy lay in his ability to pick the right
opponents to use against the others. He had a knack for bringing into his
own camp some of the most thuggish warlords operating in the political
vacuum created by war and occupation. A host of colorful and ruthless
characters flowed into the ranks of the Turkish nationalists—men such as
Ali the Sword and Osman the Lame, whose guerrilla tactics targeted
political oppositionists, armed clansmen, occupation forces, and civilians
alike. The Kemalists generally avoided the show trials and mass purges that
would later engulf the Soviet Union, but a smaller-scale version of
revolutionary courts, known as independence tribunals, were established
under the authority of the Grand National Assembly. More than seven
thousand people were arrested. Close to seven hundred were sentenced to
death.
The government allowed occasional experiments with multiple political
parties, even though direct, competitive elections were not held until 1950.
But openness was usually followed by reaction. In the spring of 1925, a
new law on the maintenance of public order provided a reason for closing
down newspapers and shuttering opposition organizations. Small
demonstrations or individual acts of dissent were sometimes exaggerated as
“rebellions,” which in turn enabled crackdowns. Communal violence that
fell short of threatening the state, such as the razing of Jewish communities
by Turkish nationalists in the city of Edirne and other parts of Thrace in
1934, was downplayed in press reporting and official discourse. Still,
eighteen armed uprisings challenged the Kemalist government before the
Second World War, almost all of them in eastern Anatolia. Major revolts by
ethnic Kurds in the region, expressing a range of grievances from the loss
of the caliphate to the withering of traditional feudal privileges, were
harshly repressed. Military planes, one of them piloted by the president’s
adopted daughter, the aviation pioneer Sabiha Gökçen, were sent to bomb
villages. Aerial attacks on Kurdish areas in the Dersim region in 1937–1938
became a kind of Turkish Guernica, a shocking bombardment of civilians
under the guise of an antiguerrilla operation. The difference from the
famous Spanish case, however, was that the people dropping the bombs and
those hiding from them were all citizens of the same country.
One might have expected that the old imperial capital would emerge as
the heartland of dissent, given that its streetscape was teeming with ancient
reminders of the Islamic values the Kemalists were eagerly putting away.
The revolution was, after all, everything that Istanbul wasn’t—anti-
imperial, forward-looking, and past-negating. But Istanbul’s residents found
themselves more ignored than feared. With the abolition of the caliphate,
the network of local imams and religious scholars centered in Istanbul had
begun to fade. The more career-savvy ones moved to Ankara, like their
ambitious counterparts in government ministries, where they became part of
the growing state apparatus charged not with eliminating religion but with
managing it. In 1924 and 1925, the office of eyhülislam was abolished,
Muslim religious courts were suppressed, and the wearing of turbans and
other religious garb was restricted to a few government-appointed clerics.
Even then, the turbaned pious were expected to take off their headgear to
salute the flag on Republic Day—October 29—a practice previously
unimaginable to the devout.
The Kemalists adopted a French term, laïcité, to describe their
conception of the new role of religion in the republic. Its Turkish equivalent
—lâiklik—followed the French model: not separating religion from the
state but, instead, actively controlling it. New state institutions were
charged with governing mosques, churches, synagogues, and religious
foundations. Independent sources of wealth—such as properties belonging
to Greek or Armenian church authorities—were either seized or made
subject to government oversight.
Although officially secular, the state privileged Sunni Islam as a true
marker of Turkish nationality, regardless of an individual’s actual level of
religious devotion. In the alchemy of religion and identity in Kemalist
Turkey, one was judged not so much by which religion one practiced—
since piousness was considered a clear sign of backwardness and
superstition—but rather by which religious heritage one rejected. Having a
devout Sunni grandparent who might quietly complain about how much
alcohol you drank was perhaps the truest marker of being both a good
republican and a good Turk. “In that case we’re purging the past?” asks a
character in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s novel of interwar Istanbul, A Mind at
Peace (1949). “Of course,” a friend replies, “but only where needed.”
Religious bodies outside the Sunni mainstream, such as Sufi
brotherhoods or Alevis, an offshoot of Shi’a Islam, saw their meeting
houses closed down or, worse, their beliefs condemned as inimical to the
state. The historic Sufi lodge, or tekke, just off the Grande Rue had been
established even before the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul, when Mevlevi
dervishes came into the city bearing the teachings of their founder, the poet
and mystic Rumi. Yet it too was closed as a site of worship. Sufi leaders, or
sheikhs, were arrested for subversion. Virtually any episode of violence that
involved religious men or women was seen as evidence of retrograde
fanatics’ holding back the forces of progress.
One of Istanbul’s signature manmade sounds—the ezan, or Islamic call
to prayer—was changed, too. The call was traditionally given in each
neighborhood by a muezzin, whose powerful voice would summon the
faithful to prayer from the minaret of a local mosque. Those with pleasing
voices or melodic creativity were prized; those with less talent were the
object of local gossip and complaints. After 1923, the task was made easier
with the introduction of amplified public address systems. The ezan was
now accompanied by the crackle and hiss of an electric microphone, a
descant that floated above the proclamation of faith.
Men sacrifice rams on the tracks of the Taksim–Tünel trolley line in Pera, perhaps to inaugurate a
new trolley car.

Beginning in early 1932, however, Turkish muezzins no longer chanted

the Arabic words “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great.” As part of its reform
program, the government mandated that the Turkish version of the phrase,
“Tanrı uludur,” be used instead, with reversions to Arabic declared a
criminal offense. The change was part of the government’s broader reform
program of purging public space of old imperial influences, including
Arabic and Persian elements in the Turkish language. The guttural vowels
and the invocation of Tanrı—the sky god of Central Asian nomads—were
also nods to a nationalist fantasy: that the truest ancestors of modern Turks
were the pony-riding hordes who had once thundered over the Eurasian
steppe. Huge crowds gathered to hear the first call to prayer in Turkish at
the Sultanahmet mosque. Five of the other largest mosques in the city
followed suit. On the Night of Power—the holy evening during Ramadan
that commemorates the revelation of the Qur’an—seventy thousand people
were packed in and around the Hagia Sophia mosque to hear the full
sequence of Islamic prayers delivered for the first time in Turkish. In the
new republic, even God had been nationalized, and from morning to night,
1,200 retrained muezzins proclaimed the fact.
Kemalism leapfrogged over Istanbul like it jumped over the Ottomans.
Mustafa Kemal assiduously avoided the city until well after the declaration
of the republic. He arrived for the first time since the war of independence
on July 1, 1927, aboard the sultan’s former yacht, Ertu rul. He moored at
Dolmabahçe Palace, which had been transformed into a presidential
residence. The streets were lined with flags. Balconies were draped with
bunting. Each summer thereafter, his comings and goings were attended by
invited guests and dignitaries, a secular and republican re-creation of the
sultan’s weekly procession to the mosque.
The yearly sighting of the president’s yacht and a flotilla of smaller
vessels was an event as keenly anticipated as the migration of sardines in
the Bosphorus. But outside of the president’s summer holidays, Istanbul and
the old imperial identities it represented were put out of the new national
consciousness. The republic was held to be the continuation of the Turks’
natural evolution as a nation, despite the half-millennium detour through
Islamic imperialism. Turkish schoolbooks taught new generations of
students to see their distant ancestors as Turkic tribesmen, even if their
grandfathers had actually been Salonican greengrocers or Sarajevan tailors.
The “sun language theory,” popular among Turkish linguists in the 1930s,
posited that all human languages were descended from a Turkic ur-source.
The ancient inhabitants of modern-day Turkey, from the Hittites forward,
were brought into the family as well, recast as descendants of even more
ancient proto-Turkic invaders from the east.
All of this entailed an act of personal and collective imagination.
Muslims whose forebears hailed from Anatolia but also from the Caucasus,
Albania, Bulgaria, Crimea, Greece, or other far-flung parts of the old
empire suddenly transformed themselves from immigrants into indigenes.
Under the Ottomans, few of these families would have dreamed of using
“Turk” to describe themselves. That label was generally reserved for a
country bumpkin more comfortable astride a donkey than in the
sophisticated environs of Istanbul. It was a term that represented the very
thing that enlightened Ottomans had despised most about their own empire
—the benighted, nomadic, and fitfully loyal peasants who inhabited the
darkest reaches of Anatolia. One could be a Muslim and a subject of the
sultan. No one wanted to be a Turk.
Mustafa Kemal’s great innovation—rooted in the theories of the writer
Ziya Gökalp, the chief ideologist of Turkish nationalism—was to elevate
the derogatory label into a new nationality. Living the ideals of the national
revolution was meant to be a personal commitment on the part of each new
citizen. “I am a Turk,” pupils were eventually instructed to chant at the
beginning of each day’s classes. “I am honest. I am hardworking. My code
is to protect those younger than me, respect my elders, and love my
homeland and my nation more than myself. My quest is to rise higher and
go farther. May my whole life be a gift to Turkishness.” The oath was not
so much a pledge of allegiance as a promise of self-improvement. Few
countries have gone through revolutions whose aim was to make everything
seem so deeply ordinary—making Turkey and the Turks, in other words, a
nation just like any other, with their own national liberation movement,
national heroes, and national language. But the core of Kemalism was
precisely that: a belief that the rump empire and its multilingual,
multireligious subjects needed to be dragged, one soul at a time, into
modernity.
The nation was hailed as both capacious and aboriginal. Like the simple
act of professing belief in one God, a Muslim of Kurdish, Circassian, or
Albanian background could participate in the nation-building project with a
simple declaration of faith in the new nationalism. “Ne mutlu Türküm
diyene,” said Mustafa Kemal in a speech on the tenth anniversary of the
republic in 1933. “How happy is the person who says, ‘I am a Turk.’” It
became one of his most famous dictums, engraved on stone monuments to
the president everywhere. The phrase was at the same time descriptive and
cautionary. It was an honor to be a Turkish citizen—the constitution defined
all Turkish citizens as Turks, regardless of religion or heritage—but it made
life easier if you claimed you were a Turk in an ethnic sense as well. Even a
Greek or Armenian Christian, with a bit of inventiveness and a careful
silence about who her parents had been before 1923, might manage the
same feat.
Turkishness—Türklük—became not just an identity but an entire way of
being, a disembodied essence of the nation that both infused individuals and
floated above them, an aspiration to self-improvement and a totem of the
mythical collective will. In the past, insulting the sultan had been a crime,
in the same way that most absolutist monarchies deemed lèse-majesté a
punishable offense. Now, Turkishness took the sultan’s place. Writing the
wrong kind of newspaper article, making the wrong kind of comment, even
wearing the wrong kind of clothes could be an insult to Turkishness, with
the transgressor fined or brought up before a judge. The same offense, in
altered form, has remained enshrined in Turkish law ever since.

The Ottomans had ruled an empire that was tradition-bound and dynastic,
stretching from the Balkans to the border with Iran, but much of its
population and wealth had lain squarely in geographic Europe: the fertile
plains along the Danube River, the vineyards of upland Bulgaria, the valley
pastures of southern Albania, the silver mines of Bosnia and Macedonia.
The Turkish Republic, by contrast, was a country that stressed modernity
and progress, but given the territorial changes created by the First World
War, ninety-seven percent of the country’s land area now lay in Anatolia,
the heartland that was poorer and more sparsely populated than many of the
regions once ruled by the sultan. The Turkish mind may have shifted west,
but the Turkish state had shifted east.
For Istanbul the most important evidence of that change came in 1927.
Early on the morning of October 28, a leaden calm settled over the city.
Galata Bridge, normally black with pedestrians, was bare. Only a few
people could be seen staring nervously from their doorways. At the Pera
Palace, an American diplomat found himself held captive. “I awoke . . . to
an oppressive silence; there was no sound of people on the streets, of
automobile horns, or of tramcars,” he reported, “and on looking out of the
window I saw armed sailors patrolling the streets.” For most of that Friday,
Istanbul was a city of the dead.
At precisely 10:15 p.m., three cannon shots rang out. People poured
from their houses and apartment buildings. Taxis rushed along the avenues.
Cinemas and cafés opened, and stores threw up their shutters. Within half
an hour, the Grande Rue was thronged. The din of urban life quickly
returned, and Istanbullus walked about like liberated prisoners.
The whole day had in fact been meticulously planned. The Turkish
government had hired a Belgian statistician, Camille Jacquart, to conduct
the first-ever national census. Never before had the inhabitants of the
country been systematically counted. On Jacquart’s orders, copies of the
census questionnaire were published in the press, along with explicit rules
governing behavior. Between the zero hour of six o’clock in the morning
and the all-clear cannonade in the evening, no one was allowed to leave
home, even for Friday prayers. People were prohibited from helping a
neighbor put out a fire, visiting shops or restaurants, traveling in cars or
trains, or casting off a mooring cable in the port. Thousands of volunteer
census-takers swarmed up staircases and down cul-de-sacs, urging people to
do their patriotic duty and report honestly and thoroughly on their age,
gender, native language, religion, infirmities, profession, nationality, and
other traits.
Within a week, the initial results were in, and they were astonishing.
Previous estimates had put Turkey’s population at seven to nine million, but
the census counted many more: some 13,648,270 people. Istanbul was
revealed to have a population of a little over 690,000, with around another
300,000 people living in other parts of Thrace, the wedge of Turkish
territory west of the Bosphorus. The city was smaller than it had been in the
late Ottoman period; the country as a whole had lost about a quarter of its
population through war-related death and disease, deportation, and
migration since 1914. But Istanbul still dwarfed every other urban center in
the republic. Only two cities had more than a hundred thousand people, and
Istanbul’s closest competitor, Izmir, was less than a quarter of its size.
Ankara, already the seat of government for four years, had persuaded only
74,553 people to live there.
Journalists hailed the census as a milestone in Turkey’s development.
The statistical bureau had demonstrated its ability to carry out a complex
feat of modern statecraft. More important, the loss of so much territory in
Europe, the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula had actually increased the
Turkish component of the population. As the newspaper Milliyet (The
Nation) claimed, the census had shown that the vast majority of the
republic’s citizens—11.7 million people—were “pure Turks”—that is,
ethnically Turkish as opposed to Kurdish, Arab, Greek, Armenian, or
another identity. That was a dubious conclusion; after centuries of empire
and more than a decade of intense war and population movement, Turkey’s
genetic pool was a swirling mix of ancestries. But the fact that the republic
had convinced so many people to claim they were Turks in an ethnic sense
was a testament to the power of Kemalist nation-building.
In greater Istanbul, the census counted around 448,000 Muslims living
alongside 99,000 Orthodox Christians (mainly Greeks), 53,000 Armenians,
and 47,000 Jews, along with nearly 45,000 other non-Muslims. With the
exception of Kurdish areas in southeastern Anatolia, Istanbul was now the
only place in the entire republic with a sizable minority presence. It
contained virtually all of the republic’s functioning Greek and Armenian
churches, its synagogues, its monasteries, its minority-language schools and
presses. Armenian monuments in eastern Anatolia had been dynamited or
allowed to fall into ruin, a conscious effort to erase the remnants of
communities destroyed in the genocide. Greek properties along the Aegean
coast were taken over by Muslim owners. Even the Kurds, with their unique
languages and traditions, would eventually be classed by republican
ideologues as simply a type of Turk. Less than a decade after the war of
independence began, the enormous imperial legacy—the long history of
multiple confessions, many languages, origins, and heritages—had been
distilled into a single city.
The Kemalist project became the world’s largest experiment in
squeezing the entirety of modern European history—from the Renaissance
to the Industrial Revolution—into a few decades. Life was accelerating, and
Turks were urged to run as they built the new fatherland. National life was
centered in Ankara, which had been formally announced as the new capital
almost two weeks before the Turkish Republic was proclaimed. Radio
broadcasting; the opera, ballet, and symphony; the most powerful
newspapers; and in time the embassies of foreign governments all
decamped there. New government buildings rose on wide avenues and
expansive squares.
City planners in Istanbul understood the former capital’s core dilemma
—not how to build a city from scratch, which was already taking place in
Ankara, but how to modernize a place that, as American tourists were fond
of saying, just had so much history to it. While new government offices
were still rising in Ankara, the Turkish government organized an
international design competition to solicit proposals for solving the problem
of Istanbul’s future development. The French urban engineer Henri Prost
was selected as Istanbul’s director of urban planning. Many years of pencil
sketches, scale models, and bureaucratic infighting followed, but Prost’s
vision was finally approved by government ministers in 1939.
Prost’s plan called for cutting highways around the Grand Bazaar,
demolishing most buildings along the Grande Rue, making the shores of the
Golden Horn into an industrial park, and building high-rise apartment
blocks along the Sea of Marmara. Half the windows in the Pera Palace were
to open onto a highway interchange. Prost included green spaces in his
designs, but these were by and large orderly promenades created by the
bulldozing of things he considered “parasitical”—old structures deemed to
be less important than an idealized image of monumental buildings defining
the city’s silhouette. A level esplanade designed for military processions
and centered on a massive new “monument to the republic” was meant to
replace the jumble of buildings around the Hagia Sophia and Sultanahmet
mosques.
Prost did have the inspired idea of keeping intact the skyline of the old
city, the peninsula where most of the Byzantine- and Ottoman-era
architecture stands. His insistence on preservation, at least in that part of the
city, secured the area against high-rise development and meant that the
city’s signature profile of domes and minarets, especially when viewed
from the sea, would remain undisturbed. But a better place to get some idea
of Prost’s overall vision is Taksim Square, which was intended to serve as
the new heart of the republican city. When John Dos Passos went to a
cabaret near Taksim in the early 1920s, he found a Russian lady on stage
doing a peasant dance, two English girls crooning in knee socks and
sweaters, a troupe of Greek acrobats, and a French woman singing
selections from Lucia di Lammermoor. In 1928, however, city planners
cleaned up part of the square and created a bronze-and-marble monument to
the republic’s founders. One side showed Mustafa Kemal, smet Pasha, and
other makers of the new country in astrakhan hats and the military garb of
the war of independence. The other side portrayed them as modern
statesmen in Western-style suits and ties. Prost’s idea was not to continue
with the monument-building in Taksim but rather to make way for more
automobiles. What resulted was an expansive flatland of asphalt and
concrete serving as a subway stop, a major road hub, and an open-air bus
terminal. Until radical traffic engineering began to reshape the square in
2013, it took some bravery to cross Taksim on foot.
Prost probably would have cringed at the modern hodgepodge that his
planning eventually produced, but his method of leveling and redesigning
bits of the city he declared architecturally insignificant was copied by later
builders. Taksim was eventually burdened with the Atatürk Cultural Center,
which looks rather like the backside of a window air-conditioning unit, and
the Marmara Taksim, a slightly more stylish take on a Soviet Intourist hotel.
The space is saved only by the area known today as Gezi Park, a swath of
green off to one side, which Prost had intended as a formal garden built on
the site of an Ottoman-era military barracks that he had deemed parasitical.
The advent of the Second World War halted the full implementation of
the Prost plan. Prost himself was let go as chief planner in 1951. The
Grande Rue was saved, as was much of the area around the old Petits-
Champs Park. After the war, however, urban improvers returned, cutting
highways deep into the heart of the old city and pulling down Ottoman-era
wooden houses to make way for cheap multistory apartment blocks,
especially in poorer districts. Petits-Champs was gone, and the Pera Palace
was hemmed in by taller buildings wrapped in reflective glass. Prost’s
defenders blamed the losses on the piecemeal implementation of his master
plan, especially in the 1950s, an era overseen by a bulldozer-friendly prime
minister, Adnan Menderes. But had the revolutionary urge to erase and
rebuild been visited on Istanbul in the years when Mustafa Kemal himself
was around to supervise it, one can only imagine what would have become
of the architectural treasures and intimate, messy neighborhoods it still has
to offer. It was not until the early 2000s that a Turkish government would
turn to remaking Istanbul with something approaching Prostian zeal—and
then without Prost’s redeeming virtue of preserving the ancient skyline.
Modernity and civilization were the watchwords of the early republic,
and the local press took great offense when it learned of representations of
the city that failed to remark on its sophistication and seriousness. A large
ball organized for tourists in 1929, for example, featured prostitutes doing
belly dances around braziers, waterpipes, and divans. The newspaper
Milliyet condemned the affair and urged the city administration to put a stop
to such faux-Ottoman frivolity. “Presenting the Turkish nation, which has
made its customs conform to those of the most civilized occidental nations,
in such an unfavorable light is an insolent attack,” an editorial thundered.
“The republican police and republican laws are made to deal with whoever
admits having organized such a money-grabbing masquerade.” The
problem was not sexual license but rather the sense that dredging up the
past was an affront to the values of progress and renewal promised by
Kemalism. Nowhere were these values more fervently preached than in the
campaign to transform the lives of Turkish women.
BEYOND THE VEIL
Two women jump rope in an impromptu session on an Istanbul street.
F OR MUSLIM WOMEN, THE CREATION of the secular state was often said to
have ushered in liberation from the double yoke of tradition and religion.
“The shape of social life changed,” recalled Mîna Urgan, a prominent
Turkish writer and academic. “Women were no longer kept at home. They
could go out with boys, have fun together, eat and drink together.”
Unlike the fez for men, Islamic head coverings for women were never
fully banned, although official discourse discouraged them as retrograde
and uncivilized. Headscarves and veils were not allowed inside state
institutions—which included everything from schools to government
ministries—and within short order, Istanbul’s Muslim elite adopted styles of
female dress little different from those in other parts of Europe. Window
screens, which had secluded many Muslim women from public view,
finally came down in 1930 as part of a national hygiene law to let more
light and air into dank interior apartments. That reform alone ended what
must once have been a brisk clandestine economy. Travelers’ accounts of
surreptitious visits behind the screened-off world of feminine Istanbul are
so numerous that the Ottoman city must have enjoyed a roaring trade in
harem tourism—in reality, probably visits to disguised brothels—for
gullible Europeans.
All these practices had already begun to fade by the beginning of the
twentieth century, however. The full seclusion of women under the
Ottomans was largely a middle- and upper-class Muslim phenomenon, as
was the wearing of elaborate veils or other coverings. The types and sizes
of veils were matters of adornment and style, not just a marker of religious
piety. Women from rural or working-class backgrounds might wear long
scarves that could be pulled over their faces in the presence of male
strangers, but the full-length çar af—a large, circular piece of fabric
covering the head, face, and clothing—was generally a fashion of the wives
and daughters of the elite. The idea of Muslim women being carted through
the streets in servant-borne sedan chairs, or gesturing coyly through their
window screens at passersby, were likewise already part of the distant—and
largely imagined—past.
But the real innovation under Mustafa Kemal was to formalize women’s
rights in a system of legal equality, in theory making Muslim women
genuine partners in building the republic. The new Swiss-inspired civil code
abolished polygamy, ended the preferential treatment of men in the
inheritance of property, and affirmed a woman’s right to divorce her
husband. Public harassment was made a criminal offense, and in 1930
women were given the vote in municipal elections. Four years later, the
franchise was extended to elections for the Grand National Assembly, and
eighteen women were soon elected to the legislature—more than double the
number in the US Congress at the time.
Legal rights for women were secured, but the emerging state was
traditionalist when it came to their real place in public life. Women were by
and large written into the new republic’s history as a group but written out
of it as individuals. When they did appear, it was usually as cardboard
heroines, women who sacrificed themselves for the nationalist cause or took
up patriotic professions in service to the republic. Newspapers were filled
with stories of female firsts. The first Muslim female lawyer to appear
before a court in Istanbul, Beyhan Hanım, approached the bar in 1928 and
was later elevated to a judgeship. The first surgeon, Suad Hanım, was
accredited in 1931, and the first pharmacist, Belkıs Hanım, accepted her
license the same year. The first wrestler, Emine Hanım, stepped forward in
1932 to take on any male competitor who dared accept her standing
challenge. The first female tramway conductors did not appear until 1941,
but a satisfied public deemed them more polite than their male counterparts.
Like much of Kemalism, however, the world did not change suddenly
with the proclamation of the republic, nor did the gains achieved by women
erase old social habits. Even in the last days of the sultans, Istanbul women
tended to marry later, have fewer children, and divorce more readily than in
other Islamic societies. Women were already very much part of social
space. They attended public entertainments. They could be seen transacting
business in the arcades off the Petits-Champs or dining in the Pera Palace
restaurant. By 1920, more than a third of the employees in Pera’s
department stores were women, and even in the more conservative areas
south of the Golden Horn, women accounted for nearly twenty percent of
sales clerks. Many of these women were Christians and Jews who led lives
little different from those of women in other European cities at the same
time, but sizable numbers of Muslim women were clearly in the public eye
as well. Tramcars accommodated both genders (even though curtains
separated the men’s section from the women’s), and during the Allied
occupation, Muslim men and women appeared together in theaters,
cinemas, and other gathering places.
The first women’s organizations had been formed soon after the Young
Turk revolution, part of the general upsurge in liberal and reform-oriented
groups that sprang up in the city in the relative freedom afforded by the
restoration of the constitution. Like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe,
these associations often sought to liberate women by elevating them. Their
leaders—chiefly from prominent Ottoman families—regarded increasing
literacy and opening a new range of educational opportunities as essential to
preparing women to take a more active role in public life.
Educated Muslim women were involved in the Turkish Hearth
movement, a set of discussion clubs on culture and current affairs that
became the nucleus of anti-occupation sentiment after 1918. Their names
appeared as bylines in a range of publications on politics, international
affairs, education, and other topics, while specialized journals such as
Kadınlar Dünyası (Women’s World) featured work by women essayists and
artists. Mass rallies in 1919 and 1920, called to protest the Hellenic
occupation of Smyrna and the Allied presence in Istanbul, featured female
speakers prominently calling on their Turkish brothers to oppose the
dismemberment of their country.
After the First World War, the expansion of women in the workforce
probably had as much to do with a fundamental demographic crisis as with
the liberal ideas of Turkish nationalists. By the time of the 1927 census, a
million women across the country were widows, and in Istanbul a third of
all married women had lost their husbands to war, disease, or other causes.
More women became the principal breadwinners in their families than at
any other time in Turkish history, largely as a result of grueling violence
and refugee flight. Women of all classes and religions were taking up public
space, confidently and deliberately, long before they were given express
permission to do so by the government. Nezihe Muhidin, one of the major
organizers of the women’s rights movement in Istanbul and founder of the
Turkish Women’s Union, even attempted to form a women’s political party
in the summer of 1923. It was technically the first party created in Turkey,
founded several months before Mustafa Kemal’s own Republican People’s
Party. The administration refused to register it.
Turkish politicians sometimes claimed that women themselves were the
main obstacles to female progress. Burdened by their own narrow horizons,
they were simply failing to take up the new opportunities afforded them by
changes in the civil code. “The duty of Turkish Women’s Societies is
primarily to persuade the great majority of Turkish women to accept the
rights that have already been granted to them,” said Milliyet in an editorial
in 1927. “These societies, prior to occupying themselves with the
organization of political life and in struggles against men, should interest
themselves in other women and should combat the primitive state of mind
shown by them.”

Istanbul women walking near the Galata Bridge, with the Yeni (New) mosque in the background.
It was an argument that reappeared with frequency: The advances
women had made were the beneficent gift of the state; the deficiencies were
of their own making. The republic even had a semiofficial voice dedicated
to making precisely that point. Afet nan, one of Mustafa Kemal’s adopted
daughters, became the chief female spokesperson for the one-party
government. Like so many other republican elites, she was born in Salonica
and studied in Istanbul’s French schools, later working as a teacher in the
city of Bursa. Taken under Mustafa Kemal’s wing in the mid-1920s, she
studied at the University of Geneva in the 1930s and, as a practicing
sociologist, turned her academic training toward crafting the president’s
personality cult. She remained one of the principal expounders of Kemalism
as a coherent political ideology and a major codifier of the official history
of the revolution’s contribution to women’s liberation.
Other women were not so fortunate. Nezihe Muhidin’s women’s
organization was closed down in the 1930s as part of the general
retrenchment against independent civic associations. But even then it was
still possible to wonder whether the republic might take a different path
from the one laid out for it in the ever-narrowing vision of Kemalism. There
was no better example of that possibility than one of the women who had
stood before the cheering crowds near the Sultanahmet mosque in 1919,
railing against the Allied occupation and urging Istanbullus to stand firmly
on the side of the nationalists. It was both the first and the last time a
woman would have such a prominent political voice at a crucial moment in
Turkey’s history.

If one were looking for a symbol of late-Ottoman optimism—the hope that

Islam, modernity, and imperial revival could be harmoniously combined—
Halide Edip would be a good candidate. She represented the best of what
the old empire could still produce. She was born into a respected Ottoman
family in 1884 and grew up in the green environs of the Bosphorus, first
near the forested campus of the sultan’s Yıldız Palace and then on the Asian
side in the suburb of Üsküdar. The family mansion, covered in wisteria, had
a terraced garden surrounded by tall acacias and a low fruit orchard.
Pigeons swooped in on gentle breezes, and small fountains featured carved
lions spitting water into a burbling pool.
Her father, Edip Bey, was an Ottoman patriot and close adviser to
Abdülhamid II. He kept a household with multiple wives, as was customary
in his class and station among Muslims, but in everything from the
management of his estate to the education of his children, he was an
inveterate Anglophile. Plenty of English travelers fell in love with Turkey,
returning to London to eat white cheese with honey and drape their tables
with Anatolian carpets. Edip Bey’s was probably the only home in Istanbul
to return the favor. He ordered his cook to serve only English food at
mealtimes.
Edip Bey was convinced that Britain had discovered the path to
enlightenment and modernity, and he sought ways of communicating those
values to his children. Woods Pasha—or Admiral Henry Woods, as he was
originally known—was a distinguished British seaman who donned a fez
and came into the sultan’s naval service as a senior adviser in the late
1860s. He became a close friend of Edip Bey’s family and recalled
regularly meeting his young daughter Halide. Flouting Ottoman fashion,
she was dressed in English-made dark blue frocks in winter and white linen
in summer. She was slight and frail, Woods recalled, but possessed an
exceptional intellect. Once she was old enough to begin learning foreign
languages, Woods selected stories for her to read in English. It may have
been on Woods’s recommendation that Edip Bey decided to take Halide in
an unorthodox direction. He enrolled her in school.
Private tutors were not uncommon among upper-class Muslim women,
much as they were for contemporary women of the same rank in Victorian
Britain or elsewhere. But actually sending a girl to school, even a girls’
school, was unusual. For Halide’s education, Edip Bey chose the American
College for Girls, a missionary-run secondary school where instruction was
in English. It offered a full complement of subjects from literature to
science, and it was one of the mainstays of elite education for religious
minorities in the city, including the daughters of English-speaking
merchants and diplomats. There she sat amid Jews and Armenians,
Bulgarians and Greeks, the only Muslim student in one of the most
prestigious institutions in the city. In 1901 she became its first Muslim
graduate.
Edip Bey was intent on his daughter’s becoming well educated, but he
was enough of a traditionalist to believe that the primary purpose of her
schooling was to make her a better woman, not to launch her on a career.
Almost as soon as she left the college, she was married to a much older
man, Salih Zeki, an Istanbul writer and translator who had also served as
her mathematics tutor. He was nearly her father’s age and quickly
positioned himself as a paternal figure to his young wife. “No little
Circassian slave bought from the slave-market at the lowest price could
have entered upon our common life in such an obedient spirit as I did,”
Halide later recalled.
She settled into a routine circumscribed by the expectations of her
gender, class, and religion: staying secluded at home, serving her husband,
and raising their two sons in an apartment overlooking Pera’s Grande Rue.
The new family’s outlook—imperial yet progressive—was evident in their
sons’ names. The first Halide called Ali Ayetullah, a traditional Muslim
name; the second she called Togo, after the Japanese admiral who defeated
the tsar in the Russo-Japanese War. With the right mix of tradition and
modernization, Muslims like Halide and her husband believed, the Ottoman
Empire might repeat Japan’s course and outstrip the industrial West. Still,
even though she could follow major world events in the international press,
her mind was not yet awakened, she said. She was consumed by frequent
depression and occasional nervous breakdowns.
Then came 1908. Like many Istanbullus, Halide was caught up in the
general enthusiasm for the restoration of the constitution and the
parliament. The Ottoman Empire at last seemed to have its own version of a
modern European revolution. Political change had come about not through
a palace intrigue or the untimely death of a sultan but because of an
uprising by liberal-minded military officers who stepped forward to drag
the empire away from self-destruction. As a well-read young woman and
fluent in English, Halide presented herself to one of the major pro-Unionist
newspapers, Tanin (The Echo), edited by the well-known poet Tevfik
Fikret. She was taken on as a literary columnist. She never visited the
newspaper’s offices—appearing unaccompanied in public would have been
impossible for a high-ranking Muslim woman, even one with an English-
language education—but her venture into the world of writing and
publishing was a revelation. “I became a writer,” she said of her reaction to
the Young Turk revolution. Her fame spread, so much so that she regularly
received death threats for her columns. In 1909, she traveled briefly to
Egypt and Britain, in part to escape the period of reaction against the
Unionist government.
Still in her twenties, Halide was a fairly conventional progressive of her
era. She prized self-improvement over politics, patriotism over
individualism, and the nation as an antidote to disorderly multiculturalism.
She was a liberal only in the sense that all the categories of her overlapping
identity—as a woman, as a Muslim, and as a Turk—required liberation
from various oppressors: men, religious conservatives, and the non-Muslim
minorities whom she and her compatriots saw as potentially disloyal
neighbors. She was involved in the establishment of some of the first
women’s organizations in the empire and later became a mainstay of the
Turkish Hearth associations, but these efforts were focused mainly on the
cultivation of women’s minds through edifying lectures in French and
English. In 1910, she made her politics personal. When Salih Zeki proposed
to take a second wife, Halide requested a divorce, which he granted. She
moved out and took the children with her. It was the first time in her life,
she said, that she no longer suffered from nerves.
Halide’s publishing career erupted. She continued her essay-writing and
drifted into fiction as well, publishing novels that sought to open up the
world of Muslim Ottoman women, treating them neither as harem slaves
nor as revolutionary feminists. She fell into the orbit of the writer Ziya
Gökalp, the main ideologue of Turkish nationalism. Originally from
Diyarbakır, in southeastern Anatolia, Gökalp had been in Salonica at the
time of Unionist agitation and quickly became one of the leading lights
among Turkish nationalists. He was short and round, with an old bullet
wound in his forehead that made him instantly recognizable, but his odd
appearance gave way when he spoke eloquently about the need for Turks to
step forward and rescue their identity as a nation from the flames
consuming the old empire. Halide eventually broke with Gökalp, whose
nationalism, she believed, stepped over the line into ethnic chauvinism.
Being in his circle had given her impeccable credentials as a visionary
when it came to questions of identity and the Turkish future. In 1918, the
Allied occupation illustrated the weakness of the old empire. In 1919 and
1920, the Hellenic seizure of Smyrna and Armenian claims on eastern
Anatolia—both of which were eventually supported by the Allies in the
Treaty of Sèvres—were its death knell. “I felt stupefied, tired, and utterly
sick of all that had happened since 1914,” Halide said. “I was conscious that
the Ottoman Empire had fallen with a crash, and that it was not only the
responsible Unionist leaders who were buried beneath the crushing weight
of it. . . . [A]t that moment the absolute finality of the death of the empire
was an unavoidable fact.”
Halide had no reason to meet Mustafa Kemal, even though both were in
Istanbul in 1918 and 1919. In fact, as a public figure, she clearly eclipsed
him at this stage. Her ties to the Turkish Hearth movement naturally linked
her with the Unionist underground in the city, and her writings had made
her one of the most recognizable intellectuals in the empire. During the
First World War, she had married for a second time, to Abdülhak Adnan.
Small and pale, with prominent round spectacles and a legendary sense of
humor, Adnan was a prominent Unionist, medical doctor, and writer. He
had served in a senior role with the Red Crescent Society during the First
World War and was later put in charge of sanitation in Istanbul—a vital
position, given the frequent outbreaks of typhus and other diseases.
Together, Adnan and Halide were a rarity: a husband-and-wife team
who were both public personas and both actively engaged in the national
movement. They stood at the center of the growing opposition to the Allied
occupation. In 1919, Halide later recalled, “I suddenly ceased to exist as an
individual: I worked, wrote, and lived as a unit of that magnificent national
madness.” That summer, she was invited to address the crowds—perhaps
two hundred thousand people—gathered outside the Sultanahmet mosque to
protest the Hellenic invasion. She felt herself instantly connected to the
masses spread out before her. She had finally stepped into a role for which
she had been preparing all her life: a public leader of a great cause at a
moment of national crisis. “Brethren and sons, listen to me,” she said.
Governments are our enemies, peoples are our friends, and the just revolt of our hearts our
strength. The day is not far off when all nations will get their rights. When that day comes,
take your banners and come and visit the graves of your brethren who have fought and
have fallen for the glorious end. Now swear and repeat with me: “The sublime emotion
which we cherish in our hearts will last till the proclamation of the rights of the peoples!”

“We swear!” the crowd thundered in response. It was a watershed moment

not only in the history of Turkish nationalism but also for Turkish women.
Never before had a woman appeared in such a visible and expressly
political role, least of all a Muslim woman. Halide still hid her blonde hair
beneath a chaste headscarf.
The next spring, when Mustafa Kemal’s military movement began to
form in central Anatolia, Halide joined the large numbers of Muslim
intellectuals, activists, and politicians making their way east to join the
nationalists. Had she and Adnan stayed in Istanbul, they almost certainly
would have been arrested by the British authorities and deported to Malta as
seditious nationalists. Both also soon had the distinction, with Mustafa
Kemal, of being given a death sentence by the Ottoman parliament. It was a
badge of honor that nationalists wore with pride. The Ottoman
government’s reach barely extended beyond the palace and the parliament
building in Istanbul, much less eastward into Anatolia. Mustafa Kemal met
her and Adnan at the train station when they arrived in Ankara, offering his
hand to help Halide down from the carriage.
Ankara was in a state of euphoria, with supporters arriving each day and
a sense that a new country was being built from scratch—more egalitarian,
more just, more committed to the goal of ridding Turkey of foreign
invaders. Given her background as a writer and journalist, Halide became a
key figure in the emerging nationalist press. Along with Yunus Nadi, a
prominent writer and editor who had also journeyed to Ankara from
Istanbul, she set up the Anatolian News Agency, the bureau that quickly
became the mouthpiece of the nationalist forces and, later, the official press
office of the Turkish government.
When the war against the Hellenes started in earnest, Halide signed on
with the nationalist army. She was made a corporal—for all their
commitment to women’s liberation, the nationalists could not imagine a
female officer—and appeared beside Mustafa Kemal in her specially
designed tunic, with a long skirt and dark Islamic headscarf. She witnessed
the decisive battle of Sakarya and accompanied the commander in chief on
his triumphal entry into Smyrna in September 1922. “I feasted my eyes on
the sea,” she wrote, “and constructed a plan for my life in the future: a
rustic house not far away from Angora [Ankara], a fireside where immense
logs would constantly burn, a gray goatskin in front of it, where I would lie
and dream.”
Her fame, however, left little time for dreaming. She wove her
experiences into a new series of novels published not long after the Turkish
nationalists had taken Smyrna. These and other works became some of the
earliest pillars in the emerging literature of the war of independence, the
first fruits of a new, republican literary genre, inspired by the anti-
occupation movement and informed by firsthand accounts of the glory and
gore of war. Later in the 1920s, when Istanbul audiences were packing into
cinemas to view some of the first Turkish-made films, one of the sagas they
saw unfolding on the screen was an adaptation of her popular novel of the
liberation struggle, Shirt of Flame, directed by Muhsin Ertu rul.
Halide and Adnan believed themselves to be at the center of the effort to
build the republic. Adnan was vice president of the Grand National
Assembly—politically, second only to Mustafa Kemal, the assembly’s
president—and one of the chief foreign policy figures in the nationalist
government. In late 1922, he and Halide returned to Istanbul. It had been
two years since they had been in the city, but two centuries’ worth of
suffering and yearning had been packed into that period, she said. Adnan
was given the title of high commissioner, assuming the duties of the initial
emissary, Refet Pasha, and serving as a quasi mayor in the transition from
Allied to nationalist governance. He was present as representative of the
Grand National Assembly at the handover ceremony at Dolmabahçe Palace,
when General Harington saluted the Turkish flag and departed the city
forever, ending the Allied presence. Halide had a less official role, but as a
novelist, publicist, and outspoken feminist, her name was immediately
recognizable among the pantheon of figures at the top of the new republican
elite. An American diplomatic report was unequivocal in its assessment of
the couple: “Dr. Adnan Bey is one of the leaders of the present Nationalist
Government, but it is generally felt that his position is due rather to the
remarkable personality of his wife than to his own genius.”
As she and Adnan set up their new home in Istanbul, they both could
sense a change coming. “I have seen, I have gone through, a land full of
aching hearts and torturing remembrances, and I have lived in an age when
the politicians played with these human hearts as ordinary gamblers play
with their cards,” she wrote. “I who had dreamed of a nationalism which
will create a happy land of beauty, understanding, and love, I have seen
nothing but mutual massacre and mutual hatred; I have seen nothing but
ideals used as instruments for creating human carnage and misery.”
The promise of the republic was that it would put an end to the long
period of discord that had defined the entire adult lives of Halide’s
generation, from the Young Turk revolution through the First World War
and the fight for independence. The promise was quickly broken, she felt.
Mustafa Kemal’s willingness to buy off local warlords, his increasing
suspicion of any form of disagreement, and the establishment of
independence tribunals to mete out punishment to open rebels as well as
quiet dissenters—all seemed the opposite of the world Halide had been
trying to create. Mustafa Kemal looked more and more like a dictator and
his Republican People’s Party like the only approved instrument of
governance. The independence war had been a people’s struggle, she
believed, and no individual could adequately represent the collective desire
for freedom. “There will be only the sum total of a people’s sacrifice to bear
witness to the guarding of their liberties,” she wrote in her memoirs.
One after another of their old colleagues was falling away. Some who
openly broke with Mustafa Kemal found themselves before a tribunal.
Others retired from public life, quietly giving up power to the one-party
state. In 1926, Halide and Adnan decided to leave Istanbul, the very year
that Turkey’s new civil code established legal equality for women. They
began a long period of self-imposed exile in France, Britain, India, and the
United States. Like their escape from Istanbul under the British, their
departure came just in time. The next year, Mustafa Kemal delivered a
thirty-six-hour speech known as the “Nutuk,” a discourse that rewrote the
history of the independence struggle by denouncing his enemies and
placing himself at the center of the narrative. Political differences were now
raised to the level of truth versus treason. Halide in particular was attacked
as someone who had advocated Turkey’s becoming a protectorate of a
foreign government—perhaps Britain, perhaps the United States—rather
than a fully independent country. It was a charge that had little backing, but
it was enough to write her out of the republic’s founding mythology.
Halide used her time abroad to work on her memoirs, which offered a
kind of alternative history of the early republic. The first volume was
published in English in the late 1920s, but it had little impact in Turkey. She
and Adnan spent time in Paris and New York, living the lives of émigré
academics by lecturing, taking up occasional visiting professor-ships, and
recalling old battles that might as well have been ancient history to their
students. As Muslim women were taking up new rights in the republic—
going about fully unveiled, working as doctors and professors, eventually
voting and standing for parliament—one of the principal fighters for their
cause was no longer around to witness the changes.
It was not until after Mustafa Kemal’s death, in 1938, that Halide and
Adnan were able to return to Istanbul. She served briefly in parliament once
multiparty democracy was instituted after the Second World War. But the
years of exile had made her a political outsider. She had been present at the
birth of the republic, yet she had missed its painful adolescence. She ended
her career, in a way, by coming back to her childhood in Edip Bey’s
household on the Bosphorus. She became chair of the English Department
at Istanbul University—the institution’s first female professor—and
translated Shakespeare into Turkish. Her version of Coriolanus, about the
journey from war hero to tyrant and from exile to revenge, is still admired.
In her earlier years, Halide believed in a salvageable empire, a place
where the sultan’s many subjects, regardless of confession, could find a
place. The experience of war and occupation made her into a nationalist.
She believed in the need for a Turkish homeland, but her version of
nationalism had a cosmopolitan lining. History and culture, she said, had
formed the Turks into the Protestants of the Islamic world—reformist,
pragmatic, and naturally committed to the separation of mosque and state.
Being a good nationalist required self-awareness, and embracing one’s
country demanded that one learn how to criticize it. “It is after I have loved
my own people and tried to understand their virtues and their faults with
open-minded humility that I begin to have a better understanding of other
people’s sufferings and joys, and of their personality expressed in their
national life,” she wrote. Even then, gender still mattered profoundly when
it came to the way people actually behaved. For all the claims to equality in
an age of republics, nationalism as a political movement was almost always
a man’s game. “Women,” she was fond of saying, “are all one nation.”
Rights, Halide believed, were there for the recognizing. They were not
granted or bestowed so much as finally accepted and acknowledged, like
removing a veil shielding women from public view and clouding their own
vision of possible lives. On the battlefield and in front of a mass rally, it was
easy to imagine a future Turkey in which Muslim women could develop a
feminism that placed them squarely alongside men, powerful and confident,
with few of the strictures that religion and tradition had imposed in the past.
As it turned out, women’s achievements would continue to be celebrated as
evidence of the republic’s quick progress, but it would be decades before
any women would achieve the independent public voice once claimed by
Halide Edip.
LIVING LIKE A SQUIRREL
A public rally on Galata Bridge.
A FTER 1927, MUSTAFA KEMAL’S “NUTUK” became the ur-text of republican
history and the basic source for interpreting the end of empire and the birth
of the Turkish nation-state. Only in recent years have Turkish historians
begun to question its one-sided version of events. The sheer scale and
complexity of the revolution, however, can best be appreciated not in a
political speech or textbook but in a long-form poem titled Human
Landscapes from My Country, the masterpiece of the writer Nâzım Hikmet.
Nâzım began work on Human Landscapes in 1941 while interned in a
prison in Bursa, a few hours from Istanbul across the Sea of Marmara. At
some seventeen thousand lines, it is a vast canvas on which Nâzım gives his
own account of the origins of the post-imperial era, told through the eyes of
ordinary people caught up in the war of independence and the building of
the Turkish Republic.
The poem pans out from Haydarpa a train station, where Istanbul
schoolgirls pass by in black satin uniforms, and plunges into Anatolia,
where war and famine rage. There is no glory in the struggle, though. A
woman advises:
“Girl,” she said, “you’re young—
grow up,
marry,
bear sons,
then I’ll ask you
what war is.”

Its heroes are thieves, peasants, writers, and ordinary soldiers, a

stunning array of characters passing across the stage of modern Turkish
history—or, rather, caught by the author’s camera as it moves slowly across
the Anatolian plateau. Earlier in his career, Nâzım had worked as a scenarist
for director Muhsin Ertu rul and the production company run by the pekçi
brothers, whose films played to sold-out audiences along the Grande Rue.
He saw Human Landscapes as a kind of total art, with techniques drawn
from filmmaking as well as poetry and prose. He worked in pans, zooms,
and freeze-frames, free verse and narrative, and every literary form from
autobiography to fantasy to folk aphorisms. Human Landscapes is a
chronicle of a human and pluralistic world, one decidedly at odds with the
homogenizing ideology that Kemalism seemed to preach. It remains
perhaps the most creative and fine-grained assessment of Turkey’s
transition from empire to republic, a kind of alternative history unspooling
alongside the standard story of Mustafa Kemal’s necessary triumph and the
single-minded modernization he wrought.
By the early years of the republic, Turkish writers had already thrown
off the conservative conventions of Ottoman poetry. The republican literary
scene was a mixed bag of paeans to the nation, nostalgic celebrations of
village culture, and epics of everyday life, many set against the backdrop of
national liberation and postwar struggle. But where other Turkish authors
were asking how poetry should be written, Nâzım asked what it could do—
whether it was possible not just to reflect reality in art but to shape social
life at the same time.
Nâzım Hikmet did more than any single individual to introduce Turkish
literature to modernity, and today he is widely regarded as Turkey’s national
poet. The small cultural center that bears his name in the Istanbul district of
Kadıköy, with its shaded tea garden and artists’ stalls, is an important
meeting spot for radical university students and old intellectuals alike. Few
national poets have been so unwelcome in their own lifetimes, however.
Nâzım spent a good part of his adult life in Turkish prisons. He was
eventually stripped of his Turkish citizenship. After his death, his body was
buried neither in Istanbul nor even in Turkey.
The reason was that, in a country committed to revolutionism, Nâzım’s
version of revolutionary zeal was long held to be of the wrong variety. His
was a version of modernity that Istanbul, more than any other part of the
republic, was well placed to embody: the quiet specter of socialism.
Criticism of Turkish nationalism from the Left remained a constant feature
of political life, even if much of it stayed, like other forms of opposition,
underground. As a diplomatic report noted in 1930, the government’s
normal stance was to assume that “any malcontent in republican Turkey is
at least a communist and probably a spy.” The single-party political system
meant there was no legal channel for expressing leftist views, and it would
not be until several decades later—in the 1970s—that intellectuals could
openly advocate socialist causes. Even then, the political establishment
perceived activists on that end of the political spectrum as a major internal
threat. Like most other rivals to Kemalism, socialism would soon be
assiduously written out of the country’s history.
Nâzım Hikmet was, like so many other prominent individuals of his
day, a native of Salonica. He was born perhaps in 1902—he was never
certain about his birth date—into a family of provincial Ottoman officials.
On his mother’s side, his lineage included several distinguished soldiers and
scholars, running back to a Huguenot orphan and a Polish count who
converted to Islam and joined the Ottoman army. His mother, Celile Hanım,
was an accomplished artist and one of the empire’s first female painters.
One of his grandfathers was the last Ottoman governor of Salonica, and his
father, Hikmet Bey, was a prominent local Unionist working within the
Ottoman foreign ministry.
When the Hellenes took over Salonica in 1912, what they got was a
provincial Ottoman seaport that nearly burned to the ground only five years
later. What Istanbul got, however, was a new soul. Thousands of Muslim
families departed Salonica for the capital, carrying with them the European
sensibilities and belief in progress that would shape Turkey’s first
generation of republican elites. Clearly out of a job under the new Hellenic
government, Hikmet Bey moved his family to Istanbul as well. He enrolled
the young Nâzım in the prestigious Galatasaray Lycée and later pushed him
to attend the Ottoman naval college on the island Heybeliada in the Sea of
Marmara, where he began to write poetry as a distraction from the
interminable lessons in hydraulics and navigation. A persistent lung
condition kept him out of military service, and he watched the First World
War from the sidelines. He was present in Istanbul when the British warship
Superb sailed in to announce the beginning of the Allied occupation.
Nâzım was too young to have played a role in the Young Turk
revolution and too sickly to be mobilized during the First World War, but
when news of Mustafa Kemal’s rival government filtered back to Istanbul,
he, like many in his age group and social class, made plans to decamp to
Ankara. Along with a friend, Vâlâ Nureddin, he made his way to Mustafa
Kemal’s forces, arriving in early 1921, and presented himself as a foot
soldier for the revolution.
With few actual skills and no military real connections—the leaders of
the brewing independence war, after all, were already seasoned officers
who had fought at Gallipoli and elsewhere—Nâzım was quickly pushed off
to a teaching job in a distant village. He could make the revolution from the
ground up by educating the populace—a valuable component of the
national struggle, if not exactly the role Nâzım had hoped to play in crafting
the new world. He wanted to be on the front line of the struggle, not in its
rear guard.
After only a few months in Anatolia, he turned his attention northward,
to Russia and the transformation that seemed to be happening there. Nâzım
had been introduced to socialism on his way to meet Mustafa Kemal’s
troops, but it was a familiarity that amounted to little more than
conversations with someone who had read a few more Marxist tracts than
he. To be on the Right was to support the decrepit sultan and the foreign
occupation, he believed. To be on the Left was to value liberation and
national rebirth. His understanding of Marx was rudimentary, but he didn’t
need to be a deep theorist to understand the direction that the war of
independence was already taking—away from its revolutionary roots and
toward the consolidation of power in the hands of Mustafa Kemal and his
closest supporters.

To many observers, revolutionary socialism and Turkish nationalism had

once seemed to be two strands of a single anti-imperialist uprising on the
frontier of Europe and Asia. Relations between Mustafa Kemal’s
nationalists and the Bolsheviks “probably form today the nucleus of one of
the most important movements in the Near East,” US High Commissioner
Mark Bristol reported in 1921. The tip of the spear would surely be
Istanbul. Allied police kept strict watch on alleged underground cells in the
city. With so many penniless Russian-speakers on hand, officials believed
that it was dangerously easy to turn desperate Whites into Reds. Roundups
of suspected agents were common. Allied police even detained Russians
who happened to be attending a Berlitz course in Turkish for fear that they
were Bolshevik spies underground seeking to brush up on the local
language. According to American intelligence sources, the Bolsheviks had
even attempted to convince Mustafa Kemal to bring Turkey formally into
the Soviet Union, where he would be made the country’s federal president.
It was an offer that Mustafa Kemal—if it ever reached his desk—quietly
passed up.
Bolshevik Russia and Turkey did have certain things in common. Both
stressed the role of the state as the engine of social and economic
transformation. Both countries had forsaken the multiparty parliaments that
the Romanovs and the Ottomans, for all their faults, had managed to create
in their final years. They eventually took for granted the view that statism—
the government’s careful management of the economy and society—
worked best when societal transformation was handled by a single political
party, the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and the Republican
People’s Party in Turkey.
Vladimir Lenin and Mustafa Kemal also shared a set of ideological
assumptions, not about the details of revolution—Mustafa Kemal looked to
nationalism rather than Marxism as his bedrock philosophy—but about how
it had to be effected and where their countries fit in the twentieth century’s
emerging order. Both believed in the idea of a political vanguard and its
historical mission of reshaping an entire society. Their strategic vision of
the world to come was one in which colonialism would be gone, empires
would collapse, and the old powers of the nineteenth century would give
way to a set of new, postrevolutionary regimes. Neither man was opposed
to the concept of a select group of powerful nations working their will in
the international system. They simply believed that their own countries
should be admitted to the club.
The Soviet model had demonstrated the transformative power of class
war and grassroots revolution. Turkey, however, was a country without a
proletariat. Because of the loss of so many urban centers, from Salonica to
Damascus, the new republic was even more rural than the Ottoman Empire.
In Russia—itself overwhelmingly rural—Lenin and Trotsky had already
shown that workers were not essential components of a workers’ revolution.
All that was required was a small group of conspirators who could form a
party, seize the state in the name of the oppressed, defeat the backers of the
old regime in a civil war, and then set about building, through
industrialization and radical land reform, the very proletariat that they
claimed as their base of support. The Kemalist government eventually
adopted the five-year plan as an approach to industrial and agricultural
development. State-regulated monopolies were allowed to take over major
industries, although Turkey did not impose direct government control over
the economy. Senior bureaucrats were nevertheless required to be members
of the only legal political party.
But the brief courtship between the two revolutionary regimes began to
sour even before the nationalists had ousted the Allies. Russia and Turkey
had been strategic rivals for centuries, and this long history was difficult to
overcome, especially in an era in which Soviets and Turks were both
beginning to see themselves as contrasting models of modernity for
oppressed peoples everywhere—one based on a proletarian revolution, the
other based on a national one. In the contest between rival ideals, the Turks
preferred the version that allowed them to build a nation of their own, not
one that preached the end of nations altogether.
Still, flirtation with leftist ideas was a consistent feature of early Turkish
politics as well as a continuing source of inspiration for people dissatisfied
with the authoritarian tendencies of the Kemalists themselves. A Turkish
Communist Party was established by Mustafa Kemal’s closest military
associates in October 1920, but the party seems to have been mainly a
vehicle for outflanking other leftists. A rival party, in fact, had been
established in Baku, in independent Azerbaijan, the previous month. Its
leader, Mustafa Suphi, was a Turkish Bolshevik who had grown up in Paris.
He saw himself as the natural conduit through which the tenets of
communism would reach Turkey. With the help of Russian Bolsheviks, he
and a group of comrades entered Anatolia from the Caucasus at the end of
1920. The following January, they made plans to travel from the port city of
Trabzon, following the coast and then going overland to Ankara. By this
stage, Mustafa Kemal’s power as leader of the national movement was in no
sense secure. Mustafa Suphi may have aimed to challenge him.
What happened next is still murky, but Mustafa Suphi and twelve of his
associates were last seen on a motorboat heading out of Trabzon. They
disappeared on the Black Sea and were presumed dead. Right-wing
Unionists were blamed for having organized the disappearance—effectively
assassinating a key rival from the other end of the political spectrum—but
the Kemalists were the clearest beneficiaries of the Suphi affair. They could
now afford to court the favor of Bolshevik Russia without actually allowing
Suphi’s Bolshevism to infest the ranks of Turkish nationalists. Both
Communist parties—the sincere one established by Mustafa Suphi and the
faux one launched by the Kemalists—were soon allowed to fade, becoming
minor footnotes in the evolution of the national movement.

The death of Mustafa Suphi had a profound effect on Nâzım Hikmet’s

vision of the emerging regime in his homeland. The Kemalists seemed to
have betrayed the revolution before it had even begun. After only a few
months in Anatolia, Nâzım decided to cross the border into the Caucasus
and join the Bolsheviks. He set off in the autumn of 1921 via the Georgian
port of Batumi—just as Dmitri Shalikashvili and other supporters of
Georgia’s Menshevik government were escaping to Istanbul—and made his
way by train to Moscow. He was nineteen years old.
It was the first of what would be a series of stays in Russia and a life
lived, by turns, in both Moscow and Istanbul. In Moscow he read Marx
beneath the statue of the poet Alexander Pushkin. He studied at the
Communist University of the Workers of the East, an institution specifically
designed to inculcate revolutionary values in Asian intellectuals who would
then return to their homelands and take to the barricades. For the next three
years, he was in the middle of a creative churning in Russian art, literature,
and performance, from experimental theater to poetry that tossed out all
conventions of rhyme and meter. He may have invented the first free-verse
lines in Turkish during this period, doing away with the traditions of
Ottoman poetry and its complex borrowings from Persian and Arabic verse.
When Lenin died in 1924, Nâzım stood guard beside the coffin at the lying-
in-state, one of many young representatives of world socialism to pay
homage to the deceased leader.
At the end of that year, Nâzım returned to Istanbul. He had left Turkey
not long after the probable drowning of Mustafa Suphi, a time when
virtually the entire population of real Turkish Communists could have fit in
the same boat. Now things were different. Socialist journals were sold
openly on the street. Workers’ circles met in clubs and private houses.
Conferences were staged to consider the world situation and the struggle
against capitalism and imperialism. He started to write for a new journal
that made its political leanings clear on the masthead—Orak-Çekiç, the
Turkish for “Hammer and Sickle.”
The relative freedom did not last, however. After the first round of
Kurdish rebellions in 1925 came a new law on public order. Leftist
newspapers were closed. Surveillance of leftists and other activists
increased. Socialists were brought before one of the Grand National
Assembly’s independence tribunals. Nâzım went into hiding but
nevertheless was swept up in the wave of accusations and denunciations.
He was sentenced in absentia to a fifteen-year prison term.
He soon left Turkey for Moscow, which again became a refuge. Nâzım
threw himself into the artistic life of the Soviet capital. But Istanbul was
home, and after only two years away he attempted to reenter Turkey
through the Caucasus. He was arrested and imprisoned at the border on the
odd charge of plotting to rouse ethnic minorities against the Turkish state,
an accusation that seems to have had little basis in reality. After months of
legal maneuvering, a court at last reversed the original sentence handed
down by the independence tribunal, and Nâzım was released and allowed to
resettle in Istanbul.
His trial had been eagerly followed by Istanbul intellectuals; when he
was released, he received something of a hero’s welcome, at least among
the reading public. His poems had already appeared in the Turkish literary
press, and in the spring of 1929 he published his first book in Turkey, a
selection of poems written earlier in the decade. His work had clearly been
influenced by the writings of the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, just as
his understanding of the rhythms of speech and the possibilities of narrative
had been shaped by his acquaintance with the theater director Vsevolod
Meyerhold. His two stays in the Soviet Union had been a kind of
intellectual apprenticeship, leading him to mimic the disjointed poetic
forms of Russian Futurism, its industrial aesthetics and visions of cultural
transformation.
The poet on trial: Nâzım Hikmet (left) in court.

In 1929, he also published his first long poem, “La Gioconda and Si-Ya-
U,” in which Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa falls in love with a Chinese Communist
and takes flight from the Louvre, only to be burned in Shanghai after
joining the revolutionary struggle herself. He became a major writer in the
pages of Resimli Ay (Illustrated Monthly), a popular journal of Turkish art
and culture, and in 1930 record executives in Istanbul approached him to
make an audio recording of his poems. Like Udi Hrant and Seyyan Hanım
at around the same time, Nâzım could be heard in coffeehouses and private
homes by people who had never met him. The record sold out in less than a
month.
Nâzım was rarely careful in his writing. More popular than ever, he had
little reason to be. The restrictive law on public order had been repealed,
and a new wave of liberalism swept over Turkey. But his attacks on
capitalism and his unabashed admiration for the Soviet system made him
the target of constant surveillance. His increasingly vitriolic dismissal of the
Turkish literary establishment, especially former friends who had
proclaimed their full adherence to Kemalism, left him with few allies.
He was arrested in 1933, released in 1934, and rearrested in 1938, in
part because cadets at his alma mater, the naval college on Heybeliada in
the Princes Islands, had apparently been reading his latest work, entitled
“The Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin.” The poem expanded the boundaries of
poetic language, weaving together scholarly prose, magical realism, and
multiple voices, much as Human Landscapes would later do, but it was the
overtly political message of “Sheikh Bedreddin,” cloaked in an obscure
episode from Ottoman history, that sparked a new round of trouble.
In 1416, a revolt against Sultan Mehmed I broke out in western
Anatolia, led by a certain Börklüce, about whom little is known, and the
Islamic mystic Bedreddin. Both leaders preached the essential unity of
religions and social classes, and their message attracted local Muslims,
Christians, and Jews as well as urban merchants and peasants resentful of
heavy taxes and feudal landlords. With some difficulty, the Ottomans
defeated the rebels. They seized Börklüce and transported him to Ephesus,
where he was crucified, strapped to a camel, and led around the countryside
as a symbol of the sultan’s wrath. Bedreddin escaped for a time,
proselytizing in an area along the western Black Sea coast known as the
Mad Forest (in present-day Bulgaria), but he, too, was finally captured and
hanged.
In “Sheikh Bedreddin,” Nâzım clearly overstepped the bounds of
political propriety. Given its themes of oppressive rule by a deified leader
and the belief in a world where rigid hierarchies and stifling social
conventions would melt away, the poem gave the Turkish government a
convenient excuse for leveling a charge of inciting mutiny. Nâzım was tried
and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison. Unlike his previous sentences,
however, this one more or less stuck. He spent the next twelve years
incarcerated as a threat to the Turkish state, a rejecter of Kemalism, and a
traitorous admirer of the Soviet Union, which had gone from being an early
ally of Turkey to a regional rival in the run-up to the Second World War. He
was released in 1950 in a general amnesty of political prisoners and only
then after a sustained international campaign supported by Pablo Picasso,
Jean-Paul Sartre, and other European intellectuals.
Nâzım lived several lives and in several senses. In his personal life, he
carried on deeply romantic and sincerely loving relationships with many
women, usually young and already married. In his art, he was by turns a
naïve patriot, a flirtatious Futurist, a reflective prison poet, a writer of epic
verse, and a skillful sentimentalist. His output was enormous. The Turkish
edition of his collected works, published from 1988 to 1991, runs to twenty-
seven volumes. In his politics, he was genuinely committed to the
revolutionary cause, but his encounters with the communism of Joseph
Stalin made him long for the Soviet Union he had known during his first
visit as a nineteen-year-old, self-exiled from the emerging Kemalist
republic. Among the many foreigners who had been seduced by the artistic
socialism of a Meyerhold or a Mayakovsky, Nâzım was among the most
wistful for that earlier era of Soviet experimentation, before Stalin and the
Gulag. His weakness was a common one among his generation: the ability
to will himself to look through the awfulness of Stalinism back toward a
time when going to Russia could seem, to a teenaged Turk, the ultimate
form of liberation.
If there is a theme that runs through all of Nâzım’s work, however, it is
not a political one at all. It is rather a call for valuing life’s casual diversity.
Human Landscapes is as much a celebration of the randomness of the world
—the attractive messiness of meeting an old friend unexpectedly on a
crowded Istanbul street, say—as it is a coded call for human liberation and
justice. His love poems, addressed to women on two continents, are among
the most moving and maturely unsentimental that one can find. “On
Living,” written during his long prison sentence, is a salute to life beyond
the political struggle:
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example—
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole life.

After his release from prison, Nâzım traveled and lectured widely
outside Turkey—the government, in fact, eventually stripped him of his
Turkish citizenship—but the Soviet Union became his adopted home. By
then, the revolutionary élan of the 1920s was long past. He was a curiosity
from the developing world, surrounded by plenty of other leftist dissidents,
former spies, and castoffs from capitalism, with no inkling of how popular
his work would later become. Toward the end of his life, he was something
of a one-man carnival act, lauding the flourishing of the arts under Soviet
socialism and denouncing their putrefaction in the bourgeois oligarchies.
His literary voice became that of the wizened ex-prisoner, not the firebrand
poet of earlier years. Even his love poems began to take on the air of
factory oil and ore smelters. “You are a field / I am the tractor. / . . . / You
are China, / I am Mao Zedong’s army,” he wrote in 1951. When he died, in
1963, he lay in state at the headquarters of the Soviet Writers’ Union and
was buried, in the company of Chekhov and Gogol, in the Novodevichy
Cemetery in Moscow. “Some people know all about plants, some about
fish,” he had written. “I know separation.” He remains there, far from
Istanbul, probably the world’s most celebrated national poet still in exile
from his homeland.
The magnetic pull of the Russian revolution attracted many Turkish
intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, and Nâzım Hikmet’s life and work
would continue to inspire Turkish socialists, even to the present day. (His
Turkish citizenship was finally restored, posthumously, in 2009.) In one of
the many ironic twists in Istanbul’s history, however, Nâzım’s journey north
toward the Soviet Union began around the same time that another
revolutionary, a Russian, was heading south. He blew in on a winter gale
along with his wife and son—a “cooperative of three,” he called them. They
were immediately the most famous Russian family in Istanbul, but, unlike
Wrangel’s flotilla of 1920, they were not Whites. The head of the family,
with his round glasses and pointy Vandyke beard, had been one of the
supreme leaders of the Reds.
ISLAND LIFE
Bosphorus bounty: A fisherman sorts his catch of mackerel.
L EON TROTSKY WAS PERHAPS the most reluctant visitor ever to arrive in
Istanbul. Even before he had stepped ashore, he handed a note to the
customs official who boarded his ship. “Dear Sir,” he wrote, addressing
Mustafa Kemal. “At the gate of Constantinople, I have the honor to inform
you that I have arrived at the Turkish frontier not of my own choice, and
that I will cross this frontier only by submitting to force. I request you, Mr.
President, to accept my appropriate sentiments.”
The note was dated February 12, 1929. It was one of the coldest winters
ever. Trams had to be dug out from snowdrifts, wolves were spotted in
outlying neighborhoods, and for the first time in more than a century, ferries
stayed moored to their piers to avoid the chunks of ice that floated down the
Bosphorus. The train from Paris spent several days buried in a snowdrift,
the incident that would inspire Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient
Express. Trotsky and his wife, Natalya Sedova, had spent the previous
twenty-two days on trains as well, slowly covering some three thousand
miles westward from Kazakhstan to the port of Odessa. For two years, the
family had been in internal exile in Central Asia, relegated to the far
reaches of the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin.
Although Trotsky had been one of the makers of the Bolshevik
Revolution—a close associate of Vladimir Lenin and leader of the Red
Army during the civil war—Lenin’s death in 1924 had opened the door to
Stalin’s ambition. Stalin had chipped away at the edges of the old Bolshevik
elite for years, but by the late 1920s he was powerful enough to take on
Trotsky, the figure with the widest following outside Stalin’s own circle and
the clearest claim to succeed Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union. On
Stalin’s orders, the Soviet secret police, the OGPU, first escorted Trotsky
and Natalya to the windy plains of Kazakhstan. Then the police were on
hand in Odessa to supervise the family’s transfer to the steamer Ilyich, with
no cargo and no civilian passengers besides the Trotskys and their son
Lyova, and the voyage to Istanbul. Turkey had agreed to allow the family to
enter the country, but this was not a gesture of sympathy for Trotsky’s
politics. It was the opposite: evidence of the fact that, by the late 1920s, the
Turkish state believed it had adopted the most useful bits of the Soviet
model while successfully scotching direct Soviet influence.
In any case, the Soviets intended to keep an eye on their most famous
exile. Trotsky was accorded the full courtesy of the Soviet Embassy as he
made arrangements for housing. For the next several weeks, a wing of the
embassy was reserved for his use. Yakov Minsky, the Istanbul
representative of the OGPU, was put in charge of keeping tabs on him as
well as helping the family to find longer-term living quarters. It was odd for
Trotsky to be treated like a guest by a government that had officially
condemned him, in absentia, for counterrevolutionary activity and plotting
the overthrow of the state. It was even stranger for the government to allow
him to write letters of protest to the New York Times and other Western
newspapers. But no one, least of all Trotsky himself, believed his
predicament would last for long. He had arrived in the city under duress,
and he had no intention of staying.
Trotsky had been exiled twice before, to Siberia and the Russian North,
during his period as an underground revolutionary in the tsarist era, and he
was used to the concept of starting a new life as an émigré. The two earlier
periods of exile had given way to triumph: the 1905 Russian revolution that
forced the tsar to create a Russian parliament and the October 1917
revolution that elevated the Bolsheviks to power. He had no desire to stay in
a country where he could not speak the local language, he told Turkish
journalists, and he hoped that soon a visa would come through for
Germany, Britain, or France. There, he would be able to continue his
political work on behalf of international socialism while also railing against
the usurper Stalin.
The Soviets likewise believed his Turkish exile would be a temporary
affair. Istanbul had the triple virtue of being an easy sail from the Soviet
coast, located in a country willing to take in Trotsky, and full of people who
might relish the chance to kill him. After all, with plenty of Whites still
hanging around the back alleys of Pera, someone would surely find
irresistible the prospect of assassinating an old Bolshevik enemy. Minsky,
the Soviet secret police agent, even seems to have kept Trotsky informed
about all the White and foreign spies working in Istanbul. That may have
been a way of helping Trotsky avoid them. It may equally have been a
clever trap: a way of arousing Trotsky’s curiosity and laying the
groundwork for branding him a foreign spy himself, if he ever happened to
have contact with capitalist operatives.
Natalya and Lyova were allowed to leave the embassy to look for
housing, and Trotsky himself could occasionally be seen walking along the
trolley tracks in Pera, bundled up against the winter cold and flanked by
guards. Minsky was nervous about keeping the Trotskys in the embassy for
too long, for fear that he would become the de facto landlord of Stalin’s
nemesis. In the end, Minsky became a reluctant real estate agent. He came
forward with multiple options for accommodation, all of which failed to
suit Trotsky’s specifications, especially in terms of security. Exasperated,
Minsky finally booted the family out of the embassy and down the street to
the Tokatlian Hotel, from which Natalya could continue the housing search
on her own. After another move to an apartment, in late April 1929 she
managed to find a place an hour and a half by ferry from the city center. It
was a house where Trotsky could continue his writing and political work in
relative safety while making plans for his next move.
Büyükada, or Prinkipo, was the largest of the Princes Islands, a group of
nine arid islands popping up like a dinosaur’s back from the Sea of
Marmara. A convent on Büyükada had once served as the preferred locus of
exile for Byzantine nobles who had run afoul of the emperor, and smaller
islands in the chain had continued to be dumping grounds as late as the
Young Turk era. Stray dogs, for example, had been one of Istanbul’s public
health hazards for centuries, and beginning around 1910, in a rolling
campaign for order and cleanliness, the city government ordered tens of
thousands of them rounded up and shipped to the rocky Hayırsızada—
Good-for-Nothing Island. Rival packs formed to guard rainwater pools and
fight over stray birds. For years afterward, it was said that on quiet
evenings, with just the right southerly wind, Istanbullus could still hear their
yelps and howls.
In the 1840s, the Ottomans had begun regular ferry service to the
habitable islands, and Büyükada in particular became the major summer
residence for the city’s wealthy merchants, especially Greeks. Wood-frame
houses with whitewashed verandas and louvered doors provided relief from
the stifling summer heat. Private automobiles were (and still are)
prohibited, so horse-drawn phaetons carted locals and visitors around the
island’s few roads, cushioned by a deep layer of pine needles. At the height
of the summer season, white and purple oleander and bougainvillea framed
the roadsides and spilled over garden walls. Along the leafy Çankaya
Avenue, which wound down to the ferry landing, massive villas and their
dependent guesthouses looked out on the turquoise sea and the low hills of
the Anatolian coast.
Like Karl Marx in the previous century, Trotsky relied for his well-
being on the kindness of capitalists he one day hoped to crush. One after
another prominent Turkish businessman came forward to help him begin a
new life in exile, perhaps attracted by the thrill of being close to a political
celebrity or eager to court an enemy of Stalin. A former Ottoman official
offered to rent the guesthouse of his villa. The expansive grounds lay on the
downhill side of Çankaya Avenue and ended in a small cliff facing the sea.
“The waves of the Sea of Marmara lapped the shore a few steps from our
new home,” Natalya recalled. “It was a beautiful place, spacious, peaceful,
set in the blue sea and bathed in golden sunlight most of the time.”
A fire, probably caused by a faulty water heater, raced through the
house in March 1931. Trotsky reportedly sued both his landlord and his
housekeeper for negligence, but that did not solve the immediate problem
of finding new accommodation. The family was once again on the move—
first to a hotel on the island, then to a walled house in the Moda
neighborhood on the Asian mainland, then back to a red-brick house on
Büyükada owned by a Turkish shipping magnate and located a short walk
from the original residence. There they settled into life amid plum and fig
trees inside what islanders called a rakı kö kü—a small house built for
sipping anise-flavored liqueur and enjoying the view north toward Istanbul
proper. It was now the unlikely home of the prophet of world revolution.
Throughout his stay on the island, Trotsky grew increasingly fearful for
his own safety. With both White Russians and Bolshevik agents present in
the city, he had reason to be afraid. He routinely carried a small pistol and
never appeared outside without a guard. Like a crotchety old man yelling at
children to get off his property, he might yank at the beard of a Greek
Orthodox priest to make sure he was not an assassin in disguise or pull a
gun on a local fisherman who had suspiciously trawled the same spot for
too many days in a row.
Islanders were less than enthusiastic about their most famous resident.
Trotsky hired local guards, gardeners, and servants, but stories circulated
about his peculiar requirements: for deaf cooks, so they would not be able
to report on his conversations, or for illiterate cleaning people who would
not be able to read his correspondence. His conversation was normally
laced with sarcasm. When he happened to find someone in the household
taking a rest or reading a book, he would exclaim, “Here is the Russian
emigration!” He also had the habit common to people too comfortable with
their own power: He would christen those around him with odd nicknames
that then became, in his mind, their new identity.
The only friendship he seems to have struck up was with a local Greek
fisherman, Haralambos. The two could be seen in a small boat, usually with
guards or houseguests, bobbing in the water and drag-netting or line-fishing
for red mullet and bonito in season. The fishing party would load up the
boat with stones and cast them into the sea to drive the great schools of fish
toward the nets. Trotsky and Haralambos would call out to each other in
their own private language braided from Turkish, Greek, Russian, and
French. In these moments, Trotsky seemed most playful and at ease. “Ah,
Comrade Gérard!” he once teased his lawyer, Gérard Rosenthal, “if you
strike the bourgeoisie like you attack the fish, they’ll have a pretty long
life!”
Even then, Trotsky rarely felt truly safe. Once, a small girl—later the
distinguished Turkish writer Mîna Urgan—swam toward the boat and
grabbed onto the gunwales. An agitated Trotsky yelled at his guard to shoo
her away and whack her fingers with his rifle butt. When the fishing was
good, though, he would return to the house in excellent spirits and spin off
new writings, dictated to a secretary with feverish speed.
Unfettered by the restrictions imposed on his work in the Soviet Union,
he could fully speak his mind and communicate with the international
socialist community. He began editing—and almost singlehandedly writing
—a new bulletin that reported on the work of the anti-Stalinist opposition.
He started writing his autobiography, My Life, based on notes he had
already made while in Kazakhstan; he finished a draft within a few months
of his arrival in Istanbul. He also made initial notes for a history of the
Russian revolution. Book contracts and publishing deals came from
Germany and the United States. Editorials and political essays streamed in
the opposite direction to major Western newspapers eager to publish
Trotsky’s thoughts on the world situation—his “ululations from the
Bosphorus,” as Winston Churchill, one of Trotsky’s targets, called them.
The revolution was surely over, Churchill said, when “the Communist
instead of bombs produces effusions for the capitalist Press, when the
refugee War Lord fights his battles over again, and the discharged
executioner becomes chatty and garrulous at his fireside.”
Lyova was marshaled in to serve as his father’s secretary, managing the
tide of correspondence and assisting Trotsky with the growing numbers of
guests making the pilgrimage from the mainland to see someone who had
become Istanbul’s—and perhaps the world’s—most sought-after has-been.
Letters arrived from graphologists requesting handwriting samples.
Methodists wrote to explain the advantages of Christianity. Astrologists
offered readings of his star chart. Autograph collectors kindly asked to add
his signature “to those of two American presidents, three heavyweight
champions, Albert Einstein, Colonel Lindbergh, and of course Charlie
Chaplin,” Trotsky recalled. He later employed a small staff—or chancellery,
as he termed it—to deal with the workload of manuscript preparation, letter
writing, and monitoring of international affairs.
Trotsky’s break with Stalin had been a spectacular development, but it
was one part of the larger differentiation among the world's socialists: those
who still looked to the Soviet Union as the leader of global revolution,
those who were forging their own paths to communism, and those who
believed that the Russian experiment was destined to burn itself out, soon to
be succeeded by new movements arising in Europe’s overseas colonies.
Trotsky now came to assume a role he had never held: a pole around which
disaffected radicals around the world—especially those most committed to
permanent revolution and the spread of revolutionary ideas—could
coalesce. Like many famous exiles, he was becoming chiefly a totem,
essentially powerless except for the force of his personality and words.
“Here on this island of quiet and oblivion echoes from the great world
reached us delayed and muffled,” he jotted in his diary.
It was one thing to imagine Trotsky as the sage of Büyükada. It was
another actually to meet him. Visitors to the island almost always found
themselves on a kind of anti-pilgrimage. “He seems too small for the
struggle,” wrote Max Eastman, the American poet and political radical, who
visited in 1932. Eastman expected to engage in deep discussions about the
inevitable triumph of the socialist cause, but he found Trotsky obsessing
about more mundane concerns, especially his finances.
His writing generated substantial sums of money. A string of newspaper
articles brought in fees of ten thousand dollars. The American edition of My
Life garnered an advance of seven thousand. The Saturday Evening Post
paid forty-five thousand to serialize his History of the Russian Revolution.
But Trotsky was spending more than a thousand dollars a month on
bodyguards, housing, food, and especially books, since his library and
extensive collection of photographs from the revolution had been destroyed
in the fire at the first house. To economize, he kept little in the way of
furniture, wandering about worriedly in mainly empty rooms. He let the
garden go to seed. His dog, Tosca, chased birds through the tall grass and
saplings. “We seemed to camp rather than live there,” recalled one of his
secretaries.
Eastman had signed on as Trotsky’s literary agent and was largely
responsible for the income flowing into his bank account. But in their
conversations, Trotsky tended to talk down to Eastman, complaining about
the stinginess of Western capitalists and the tightfistedness of American
publishers, even though Eastman was an old friend and one of the leading
voices of the American Left. Trotsky squirmed out of contracts and
groveled for extensions. He promised to deliver commissioned manuscripts
but then insisted he had never done so. During Eastman’s visit, Trotsky
spent most of their time together trying to convince Eastman to collaborate
on a stage play about the American Civil War. Trotsky believed it would be
a hit on Broadway, a work that would combine Eastman’s knowledge of
American history with his own expertise on troop movements and tactics.
Eastman considered the idea ridiculous.
Trotsky had “followers and subalterns,” Eastman concluded, but he was
incapable of having real friends. Trotsky would not have disagreed. “I do
not measure the historical process by the yardstick of one’s personal fate,”
he wrote. “On the contrary, I appraise my fate objectively and live it
subjectively, only as it is inextricably bound up with the course of social
development.” Enemies, he would say routinely, should be shot. He saw
this philosophy as a virtue, but most of the people who knew him during his
exile seemed to see it as his signature flaw, both as a person and as a
politician. He preferred the safety of the podium and the blinding
anonymity of the limelight to intimate conversation and real engagement.
He was unsuited to exile not because he lost power—his political influence
had been waning throughout the period when Stalin’s was rising—but
because it robbed him of the two things that made it possible for him to live
in the world of reality: a platform to inhabit and a program to implement.
Like the Whites, Trotsky believed that both of these things might one
day return if he could only move out of Istanbul and find his feet again.
When he was not writing essays or corresponding with adherents, he was
filling out visa applications. Germany declined to admit him, as did the
Netherlands, Italy, Austria, and Spain. Denmark allowed only a short trip to
Copenhagen. The British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of
the London School of Economics and Political Science, visited Büyükada
two months after Trotsky’s arrival, but even they could not convince the
British government, then under sympathetic Labour Party control, to grant
him admission. Trotsky ended My Life with a wry chapter he called “The
Planet Without a Visa.”
Finally, through the intercession of French socialists, he managed to
secure asylum in southern France, with the proviso that he never visit Paris
and remain under continuous police surveillance. The years in Istanbul had
been among the calmest, most creative, and “least unhappy” of his entire
exile, according to his preeminent biographer, Isaac Deutscher. Trotsky
recorded the final Büyükada days in his diary: “Our house is already almost
empty; wooden boxes stand below, and young hands are busy hammering
nails. In our old and neglected villa, the floors this spring were decorated
with paint of a composition so mysterious that tables, chairs, and even feet
stick lightly to the floor even now, four months later.” He couldn’t pass up
the obvious metaphor. He felt that his feet somehow had become stuck to
the island. He had aged there. His hair had gone white, and his brow had
furrowed. Heart trouble and gout had set in. In July 1933, he and Natalya—
Lyova had already managed to move to Berlin—made their way down
Çankaya Avenue for the last time and boarded a small ship bound for
Marseille.
Trotsky had been delivered from his Turkish exile and was on his way
to a new life, first in France, then in Norway, then finally in Coyoacán, a
borough of Mexico City. He and Natalya carried newly issued Turkish
passports that made their status clear. “The bearer of this passport,”
declared the first page, “is not under the protection of the Turkish state.”
But as he sailed along the coast of the island, past the charred upper floor of
his first Turkish house and into the open sea, he was now in more danger
than ever before. Istanbul, in a way, was going to follow him.

At the beginning of the 1920s, John Dos Passos had come downstairs to
find the lobby of the Pera Palace in chaos. In the lounge, Hellenic, Italian,
and French gendarmes were trying to converse, each in his own language.
A British member of parliament was downing a cocktail while attempting to
explain something to a soldier. Bellhops and doormen were carrying out a
man in an astrakhan hat and frock coat, leaving behind a pool of blood on
the mosaic floor and a stained, plush-red armchair. The hotel manager was
walking back and forth with sweat beading up on his brow, trying to learn
what had happened. The envoy from Azerbaijan had been assassinated,
someone said, and the gunman was a bearded Armenian. Or perhaps it was
a clean-shaven Bolshevik, someone else said, who came right up to the
doorway and shot him dead. Meanwhile, a waiter implored guests to settle
their bills.
It was not an unusual scene, both during and after the Allied occupation.
Intrigue of some sort seemed to be the city’s common currency. With so
many Russians living in Istanbul and its outskirts, the city became both a
battleground for intra-Russian disputes and a potential target for Bolshevik
agents. In October 1921, the Wrangels’ residential yacht, the Lucullus, was
rammed and sunk by a steamer while at anchor in the Bosphorus, a
probable assassination plot that the general and his wife escaped only
because they happened not to be on board at the time. A certain Kuznetsov,
lodged at the Pera Palace, was known to be the centerpiece of Bolshevik
propaganda efforts, with a particular interest in turning Cossacks and other
White Russians to the communist cause.
“The Bosphorus was a dumping ground of all Europe’s war crooks and
spies,” recalled Robert Dunn, an American naval official. The Pera Palace
and Graveyard Street were natural points of attraction for foreigners and
locals caught up in the game of intelligence gathering. The British Embassy
stood at one end of the street, with a Turkish policeman permanently
stationed outside to direct traffic to and from the Grande Rue. Farther along
was the old Petits-Champs Park, with its theater and clubs. Next to the park
was the Pera Palace itself and, next to that, the small grounds of the
American Embassy. Then came the YMCA, followed by a British police
station. During the Allied occupation, the headquarters of British naval
intelligence and the officers’ mess of the British contingent were located in
buildings just across the street. Bertha Proctor’s bar and sometime brothel
anchored the southern end.
Even by the late 1920s, when the foreign presence in the city was much
diminished, it was still advisable to be careful with conversation and to
check around corners in that section of Pera. Settling in Istanbul had
involved “little deceptions and coercions,” Trotsky’s wife, Natalya,
recalled. Trotsky may have seemed a conspiratorial eccentric to the
islanders on Büyükada, but paranoia is a reasonable response if someone
really is out to get you. The Soviet Embassy, today the consulate of the
Russian Federation, was Trotsky’s first home in the city, but it was also the
headquarters of the surveillance system that kept constant tabs on him. It
lay at the center of a large and growing web of secret agents who hoped to
make Istanbul the base for intelligence operations throughout southern
Europe and the Near East.
“The network of spies was well-organized at Constantinople,” recalled
Georgy Agabekov, a senior official in the foreign intelligence branch of the
OGPU. Agabekov claimed that virtually all the correspondence of major
anti-Soviet émigré groups in Istanbul, such as Ukrainian nationalists and
Caucasus highlanders, found its way into Soviet hands. The Soviets were
careful to balance the desire to infiltrate enemy organizations with the need
for keeping operations low-key enough to avoid offending the Turks.
Agabekov claimed that the Soviets had managed to finagle informers inside
the Japanese, Austrian, and other foreign embassies; to intercept mail
destined for White associations and for Trotsky himself; to sign up an
Armenian bishop as a paid agent; and even to place an informant inside
Trotsky’s house on Büyükada. Much of this was little more than
enthusiastic bumbling, however. Agents were proud of their roles as zealous
defenders of Bolshevism—too proud, in many instances—and stood out
like sore thumbs to counterintelligence operatives in Istanbul, Paris,
London, and other cities—“prancing along in [a] blue serge suit made to
order by some Russian émigré tailor,” noted one disillusioned Soviet
official.
Agabekov himself had the dubious honor of being the first defector
from Stalin’s secret police, and it was his time in Istanbul that caused him to
flip sides. In 1929 and 1930, he had been working in the city to set up a
string of intelligence operations in Greece, Syria, and Palestine, while
leaving Turkish affairs to his OGPU colleagues working out of the embassy.
Agabekov always claimed that he had become disenchanted with the Soviet
system, but the proximate cause was probably more prosaic. He seems to
have fallen in love with a young English woman, Isabel Streater, whom he
had hired as a language tutor. He at first offered himself to British diplomats
as a defector, but they suspected a trap and treated him coolly. Finally, in
January 1930, Agabekov and Streater fled separately to Paris, she via the
Orient Express and he by sea, and eventually began a new life together as
husband and wife.
Agabekov’s defection was a blow to the Soviet effort, but the Istanbul
operation was accustomed to the regular turnover of personnel. Less than a
year before Agabekov’s departure, sometime near the middle of 1929,
Yakov Minsky, the OGPU station chief who had originally helped Trotsky
settle in the city, fell ill and returned to Moscow. His successor was a dark-
haired, round-faced operative with a reputation as a personable comrade.
His gray-green eyes and witty demeanor seemed to make him irresistible to
a string of female coworkers. Even today it is difficult to establish with
clarity to whom he was married and when; he may have been married to
several women at the same time. His official cover was that of a diplomat at
the Soviet Embassy. His travel documents identified him as someone named
Naumov. His superiors gave him the code names “Tom” and “Pierre.” His
real name was Leonid Eitingon.
In many ways Eitingon had the ideal background for a Soviet agent,
especially for someone working in an era long before the clear battle lines
of the Cold War had been imagined. For more than a generation his family
had cultivated the ability to live in many places at once. Eitingon was part
of the extended family of Chaim Eitingon, a prominent Russian-Jewish
furrier. The elder Eitingon had built up a fur-trading empire that stretched
across the Russian Empire and abroad. When the empire ended, his family
remained the principal conduit for the Soviet fur business, a major source of
wealth for the new regime.
From Moscow to Leipzig to New York, the family oversaw an import–
export firm that weathered the Russian civil war and remained lucrative
well into the 1930s, when the Depression and the Stalinist nationalization of
key industries shut off the spigot. Chaim’s son, Max, had grown up in the
midst of a wealthy central European and Jewish world. He was the emblem
of a family that had reinvented itself within a single generation, moving
from the edges of a Russian shtetl to the European beau monde. Trained as
a doctor, Max went on to become one of Sigmund Freud’s earliest acolytes
and the chief codifier of Freudian training in psychoanalysis.
Max’s cousin, Leonid, was from the less-wealthy branch of the Eitingon
clan. Born in 1899 in the Mogilev district in what is today Belarus, he was
the son of a minor bourgeois factory owner and followed the path of many
upwardly mobile Jewish young men in the waning days of the Russian
Empire: he joined the communists, at first signing on with the Socialist
Revolutionary Party and then, after the Bolshevik coup, enlisting in
Trotsky’s Red Army. In the civil war, he fought to root out
counterrevolutionaries in his native district as a member of the Cheka,
Lenin’s secret police, a job that he seems to have carried out ruthlessly. He
was the first generation of good soldiers fighting for the new socialist
motherland and, in those days, for world revolution as well—an outcome
that Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders believed was all but
inevitable.
Shortly after the end of the civil war, Leonid Eitingon was assigned to
foreign intelligence work in Harbin, a Chinese city that was in many ways
the East Asian equivalent of Istanbul at the time. It harbored a large
community of former White Russians who had chosen to escape east, rather
than south, as Bolshevik armies swept through the old empire. Like
Istanbul, it was both cosmopolitan and a hotbed of espionage and intrigue, a
small island of old Russian culture in a foreign sea. Eitingon’s activities—
gathering information, turning Whites to the Bolshevik side, and quite
possibly arranging the assassination of key leaders in the White community
—eventually raised the ire of the Chinese authorities, who, like the Turks,
were reluctant to see their country become a battleground for someone
else’s disputes. When Chinese police broke into the Soviet Consulate in
Harbin and searched its files, Eitingon’s true identity as a secret police
agent was discovered. He was sent packing to Moscow.
In 1929, when he was transferred to Istanbul, Eitingon was immediately
placed in charge of the real prize in Soviet foreign espionage: keeping an
eye on the aging exile who had recently taken up residence on Büyükada. It
was a sign of Eitingon’s fine-tuned political sense that he managed to
weather his time in Turkey without acquiring even a hint of Trotskyite
leanings. One of the professional hazards of being stationed in Istanbul and
monitoring the Soviet regime’s archenemy was that the assignment placed
an agent in the dangerous position of possibly being turned himself—
brought over to the Trotskyite camp and made an informant for the man
sitting in isolation on the island. In the 1930s, when Stalin began his purge
of the Soviet bureaucracy, at least one former Istanbul agent, Yakov
Bliumkin, was dismissed and executed for having gone over to the
Trotskyites. There is no evidence that Trotsky’s supporters ever managed to
engage in such counterespionage on a large scale, but authorities in
Moscow clearly feared the magnetic power of Trotsky’s personality and
ideas.
Eitingon, however, survived the Stalinist purges untainted. After leaving
his Istanbul assignment, he was placed in charge of espionage operations in
western Europe, serving as one of the most experienced and highest-ranking
secret operatives working abroad. He briefly served as case officer for Guy
Burgess, the famous British traitor and member of the so-called Cambridge
Five spy ring. During the Spanish Civil War, Eitingon served as the Stalinist
secret police’s deputy head of mission in Spain, training legions of
commandos to fight the rightist forces of Francisco Franco and developing
a friendship—perhaps even more—with a young Spanish communist
named Caridad Mercader. Like Eitingon, Mercader was the product of a
bourgeois family and someone whose own political convictions had pushed
her into the anticapitalist camp. She had signed up with the anarchists and,
after the defeat of the Left by Franco, fled with Eitingon to Moscow.
Eitingon’s experience in Spain, his reputation for efficient work throughout
Europe, and his personal relationship with Caridad all recommended him to
head up a new operation that would soon unfold half a world away.
On a late August afternoon in 1940, Eitingon found himself in one of
two cars idling on a dusty street on the fringes of Mexico City. He was
monitoring an asset, much as he had done many years earlier in Istanbul.
The asset was Ramón Mercader, Caridad’s handsome son, but things were
not going well. Eitingon knew that relying on Ramón was a shaky way to
run a mission.
Three years earlier, Eitingon had personally trained him as a commando
and dispatched him to the front lines against Franco’s army, only to have
him return wounded and gun shy. He was indecisive and given to nervous
sweats. His only real advantage in the current operation was the fact that he
had managed to ingratiate himself with the person who lived in the walled
compound down the block, an old man whom Eitingon had personally
given the Russian code name of “Utka,” the Duck. That personal
connection was important, since Ramón’s mission was to kill him.
A house alarm was sounding. Dogs were barking. There was a
commotion behind the front gate. The backup plan had been for Ramón to
use his revolver if the mission went awry, but the absence of gunfire meant
that even the fallback plan had gone badly. Eitingon ordered the cars to
depart, leaving the assassin to find his own way out of the mess he seemed
to have made. It was not until sometime later, once Eitingon was safely
back in the Soviet Union, that he learned the details of what had happened.
That day, August 20, Ramón had arrived much as he had done each
afternoon, parking his car outside the compound and waving at the armed
guards to let him in. He made his way to the study where the old man sat
working on a text. Minutes later, he pulled out a short-handled ice ax he had
concealed in his raincoat and brought it down on the back of Leon Trotsky’s
head.
Trotsky let out a piercing cry, so loud that Eitingon might well have
heard it down the street. Natalya rushed into the study to find the two men
separated, Trotsky leaning against a doorway and Ramón looking on dazed,
seemingly surprised that the initial blow had not killed him.
Blood was everywhere. Trotsky’s guards burst in and grabbed Ramón,
nearly pummeling the young man to death before Trotsky could order them
to stop. Ramón’s testimony, after all, might be used to uncover who had
planned the attack. Trotsky was still able to speak when an ambulance
delivered him to a nearby hospital. “I don’t want them to undress me. I want
you to do it,” he told Natalya before slipping into a coma. He died the
following evening.
As Eitingon sped away, he could not have known that his career had just
reached the high point from which he would begin a very long fall. Eitingon
had the distinction of being the only Soviet agent whose own career had
bookended Trotsky’s exile. He had arrived in Istanbul around the same time
as Trotsky and then personally planned the attack that would liquidate him
eleven years later. For his service, he and Caridad were awarded the Order
of Lenin in a private ceremony in the Kremlin—he as the chief conspirator
and she as the mother of the literal hatchet man. Ramón, ever the sap, spent
the next twenty years serving a murder sentence in a Mexican prison.
By the early 1950s, however, Eitingon had fallen from grace. He was
accused of playing a central role in the Doctors’ Plot, an alleged conspiracy
by Soviet physicians, many of whom happened to be Jewish, to assassinate
key Soviet leaders. In reality, the plot was a fabrication spurred on by
Stalin’s paranoia over internal enemies, but the effort to unmask the
supposed conspirators produced a frenzied antisemitic campaign that
targeted senior Jewish communists. Eitingon was arrested, stripped of his
medals, and jailed. He was eventually released but spent the rest of his life,
until his death in 1981, as an outcast from the intelligence services, working
as an interpreter. “There is one small guaranteed way not to end up in jail
under our system,” Eitingon once joked to his boss. “Don’t be a Jew or a
general in the state security service.” The old Bolshevik mastermind, who
had quietly hounded Trotsky from Istanbul to Mexico City, of course was
both, and he died in his own kind of internal exile.
QUEEN
Under scrutiny, early 1930s: A contestant poses for judges in a Miss Turkey competition.
B Y THE TIME LEON TROTSKY left Büyükada for France and Mexico, Nâzım
Hikmet was serving one of his many jail sentences, Halide Edip was in
voluntary exile with her husband, Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiades was
on his way to becoming Greece’s greatest industrialist, and Mustafa Kemal
had fully consolidated his power as unrivaled leader of the Turkish
Republic. Debates over socialism and republicanism, patriotism and
feminism, loyalty and leadership had pushed Istanbullus in separate
directions. They could even cause old comrades to part ways. Yunus Nadi,
for example, had been Halide Edip’s partner in establishing the Anatolian
News Agency, but from that point forward, their careers diverged. Where
Halide became one of the regime’s foremost critics, Yunus Nadi was one of
its most committed spokesmen.
He had worked as a newsman already in the late Ottoman period and
had briefly served in the Ottoman parliament. His credentials as a reform-
oriented publicist and bitingly effective writer were impeccable. He had
been part of the Unionist underground, and, when Mustafa Kemal’s
resistance movement emerged, he was one of the early enthusiasts who fled
from Istanbul to Ankara to join it. After the proclamation of the republic, he
returned to Istanbul and became the city’s leading newspaper editor and
press entrepreneur. He could be fierce in criticizing specific government
policies or the inefficiencies of state institutions, but he always did so from
inside the circle of power around the president and his core associates.
The newspaper Yunus Nadi established in 1924, Cumhuriyet, quickly
rose to become one of Turkey’s most widely read dailies and a mainstay of
ardent Kemalism. Its opinion pages could both reflect and sway public
attitudes. Foreign governments carefully scoured its pages for evidence of
Turkey’s shifting foreign-policy orientations—from early flirtations with
the Soviet Union to admiration for Adolf Hitler’s growing power in
Germany. Turkey was modernizing, and Cumhuriyet was there both to
record the revolution and to champion it. “For four or five years now,
Turkey has been in a period of deep restructuring,” Yunus Nadi declared in
its pages in 1928. “We want to import all traits of Western civilization to
our country. Not long ago . . . our social life rested on Eastern principles.
We are turning them upside down.”
Round and jowly, he wore his gray hair swept back severely. In broad-
lapelled suits and the occasional wing collar, he could seem a cartoon of a
press mogul, a Turkish version of Citizen Kane. He could rail on the page
and gently persuade in person. Both of those skills came into play when he
hit upon an idea for expanding newspaper sales and showcasing the new
sense of modernity that Kemalism had brought to the ancient city. In
February 1929, Yunus Nadi announced that Istanbul would host the
republic’s first ever beauty contest.
“Why Wouldn’t We Do the Same?” a front-page headline asked. Since
all civilized countries held beauty contests, with the winners competing in
international pageants across Europe and the United States, a similar
competition would mark another milestone in Turkey’s march toward social
maturity. The newspaper soon announced a search for “the most beautiful
Turkish woman,” who would be selected to represent Turkey abroad and
demonstrate the elevated qualities of the new republican woman to a global
audience. It would be no different from a soccer game, Yunus Nadi said, a
chance to send the best Turkish citizens overseas and to measure
themselves against the finest products of other civilized nations. Further
particulars followed. All Turkish women and girls over the age of fifteen,
regardless of religion or ethnicity, were invited to participate. Contestants
were asked to send in a photograph, which would be printed in the
newspaper, and readers would have a chance to vote on the finalists. There
would be no swimsuit element, the newspaper explained, and the jury
would consist only of the most respected citizens. Prostitutes were
expressly forbidden from taking part.
In a country with one party, one leader, and one acceptable path to the
future, being asked to vote freely on anything was a novelty, and Yunus
Nadi’s idea had its desired effect. Photographs flowed into the newspaper’s
editorial offices. Readers debated the merits of the various finalists. The
Turkish winner should have a good chance of beating out other contestants
in an international pageant, one writer declared. The recent winner of a
European contest had been a Hungarian woman, and since Turks and
Hungarians were genetic cousins—both descended from Central Asian
nomads, apparently—odds were in the republic’s favor. The discussions
were so intense that few people in Istanbul probably noticed the arrival of
another celebrity, Leon Trotsky, in the same week the competition was
announced.
After readers had selected around thirty finalists, the first competition
was held at the newspaper’s editorial offices. A jury of fifty notables
examined each of the women, who were required to wear a décolleté dress
and to produce an identity document certifying their Turkish citizenship. By
September 3, the results were in, and Cumhuriyet dedicated the entire front
page to describing the competition and its winner, one Feriha Tevfik. The
young woman rocketed from obscurity to fame in an instant. She went on to
an international competition in Belgium, but despite Yunus Nadi’s high
expectations, she failed to place. Still, moguls of Turkey’s emerging film
industry came calling. She went on to star in several melodramas and
romantic films, a well-known figure if not exactly a household name
through much of the 1930s.
Yunus Nadi soon announced that the competition would be an annual
event. Beginning in 1930, twenty finalists would be invited to a grand ball
at the Turquoise club, where they would parade before judges and paying
guests in the style of other foreign pageants. “Beauty Is Not Something to
Be Ashamed Of,” an editorial headline read. All of this was still shockingly
new, however. Yunus Nadi had had to defend the contest from the moment
he originally broached the idea, and the negative reaction began to swell.
He found himself managing an enormous backlash, not only from
conservatives in Istanbul society but also from the Turkish government.
When judges selected Na ide Saffet, a Turkish schoolteacher, as Miss
Turkey 1931, the Ministry of Education issued a circular threatening
dismissal for any teachers and pupils who participated in such contests.
Teachers in particular were held up as models of propriety and good sense
—and were, to boot, state employees—so having one of their number
placed before ogling judges was considered an offense to public morality.
Even worse, Yunus Nadi had failed to deliver the most important thing
he had promised: that in bending good taste by staging a beauty contest that
included Muslim women, he would at least produce someone who could go
on to win an international crown. Three years of entrants fell by the
wayside when they stepped onto stages in Belgium and France. The title of
Miss Europe 1930 had gone to the entrant from Greece, trouncing her
Turkish competitor and delivering a major blow to national prestige. It was
at this point that Yunus Nadi seems to have come up with an inspired idea.
If beauty contests were seen by conservatives as somehow beneath the
dignity of Muslim women—in part because the winners had gone on to film
or acting careers, which were still considered a sign of loose morals and
déclassé origins—one way to solve that problem would be to put forth a
contestant whose background was itself beyond reproach. The person he
found was Keriman Halis.
Keriman was only ten years old when the republic was declared, but for
families such as hers, the fall of the Ottoman Empire was less the end of an
old way of life than a rising wave that, with the right planning and
connections, could lift fortunes and redefine opportunities. Her great-
grandfather had been eyhülislam of the Islamic community. He was, next
to the sultan in his role as caliph, the most powerful religious leader in the
entire empire. Her grandfather had been a pasha, a senior general in the
imperial land forces. Her father, Halis Bey, was a merchant who built a
successful business in the late nineteenth century when Ottoman consumers
were hungry for items that marked them as modern and European. He had
been among the first importers to introduce fire extinguishers to the empire
and, in a way, helped alleviate what had been one of Istanbul’s preeminent
problems for centuries.
With such a pedigree, Keriman spent her childhood among French
nannies, equestrian outings, and the social season of balls and chaperoned
excursions. With a round face and sparkling brown eyes, she was regarded
as a considerable beauty, and the family home in Fındıklı, on the European
shore of the Bosphorus, was a place of quick conversation and optimism
about the future. Her father’s passion for literature and the arts meant that
she was surrounded by a cadre of Muslim writers, artists, and thinkers who
were helping to reshape the city in the transition from Allied occupation to
national sovereignty. It was an atmosphere similar to the one that Halide
Edip, three decades Keriman’s senior, had known in her own childhood, but
the differences were also stark. Halide had been a member of the first
generation of women whose adult lives spanned the turbulent years from
empire to republic. Their struggles had been over veiling, seclusion, and
civil rights. Keriman’s generation, by contrast, took the new public lives
and legal status of women for granted. They were the first cohort of young
women who, as adults, had known no country but the Turkish Republic.
In the late 1920s, Keriman had little reason to frequent the jazz cafés
and ballrooms in Pera, uphill from her family home. Finding someone of
her breeding and social standing in such venues—surrounded by Russian
singers, Levantine partygoers, and sometime prostitutes—would have been
nearly unthinkable. But one of Yunus Nadi’s signature talents was bridging
these two very different worlds.
Istanbul was in many ways a big village, at least for the thin stratum of
Muslims in the highest echelons of business and government. It was easy
for one of the city’s most respected newspaper editors to fall into the orbit
of Halis Bey and his talented and beautiful children. Yunus Nadi reportedly
approached Halis Bey on more than one occasion to inquire whether
Keriman might be allowed to stand as a contestant in his beauty contest.
But in an age when seeing Muslim women on stage in any capacity was still
a rarity, it was hard to imagine a father’s placing his daughter in a position
where she would be intentionally examined by strangers. Keriman was
technically old enough to participate in the competition, at least according
to Yunus Nadi’s own rules, but her father was skeptical. On each approach
Halis Bey had demurred. Finally, after several years of gentle cajoling, her
father relented, and in 1932 Keriman Halis was put forward as an entrant in
Cumhuriyet’s Miss Turkey contest. At the competition in Pera that July, she
walked away with the prize.
Yunus Nadi had far grander designs than simply ushering Keriman
toward national fame, however. He immediately entered her into the
competition known as the International Pageant of Pulchritude, more
popularly known as the Miss Universe competition. Like Yunus Nadi’s
contest, the pageant was a public relations stunt. Its origins had lain in
Galveston, Texas, a city flattened by a hurricane in 1900 and, even three
decades later, still seeking ways of luring visitors. Most of the winners had
been Americans—most of the competitions, in fact, had been held in
Galveston, even though they were marketed as global talent searches—but
pageant organizers soon realized that they had a franchise that could be
offered to any city or town seeking to revitalize tourism and develop a
brand. That year, the competition moved to Spa, the resort in Belgium. With
the worldwide economic depression, hotel and restaurant revenues had
dwindled, and the pageant was intended to be a source of money as well as
good press. In August 1932, contestants, friends, and reporters began
arriving in Spa in droves, just as Istanbul was preparing to send off its own
champion.

Miss Universe, 1932: Keriman Halis in a publicity photograph.

Twenty thousand Istanbullus reportedly turned up for Keriman Halis’s

farewell reception in Taksim Square. She set off by train for Belgium with
her father as chaperone. Along the way, crowds gathered at Turkish stations
to see her pass by. Once in Spa, all the competitors were the object of
intense media attention, but Keriman was of particular interest. She was the
only contestant from the Muslim world and a young woman whose family
background seemed to give her an air of respectability and grace—which
was precisely why Yunus Nadi had worked so hard to convince her father to
allow her to compete. It was also perhaps the reason that she took to the
stage in Belgium with the full backing of the Turkish government, in great
contrast to Yunus Nadi’s entrants from earlier seasons.
In Spa, she performed much as she had done in Istanbul, walking
regally in a ball gown, conversing with judges, and posing discreetly for the
world’s press. By the end of the competition, she was certain one of the
other contestants, a German, had won the grand prize. But when her name
was called, she stepped forward with a tentative smile and into the flash of
cameras. She was declared Miss Universe 1932. In the ensuing days, nearly
thirty thousand telegrams came in with congratulations, and Yunus Nadi
devoted an entire issue of Cumhuriyet to covering each minute detail of the
story. Mustafa Kemal telegraphed his warm wishes, as did the Grand
National Assembly, the minister of the interior, and the governor of
Istanbul. Yunus Nadi was summoned to the president’s office to receive
congratulations from Mustafa Kemal in person. smet Pasha, the old war
hero and prime minister, rose in parliament to proclaim Keriman “a living
argument against the numerous voices raised in our disfavor.” Cumhuriyet,
never missing an opportunity for hype, dubbed Keriman “The Turkish Girl
Who Conquered the World.”
Public engagements and invitations followed. Keriman was hailed in
Belgium, feted in Paris, and celebrated in Cairo. She appeared in Berlin and
Chicago, and even stopped over in Athens on a courtesy visit with
Eleftherios Venizelos, the old Hellenic enemy who had since patched up
relations with Mustafa Kemal. She became an ambassador not only for the
pageant but, even more important, for her country. She was never quite
what her hosts expected. At one gala dinner, an enthusiastic organizer used
small paper fezzes as centerpieces, thinking that the Oriental decorations
would please the world’s first Muslim beauty queen. Since the hats were a
symbol of the old empire and illegal in republican Turkey, she refused to
enter the hall until they were removed.
Keriman arrived back in Istanbul to an uproarious welcome. She toured
the nation, greeted at each stop with an enthusiasm that rivaled only that
shown for President Mustafa Kemal himself. She was invited to appear in a
film but refused. Honor demanded otherwise, she said. She eventually
married, started a family, and became a celebrated symbol of Kemalist
virtue. Pageant participants would pay a ritual visit to her for decades to
come. She always rejected the label of beauty maven and insisted that the
competition had been an exhibition of female emancipation and Turkish
modernity.
Two years after her victory in Belgium, when Turks were required by
law to take surnames, Mustafa Kemal announced that Keriman’s would be
Ece—meaning Queen. It remained the family name thereafter. Halide Edip
was still on the lecture circuit abroad, but Turkey’s most famous feminist
had already been eclipsed by a person who had become both the republic’s
most recognizable woman and, for an instant, the world’s. When Istanbul’s
commuters drove along the coast road near the Bosphorus, past Keriman’s
old family home, they found themselves traveling on a street that had been
renamed Queen Avenue in her honor.
HOLY WISDOM
A friendly visit, April 1939: Joseph Goebbels (foreground center) and his entourage touring the
Hagia Sophia.
K ERIMAN HALIS WAS CONSIDERED a national treasure not just because she
defeated every other contestant in Belgium. More important, she had
triumphed over any woman whom Greece had managed to put forward.
That was precisely Yunus Nadi’s hope. The old Hellenic-Turkish rivalry
was a trump card that he had played continually against conservatives who
saw the entire concept of a beauty pageant as demeaning to Turkish dignity.
The Hellenes had been sending their contestants to pan-European
competitions for years, he pointed out, and Turks should not fail to do their
part for national greatness by selecting their own native beauty. “If the
Hellenes Are Doing It, Why Shouldn’t We?” a headline in Cumhuriyet
asked. Keriman’s victory—and, by extension, Turkey’s—made his case
eloquently.
Just as Keriman was embarking on a world tour, Istanbul was also
beginning another great experiment in beauty and modernization. This
particular version, though, involved not besting the Greeks but, in a way,
embracing them. Across the Golden Horn from the Pera Palace lay the
remnants of what had once been some of the greatest churches in eastern
Christendom: the Hagia Eirene, dedicated to Christ’s attribute of the “holy
peace” and later ensconced inside the grounds of the sultan’s palace at
Topkapı; the diminutive Church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, with its
unique undulating dome; and the jumble of barrel vaults and arches of the
Church of the Holy Savior in Chora, just inside the city’s land walls. After
the Ottoman conquest, most of these and other churches had been either
turned into mosques or allowed to decay. Towering above them all were the
four minarets of the grandest mosque in Istanbul, the one the Turks called
the Ayasofya, a rendering of the name it had borne as a Greek Orthodox
church: the Hagia Sophia.
The grand structure rises at the very heart of the original Greek colony
of Byzantium and the political and religious core of Byzantine
Constantinople. In the sixth century, Emperor Justinian I ordered a new
church to be built on the site of two earlier structures, which he insisted had
to be grander and more elaborate than those that had come before. Justinian
had expanded the territory of his empire across the Mediterranean and
presided over a period of confidence and rebirth in New Rome. The
cathedral was meant to showcase that renewed power, and when it was
consecrated in 537, its completion was hailed as nothing less than a miracle.
“So the church has become a spectacle of marvelous beauty,” wrote
Procopius, the opinionated chronicler of Justinian’s reign, “overwhelming
to those who see it, but to those who know it by hearsay altogether
incredible.” When Justinian entered the building for the first time, he is said
to have compared his achievement to that of the biblical builder of the
temple in Jerusalem. “Oh, Solomon,” he exclaimed, “I have conquered
you!”
The church was dedicated to the “holy wisdom”—literally, hagia sophia
in Greek, one of the attributes of God—but the Byzantines knew it simply
as the Great Church. Its shape, structure, and scale created the standard by
which every other Byzantine church would be judged for the next
millennium. The central area, or nave, is nearly square and surmounted by a
central dome more than a hundred feet across. The Byzantines, heirs to
ancient Roman architectural techniques, had solved a basic structural
problem that would elude Western designers throughout the Middle Ages:
how to cover a large space without interior columns. The building is in fact
its own support.
The weight of the dome cascades along the periphery of the nave
through a series of semidomes, arches, and colonnades, all the way down to
the foundation. The same techniques would be adopted by the Ottomans
after their conquest of Constantinople, which is why all the great mosques
of the Ottoman capital—the Süleymaniye and Selimiye, the Sultanahmet
and the Kılıç Ali Pasha, all with airy interiors that can fit row upon row of
the kneeling faithful at Friday prayers—in many ways compete to outdo the
Hagia Sophia at its own game. Across the world, both Greek Orthodox and
Roman Catholic churches often took the Hagia Sophia as their model, from
some of the great structures of the Italian Renaissance to the neo-Byzantine
revival of the late nineteenth century.
The church’s interior decoration consisted originally of patterned
mosaics that probably did not depict human forms. In the eighth century,
the Iconoclast movement in Eastern Christianity railed against human
images, which were viewed as “graven” and therefore prohibited by the Ten
Commandments. Enthusiastic monks raced around the empire literally
defacing murals and mosaics in churches, monasteries, and public spaces.
But shifts in attitude gradually allowed representational art to emerge inside
the city’s most important sacred space.
From the tenth century forward, the interior of the church was covered
with serene angels and devout emperors towering above the nave and
peering down from the galleries. A representation of the Virgin seated with
the Christ Child on the throne of heaven filled the apse, while the dome
sheltered one of the most common yet arresting scenes in Orthodox
Christian art: the majestic image of Christ Pantocrator, the all-powerful
Jesus with an expression at once kind and stern, his hand raised in
benediction and reproach.
The effect, with the eyes of saints seeming to glisten in the candlelight
and twirls of incense wafting up into the gloom, must have been
mesmerizing. According to tradition, a delegation of Slavs visited in the
tenth century and reported back to their prince, Vladimir of Kiev, that “we
knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. . . . We only know that
God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies
of other nations.” On their recommendation, Vladimir adopted Christianity
as the state religion and concluded a marital alliance with the sister of the
Byzantine emperor, the beginning of what would later become the Russian
Orthodox Church.
Much of the interior decoration was chipped away over the centuries as
souvenirs or loot. There was probably no better preservative, however, than
Muslim conquest. When Mehmed II marched into Constantinople in 1453,
he interrupted a Mass being conducted inside the church for the protection
of the city. His forces battered down the imposing bronze doors and killed
or captured the embattled worshippers, dragging priests away from the altar
in midchant.
But Mehmed quickly realized the architectural—and spiritual—treasure
that lay before him. When he stood before the church’s gates in the hours
after his armies had secured the city, he bent to the ground and scooped a
handful of dirt onto his turban, a gesture of ritual purification before a
house of God. Inside the vast space, he stood in silence, watching the play
of light from thousands of flickering candles. A Muslim imam pronounced
that there was no God but God, while Mehmed knelt in prayer before the
apse, which pointed roughly southeast, toward both Jerusalem and Mecca.
From that day, he ordered, the church would become a mosque. Four
mismatched minarets were later added to the exterior. The human figures on
the interior walls—in theory, prohibited in Islam—were dealt with as
cheaply and efficiently as possible. They were simply covered with plaster
and paint.
Christian angels and Greek emperors thus lurked beneath the thin scree
only inches away from where the sultan and his retinue came for Friday
prayers. Under the Ottomans, they were partially uncovered on only one
occasion. In the 1840s, as part of a plan for modernizing the capital, the
reformist Sultan Abdülmecid I commissioned two Swiss architects, Gaspare
and Giuseppe Fossati, to revitalize the city’s most important mosque. The
Fossati brothers reworked the exterior decoration, erasing centuries of
grime and giving the walls more color and drama, including lateral red
candy stripes, a version of European neo-Gothic excess.
The Fossatis had also been the first to remove the interior plaster and
reveal the intricate mosaics, which they had discovered by accident while
repairing cracks and stabilizing the marble revetment on the walls.
Abdülmecid saw himself as an emperor confident in his place in world
civilization and able to look with interest on the achievements of the
Christian rulers who had come before him. He was delighted by the
discovery. For a few months, the mosque was transported back to an earlier
time, filled with sparkling light bouncing from the diadem of an empress,
the golden halo around the head of Christ, and the dazzling lapis lazuli of
the Virgin’s cloak.
The Ottoman Empire was given one of its first prolonged gazes at its
own Byzantine past, but then, just as quickly, the Islamic state turned away
from the representational art that lay beneath the walls of its greatest
mosque. The Fossatis catalogued a portion of what they had discovered
before the sultan, bowing to pressure from Muslim conservatives, ordered
them to seal the images behind fresh plaster and whitewash. Nearly a
century later, however, the mosaics would come to light again.
From his suite in the Pera Palace, Thomas Whittemore had been one of the
best-connected people in Istanbul in the early 1920s. He had overseen a
mini-empire of charitable organizations, fundraising events, refugee
assistance centers, orphanages, and student scholarship foundations, all
focused on assisting White Russians in escaping their old empire and
reinventing themselves in Turkey or elsewhere. He lunched with Allied
high commissioners and generals, visited Ottoman dignitaries, and charmed
the core activists of what would now be called Istanbul’s civil society,
especially the many women who were in large part responsible for
philanthropic work in the city.
Whittemore was by nature flamboyant and reclusive, intensely private
yet given to searching for the limelight, a depressive self-promoter of the
first order, and someone awed by beauty and the thrill of discovery—in
other words, the epitome of the public intellectual. In later life, he vamped
in his signature trilby for the noted photographer Dmitri Kessel and a
spread in Life magazine. He posed for noirish studio shots with a serious
brow and brim pulled low. Short and thin-framed, he might show up at a
meeting swallowed up in a striped North African burnoose, a Balkan
shearling coat, or a Kurdish goatskin. He could appear at the oddest of
moments—at the coronation of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie, on a transatlantic
crossing with W. B. Yeats and Jascha Heifetz, or on the arm of the last king
of Italy in the Palazzo del Quirinale. He cultivated in himself what he
prized in others: a flair for the unexpected and a love of the “mystic,” a
word he used with frequency.
As a member of a prominent Boston family, Whittemore had spent his
young adulthood, before the First World War, bouncing from one pursuit to
another. He took a degree in English from Tufts College and later taught a
few literature classes there. He attended graduate lectures at Harvard in art
and art history. He dabbled in medieval studies. Through a friend, the
renegade curator, art historian, and sometime secretary of Boston’s Museum
of Fine Arts, Matthew Prichard, Whittemore made his way through the
transatlantic society of men usually referred to as aesthetes: fast-talking,
witty, less well-read than well-informed, and confirmed bachelors in an age
when everyone understood what that meant—Oscar Wildes, of sorts, but
with Yankee accents. Traveling together in Paris, Prichard and Whittemore
made the rounds of literary events and gallery openings. Prichard may have
been the person who introduced Whittemore to his friend Henri Matisse,
whom Prichard had met at one of Paris’s premier gathering places, Gertrude
Stein’s salon. The three became close associates. Matisse’s sketch portrait
of Whittemore remained one of Whittemore’s prized possessions.
In 1910, Whittemore visited, perhaps with Prichard, the Meisterwerke
muhammedanischer Kunst, a Munich exhibition of more than three
thousand masterpieces of Islamic art that still counts as the largest single
gathering of Islamic miniatures, calligraphy, and decorative arts ever staged.
The exhibition was a first. Never before had Europeans displayed items
from Muslim lands as autonomous products of the human imagination, not
stage props adorning an Orientalist fantasy of a harem or a Bedouin tent.
More than a hundred thousand people walked through dozens of halls
displaying Islamic objects one piece at a time.
As with many artists, collectors, and critics who saw it, the Munich
exhibition transformed Whittemore’s understanding of the possibilities and
richness of the Near East—its Islamic present as well as its Christian past.
Over the next decade, he made a long detour away from art and into the
field of refugee relief, but his interest in the region’s many-layered heritage
never wavered. His mind, he once confided to a friend, was always in
Istanbul. On long walks from the Pera Palace, he came to see that his true
calling lay almost literally before him—not in the long lines of Russian
refugees queueing up in the hotel lobby but rather in the paving stones and
plastered walls of the city itself, in the remnants of old Byzantium.
As Whittemore knew, something called the Byzantine Empire was
largely a construct of modern historians. The first appearance of the word
Byzantine in English dates only from 1794, and that in a source relating to
botany, not history or culture. The people we now call the Byzantines never
used that label, nor did they conceive of their world as politically separate
from that of their Roman forebears.
True, they had traded pagan rituals for Christian piety, the coarse Latin
of the dying western empire for refined Greek, and the silted and flood-
prone Tiber River for the free-flowing, world-connecting Bosphorus. Yet
they nevertheless called themselves Romans, or Romaioi in Greek, and
imagined their civilization as the logical and unbroken continuation of that
of Augustus and Marcus Aurelius. The lands under their control expanded
and contracted over the centuries, but the Byzantines consistently called
anyone living outside their capital city “hoi ex Rom s,” foreigners from
beyond New Rome, that is, Istanbul. They usually referred to their
metropolis as simply “the city,” much as New Yorkers speak of Manhattan.
That habit probably gave us the modern name, since the Greek eis t n polin
—“to the city”—is tantalizingly similar to “Istanbul.” To this day, ethnic
Greeks native to Istanbul are referred to in Turkish as something akin to
“Romans,” or Rumlar, an echo of the name Byzantines gave themselves.
The Byzantine heritage had an obvious richness and resilience, an
ability to imagine continuity while adapting to the shifting circumstances of
what had become, by the early Middle Ages, a borderland state wedged
between rival Christian powers in the Balkans, marauding Crusaders
pouring in from the west, and multiple waves of invading Muslims from the
south and east. Its influence lived on not only in the civilization of the
Ottomans themselves—who actually embraced a fair amount of Byzantine
culture, except for the Christian theology—but also in the art, music,
spirituality, and architecture of Eastern Christendom, from Greece to Russia
to Ethiopia.
But despite these living links, Byzantium was long seen by Western
scholars and art collectors as the poor cousin of the material culture of
ancient Greece and Rome. At worst, writers echoed the eighteenth-century
historian Edward Gibbon, who limped toward the conclusion of his
magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789) with a
sense of exasperation at the foibles and fractiousness of the Byzantines. “I
have reached at length the last reign of the princes of Constantinople,” he
wrote, “who so feebly sustained the name and majesty of the Caesars.”
Byzantine art was similarly thought of as essentially in-between: naïve and
hemmed in by convention, not so much antirepresentational as indifferent to
representation, less interesting than the hyperrealism of Greek and Roman
sculpture that preceded it and less imaginative than the Renaissance
tapestries and paintings that followed—an art purpose-built for a world that
was dark and God-bound, smelling of incense and candle wax. The
adjective Byzantine eventually became a synonym for anything
overbureaucratized, recondite, opaque, and ridiculous.
For a small cadre of art historians, however, the Byzantine tradition was
a long-forgotten bridge tying together the Greek-speaking Mediterranean,
the political legacy of ancient Rome, and the many Eastern influences that
would eventually find their highest expression in the architecture of
Ottoman Istanbul. The first journal of Byzantine studies emerged in the
1890s, the first international congress (with just thirty participants) was held
in the 1920s, and the first international exhibition of Byzantine art was
organized in the 1930s. In the interwar years, the entire field of Byzantine
studies was given a major boost by the energetic collecting of a single
visionary couple, Robert and Mildred Woods Bliss, who stuffed their stately
mansion in Washington, DC—Dumbarton Oaks—with artifacts that would
prove vital to scholars seeking to understand the lost world of Byzantine
emperors, chroniclers, and artisans.
Thomas Whittemore was part of this vanguard of the devoted. He had
no degree in art history, and his only real experience with archaeology had
been as an assistant on a dig in Egypt before the First World War. What he
did have was supreme confidence in his ability to raise enough money to
pick up where Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati had left off—restoring the
Hagia Sophia to its former glory and opening its doors to the wider world.
Whittemore had a preternatural ability to sidle up to the great and
powerful. During the First World War, he had delivered biscuits and nibbles
from the queen of England to her sister, the dowager empress of Russia. His
work with Russian refugees had put him in contact with some of the
greatest historians and conservators in Europe. The Russian Archaeological
Institute, just up the Grande Rue from the Pera Palace, had been the chief
institution in Istanbul charged with unearthing the remnants of Byzantium,
and with its shuttering after the Bolshevik Revolution, many of its leading
lights sought Whittemore’s aid. His family connections in Boston gave him
access to American philanthropists, while his misspent youth among artists’
circles and Parisian salons had sharpened his ability to convert his vague
enthusiasms into vital projects. “[H]e had a gift for making himself appear
to be a charlatan,” recalled Sir Steven Runciman, the distinguished
Byzantinist, but “[h]is persuasive powers enabled him also to raise funds . .
. from rich American ladies, whom he handled with superb artifice.”
In 1930, Whittemore established the Byzantine Institute, with makeshift
offices in Paris, Boston, and Istanbul, as a vehicle for fundraising and a
letterhead with which he could approach the Turkish government for a
concession to work on the Hagia Sophia. Whittemore’s version of events
was that he simply made an entreaty to Mustafa Kemal, who was so taken
with the proposal that he slapped a “Closed for Repairs” sign on the mosque
the next day, written in his own hand. But that was a fundraiser’s tall tale.
Whittemore in fact put to good use the skills he had developed in raising
money for Russian refugees: interceding with leading Turkish officials,
garnering support from amateur collectors and monied families in the
United States, chatting up diplomats in Istanbul and Ankara, and finally
approaching a key official named Halil Bey, the former director of the
Turkish National Museum and a parliamentarian in the Grand National
Assembly. The Harem of Topkapı Palace—the household areas once
reserved for women and children—had already been opened to visitors in
the spring of 1930. Treating the entire historic area of the old city’s
promontory as a single zone of historic significance, from the palace to the
Sultanahmet mosque, was part of Henri Prost’s design for a monumental
park in the neighborhood. Things were shaping up in Whittemore’s favor.
Politics also played a useful role. Mustafa Kemal’s government was still
in the midst of realizing two principal goals: unwinding the long tradition
that had fused Islam and state power in the Ottoman Empire and
transferring wealth out of the hands of ethnic minorities and toward Muslim
Turks. The caliphate had been abolished, minorities had been pressed to
renounce their collective rights, and Islam had been disestablished as the
state religion. Making a museum out of the building that was at once the
greatest Greek monument beyond the Parthenon and Istanbul’s most
important mosque was a brilliant vehicle for realizing the government’s
core aims. A rapprochement between Turkey and Greece—occasioned by
the coming to power of a more conciliatory government in Athens, even
though it was headed by the old firebrand Venizelos—also expanded the
scope for reassessing the Greek legacy in Istanbul. In October 1930, the two
countries signed a treaty of neutrality and cooperation that, against all
expectations, would prove to be one of the most longstanding diplomatic
agreements in interwar Europe. Two years later, Mustafa Kemal sent
Keriman Halis, still wearing her Miss Universe crown, to meet Venizelos as
a symbolic recognition that times had changed between the rival nations.
The Hagia Sophia was a similar exercise in cultural détente. Ironically,
restoring the greatest material expression of Greek Christianity became one
of the most powerful levers wielded by the Kemalists in their drive to make
the country more Turkish, more secular, and more secure with its neighbors.
In the summer of 1931, the Turkish Council of Ministers authorized
Whittemore’s Byzantine Institute to lead the expedition to revitalize the
church and, in particular, to uncover the old mosaics. By December, wood-
and-metal scaffolding rose inside the cavernous interior, giving access to
spaces above the doorways and to the elevated galleries on the second story
overlooking the nave. Week by week, Whittemore’s workmen gently
chipped away at the paint and plaster to reveal the glass tesserae, or mosaic
pieces, that lay underneath. Tiny bits of surface plaster would cling to the
glass, threatening to dislodge the delicate tesserae from their beds, so
workmen were instructed to use dental tools to scrape away the vestiges of
the Fossatis’ work.
Once they were exposed, the tesserae were gently washed with a
chamois and a weak ammonia-and-water solution, rubbed with a soft bristle
brush, and then buffed with another chamois. The work was achingly slow,
and even though Whittemore had never overseen such a project, he
managed to hire talented technicians and supervisors. Venetian mosaicists,
Russian workmen, French antiquarians, and American architectural
historians were all drawn to what was quickly becoming one of the world’s
most intriguing archaeological feats.
The restoration promised a new way of thinking about the city’s Greek
heritage. With the old church returned to something of its former glory, the
artistic and cultural legacies of the city—the multiple pasts of which the
Turks could see themselves as the legitimate and magnanimous custodians
—would be revealed as well. If the Acropolis in Athens was one version of
what it meant to be Greek—sun-bleached, austere, and pagan—the version
being revealed bit by bit in the Hagia Sophia was its natural rival: color-
filled, majestic, and a hybrid of East and West in exactly the way that
Mustafa Kemal’s republic was imagining itself.
But this was also why Whittemore’s work courted such controversy at
the time. The Turkish president may have given his personal blessing to the
project, but newspapers were filled with articles decrying the Americans as
destroyers of the city’s greatest mosque. Whittemore was denounced as a
proselytizer in the guise of an archaeologist, seeking to spread Christianity
one chisel cut at a time. Islam prohibited human images, others claimed,
and Whittemore was offending religious belief by exposing the mosque’s
infidel beginnings.
Secular Turks rallied in response. Halil Bey, the parliamentarian and
museum curator, rose to Whittemore’s defense and stressed the scholarly
and artistic nature of the enterprise. Yunus Nadi likewise hailed
Whittemore’s work as the victory of science over religion. The original
decision to plaster over the mosaics under Sultan Abdülmecid I, he wrote in
Cumhuriyet, had been an expression of brutal religious conservatism. Now,
at last, the artistic glories of the city were being freed from their religious
veils and revealed to their secular custodians.
In the summer of 1932, Whittemore traveled to Ankara to report
directly to Mustafa Kemal. The president dispatched one of his adopted
daughters, Zehra, to receive him at the train station and drive him to the
presidential farm outside the capital. There, Whittemore and the Turkish
leader walked in the gardens and discussed the ongoing restoration, with
Zehra serving as translator. When he was shown early photographs of some
newly uncovered mosaics, Mustafa Kemal expressed deep interest in the
project and satisfaction with the Byzantine Institute’s labors. On the
crowded train back to Istanbul, Whittemore gleefully noted that the
president had made sure to arrange a special sleeping berth for him, while
the Japanese chargé d’affaires was left to fend for himself.
Whittemore’s earlier digs in Egypt had involved sifting through desert
sand or loose rocks, with odds against finding anything but a collapsed wall
or a cast-off potsherd. Now, he almost always knew what he was looking
for, since the Fossatis had left some record of what they had found nearly a
century earlier. Inch by inch, his team retraced the Fossatis’ footsteps,
discovering the work the Swiss brothers had done to stabilize many of the
mosaics and ensure that they remained firmly attached to the interior walls.
Whittemore staged films of his team hard at work, his assistants in white
lab coats and overalls and he in a dark suit and ever-present trilby.
In early 1933, one of the teams began chipping away at a blank wall in
the south gallery, the second-story promenade that looks down into the
building’s main space. The careful chiseling soon revealed a mosaic
covering much of a large, east-facing wall. Its outlines seemed to soar
toward the ceiling, dwarfing anything in that portion of the structure. The
next season, Whittemore’s team turned its full attention to revealing the
mosaic tessera by tessera. With each chisel strike or scrape of a dental pick,
more and more of a new mosaic revealed itself. Much of it had been lost at
some point in the church’s history, perhaps destroyed in an earthquake or
hacked away in the desperate hours after Ottoman infantry first stormed
into the crowd of Christian worshippers in the fifteenth century. Still, within
weeks the full dimensions and content of the image had become clear: a
huge version of a religious scene that art historians knew as the Deesis,
from the Greek word for prayer or supplication. It turned out to be one of
the great treasures of Byzantine art.

A Deesis image typically shows a majestic Jesus Christ flanked on his right
by the Virgin Mary and on his left by John the Baptist. Mary and John bow
their heads toward the savior, their bodies turned partially toward him,
while Jesus looks almost squarely at the observer, his head turned slightly
to the right and his right hand raised in blessing. The iconic form
exemplifies the very thing that worshippers in an Orthodox church are
expected to do themselves: adore the savior, approach him in prayer and
humility, and seek his forgiveness literally eye to eye. Unlike the
iconography of Western churches, Orthodox images are not simply
illustrative—telling a story from the Bible, say—or allegorical—revealing
an essential truth in the form of a parable or set of meaning-laced symbols.
They are meant to do something: to serve as a portal, an urgent and direct
route to the divine. You don’t just admire an Orthodox image; you certainly
don’t worship it. You interact with it.
The Deesis was a standard form in Byzantine art, but Whittemore’s
specialists knew that this particular example had managed to exceed the
bounds of its form. The entire background was composed of gilded tesserae,
which made the huge portraits of Jesus, Mary, and John pop into three
dimensions. The folds of their garments are deep and shadowed, with the
outer edges picking up the ambient light of Christ in his glory. The savior’s
lapis-colored cloak shoots out from the flat surface, pushing the duller
clothing of the Virgin and John into the background. Jesus’s pale and
unlined face glows brighter against this golden background, his light-brown
beard merging naturally with the flesh-colored skin and pinkish lips, all
framed by a massive halo. With the uncanny depth of the folded gowns, and
even the subtle indentations defining the line of Jesus’s collarbone, it is easy
to forget that all this was achieved with tiny pieces of glass all assembled on
a flat surface well above the sightline of an observer.
But even though Christ is naturally at the center of the Deesis, in this
version it is John who steals the show. He is wrapped in a green-and-brown
cloak that is not so much draped as crushed, the lines harsh and angular,
suggesting wrinkles more than folds. His hair is a mat of red and brown,
furlike and mangled, sweeping back from his head and hanging down his
back. His beard ends in rough ringlets, obscuring his mouth and contrasting
with the light fuzz on the jawline of Jesus.
The expression on his face is one of the most anguished and moving
expressions in the Byzantine tradition. His eyebrows almost touch, angling
up to meet his furrowed brow. His eyes are hooded as he strains to gaze on
the glorified Christ. It is here that the Deesis has its greatest element of
visual depth, an exemplary exception to the general rule that Orthodox
images eschewed perspective in favor of flatness. His right eye is slightly
smaller than his left, making his face uncannily natural and full of life.
Unlike Christ or the Virgin, unlike the emperors and empresses depicted
in other mosaics in the Hagia Sophia, John is neither an object of devotion
nor a record of some great personage from the Byzantine past. Almost alone
among the scores of sacred images that would have surrounded worshippers
at the height of the church’s fame, he is meant to be a figure not of
veneration but rather of emulation: the very model of piety in sin, rejection
of the world, and selfless awe before the holy wisdom.
Literate Greeks would have been able to read the inscription on the far
right of the panel. It identifies John not in the way he is normally described
in the Western church—as the Baptist, the one who anointed Jesus with
water from the Jordan River, a paradoxical act of wiping away the sins of
the sinless Son of God. He is here called Ho Prodromos, the predecessor,
the first on the road, the one who comes before. He literally points the way,
his open left hand disappearing into the blankness of missing tesserae as he
gestures toward his right, toward the light streaming in from a towering
window, casting the viewer’s attention away from himself and onto the
risen Christ.
Whittemore’s team estimated that the Deesis panel had been created in
the 1260s, a time when Byzantine art had already begun to incorporate
some of the features of early medieval design from the West. The face of
John was heart-wrenching in its weighty agony, yet it was also a lost
example of what the Byzantine world might have become. The Byzantines
had no Renaissance, but there is a quiet hint of it here, a faint glimmer of
the sacred art that could in time have produced its own version of a Titian
or a Michelangelo. It was also a reminder that, at least in the thirteenth
century, the two halves of the church were not that far apart, both of them
struggling, like John, to make sense of the incomprehensible Divine. But
there was a further secret in the Deesis—a trait that, as it turned out, the
mosaic shared with many of the other images adorning the church. It lay not
in the subject matter but rather in its tiniest components: the tesserae that
the Byzantine mosaicist had used to create the image.
In testing the strength and bonding of each individual tessera,
Whittemore’s associates discovered that they did not form a smooth surface.
Instead, they jutted out at all angles, some of their corners exposed and
others pushed deep into the layer of lime and marble dust that formed the
base-level adhesive. This was not simply a result of age and the periodic
rattle of earthquakes, however. The tesserae had been placed that way for a
reason: to turn the golden background of the image, the halos, and even the
eyes of the saints into hundreds of individual reflectors, shooting back the
candlelight and sunlight. That technique could cause the images to step out
of pious myth and into the world of the living. There was even a surprising
regularity to the angles. The higher the angle relative to the flat wall, the
more light was reflected at the observer: fifteen degrees for the tesserae in
the vestibule, which was naturally brighter, and up to thirty degrees in the
narthex, where sunlight had a more difficult time penetrating. For an
especially vibrant effect, as in the Deesis background, the tesserae were
laced with gold leaf and set in a scalloped pattern that made the background
glitter and flare.
Whittemore realized that, in the Deesis, his workmen had uncovered not
simply an arresting image but also evidence of artists—Greeks, Venetians,
or unknown others—who had managed to work within a visual convention
while at the same time exceeding and deepening it. Whittemore’s team had
inadvertently conjured a forgotten moment in time: weeks and months in
the thirteenth century when one or more mosaicists, working individually or
as part of a small team, stood on creaky wooden scaffolds near the top of
what was, at the time, the largest church in the entire world, placing half-
inch pieces of cut glass at precisely the right angles so that sunlight, pouring
through the church’s many windows nearly seven centuries later, would be
reflected in dazzling fashion. The Deesis mosaicists had managed to
achieve an effect that was both more than and exactly equal to the sum of
its parts.
The Deesis and other mosaics that Whittemore unearthed sparked a
revival of interest in Byzantine art. Each season’s work was covered in the
international press, and in time Whittemore devised ambitious plans to copy
the mosaics on a grand scale, so that they could be viewed by audiences
around the world. His team attached huge rolls of tracing paper to the
mosaics and rendered the exact outline of each tessera in pencil. The
tracings were then photographed and backed with linen, to create stable
platforms that could be painted with egg tempera, re-creating the colors as
they appeared on the wall. Plaster casts were also made by running a thin
cotton pad across the mosaics, pressing it into the tessera, stabilizing it with
shellac, and then using the textured cotton as a mold. The resulting cast
could then be painted as a three-dimensional replica of the original. The
casts gave the observer the chance to feel the flatness and the crevasses of
the glass tesserae. It was almost like being there oneself, teetering on top of
Whittemore’s scaffolds.
In 1941, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York spent $7,500 to
purchase one of the copies of the Deesis. Three years later, it became the
centerpiece of a grand exhibition dedicated to the restoration of the Hagia
Sophia, and it is still there today, featured in the museum’s medieval hall.
For the first time, thousands of people outside Istanbul were able to see the
wonders that Whittemore’s ambition had wrought. The visitors no doubt
included Greek families who had fled in the 1920s and were making new
lives in America, consuming the recordings of Roza Eskenazi and now able
to see a restored version of their city’s signature landmark. The grandson of
a preacher whose core belief had been the oneness of humanity had
renewed the public’s interest in one of the most religiously mixed-up places
on earth—the world’s greatest church, then its largest mosque, then a
museum housing an iconic wanderer, John, the First on the Road, eyes
downcast before his majestic God.

The Hagia Sophia “is the universe of buildings,” Whittemore wrote. “It is
what the world needs most and has lost.” In 1934, the Turkish Council of
Ministers formally declared it a museum, and by early the next year it was
open to visitors. Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson stopped by, as did John
D. Rockefeller Jr., and Matisse, Whittemore’s old friend from Paris. The
tide of politicians, diplomats, and celebrities became so great that the
Byzantine Institute began compiling logs of distinguished guests, the better
to promote new projects to future funders. For centuries the most important
building in the city had been a place of Islamic worship, accessible to the
faithful but generally hidden from non-Muslims. Now it was open to
everyone.
The effect of walking into the space is as arresting now as it was then.
Sunlight shot through the high windows and made the walls glow, much as
they had done on the day Mehmed the Conqueror strode in solemnly in
1453. Whittemore commissioned filmmakers to make studies of light in the
interior and to catch the progress of the sun’s rays across the floor, a way of
understanding the ingenious angling of the tesserae and the optics behind
the twinkling and sunbursts that had astounded earlier generations.
Watching the films today—kept in the Byzantine Institute’s archives at
Dumbarton Oaks, now a unit of Harvard University—is like seeing the
preserved record of some natural ballet, mesmerizing in its effects, a gentle,
almost loving statement of visitors’ persistent fascination with the
intertwining of light and architectural form in Justinian’s Great Church.
In the spring of 1939, a German tourist checked into the Pera Palace and
made his way to the Hagia Sophia to see the results of Whittemore’s labors.
“The dome has a graceful elegance, light and yet monumental,” he wrote in
his diary on April 14. The sun, still low in the spring sky, illuminated the
space and gave the entire scene a fairy-tale quality. He was on his way to
lunch at the Teutonia Club with representatives of the local German
community. The afternoon was taken up with shopping for carpets and
tourist trinkets in the Grand Bazaar. “The folks at home will love these
things,” he said.
Life seemed wonderful in the old city, but he was struck by the contrast
between the resplendent Hagia Sophia and the darkening mood—a kind of
“psychosis,” he recalled—that seemed to infuse Istanbul. A week before,
fascist Italy had suddenly invaded Albania, sparking fears that Benito
Mussolini would soon come after Turkey as well. While looking up at the
ancient mosaics, hands clasped behind his ecru mackintosh, Hitler’s
propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, knew that change was coming. Even
in Istanbul, everyone was expecting war.
SHADOW WARS
Air raid drill, ca. 1944: Istanbul firemen in gas masks stand guard outside the entrance to Galatasaray
Lycée on a deserted Grande Rue.
F IVE MONTHS AFTER JOSEPH GOEBBELS checked out of the Pera Palace,
Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland and the Second World War
began. Turkey soon affirmed its neutrality. The country had been an early
joiner in the First World War, and Turkish politicians—not to mention the
republic’s refugee citizenry—could remember the result. Few families had
been untouched by the effects of genocide, foreign invasion, ethnic
cleansing, and forced migration. At a funeral it doesn’t matter where you
stand, the Turkish foreign minister told the British ambassador, so long as
you’re not lying in the coffin.
The commitment to staying on the sidelines was as old as the republic
itself. Mustafa Kemal had articulated the principle of “peace at home, peace
in the world,” and it became the polestar of the country’s foreign policy.
The concept flowed as much from rational self-interest as from idealism.
Turkey had sloughed off its old empire to its own great advantage. Smaller
and leaner, the republic had few of the territorial problems that had
bedeviled its imperial predecessor. “Where should we be now if, forced to
mobilize and put our troops in Thrace, we had at the same time to defend
the Yemen?” Prime Minister ükrü Saraco lu explained to a colleague. But
Turkey was still situated in a complicated neighborhood.
In the Mediterranean, Italy’s ambitious rise was seen as a major threat,
especially after the Italian occupation of Albania in the spring of 1939.
Across the Black Sea, the Soviet Union had become a serious worry. The
days of looking to the Soviet model of single-party rule, quick economic
development, and breakneck nation-building were gone. Ankara and
Moscow were united in a nonaggression pact left over from the early years
of the republic, but the concern now was that Stalin would use war as an
excuse to grab Turkish territory in eastern Anatolia or to realize the old
Russian dream of controlling the Straits. To the south, British and French
influence lingered on in those countries’ mandate administrations in
Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. Some Turkish politicians saw the old
adversaries as prospective allies, but two decades after the occupation of
Istanbul and the abortive Treaty of Sèvres, others still looked warily on
relations with London and Paris. In the Balkans, Turkey was bound by a
treaty with Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia. The pact committed the
signatory states to stable borders and consultations in the event of
hostilities, but Bulgaria’s refusal to join kept the region tense and Turkey’s
border unsecured.
Farther afield, Germany was Turkey’s most important trading partner
and a core market for raw materials such as chromium, used in the German
arms industry. Despite the disastrous alliance with Berlin during the First
World War, there was considerable sympathy for the confident nationalism
and state-dominated economy of Hitler’s new order. Some public figures in
Istanbul and Ankara shared the Reich’s founding ideology as well,
declaring Turks and Aryans natural allies in the coming racial struggle. The
same month as Goebbels’s visit to Istanbul, Berlin deployed one of its most
seasoned officials, former chancellor Franz von Papen, as the new
ambassador in Ankara. Although a sometime critic of Hitler, von Papen had
in fact been one of Nazism’s great enablers, assisting in Hitler’s rise to the
German chancellorship and in winning over Austria to the German cause.
His powers of persuasion now seemed to be aimed squarely at Turkey.
All the countries that Turks had once seen as models of civilized
behavior—France and Britain in the nineteenth century, Germany in the
early twentieth, the Soviet Union during the war of independence—were
hurtling toward mutual destruction. Turkish foreign policy thus involved
careful balancing. The strategy was to build a protective web of alliances,
counteralliances, and nonaggression agreements, all the while trying to
convince each major power that Turkish neutrality was in everyone’s best
interest. In 1936, Turkey had signed the Montreux Convention governing
shipping on the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. The government was
required to keep the Straits open to civilian traffic in peacetime and to
restrict the deployment of naval vessels not belonging to states bordering
the Black Sea. When at war, Turkey was authorized to place its own limits
on the passage of both military and civilian craft of belligerent countries.
Those provisions gave the Turkish government a convenient out: They
provided a legally binding reason for dealing evenhandedly with all
countries, whether Allies, Axis, or neither. But as Europe raced toward war,
old treaties and commitments were falling by the wayside. Few people
could predict how Turkey’s foreign policy might evolve in the immediate
future. The reason was that the country was itself in the middle of the most
profound period of political uncertainty since the foundation of the republic.

When the law requiring surnames was passed in 1934, the Grand National
Assembly voted to award Mustafa Kemal the name Atatürk, often translated
as “Father of the Turks.” Atatürk was certainly perceived that way at the
time: as the military liberator, first president, and visionary modernizer of
his country—the true founding father and model citizen for the earliest
generation of republicans. But a better translation would be something like
“Papa Turk.” Not only was he the driving force behind the country’s
sweeping cultural, political, and economic changes; he was also regarded as
an avuncular figure whose every utterance gave rise to reverent and—so far
as these things can be discerned—genuine adoration.
Atatürk was very much in the mold of other twentieth-century dictators.
He ground down political opposition and held firm to the belief that state
planning could realize the true interests of the nation, without ever feeling
the need to ask the nation what its interests happened to be. Yet, unlike a
Mussolini or a Franco, he knew where to draw the line. He was one of the
few supreme leaders of the era to develop a cult of personality that staved
off its own inevitable decay. The reason was a matter of timing.
Atatürk had the good fortune, in a way, to exit the stage while his
reputation was still near its height. He spent the summer of 1938 in
Istanbul, much as he had done each of the previous ten years, visiting
Florya beach and lodging at Dolmabahçe Palace and aboard the Savarona, a
yacht the Turkish government had purchased for his use. Much of his
youthful vigor was gone, however. His stocky physique and upright bearing
had given way to a stoop. His skin had gone sallow and green. Cirrhosis of
the liver had sapped his strength, and nosebleeds, rashes, and pneumonia
had caused him to withdraw from daily tasks. At a frail fifty-seven years
old, he had become more a venerable head of state than the energetic head
of government who had pushed through the last batch of monumental
reforms—the surname law, women’s suffrage, a constitutional guarantee on
secularism—only a few years earlier. In mid-October, he fell into a coma,
recovered briefly, and then slipped back into unconsciousness. He died on
the morning of November 10 at Dolmabahçe, the site of so many other
defining moments in Istanbul’s modern history, from the exile of the last
sultan to the departure of the Allied occupation force. To this day, the clock
in his palace bedchamber is set permanently to 9:05, the moment of the
president’s death.
The city, like the country as a whole, went into a frenzy of grief.
Children poured from schools weeping, to be picked up by worried parents
who themselves had tears streaming down their faces. Newspapers
appeared in midday editions with their pages framed by black borders.
Atatürk’s last words had been a Muslim salutation—“Peace be upon you”—
but his funeral arrangements were decidedly secular. His body was
embalmed, rather than buried immediately as required by Islamic law, and
lay in state at the palace for an entire week. The crowds were vast and
inconsolable. Nearly a dozen people were trampled to death in the crush. A
few days later, his coffin was taken in solemn procession to a battleship. As
the cortege departed the city, hundreds of thousands of people watched from
the shore, lined up like seabirds on piers and breakwaters. The ship
continued across the Sea of Marmara and transferred its cargo to a train for
the onward journey to Ankara, where the president was interred. He was
later moved to an august mausoleum overlooking the capital.
Atatürk’s final gift to his country was his failure to name a preferred
successor. That act of silence meant that the regular process for selecting a
new president was allowed to work. The constitution specified that the head
of state was to be elected by parliament, as Atatürk himself had been, term
after term. The Grand National Assembly soon selected smet nönü—the
field commander from the war of independence and sometime prime
minister—as the republic’s second president.
A farewell salute, November 1938: Wailing crowds and police officers at the funeral procession of
Atatürk.

nönü had been one of Turkey’s great political survivors. He had

managed to outlast most of the other early allies of Atatürk and had become
a dutiful second-in-command to the president, although by no means always
within his good graces. His invented surname harked back to 1921, when,
as smet Pasha, he had led nationalist forces at the dual battles of nönü,
engagements that marked early milestones in the nationalists’ strike against
the Hellenic army. In addition to the presidency, the parliament awarded
him the honorific title of “National Leader,” but it was an uncomfortable fit.
Thin and mustachioed, nönü was a manager and a strategist, with none of
the charisma or drive of an Atatürk—a figure who, even in death, was given
the even grander title of “Eternal Leader.”
All of that turned out to be a good thing, however. nönü had done a
great deal of backroom maneuvering to ensure his succession as president,
but outwardly the transition was smoother than anyone had expected.
According to the British ambassador, Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, “The
only change noticeable was the introduction of a quieter and more orthodox
life in political circles.” nönü flirted with a Turkish version of blood-and-
soil nationalism and remained suspicious of ethnic minorities, but his
approach to foreign policy was to embed Turkey in a set of treaties and
explicit undertakings with rival governments. As Hitler and Stalin jointly
occupied Poland, nönü first turned to the West, signing a mutual assistance
pact with Britain and France. Once German troops marched into Paris and
German planes began targeting London, that lifeline came to look more like
a sea anchor threatening to drag Turkey into the conflict. In June 1941,
Turkey pivoted and signed a nonaggression treaty with Germany. The same
month, Hitler launched his sudden attack on the Soviet Union, opening a
new front in the war and seemingly confirming the bet that Ankara had
made on Germany’s ascendancy.
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 Tepeba ı and then onto Me
rutiyet 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 Re at Mutlugün were two of the six people killed by the
blast at the Pera 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.
The Emniyet had only been around since 1926, but it was part of an
entire system of surveillance and repression that had grown up alongside
the single-party government created during Atatürk’s presidency. It also
rested on a longstanding Turkish obsession with public order and the
machinations of unseen forces. Half a century earlier, Abdülhamid II had
spent much of his day reviewing the written reports of his network of spies,
who noted everything from foreign arrivals to antigovernment jokes
overheard in the street. The sexual peccadilloes of diplomats were of
particular interest to the sultan, who would casually drop hints to red-faced
ambassadors to let them know that their most intimate moments in a Pera
bordello had been watched. In those days, Muslims seen conversing with
Europeans could be threatened with exile, tramcar passengers remained
studiously silent, and public conversations in the Pera Palace were usually
conducted in whispers.
Now, the Emniyet became the central body tasked with both protecting
the Kemalist revolution and uncovering its internal enemies. It specialized
in unveiling conspiracies, and, as in the case of enemies of the state such as
Nâzım Hikmet or rambunctious exiles such as Halide Edip, it developed a
particular sideline in observing the supposed links between opposition
currents in the Turkish Republic and their external backers. As with all
clandestine services, however, the line between neutralizing a real danger
and manufacturing one precisely so that it could be neutralized was always
somewhat hazy. Intelligence work could be a closed circle. Sometimes the
evidence that a threat existed was no more than the fact that some security
operative had decided to report that it did. It was a way of thinking about
security, politics, and foreign intrigue that was built into the basic structure
of the republic and its police apparatus.
An information-hungry city naturally produced a surfeit of information
suppliers, which is probably why officers such as Ardıç and Mutlugün had
found themselves at the Pera Palace on the day of their death. Hotels were
at the center of an intricate economy of information gathering and sharing.
“Istanbul has many people who try to make a living by selling information
to anyone who will buy it,” noted a secret US intelligence dispatch. The
more foreigners, the more work, and the more work, the more lucrative
intelligence became. The Emniyet regularly supplied written reports,
photographs, arrival and departure lists, hotel registration information, and
even passport photographs of any person whose likeness a foreign
intelligence agency might wish to track down—and pay for. When a
newcomer arrived at a hotel and delivered his passport to the concierge, he
could be certain that it would soon be shown to the Turks, the Soviets, the
Americans, the Germans, the British, the Italians, “and probably the
bartender in his favorite café.”
Many efforts to elicit information or to buy Turkish sympathies were
not surreptitious but, rather, public and invariably creative. In February
1943, Germany returned the decayed corpse of Talât, the Unionist leader
and mastermind of the Armenian genocide, who had been shot more than
two decades earlier by an Armenian assassin in Berlin. It was a goodwill
effort built on the macabre return of an old exile—a controversial figure
whose historical role had been downplayed during Atatürk’s lifetime but
who was now ceremonially resurrected and elevated to the pantheon of
Turkish nationalists. In a grand procession attended by President smet
nönü, Prime Minister ükrü Saraco lu, Ambassador Franz von Papen, and
Turkish and German officers in full dress, the old pasha’s remains were
reinterred on a small hilltop in Istanbul. He would eventually be joined by
other Young Turks, including his associate Enver, whose remains were
brought from Tajikistan in the 1990s. In a twist that no one seems to have
noted at the time, the hill happened to look across to one of the city’s main
Armenian cemeteries.
The Allies, too, worked assiduously to move Turkish public opinion and
lure the republic out of its neutral stance. Their relative success depended
mainly on the course of the war, however, rather than on intelligence coups.
Turkey’s nonaggression pact with Germany looked like a reasonable move
in the summer of 1941, as the Wehrmacht swept quickly eastward. By the
next fall, however, the Axis advance into the Soviet Union had stalled at
Stalingrad, German strength in North Africa was withering, and the Allies
were beginning to press Turkey to enter the war on the Allied side. The
long history of ducking and weaving, tactical reassessments, and
elaborately orchestrated dissimulation was coming up against the dawning
reality that Hitler could well lose the war. Once Mussolini fell from power
in Italy, in July 1943, the Axis was effectively split, and Turkey’s position
of calculated neutrality appeared increasingly untenable.
War’s lighthearted moments, ca. 1944: An office worker demonstrates his gas mask to a female
colleague.

British intelligence services, including the renowned Special Operations

Executive, or SOE, were operating in the city already at the time of the Pera
Palace blast. Istanbul had become the center of SOE activities in the
Balkans, which meant that British officers were not only acquiring
information but also planning specific acts of sabotage or assistance to
underground fighters in other countries, especially in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia,
and Greece. As the war wound on, the SOE put in place a plan for
coordinating resistance operations in the event of a German invasion of
Turkey, including cultivating agents who posed as loyal Nazis and would
therefore presumably form part of the postinvasion occupation force,
effectively serving as double agents inside German institutions.
Once the United States joined the war, the American Office of Strategic
Services, or OSS, eventually set up shop in the city as well. Lanning
“Packy” Macfarland, a Chicago banker, arrived in the summer of 1943. He
had been recruited into the service in the United States and initially worked
out of the US Consulate in Istanbul before renting an apartment not far from
the Pera Palace. The Americans intended to use the city’s substantial émigré
communities—Germans, but also Czechs, Hungarians, and others from
Nazi-occupied or Axis lands—as sources of information, much as the
British had been doing for some time.
A detailed history of this silent war comes from the most boring and
inadvertently revealing of sources: the reimbursement forms that
intelligence handlers filled out after making contact with a secret informant.
Agents received between 50 and 500 Turkish lira per month as retainers;
Turkish police were given up to 400 lira per month for supplying hotel
arrivals and departures lists. Handlers’ reimbursement forms included a
printed line item for “Bribery,” where OSS employees could claim expenses
for everything from paying telephone operators not to report long-distance
calls to the all-encompassing “purchase of strategic information” from a
Turkish or other source. Handlers expensed the purchase of musical
instruments, tennis rackets, and men’s suits. The underground economy of
tattling and whispering was operating in a warren of streets where people
on opposite sides of a worldwide war could literally bump into one another
as they went about their work. It was all a bizarrely intimate business. If an
agent needed a hernia belt, for example, it might be an American handler
who supplied it.
Running agents in Istanbul was like fishing in a trout pond. There was
never any trouble getting a strike on the line; the real issue was making sure
that it was the fish you really wanted. “Espionage directed against other
countries from Turkey is regarded as a kind of lucrative game at which
anyone can play with relative impunity,” said an OSS report. In a city
teeming with willing agents, the most important job was to vet them for
reliability. It was a field that American operatives called X-2, or
counterespionage. In July 1943, an American operative named Joseph
Curtiss arrived in Istanbul with $25,000 in private donations allegedly to
cover the purchase of antiquarian books for libraries at three East Coast
universities. For the next several months, he established his credentials by
consulting with book and manuscript dealers in the Grand Bazaar and
spreading the word that he was looking for exceptional texts for scholarly
collections. The money he carried, however, was for paying agents, not
buying rare books. By October—long enough for Curtiss to develop his
cover story—it was safe enough for him to have direct contact with
Macfarland, the OSS station chief, in order to lay out a plan of action. He
was given an office in the OSS headquarters and set up shop before the
arrival of another X-2 operative and eventually the branch’s overall director,
John Maxson, the following January.
Curtiss and Maxson were running a shoestring operation, but they
quickly realized that they had at their fingertips a network that no one had
yet put fully to use: the sizable American community working in the city.
Business leaders had been some of the earliest OSS recruits. Archibald
Walker, the director of the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, had in fact run
the spy operation before the arrival of Macfarland. But X-2 soon set about
systematically contacting Americans, many of them working at Robert
College, the brother institution to the American College for Girls and a
Protestant missionary school that had become one of the country’s best
educational centers. Professors, receptionists, and the registrar were all
signed up as providers of information. Betty Carp, the matronly
administrative officer at the US Consulate and—despite her American-
sounding name—a native Istanbullu of Austro-Hungarian background,
became one of the major suppliers and vetters of information. Her quiet
tradecraft and sharp judgment were so renowned that she had earlier been
deployed to Washington. There she had regularly invited the wife of Soviet
ambassador Maxim Litvinov to the movies and then reported their
conversations back to the OSS. Her fluency in multiple languages,
including German and Turkish, and her low-key ability to ingratiate herself
with virtually anyone in Istanbul, gave her unprecedented access. Few
Germans probably realized that the short, middle-aged figure standing
nonchalantly outside the Teutonia Club was actually making detailed
mental notes on who was coming and going.
One of the few Americans not working in some capacity as an agent
was the redoubtable Thomas Whittemore. His ability to spin fantasy into
reality was invaluable in fundraising for the Hagia Sophia, but in the world
of spycraft, it was a detriment. “Mr. Thomas Whittemore is a very well
known Byzantine scholar . . . [and] he is well informed and has contacts
with the various Cabinet Ministers,” noted Betty Carp in a secret report.
“He is however the type who never condescends to give his information to
anyone lower than Churchill or Roosevelt.”
In a city where information was at a premium, any agent was under
enormous pressure to sell it to the highest bidder as well as to attract
multiple buyers for the same product—that is, to become a double agent.
“They are everywhere in Istanbul,” reported the Istanbul office to the OSS
director in Washington, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan. Part of the
work involved keeping tabs on the movement of “enemy nationals” in
Istanbul, and the results were substantial. Within only a few months after its
establishment, the OSS’s X-2 branch had assembled some three thousand
notecards, each providing background and intelligence on a distinct person.
The problem was that German handlers were even better, at least when it
came to soliciting informants with truly interesting things to say. In
particular, the Abwehr—the German military intelligence wing—had a
remarkable ability to recruit the kind of agent that Allied personnel seemed
to find irresistible, the community that a secret American X-2 report called
“bar girls, artistes, and the like.” German handlers spent lavish sums on
bribing and covering the expenses of agents working in hotels, restaurants,
and nightclubs. Americans seemed especially willing to believe that “any
attractive girl who shed a few tears and told him how much she hated the
Germans was genuinely anti-Nazi.” Employees of American intelligence
services had reportedly thrown “large and rather drunken parties” where
women known to be German agents were present. Tongues loosened by
alcohol were the stock-in-trade of this particular brand of Istanbul spy.
By 1944, the security breaches had reached such a level of absurdity
that American handlers developed their own theme song, written by a US
government employee and given a rousing premiere at a local dance-bar. Its
words were mimeographed and distributed to the audience, and it became
such a fashionable tune that orchestras throughout the city would strike it
up whenever a group of Americans came through the door. The title and
refrain—“Boo Boo Baby I’m a Spy”—were the last thing an undercover
operative wanted to hear as he walked into a lounge.
“I’m involved in a dangerous game,” the song went:
Every other day I change my name,
My face is different but the body’s the same,
Boo Boo Baby I’m a spy.

Of course you’ve heard of Mata Hari,

We did business cash and carry,
But Pappy caught us and we had to marry,
Boo Boo Baby I’m a spy.

I’m a lad not altogether bad,

In fact I’m a damn good lover,
But listen, sweet, let’s be discreet
And do this under cover. . . .
A government employee’s openly touting his position as a spy in a
cabaret tune was, at the very least, poor tradecraft, and American officials
reported the lyrics to Washington as a security threat. But the song was
mainly an exercise in bravado. “I’m so cocky I could swagger,” went the
chorus. “I’m ten percent cloak and ninety percent dagger.” In fact,
American spies rarely had the inside dope at all.
Much of their information came from an extensive array of eastern
European émigrés then resident in the city, a group of individuals known as
the Dogwood chain, after the code name of its principal liaison with the
OSS, a Czech engineer named Alfred Schwarz. Recruited by Macfarland,
Schwarz developed what may have been the largest information network in
occupied Europe, funneling information on troop movements, airfields,
munitions dumps, and fuel terminals back to the OSS station in Istanbul.
The problem was that many of the subordinate agents in the chain were
actually double agents for German intelligence. Dogwood was deemed to
be so unreliable that Macfarland ordered it terminated in the summer of
1944.
Most of the Dogwood reports had been, at best, mediocre. That was par
for the course in Istanbul, and perhaps the inevitable result of too much
money chasing too many willing spies. Few espionage efforts produced
spectacular results, and those that did were predictably located in Ankara.
In early 1944, the British secured the defection of Erich Vermehren, the
secretary to the local Abwehr chief. That success proved to be a
considerable blow to German morale in Turkey, but the Abwehr had in fact
already gone one better.
The British ambassador, Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, was an
irreproachable member of the diplomatic corps. The product of Kentish
village life, Victorian rectitude, and the scholarly trail leading from Eton to
Oxford, Knatchbull-Hugessen was the image of a British Foreign Office
official, with a trim mustache and three-piece suit. The ambassador was
supremely well respected within the diplomatic corps, even by his archrival
von Papen. The Turks’ only complaint about him, it seems, was his
unpronounceable name. But his exalted position may have lured him into
complacency. In one of the greatest insider jobs of the war, the Germans in
the autumn of 1943 had recruited a person they code-named Cicero. He
turned out to be the ambassador’s valet.
Cicero had in fact fallen into the Germans’ lap. He had presented
himself to the first secretary at the German Embassy in Ankara, speaking
poor French, using the name “Pierre,” and promising an unbelievable array
of secret documents, which he was happy to turn over to Berlin for a fee.
“You see, I hate the British,” he explained simply, and he threatened to offer
his services to the Soviets if the Germans were not willing to pay the asking
price. The diplomats were skeptical, but the valet soon delivered the goods.
He was able to access the safe in Knatchbull-Hugessen’s office and
photograph secret dispatches between the ambassador and London,
including details of wartime conferences and hints of Operation Overlord,
the plan for the Allied invasion of Normandy. Some of these documents
made it all the way to Hitler, but the Abwehr was never able to capitalize
fully on Cicero’s access, largely because of persistent fears that he was too
good to be true. In a country where double agents were common, German
handlers repeatedly worried that Cicero himself was one. In fact, Cicero
seems to have been a sincere purveyor of reliable information, which might
have changed the course of the war had Germany heeded it. Instead, the real
double cross worked the other way around. The considerable sums of
money that Cicero—an Albanian named Elyesa Bazna—received for his
services as a spy, the equivalent of several hundred thousand British pounds
sterling, turned out to be counterfeit.

The bombing of the Pera Palace was a rare exception to the general rule that
governed espionage in a neutral country: Don’t bother the hosts. By and
large, the war in Istanbul was carried out in private apartments and secret
meeting places, with handlers and agents mainly interested in avoiding one
another in public whenever possible. Even at Turkey’s Republic Day
celebrations on October 29, when diplomats were invited to a grand
reception at the foreign ministry in Ankara, Turkish officials provided two
separate rooms so that enemy powers would not have to share the same hors
d’oeuvres and champagne. The foreign community was so small that
bumping into a rival operative was reasonably common, however. Teddy
Kollek, an Austrian citizen by birth, recalled being approached by a Nazi
agent at the Abdullah Efendi restaurant in Istanbul, a popular dinner spot
for both Allied and Axis officials. The agent began eagerly speaking to him
in German, which Kollek spoke fluently. The conversation abruptly came to
a halt when the agent realized he had made a terrible mistake. Kollek was
actually working for the Zionist underground in league with British and
American intelligence agencies.
Kollek’s work was only the beginning of a long and storied career.
Among other things, after the war he went on to become mayor of
Jerusalem. But during his time in Istanbul, he participated in the one
operation that could claim to be an unqualified success. By 1944, just as
OSS operatives were beginning to wrap up their work in the city, clearing
financial accounts and thinking about the next stages in their own careers, a
new kind of intelligence effort was kicking into overdrive. Its organizers
knew that their work depended not on placating the Turkish authorities but
rather on bothering them a great deal. It was a form of undercover work
that, more than any other, bumped up against the Turkish Republic’s most
hallowed precepts—its claim to ethnic purity, its slow-burning war on its
own minorities, and its desire to deal evenhandedly with both Axis and
Allies. Rather than gathering information, however, it involved a desperate
and risky effort to gather exiled people.
PAPER TRAILS
Fascists on parade: Young Italians—probably members of Istanbul’s own small Italian community—
give the Roman salute as they march past the Republic Monument in Taksim Square.
M ISBAH MUHAYYE ’S ACQUISITION OF the Pera Palace had been a stellar
business deal in the 1920s, but after the bomb explosion in 1941, he had
reason to rue his decision. The repairs were extensive, and the headline-
grabbing blast was the last kind of notoriety that a hotelier wanted for his
establishment. Muhayye tried to recoup his losses in whatever way his
imagination could conjure. He cabled Winston Churchill demanding
compensation. He sued Ambassador George Rendel for negligence in
allowing the booby-trapped luggage to be brought into the hotel. He was
eventually awarded hundreds of thousands of Turkish lira in compensation,
but since an Istanbul court had no jurisdiction outside the country, the entire
issue was largely moot.
Even before the explosion, the hotel’s fortunes had been declining. The
brief boost provided by the Jewish boycott of its rival, the Tokatlian,
couldn’t make up for the fading velvet, a certain griminess to the marble, a
sense that the establishment as a whole, like talkative regulars at the Orient
Bar, was making a living from past exploits and a few good stories. When
the Pera Palace made headlines, the news was mainly about seediness and
scandal. In 1935, a prominent Turkish diplomat, Aziz Bey, took out a room,
placed some money on a table, which he instructed was to be used for his
funeral, and then slit his throat with a razor blade. In 1939, a Yemeni man
checked into the hotel, along with three Mexican female companions, and
opened a tab by claiming to be a well-heeled Indian prince. It took the
administration three months to realize he was penniless.
Social life in Pera had begun to shift northward, away from the Pera
Palace’s immediate environs. At the southern end of the neighborhood, the
Grande Rue frayed into narrow alleyways and stair-step streets that twisted
past stationers, music shops, and glass dealers. Farther north in Taksim, the
creation of the Republic Monument in 1928, followed by Henri Prost’s
energetic reengineering in the 1930s, made the square into a focal point for
the modern city. When schoolchildren gathered to honor the memory of
Atatürk or local fascists goose-stepped down the Grande Rue, they
invariably headed toward Taksim. Each footfall was one more step away
from the Islamic empire and toward the republic.
The Park Hotel took advantage of this northward slide. Located not far
from Taksim Square, on an avenue that wound down toward the coast road,
it stood on the site of the old family home of the last Ottoman grand vizier,
Ahmed Tevfik Pasha. With the German Consulate situated next door, the
hotel’s dining room came to serve as an unofficial canteen for the growing
consular staff, much as the Pera Palace had done for its own diplomatic
neighbors: the American Consulate, housed in an old Ottoman mansion
next door, and the British Consulate, just up Me rutiyet Avenue near the
fish market. The oscillations in Turkey’s foreign policy could once be
gauged by whether there were more Turkish officials drinking at one end or
the other of the Grande Rue—at either the Pera Palace or the Park. With the
former temporarily out of commission, while its ground floor was being
pieced back together and the elevator rehung after the fatal bombing, the
latter seemed to have won the contest.
In the Park Hotel’s narrow lobby, American and British businessmen
walked past Japanese, Bulgarian, and German officials. Diplomats arrived
with their families, and the foyer often doubled as a playground for
rambunctious children who had spent too many days on trains or ships. In
the restaurant, the Japanese held court early in the evening before
surrendering tables to the Germans, who would carry on with postprandials
until midnight. Rumor had it that all the rooms were bugged, and everyone
knew that the waiters had a habit of lingering too long after taking an order
or lifting the plate cover from the main course. Anything they overheard
would find its way to one consulate or another. But this mutual uncertainty
created a balance of power in the hotel’s dining room. It kept the
conversation light and the politics discreet. Just knowing your enemies was
a certain kind of security.
That was why, in blustery February 1944, the place seemed so appealing
to a raven-haired, round-faced Bloomingdale’s executive with a penchant
for natty bow ties and unkempt pocket squares. Ira Hirschmann was new to
Istanbul, and if circumstances had been different, he might have passed his
time negotiating a deal for cloth shipments to New York’s Garment District
or buying up intricate Ottoman inlay work. In another life, he might have
been a music impresario. Wherever he went, he spent his free time
organizing impromptu concerts with a promising local violinist or piano
maestro. He had no qualms about correcting the tempo or tuning of any
hotel-lobby orchestra he encountered. He was a born organizer, a big
thinker, and supremely confident in his ability to make things happen.
But Hirschmann spent most days in Istanbul as a detail man: leasing
rust-bucket cargo ships, reoutfitting them as passenger vessels, and
interceding with frontier officers, local police, and harbormasters over the
minutiae of shipping regulations and manifests. Before he retired to dinner
at the Park, he finished each day at the office by burning his working
papers. What few of the other guests would have known was that
Hirschmann was at the leading edge of yet another wave of exile. It would
end in one of the single largest efforts to get Jews out of occupied Europe.
His engagement with Istanbul had started in a roundabout way a few
months after the Pera Palace bombing, but it involved a tragedy of a much
grander scale.

Pushed along by the south-flowing top current in the Bosphorus, the Struma
quietly dropped anchor in Istanbul on December 15, 1941. The journey
from the Romanian port of Constan a, nearly two hundred nautical miles
away, had been horrific. A repurposed sailing vessel, the ship had been used
most recently as a ferry for livestock. Its engine was a refurbished castoff
that had been hauled from a sunken tugboat. The old wooden hull, covered
with thin metal plating, was ill equipped to weather the winter storms on the
Black Sea.
On board, the only thing that kept the passengers from being tossed
around like dolls was the fact that they were packed tightly, filling the decks
and passageways, women and men with leather suitcases and fur-trimmed
overcoats, children with a favorite toy or storybook. Nearly eight hundred
people were squeezed below decks.
They had passed through minefields and avoided surface ships and
submarines patrolling in deep water. Most had been stripped of their
citizenship by Nazi-allied governments. Germany had prohibited Jews from
leaving German-controlled areas and was putting pressure on Romania, its
Axis partner, to do the same. As they sat anchored off Sarayburnu, they
were finally inside a neutral country, and from there they hoped to arrange
passage to Palestine. The Bosphorus was no longer just a strait that defined
the eastern edge of Europe. For the Jewish families pressed inside the
Struma, it was an escape tunnel.
Week after week, the ship waited in Istanbul, not far from where
Wrangel’s flotilla of refugee Russians had anchored two decades earlier.
Snow fell. Gray ice ringed the Golden Horn. Port authorities ferried food
and water in small boats. The Turkish government refused to let the
refugees step ashore, for fear of upsetting its neutral balancing act in the
war and setting a precedent that would flood Istanbul with destitute
immigrants. The British Mandate authorities in Palestine, who had placed
strict limits on Jewish migration, denied clearance to set course for the
Palestinian port of Haifa. The passengers were thus both formally stateless
and lacking an approved destination—from nowhere, belonging nowhere,
and going nowhere.
The yellow quarantine flag was posted on the Struma’s mast, and
communication with land was strictly monitored by Turkish police.
Sympathetic humanitarians could occasionally pass messages back and
forth to passengers, but this required waiting until a police officer who
could be bribed was placed on watch. Simon Brod, a local textile magnate
and Jewish humanitarian, worked to provide blankets and other small
necessities. Other members of Istanbul’s Jewish community tried to
intercede with the port authorities on the passengers’ behalf.
On January 2, 1942, six men on board the Struma—Emanuel and
Edouard Ludovic, Israel and David Frenc, Teodor Brettschneider, and
Emanuel Geffner—managed to pass a letter to the port police describing
their circumstances. Most had Romanian passports and entry and transit
visas for Palestine, Syria, and Turkey, but the period between receiving the
visas and actually boarding a ship in Romania had been so long that the
papers had expired. They asked the port police to allow them to make
contact with the respective consulates in order simply to extend their travel
papers.
The Ludovics were deemed not to have proper paperwork and were
required to remain on board, but Brettschneider, Geffner, and the Frencs
were allowed to leave the ship. They passed into the city and began making
arrangements to travel by land to Palestine. The Jewish Agency for
Palestine—a group of Palestinian Jews active in organizing transports such
as the Struma—used this small opening to appeal to the British authorities.
If the entire ship could not pass on to Haifa, perhaps the authorities would
at least issue Palestine visas for the ship’s fifty-two children between the
ages of eleven and sixteen—passengers who were old enough to travel on
their own but not too old to represent a threat to any country. The
suggestion neatly plumbed the thin line between humanitarianism and the
rational interests of the two governments in control of the refugees’ fate, the
Turkish and the British.
In a flurry of telegrams and telephone calls, Jewish Agency officials at
last managed to secure an agreement allowing passage for the children. The
British Embassy in Ankara dispatched a letter to the Istanbul city authorities
confirming the children’s entry visas. The Turks were then to pass the order
to the port police, requesting that the children’s passports be forwarded to
the British consular official for stamping. However, the port police—wary
of acting independently on such an important matter—insisted that the
arrangements be confirmed by a direct order from their superiors in Ankara.
While they were waiting for the instructions to arrive, a countermanding
order came through. The Struma was to be towed back out to sea, where the
captain would be instructed to restart the engine and make for another port,
either in Bulgaria or back to the point of origin, Romania. In the struggle
between multiple bureaucratic directives—disembark the children or expel
the ship from Istanbul—the easier and clearer order won the day. After ten
weeks in diplomatic limbo, the Turkish government had decided to solve
the problem simply by removing the ship from Turkish waters.
A Turkish tugboat secured a towline, and on February 23, the tandem
vessels began fighting the current northward beyond the rocky headlands
where the narrow Bosphorus widens into the open sea. As the Struma was
pulled silently out of the harbor, Istanbullus could see a sign that passengers
had painted on sheets and hung over the railings: “Save us!”
Once well into the Black Sea, the tugboat cut the line and turned back
toward the Bosphorus, leaving the ship adrift. The crew struggled to restart
the engine, which had failed numerous times during the outbound journey.
The Struma bobbed quietly for a few hours, and then, around dawn on
February 24, 1942, a massive explosion ripped through the hull. The ice-
cold seawater flooded compartments and swept across the deck. In minutes,
the Struma broke in half.
The next day, Joseph Goldin, one of the Jewish Agency’s
representatives, telegraphed the news to his superiors in Jerusalem. “Struma
wrecked blacksea four miles from bosphorus,” the operator tapped,
“missing details disaster and number survivors stop fearing great number
victims.”
In the hours that followed, Goldin worked desperately to compile a list
of survivors. He first included the names of the Ludovics, who had tried to
disembark with the other visa-holders, then penciled a question mark beside
their names, then crossed them out. Over the days that followed, he drew a
line through nearly every other name on the ship’s manifest. The Ludovics,
whose visas had expired, and dozens of children whose papers had been
preapproved by the British, had all perished. Only nine passengers had been
allowed to exit the Struma before the tugboat reattached its line to the ship
and pulled it toward the Black Sea. Of the roughly 785 Jews and six
Bulgarian crew who remained on board—the exact numbers remain
uncertain even today—only one survivor, David Stoliar, was found alive by
a Turkish rescue boat and brought ashore.
Over time, the reason for the explosion emerged. The ship had been
targeted by a Soviet submarine acting on orders to hit any ship on the Black
Sea as a means of blocking aid to Germany and its allies. Few people in
Istanbul, however, spent much time thinking about the Struma. The local
reaction to the carnage was muted. Refugees had come and gone for a very
long time, and headlines in local papers were taken up with what was
perceived to be a much bigger story: a botched assassination attempt in
Ankara against Franz von Papen, the German ambassador, which occurred
the day after the Struma sinking. It turned out to be the handiwork of
Leonid Eitingon, the same operative who had successfully managed
Trotsky’s assassination eighteen months earlier.
A few weeks later, Istanbul’s German-language newspaper, the
Türkische Post, carried an official statement by Prime Minister Refik
Saydam. The authorities had done everything possible to prevent the
regrettable Struma affair, he said, but in the end Turkey could not serve as
someone’s surrogate homeland or “a refuge for the unwanted.” Saydam
followed up by dismissing the Jewish employees of the Turkish state press
agency, on the grounds that they had spread Jewish propaganda by
reporting the sinking.

Newspapers around the world carried the story of the Struma. It was by far
the largest refugee disaster up to that time, but it was also part of a long line
of tragedies, quixotic voyages, and missed opportunities associated with
what Jewish activists called the aliyah bet—the project of getting Jews out
of Europe and into Palestine.
Fifteen months earlier, the Patria had lain at anchor in the harbor at
Haifa. The Jewish passengers on board were classed by the British as
illegals, since they did not have the proper immigration papers. The plan
was to send the ship to Mauritius, where the British hoped to make
provisions for resettling the refugees. Before the ship could set sail,
however, Jewish operatives planted a bomb on board, hoping to disable the
engine and force the British hand. But a miscalculation led to a much larger
explosion, which killed some 267 people. A month later, another refugee
ship, the Salvador, ran aground in a storm in the Sea of Marmara south of
Istanbul. More than two hundred people died.
Ira Hirschmann read about all these events in the New York press. He
had seen other stories of ships being turned away from European ports or
sent on long, fruitless voyages seeking permission to dock in Britain, the
United States, Palestine, or elsewhere. But the Struma disaster affected him
most profoundly. The sheer scale of the tragedy, along with the fact that
bureaucratic paperwork had blocked an easy solution for at least the older
children, seemed outrageous. As the months went by, Hirschmann paid
more and more attention to reports of refugees attempting to flee via the
Balkans and Turkey, the last routes that seemed to be open to Jews escaping
from Nazi occupation or from roundups conducted by Axis governments.
“It was an avalanche of sad statistics,” he recalled.
Hirschmann had made his career by getting things done in fields that he
had little experience in managing. His father had immigrated to Baltimore
from Latvia as a teenager and made his fortune as a men’s clothier and
banker. The Hirschmann household was fueled by ambition and filled with
the easy optimism of an upper-middle-class Jewish family, with a piano and
music lessons, good schools, and taken-for-granted success. But
Hirschmann himself was on the road to a solid career as a ne’er-do-well. He
studied briefly at Johns Hopkins University but dropped out before
choosing a major. He joined a Baltimore advertising agency but found the
work tedious.
His real talent lay in what would now be called networking. He left
Baltimore rather abruptly to seek more excitement in New York, and, as an
outgoing young man of some standing, he fell into the circle of Jewish
philanthropic and business organizations in New York and New Jersey. One
of them was the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or the
Joint, the country’s largest philanthropic association for American Jewry.
Through social gatherings and activities sponsored by the Joint, he
happened to meet the owner of one of Newark’s most successful department
stores, Bamberger’s. Hirschmann parlayed the contact into a job as a low-
level copywriter in the store’s advertising department. From there, his
career skyrocketed. Identified as an up-and-comer in the retail world, he
moved to Lord and Taylor and then to Macy’s, which had acquired the
declining Bamberger’s, and eventually to Bloomingdale’s.
As one of the new lords of advertising, Hirschmann’s primary job was
to know people: to solicit the wealthy and famous and to divine the hearts
and minds of everyone else. He sought the advice of Louis Brandeis and
Felix Frankfurter. He stumped for Fiorello La Guardia. He lunched with
Toscanini. It was the Struma affair that made him pay attention to
international affairs, however. After reading about the disaster, his “pent-up
feelings erupted,” he later wrote.
At the time, millions of people were fleeing persecution, pogroms, and
advancing armies. Entire communities had been destroyed by war and
occupation in Poland and Soviet Ukraine. In Hungary, Romania, and
Bulgaria, large-scale deportations of Jews had not yet taken place, but these
Axis allies were under increasing pressure to fall in line with the Final
Solution and surrender their Jewish residents.
Geographically, Turkey was the obvious exit route for Jews seeking to
escape. Its neutrality offered relative freedom of movement, provided that
any rescue effort did not push activities too far into the open and create a
public relations problem for the Turkish government. In two nights, a ship
could sail from Romania to Istanbul; an overnight train ran from Sofia,
Bulgaria. With new stories emerging from Europe about planned killing
centers and mass expulsions of Jews to labor camps, the hope was that
Allied governments would at last start paying attention. The Emergency
Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe—a group formed in New
York in the summer of 1943 to pressure the US government to deal with the
Jewish refugee problem—had floated the idea of sending someone to
Turkey to investigate the possibility of emigration via Istanbul. Hirschmann
volunteered.
Some weeks later, Hirschmann and the president of the Emergency
Committee, Peter Bergson, met with Breckinridge Long, the assistant
secretary of state in charge of overseeing US responses to the refugee crisis
in Europe. Long insisted that the government was doing everything possible
to provide relief for European civilians caught up in the war. Bergson
mentioned that the Emergency Committee wanted to send a special
representative to Europe and that Hirschmann had stepped forward to take
on that task. Long was skeptical, but he agreed to send a telegram to
Laurence A. Steinhardt, the US ambassador to Turkey, to seek his advice
and his agreement to work with Hirschmann. Steinhardt cabled back that he
had no objection, and in January 1944 Hirschmann prepared to make the
rounds in Washington, arranging meetings with agency heads and getting
up to speed on the business of refugee assistance.
In the middle of his preparations, he was awakened by an early morning
telephone call. On the line was Oscar S. Cox, a confidant of President
Franklin Roosevelt. “The president has just signed the order,” he said.
Hirschmann knew instantly what he meant. Cox had recently shown
Hirschmann the text of Roosevelt’s order creating a body called the War
Refugee Board, composed of the secretaries of state, war, and the treasury.
The board’s task would be to take immediate action to rescue from the
Nazis as many members of persecuted minorities—ethnic, religious, or
political—as possible. At last there would be a US government body whose
sole mission was to relieve the plight of civilian victims of war—in other
words, to try to ensure that there would be no more Struma affairs.
Hirschmann’s role was to be the State Department’s special attaché for
Turkey and the Middle East, Cox continued. His task would be to carry out
the board’s work in that region.
Hirschmann was elated. He would now be an official representative of
the US government, rather than just a private citizen on a humanitarian
mission to aid displaced families. The next day, he boarded a plane for
Miami. After a week cooling his heels waiting for a US Army transport
plane for Turkey, he found a berth. At the end of January, the C-54 took off
with a group of young officers bound for India and one middle-aged civilian
hitching a ride. After five days en route, via air hops to Puerto Rico, Brazil,
Ghana, and Egypt, several days in Jerusalem, and a twenty-eight-hour train
ride across the Taurus Mountains and half of Anatolia, Hirschmann at last
arrived in Ankara on Valentine’s Day, 1944.
“An old world seems slipping away from me,” he wrote in his diary,
“and I seem to be racing into a new.” The Turkish capital had been willed
into existence, and it still took an act of imagination to see it as a real city.
The wide streets and purpose-built government buildings seemed soulless
and merely functional. Hirschmann was happy to have a social invitation
shortly after he arrived, to attend a diplomatic luncheon at the residence of
Ambassador Steinhardt. Guests milled around the spacious residence, but as
they made their way to their next appointments, Hirschmann lingered
behind for a chance to speak with Steinhardt privately.
Besides their Jewish heritage, the two men had little in common.
Steinhardt had had the kind of career that Hirschmann might once have
dreamed of: a life of diplomatic adventure at missions in Sweden, Peru, the
Soviet Union, and now Turkey. Hirschmann was flattered by the
ambassador’s eagerness to talk.
Hirschmann was to remain indefinitely in Ankara, Steinhardt informed
him, and to have the status of special attaché to the US Embassy. His orders
from Washington included an almost-unprecedented power. Unlike other
diplomats, who were prevented by law from conversing with agents of
enemy countries, Hirschmann would be expected to engage with enemy
powers for the purpose of spiriting refugees out of harm’s way. Support was
to be provided by the embassy staff, but Hirschmann was to have main
responsibility for the “transportation, rescue, relief, and maintenance of
refugees” under his care. Americans were a people with a conscience,
Hirschmann recalled thinking on hearing his orders for the first time, but
now they “had a government with a conscience, as well as policy.”
As he made his inquiries around Ankara, Hirschmann found the buck
being passed from one office to the next, from an embassy to a Turkish
government agency, and from government officials back to embassies. He
began to feel like a wandering refugee himself. The British had agreed to
allow a precise quota of immigrants to come to Palestine, but the number
had been persistently under-filled for a simple bureaucratic reason: Being
legally admitted to Mandate Palestine required papers—an exit permit from
a Nazi-allied country, for example, plus a transit visa via a neutral state,
plus an immigration certificate from British Mandate authorities. Even if
transport could be arranged—in secret or at great risk, as in the Struma case
—papers were still the one thing that only governments could supply.
In the middle of February, as the icy winter winds roared down
Ankara’s avenues, it gradually dawned on Hirschmann that the person who
would be key to his efforts was not in a governmental role at all. He was
technically a private citizen living in Istanbul who had a penchant for
making lists. Unlike Hirschmann, he could only afford rooms in the Pera
Palace, which at this point had become somewhat desperate for customers.
That fact gave him a telegraph code—the equivalent of an e-mail address
today—that would become one of the most widely known of the entire war:
“barlas perapalas beyoglu.”

Chaim Barlas was an old Istanbul hand, at least compared to the novice
Hirschmann. He was easy to miss in a crowd: slight of stature, swallowed
up in an ill-fitting overcoat, with hooded eyes that marked him as an
inveterate insomniac. But he knew everyone who was anyone in the city
and most people of rank in the country as a whole. His correspondence files
included regular letters and notes from the American, French, and British
ambassadors; the Swedish military attaché; the consuls of Greece,
Yugoslavia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, France, Afghanistan, Switzerland,
Spain, and Italy; and folders brimming with memoranda, telegrams,
contracts, and reports from Turkish shipping magnates, business leaders,
and political luminaries. He was probably the best-connected man in
Istanbul, polite to a fault as a letter writer, solicitous in conversation, and
obsessive about getting names, birth dates, and places of birth exactly right.
It was a rare combination of gifts, and the lives of many people depended
on how well he wielded them.
Barlas’s official title was Representative of the Immigration Department
of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Both his title and his organization’s
name gave little hint of the enormous role that both would soon play. By
agreement of the League of Nations, the former Ottoman territory of
Palestine had been placed under British administrative authority as part of
the settlements governing the breakup of the sultan’s empire at the end of
the First World War. Part of that mandate provided for the establishment of
a Jewish Agency for Palestine to act as the official voice of the local Jewish
community, or yishuv, and to liaise with the British authorities on any
matters connected with the community’s affairs. Headed by David Ben-
Gurion, the agency created its own self-defense unit, the Haganah, and
oversaw the social and economic development of the Jewish community. As
time went on, it became the body that facilitated migration by arranging
entry permits for Jews seeking to move to Mandate Palestine. It was the
organization that would eventually morph into the government of
independent Israel.
Immigration lay at the root of the Zionist cause. It was a way of
changing the demographic realities in Arab-majority Palestine and creating,
literally one person at a time, a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel. But
with the advent of the Final Solution in Europe, migration also became a
pathway to survival. The United States, Britain, and other European
countries had begun to impose strict quotas on Jewish immigration after
1938, precisely at the time that anti-Jewish laws and attacks ramped up in
central Europe. Like Turkey, these governments feared that Jewish
refugees, pushed out of Germany and the Nazi-occupied regions of Europe,
would seek to immigrate permanently, a fear stoked by widespread
antisemitism in the receiving states. The Palestine option was thus a route to
safety that more and more Jews were eager to take.
Sometime after arriving in August 1940, Barlas took up residence at the
Pera Palace. The location was ideal. Not only were the Americans and
British close by, but the hotel was also safely away from the Park and the
Tokatlian, whose Axis leanings were well known. And since the Pera
Palace had its own telegraph station, Barlas could almost treat the lobby as
his personal office. Even after he managed to locate a larger, permanent
office on the Grande Rue, runners were constantly going back and forth to
send wires at the hotel.
Barlas and his associate Joseph Goldin were the only two individuals
working openly as representatives of the Jewish Agency, but behind them
lay a larger network of Jewish activists living in Istanbul as journalists and
businessmen while secretly providing assistance to the rescue effort.
Turkish authorities generally assumed that any foreigner was up to some
kind of spy game, and they kept close tabs on the Barlas group.
Surveillance could lead in bizarrely amusing directions. One of Barlas’s
associates, Teddy Kollek, recalled being approached on the street by a
passerby who overheard him speaking Hebrew. The man was a Jewish
importer of dried fruits who had come to Istanbul to arrange a shipment of
produce to Palestine. When his visa expired, he applied to the Turkish
police to have it extended, but the police saw his real job as an unbelievable
cover story. They insisted that he reveal which foreign agency he was
working for, and when he protested that he wasn’t working for any of them,
his visa was denied. Kollek managed to convince one of his contacts in
British intelligence to claim the distraught businessman—falsely—as one of
their own. That satisfied the police, and the fruit merchant was sent away
with visa in hand.
While Jewish Agency representatives were in some ways dependent on
the help of British officials, the same government also provided their
greatest roadblock. At the beginning of their work, Barlas and his associates
realized they were caught in a double bind. To begin with, the Jewish
Agency had to work to convince the British authorities to allow Jews into
Palestine. While the British had delegated to the agency the right to vet
Jews for entry, full approval still depended on British consular authorities’
making the final call. Since 1939, however, the British had placed strict
limits on Jewish entry. An earlier migration campaign organized by the
yishuv had led to a massive influx of Jews in the 1930s while also sparking
resistance from local Arabs. The British response was a famous white paper
issued by the government of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. The
policy paper committed Britain to supporting the transition toward a
Palestinian state jointly governed by Jews and Arabs, but in order to
maintain demographic balance, it capped new Jewish immigration at 75,000
people over the five years from 1940 to 1944.
The other problem for Barlas was gaining Turkish assent for Jews to
transit via Istanbul, either by rail or by ship. Jews quickly found themselves
trapped, as Hirschmann once quipped, between a white paper and the Black
Sea. Since the beginning of the war, the Turks had been playing a delicate
balancing game—not only with all the major powers that were courting
them to join the war but also with their own past. Turkish immigration law
had been crafted less as a way of forestalling a flood of refugees during war
—although that was how Turkish officials explained their behavior—and
more as a way of preventing the return of minorities who had fled the
country in the 1920s and 1930s. The regulations were so strictly enforced
that American sailors with Greek names were sometimes refused
permission to step ashore in Istanbul, for fear that they were secretly ex-
Istanbullus returning to reclaim the family estates.
Old habits were reinforced by wartime fear and the persistent belief that
local minorities were a potential fifth column that could be put to use by
enemies. Everyday antisemitism and racialized nationalism were becoming
commonplace. Antisemitic cartoons, a mainstay of the Turkish press,
portrayed local Jews as parasites eager to profit from the war-ravaged
economy and immigrant Jews as unscrupulous wealth-mongers who would
strip Turkey bare in their race to get out of Europe. In France and
elsewhere, individual Turkish diplomats made attempts to prevent Jews
with Turkish citizenship from being deported to Nazi camps and death
facilities. But while these examples were later highlighted as evidence of
Turkey’s collective heroism, only one unambiguous case of genuine rescue
seems plausible: the effort by Selahattin Ülkümen, the Turkish consul on
the island of Rhodes, to prevent the Nazis from deporting forty-six Jews,
most of whom were Turkish citizens. Many more might have been saved
had the Turkish government intervened more energetically on behalf of
people trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe who also happened to be Turkish
citizens.
The treatment of Jews in Turkey was part of a broader pattern of
squeezing minorities, nationalizing the economy, and encouraging non-
Muslims to leave. In November 1942, the government enacted a one-off
levy on “wealth and extraordinary profits,” an intentionally vague wording.
This new “wealth tax” was intended in part to raise funds in case Turkey
were forced to enter the war and in part to crush war profiteers who had
supposedly benefited from inflation and scarcity. Some 114,368 individuals
and businesses were assessed by specially appointed commissions, with no
right of appeal except directly to the parliament. The bulk of the tax burden
fell on Istanbul, but none of the major Turkish-owned hotels, including the
Pera Palace, seems to have been much affected. The reason is that the
largest tax assessments were handed out to Greeks, Armenians, and Jews.
“This law is also a law of revolution,” said Prime Minister Saraco lu at the
time. “We will in this way eliminate the foreigners who control our market
and give the Turkish market to the Turks.”
Families and minority businesses found it impossible to meet the
requirements. According to a secret report by the OSS, the tax assessments
for Armenian property owners amounted to 232 percent of their property’s
real value, 179 percent for Jews, and 156 percent for Greeks, while
Muslims were assessed at just under 5 percent. Many of the most successful
businesses in the city—including the Gesarian brothers’ gramophone
company, which had recorded Seyyan, Udi Hrant, and other leading artists
of the day—became targets. Faik Ökte, the Turkish official responsible for
administering the tax in Istanbul, later wrote a tell-all memoir denouncing
the affair and blaming the prime minister, Saraco lu, for coming up with the
idea. It was all a shameful episode, Ökte concluded, the “misbegotten
offspring of German racialism and Ottoman fanaticism.”
Betty Carp, the American consular administrator and OSS agent,
recalled the effects of the tax on friends and acquaintances, few of whom
were rich or propertied. One Greek friend, Irini, witnessed the police arrive
at her house and cart away everything except a bed and mattress, a few
items of china and dishware, and, in exchange for a bribe, her clothes. The
men of the household were herded into an open garbage truck and, in a
raging snowstorm, taken away. In the end, more than a thousand Istanbullus
—including prominent industrialists and commercial leaders—were
assembled at Sirkeci station and deported from the city to pay off their
debts through forced labor, many of them at a special camp in A kale, in
eastern Anatolia. Their personal belongings were sold in public auctions at
the Grand Bazaar.
The wealth tax was repealed in March 1944 and prisoners were allowed
to return home, but their properties were never restored. In fact, the effort to
pay the exorbitant tax rates had produced another massive wealth transfer
among Istanbul’s ethnic communities on the model of the 1920s. Greeks,
Armenians, and Jews owned nearly eighty percent of the property sold off
during the era when the wealth tax was in force. Ninety-eight percent of the
buyers were Turkish Muslims or the Turkish government. “According to the
best-informed sober judgments,” a diplomat reported at the time, “this
represents the first step of a bloodless massacre.”
The bureaucratic obstacles that faced Jews were thus part of the Turkish
state’s deeper nervousness about minorities and movement in general.
Chaim Barlas was juggling a host of diplomatic conundrums. As soon as
one door opened, another closed. The Turkish government agreed to
facilitate the dispatch of food packages of raisins, nuts, figs, and margarine
to Jewish communities via the Red Cross, a kind of stopgap while Jews
were awaiting permission to emigrate. But because of rationing, the Turkish
authorities mandated that packages containing meat could only include pork
—a product in low demand among Muslims but, of course, prohibited for
observant Jews as well. Similar problems affected transportation. Turkey
had eased its restrictions on group transit of refugees in February 1943, but
two months later Bulgaria closed its frontiers to people traveling in large
groups—effectively stopping any substantial flow across the crucial land
border between the two countries. Barlas next approached the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs in Ankara, requesting that Turkey reverse its policy and
instead allow individuals to transit the country rather than requiring that
they be part of a preestablished group.
It was a bold request. This was precisely the problem that Turkish
authorities had feared: an influx of individual families—difficult to monitor
and impossible to control once they had entered the country—making their
way to Turkey and getting effectively stuck there, with the government
having no way of knowing whether they had in fact exited and continued
toward Palestine. The response was to accede to Barlas’s request but to
place a nearly impossible restriction on movement: Only nine Jewish
families were permitted to transit the country per week. Moreover, the
Turkish government required that everyone admitted as part of this quota
exit the country before another quota could be admitted. At that rate, Ira
Hirschmann later reckoned, it would have taken two hundred years to ease
the bottleneck of displaced people seeking to flee Hungary, Romania, and
Bulgaria.
The plan went into effect that September, but in the following two
months only 215 people—some from Romania, others from Poland who
had escaped to Hungary—made their way to Istanbul. By December 1943,
Barlas had already compiled a list of more than a thousand other names.
Small numbers of refugees had also arrived on the Turkish coast from
Greece, and arrangements were being made for acquiring immigration
papers for Palestine.
In December, Barlas wrote to Ambassador Steinhardt that only 1,126
people had made their way out of Nazi-dominated Europe via Turkey. In
fact, nearly twice as many Turkish Jews—2,138 people—had left for
Palestine as the number of rescued Jews escaping the Nazis. If that balance
continued, the Jewish Agency would be emptying Istanbul of its Jews far
faster than it was able to aid Jews trapped inside Axis Europe.
Hirschmann’s arrival in February 1944 gave a new impetus to the effort.
Hirschmann set about pulling together the many organizations that were
working, sometimes at cross purposes, to facilitate rescue. He now had the
full authority of the American government, and the personal endorsement of
President Roosevelt and key members of the cabinet. What he also brought
to the table was money.
Workmen clear the tracks of ice and snow for a trolley car.

From his years in New York and New Jersey, Hirschmann had a long
association with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; in his
new role at the War Refugee Board, he helped transform the board into a
conduit for Joint funds. The Joint had been active since the First World War
in channeling assistance from the American Jewish community to needy
people abroad. It now became the principal financier for the Turkish relief
effort, as well as for many other programs around the world. The War
Refugee Board persuaded the US Treasury Department to waive restrictions
on trading with enemy countries to allow the Joint to carry on financial
transactions in Axis-dominated zones: to exchange currency, distribute
resources, and where necessary buy tickets and arrange for travel for
individual Jewish families. Other funds—nearly $700,000—indirectly
financed operations in Turkey and transport to Palestine, in addition to
hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on transit from Hungary and other
countries and distribution of food via Turkey. Further Joint-funded
programs delivered food to concentration-camp internees and Jewish
refugees hiding in the Russian Far East; sent burlap-wrapped food packages
to Jews languishing in Romanian ghettos (with the burlap to be used for
clothing and blankets); supplied physicians and public health workers to
Balkan refugee centers; and provided direct financing for the ongoing work
of Jewish schools, hospitals, and other community organizations in Istanbul,
Ankara, Izmir, and other Turkish cities.
In relatively short order, Hirschmann, Barlas, Steinhardt, and other
major players managed to work out an informal arrangement involving the
US government, the Jewish Agency, and private American philanthropists,
all focused on getting as many Jews as possible into and out of Turkey.
Hirschmann was also in regular contact with Lanning Macfarland and the
OSS station in Istanbul, using the resources of the US intelligence mission
while passing along any information he had been able to glean from his
own sources about conditions in Axis Europe.
Since the day the war began, Barlas told Hirschmann, he had devoted
himself to the task of rescue. Now, at last, he felt “confident that nothing
can further disturb our cooperation which has only one aim in view: the
rescue and bringing into safety of our brethren.” But as the winter of 1943–
1944 faded into a bright Istanbul spring, a singular problem remained: If the
Nazis were increasingly killing Jews in groups—and now on a scale that
even skeptical Allied observers could no longer deny—the only way to save
them was in groups as well.

As long as a private citizen had the requisite papers, there was no problem
in theory with being able to enter a neutral state such as Turkey. But theory
and reality were often far apart. In the summer of 1938, the Turkish
government had officially barred the door to Jews coming from countries
with antisemitic laws. Ankara may have believed that these people, even
though the neediest, were also the most likely to stay in Turkey. Once
Germans began transporting large groups of Jews to established killing sites
in Poland, a possible route of rescue was to transport Jewish refugees to
Turkey en masse in specially outfitted ships or trains. But the devil lay in
the bureaucratic details.
The process began with Barlas. As representative of the Jewish Agency,
he was empowered by the British Mandate authorities in Palestine to draw
up lists of candidates for immigration, based on information provided by his
own agents or directly from people with family members still in Axis-
dominated lands. The information required was substantial, and war made it
hard to obtain. It could take two to three weeks to gather a complete list of
names, dates of birth, places of birth, and current addresses for a group of
people large enough to fill a ship or train.
Once the list was assembled, Barlas would forward the information to
Palestine. The authorities there would go down the list name by name,
either endorsing or denying a person’s candidacy. The finalized list would
then be forwarded to London for approval. That entire process took another
two to three weeks. After that, the British passport control officer in
Istanbul would be instructed to draw up his own prioritized list—again over
a period of two to three weeks. From there, the officer would communicate
directly with the British Embassy in Ankara with details of which families
were approved for immigration.
The final list would then go from the embassy to the Turkish Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, where it would eventually—over three or four days—
find its way to the Turkish consular affairs department. That department
would in turn transmit the list of approved candidates to Turkish consuls in
Bucharest, Budapest, Sofia, or other cities where officers were empowered
to release transit visas. In the end, a Jewish family could expect to wait at
least two and a half months, if everything went smoothly, to receive
permission both to transit Turkey and to enter Palestine. The wait was often
considerably longer. After that, it was Hirschmann’s job to sort out the even
more complex issue of arranging ships and trains to get people with the
appropriate paperwork out of harm’s way.
For the applicants, the entire process was excruciating. You wrote a
letter or filled out a form, waited, then perhaps wrote it all again. Abraham
Slowes had immigrated to Palestine from Poland in 1930 and made a
successful career in Haifa as a power-station engineer. His parents, Moshe
and Malka, were respected dental surgeons who were still living in the
family home in Vilna. The city—eventually renamed Vilnius—had
undergone immense changes: It was part of the Russian Empire when the
Slowes family first moved there; it had been made part of Poland after the
First World War; it was captured by the Red Army in September 1939 and
incorporated into Soviet Lithuania. As Hitler and Stalin jointly moved
through eastern Europe, Vilnius was at the center of the vise. In early March
1941, Abraham received a simple telegram from his father. “Send
certificates,” Moshe Slowes wrote, requesting that his son get travel
documents for himself, his wife, and another family, the Fiksmans.
Abraham wrote back quickly to say that he was doing everything
possible to arrange the certificates of immigration to Palestine via Turkey.
In fact, he had already made an application on his parents’ behalf, but that
request had been denied in February 1940. In the months that followed, his
family’s predicament worsened. Germany and the Soviet Union were allies
when Moshe sent the first telegram to his son. Three and a half months
later, the two countries were enemies. The German invasion of the Soviet
Union placed the family squarely on the front line of a new war. Abraham
now ramped up his efforts, sending a steady stream of letters and telegrams
to virtually anyone he thought might be able to help. Finally, in March
1942, more than two years after his first request, the Department of
Migration in Jerusalem wrote with superb news. The British passport
control officer in Istanbul had been instructed to release immigration
certificates for Moshe and Malka. They would simply need to apply in
person in Istanbul.
The first problem for Abraham was getting this news to his parents; the
second was getting his parents to Istanbul. He must have known at the time
that things were desperate in Vilnius. The Wehrmacht had captured the city
from the Soviets in the first days of the invasion in the summer of 1941, and
Jews in the city had been rounded up and confined to a ghetto. But the
uncertainty of war and the bureaucracy of the process created new
obstacles. When Abraham asked the Red Cross to contact whoever was
living at his parents’ last known address, the receiving officer wrote back
instructing him to fill out the required form. Abraham quickly returned the
form—listing eight family members who were believed to reside in the
occupied zone—and included a postage stamp to pay for the cost of
forwarding. He wrote to the Swedish consul in Jerusalem and even to the
Vatican. “I venture to hope that assistance will not be denied to aged people
who have during all their lives helped the sick as physicians, in these hard
times,” he told the Swedish official, enclosing his parents’ photographs as
identification. The consul in Jerusalem wrote back, asking him to address
his request to the Swedish consul in Haifa. Similar replies came from his
other correspondents. Regrettably, they all said, contact with the German-
occupied territories had ceased.
Finally, Abraham reckoned that going closer to the source might yield
better results, and in early August 1944 he wrote to the British Embassy in
Moscow requesting that news of the immigration certificates be forwarded
to his parents’ address. Only weeks earlier, the Red Army had retaken
Vilnius, so Abraham hoped that the lines of communication would once
again be open. In November, an attaché at the embassy wrote back with the
first clear news. “With reference to your letter of 8th August enquiring
about the whereabouts of your father,” the letter said, “I regret to inform
you that a letter sent to the address you gave has been returned marked
‘Addressee has died.’”
A follow-up note from the embassy the next spring contained more
information: The family apparently had been killed at the beginning of the
German occupation four years earlier. The people to whom the Palestine
authorities had issued immigration certificates, to whom the passport
control officer in Istanbul was prepared to issue a validation, and to whom
Turkish officials were asked to issue a transit visa were already dead by the
time the first stamp had been placed on any of their documents. For
individual families, as well as for Barlas and Hirschmann—all of them busy
creating long lists of people waiting to be saved—filling up a passenger
manifest was sometimes like assembling a ship of ghosts.
AT THE GATE OF FELICITY
A safe haven, August 1944: Jewish refugees, probably survivors of the doomed Mefkûre convoy,
arrive at Sirkeci station from the Black Sea coast.
T HERE WAS A MUNDANE everydayness to acts of heroism. The telegraph
operator tapping away Barlas’s messages from the Pera Palace was just one
piece of an intricate bureaucratic puzzle. Filling out forms, collating official
papers, negotiating with a transport company, arranging for the repair of a
ship’s engine, and doggedly pursuing Turkish officials more interested in
having a problem go away than in resolving it were all critical elements of
rescue and escape.
Survival required planning, and before planning came paper, lots of it.
War, occupation, and atrocity blocked the Slowes family’s paper chase. For
many Jews, however, the core problem was not just getting the permits to
enter Turkey and then Palestine. Rather, outside the areas of German
occupation, there was still a set of officious and maddening technicalities
involved in convincing a government—even a reasonably cooperative one
—to let people leave. “It would appear from the telegrams received by
Hirschmann and myself that the War Refugee Board is under the impression
that the principal difficulty with which we have been confronted has been a
reluctance on the part of the Turk Government to cooperate,” Ambassador
Steinhardt wrote to Washington in March 1944. “Thus far this has not been
the case. Up to the present time our principal difficulty has been the refusal
of the Axis authorities in the Balkans to permit Jewish refugees to depart.”
Romania was the intended point of exodus for growing numbers of
Jews, just as it had been for the ill-fated Struma passengers. Some were
native to Romania and had spent the war living openly in the capital,
Bucharest, or in other cities. Others had been interned or deported to
Transnistria, the stretch of occupied Soviet Ukrainian territory where the
Romanian government herded hundreds of thousands of Jews into camps
and ghettos. Still others had fled to Romania from farther north, from
Poland or other areas under direct German rule.
Even though Romania was a Nazi ally, it was still possible to live
relatively safely inside the country’s prewar borders, despite the growing
pressure that Berlin was exerting on Bucharest to round up local Jews and
send them to German-run camps. What united the many Jewish
communities thrown together by war inside Romania was the government’s
requirement that a Romanian official formally approve any request to
emigrate by issuing an exit visa and, when necessary, a passport. This was a
common practice in many countries at the time; it was simply a way of
keeping tabs on citizens’ comings and goings across international frontiers.
But in the context of persecution and flight, it created enormous obstacles
for Jews in particular.
Even after the Turks had ceased requiring transit visas for Jews holding
valid immigration certificates, the Romanian government insisted that
migrants present special exit documents before departure. Since many Jews
had been stripped of their citizenship by the Romanian government in 1938,
as part of a string of antisemitic laws, getting out of the country required
that Romanian Jews apply to have their citizenship reinstated or verified.
Bureaucrats dutifully kept all these records, much like an immigration
officer today would be able to provide a full accounting of which airport
one departed at precisely what hour.
At a minimum, getting out of Romania required that a Jewish applicant
present the following documents:

a current photograph
a statement of the applicant’s birth date, place of birth, height, hair
color, eye color, nose shape, forehead shape, mouth shape, chin
shape, and facial hair
a certificate confirming that the applicant had no pending legal cases
against him
a notarized affidavit from two witnesses confirming the identity of the
applicant, his parents, birth date, residence, and identity as a Jew
a notarized affidavit confirming the identity of the two witnesses above
a certificate from the Ministry of Finance stating that the applicant was
not in arrears on taxes in the past five years
a special form, signed by the applicant, expressly requesting
permission to leave the country
It was the last requirement on this list that was the most insulting. The form
required that the applicant sign a simple statement swearing to the
following:
By these presents, I, the undersigned, __________, living at __________, declare that, in
obtaining a passport and leaving the country, I understand that I will be permanently
settling abroad with my entire family.

The bureaucratic language masked the perverse reality: The Jewish

applicant was in effect restored to a version of Romanian citizenship only
on the condition that he and his immediate relatives never set foot in the
country again.
In addition to restrictions on the Romanian side, the Turkish
government continually threw up roadblocks as well. Officials in Ankara
were wary about using Turkish-flagged vessels in any rescue efforts, even if
the full costs were borne by private organizations or foreign governments,
for fear that this would tip Turkey too far to the Allied cause and bring
down Hitler’s wrath. The Struma affair had made the government even
more cautious. In the event of another catastrophe at sea, Ankara believed,
the blame would land squarely on Turkish heads, repaying any assistance in
the rescue effort with international condemnation. Even as seemingly
simple a matter as allowing relief organizations to trade Turkish lira at the
same preferential exchange rate allowed for diplomatic missions was
treated carefully. Delaying tactics and a retreat into the arcana of diplomatic
consultations and official inquiries were the normal responses to
Ambassador Steinhardt’s requests for assistance.
By the middle of 1944, however, things were working better than ever
before. So many foreign organizations were seeking to aid Jews via Istanbul
—some Jewish, some American, some international, such as the Red Cross
—that the entire process threatened to collapse under its own weight. Given
the fact that it was in a refugee’s interest to be in contact with as many aid
groups as possible—hedging bets in the hope that at least one of them
would be able to help—multiple agencies sometimes devoted incredible
energy to a particular case only to find that a matter had already been
resolved by another.
As Ambassador Steinhardt wrote to Barlas in June, many of these
groups sent their representatives to Turkey for only a few days and had little
understanding of the complexities of the local environment. There were
even instances when multiple rescue groups were bidding on the same ship,
driving up the price that an owner could ask. And since some of them were
expressly involved in illegal migration—flouting Turkish immigration law
in the hope of getting more people out of central Europe—their activities
threatened to bring a halt to the hard work of the Jewish Agency and others
in securing legal permission to transit to Palestine. Earlier that spring,
Foreign Minister Numan Menemencio lu had told Steinhardt explicitly that
the Turkish authorities were well aware of the illegal activity being carried
out in Istanbul and that the government could easily activate plans for
stopping it. For that reason, Barlas had always been wary of mixing aliyah
bet with his own above-board campaign to get official transit visas and
Palestine certificates for as many Jews as possible.
In all of these efforts, both legal and illegal, information was the crucial
component of survival. If you knew where family members or friends were
located and how to get to them, and if you had the wherewithal to assemble
official papers that could easily have been mislaid or destroyed, the chances
of making it to safety were immeasurably greater. That is why Barlas and
Hirschmann frequently made the short trip from the Pera Palace and the
Park Hotel, across Taksim Square, and toward the neighborhood of
Harbiye. Their destination was the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit.

Harbiye’s name was derived from the root word for “war,” but there was
probably no more peaceful or secure place in the city. It had been the site of
the old Ottoman military training academy—hence the name—and had
graduated the elite of the sultan’s imperial land forces, including Mustafa
Kemal. It had also been selected by the British occupation troops for their
headquarters after the First World War. Like most of the suburban highlands
north of the Golden Horn, where many non-Muslims had resided during the
Ottoman era, the district was a hodgepodge of Christian churches,
cemeteries, shops, and lodgings for foreigners, all lying uneasily alongside
barracks and parade grounds. When he set up his offices during the Allied
occupation, General Charles Harington found an overgrown Armenian
cemetery nearby. He ordered it transformed into a sports field. The old
tombstones were rearranged into makeshift bleachers from which members
of the British colony could enjoy refreshments and watch amateur cricket
matches.
The neighborhood was far away from the old city, both geographically
and culturally. A major Turkish novelist of the era, Peyami Safa, entitled
one of his most famous works Fatih–Harbiye (1931), contrasting the
traditionally Muslim district of Fatih south of the Golden Horn with its
upwardly mobile opposite to the north. Secular Muslims were increasingly
moving into multistory houses and new apartment buildings in Harbiye, but
the district had long been known for its Christian businesses, schools, and
places of worship. In 1846, the Ottoman authorities had allotted land in the
neighborhood for what would become Istanbul’s most important Catholic
church. It was the seat of the spiritual leader of the group still referred to
today as the city’s Latins or, more commonly, Levantines.
Istanbul’s Levantines were comfortable in many cultures but perhaps
never truly at home in any. The church’s parishioners included Arab
merchants, Maltese bankers, and Italian financiers—usually French- or
Italian-speaking but also inherently multilingual—who were products of the
long period of interaction between the Ottomans and Catholics in the
eastern Mediterranean. Among them were some of the city’s wealthiest
families, who lived clustered in villas and apartment buildings in Pera. They
were “a strange community,” said the writer Harold Nicolson, “isolated,
important, polyglot and yet united by a common function” as economic go-
betweens linking Ottoman producers with European markets. The
memoirist Ziya Bey was more pointed and probably reflected a view
common among Muslims. The Levantines were, he said, “a nondescript
people . . . whose one purpose is to make and spend money and who are
ready to sell anything for the purpose.” Ziya Bey’s disdain was directed at a
tiny portion of the city’s population, however. There were fewer than
23,000 Levantines in the city at the time of the first republican census in
1927, two-thirds of them foreign citizens, and that number declined steadily
thereafter.
Catholic communities in the Middle East always retained the flavor of
an earlier time in the church’s history. In Christendom’s great schism of
1054, the churches now labeled Orthodox—Greek, Russian, Romanian, and
others—decided to hew to the concept of church hierarchies being tied to
distinct national or cultural communities. They parted ways with the idea
that one leader among them—the bishop in Rome—could lay claim to
universal authority. But Rome realized that touting its universality too
loudly in the East would harden the position of its Orthodox rivals; worse, it
might alienate loyal congregations that had developed their own traditions.
That is why Istanbul, like Damascus or Beirut, developed an enormous
variety of churches that, in the West, would all simply be called Catholic,
from Armenian Catholics to Syrian Catholics to Latin (that is, Roman)
Catholics. The result was the broad mosaic of Catholicism in its many
Eastern forms, each with its own liturgy, vestments, hierarchy, and even, for
some, married priests. In that sense, the Levantines—although purely
Roman Catholic—might be seen as the easternmost Westerners or the
westernmost Easterners, depending on one’s point of view, within the
Catholic communion.
Among these Catholics, the pope always tended to tread rather lightly.
That may have been why the apostolic delegate—the pope’s personal
representative in Turkey—ended up in a rather out-of-the-way location, in
Harbiye, rather than establishing himself in the middle of the old Christian
district of Pera. The Cathedral of the Holy Spirit is by no means the most
appealing Catholic church in Istanbul. Its plaster façade frames a mildly
interesting mosaic of a dove descending and tongues of fire sprouting from
the heads of the faithful. Wisteria and English ivy spill into the courtyard.
What the cathedral lacked in architectural appeal, however, it made up for
in temporal power, which is why Chaim Barlas had been trying so hard to
get there through the early winter of 1943.
Even though Barlas’s telegraph station in the Pera Palace was less than
a half-hour walk from the cathedral, protocol demanded that he go through
the proper channels. He corresponded with the apostolic delegate’s chief
secretary, Vittore Righi, in hopes of arranging a meeting. He may have
already gained access in January, but it is more likely that the process
dragged on for several weeks, as pleasantries were exchanged and requests
forwarded.
On February 12, 1943, Barlas found a telegram waiting for him in the
lobby of the Pera Palace. It was from Isaac Herzog, the chief rabbi in
Jerusalem, and warned of the “extreme danger” that Jews in Italy were
facing. He urged Barlas to make contact as quickly as possible with the
pope’s representative to see whether something could be done. There was
no plan to bring Italian Jews to Istanbul; Barlas already had his hands full
trying to arrange passage for the much larger communities besieged in
eastern Europe. But the hope was that a respected senior church leader
might be able to intercede with papal officials in Rome. In any case, Barlas
now had yet another talking point on which to engage the Vatican’s
representative.
Pope Pius XII had chosen to observe a calculated neutrality in the war,
even when it became clear that Jewish communities were being destroyed
en masse throughout Europe. His staunch opposition to communism pushed
him away from an open endorsement of the Allied cause, which would have
placed him effectively in the same camp as the Soviets. His concern for
protecting Rome and Vatican City from Hitler’s armies also pushed him to
speak cautiously when addressing the issue of German atrocities, even
though Vatican diplomats were fully aware of the horrors being perpetrated
in occupied Poland and the Axis-occupied parts of the Soviet Union.
However, equal treatment of both sides became the polestar guiding Pius
XII’s diplomacy. “He explained that when talking of atrocities he could not
name the Nazis without at the same time mentioning the Bolsheviks . . . ,”
said Harold H. Tittmann Jr., the American chargé d’affaires at the Holy See.
“He stated that he ‘feared’ there was foundation for the atrocity reports of
the Allies but led me to believe that he felt there had been some
exaggeration for purpose of propaganda.”
Barlas knew the church’s position, which is why he was so careful in his
approach to the papal representative living near him in Istanbul. Finally, in
the spring of 1943, Barlas walked through a small doorway off Cumhuriyet
Avenue and into the presence of someone with the weighty title of Titular
Archbishop of Mesembria and Apostolic Delegate to Turkey and Greece.
Monsignor Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli had been in Istanbul much longer
than Barlas. He had served as apostolic delegate since 1934 and, before
that, had enjoyed a promising ecclesiastical career. But he was also imbued
with the core quality that was of most interest to Barlas: a commitment to
social activism and the church’s role in the world.
Roncalli was born in 1881—making him an exact contemporary of
Mustafa Kemal—near Bergamo, the son of sharecropping farmers who
produced a hearty Italian household of thirteen children. It was not unusual
for a large family to have at least one son destined for the priesthood, but
Roncalli seemed to take to theology with unusual fervor. He completed
studies as a local seminarian, then as a scholarship student in Rome, and
finally as a doctoral candidate. In 1904, he was ordained as a priest. He
eventually returned to Bergamo to serve as secretary to the local bishop, a
position that gave him his first real access to the church hierarchy. Bergamo
was one of the centers of progressive social thought, the view that the great
wealth and power of the church should be used both to improve the lot of
individual parishioners and to nudge political institutions into directions
that were more equitable and just.
The job of chief confidant and adviser in the bishopric placed Roncalli
squarely within the major currents of progressive teaching. His
organizational experience also recommended him to higher authorities. By
1920, he had been elevated by Pope Benedict XV to become director of the
Society for the Propagation of the Faith, a position that gave him added
experience as administrator of the church’s missions in Italy and abroad.
That international experience placed him in line for an appointment outside
Italy, and in 1925 he was named archbishop and papal representative in
Bulgaria, a position that, in 1931, Roncalli convinced both the church and
the Bulgarian government to raise to the level of apostolic delegate. Three
years later, he was transferred to the same position in Istanbul.
Roncalli quickly grew fond of Turkey and the Turks. His decade of
service in Bulgaria had already made him an expert in negotiating the
societies and cultures of southeastern Europe, and he threw himself into his
new job with enthusiasm. He began learning Turkish, although the
intricacies of the language made him think of the project mainly as a form
of mortification and penance. His real challenges were less cultural than
political. “My work in Turkey is not easy,” Roncalli wrote candidly in his
journal. “The political situation does not allow me to do much.”
In the world of ecclesiastical diplomacy, an apostolic delegate’s role
was delicate. He had no legal diplomatic standing and, unlike the higher
office of papal nuncio, could not speak on behalf of the Vatican. His
bishopric was based in Istanbul, where most of Turkey’s Roman Catholic
community resided, but that location also kept him at some remove from
the foreign policy intrigues—and political power—in Ankara. The Turkish
government had extended its commitment to secularism into the
international realm; any communication between Roncalli and Foreign
Minister Menemencio lu was treated as strictly personal, not as a form of
diplomatic correspondence. In 1939, when Roncalli contacted the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs with the official announcement of the death of Pope Pius
XI and the accession of Pius XII, the foreign ministry’s response was that
the event was a purely religious matter and had no bearing on interstate
relations. Like other priests, Roncalli often had to leave his ecclesiastical
collar in his closet, since the Turkish government generally prohibited the
wearing of religious garb in public. Nor did Roncalli have a claim to any
particular administrative power over the bishops in the territory where he
happened to be located. His only real tools were moral suasion and a direct
line of communication with Rome. In Roncalli’s case, any hindrances were
lessened by a wealth of local experience, contacts, and “a great deal of tact
and ability,” in the words of the French ambassador.
There is no transcript of Barlas’s first encounter with Roncalli, but he
presumably made the points to the delegate that he had earlier made in
correspondence with Righi: that the Jewish Agency was ramping up its
efforts to get Jews out of occupied Europe; that the church could do more to
condemn the atrocities being committed across the continent; and that the
church could play a very particular role in mobilizing its contacts to make
sure that Jews were able to access the immigration papers they would need
to exit their home countries, transit Turkey, and finally arrive in Palestine.
In any case, the channels of communication were now open. Throughout
the spring and summer of 1943, Barlas either met personally with Roncalli
or passed documents to him through Righi. In June, Barlas wired a quick
update to Jerusalem: “Have seen today his eminence the pappal [sic] nuncio
[sic] who is doing utmost render help.”
Barlas’s requests were becoming ever more pointed and concrete.
Barlas was asking Roncalli not only to use his resources to press Rome on
taking a stronger stance against the persecution of Jews but also to use the
Vatican network for the express purpose of assisting individual families in
escaping. The relationship was mutual, in fact. Given his past experience in
Bulgaria, Roncalli knew of families who were seeking to flee. On multiple
occasions, he asked Barlas to follow up on whether a specific person in
Sofia or elsewhere had received immigration papers. In November the chief
rabbi in Jerusalem wrote to thank Roncalli for the “precious assistance that
you have continually rendered in [Barlas’s] efforts to come to the aid of our
poor brothers and sisters.”
Another crisis was yet to come, however. Axis-aligned countries such as
Hungary and Romania had already enacted harshly discriminatory anti-
Jewish laws and shuttered Jewish businesses. They had no qualms about
murdering Jews in territories that they had occupied during the war. In
Hitler’s carve-up of eastern Europe, Hungary was awarded slices of
Czechoslovakia and Soviet Ukraine; Romania took an even larger portion
of Soviet Ukraine, including the strategic city of Odessa; and Bulgaria
received part of Macedonia and western Thrace. All three countries rounded
up and deported foreign Jews from these occupied territories; some
participated in the large-scale murder of Jewish civilians who were blamed
for opposing the occupation or aiding the Allied enemy.
But these governments were also surprisingly patriotic about their own
Jews. They resisted German pressure to load local Jews onto trains for
deportation to Nazi-run killing centers abroad. Jews living inside Hungary,
Romania, and Bulgaria proper were by and large spared the worst ravages
of the early stages of the Holocaust.
In Hungary, that situation began to change in the spring of 1944. As the
likelihood of an Allied victory became more and more apparent, Hungary’s
government began putting out secret feelers in Istanbul and other neutral
capitals. If the Allies would agree to certain conditions—such as avoiding a
Soviet occupation of Hungary and forgoing any punitive border changes in
a peace settlement—Hungary might switch its allegiance from the Axis to
the Allied cause. German intelligence was intimately aware of these
conversations, and as German troops retreated from the Soviet Union after
the defeat at Stalingrad, plans were drawn up for the full-scale invasion of
Hungary—a way of scotching Hungary’s exit from the Axis and creating a
buffer against an Allied advance through southeastern Europe. In the
process, the Nazis would be able to realize a goal that the uncooperative
Hungarian government had blocked since the beginning of the war: the
large-scale deportation and murder of Hungary’s substantial Jewish
community, which numbered some 725,000 people before the war. In
March 1944, Wehrmacht troops crossed the border, accompanied by SS and
Gestapo units. The attack on Jews began later that summer, a phased
campaign personally overseen by Adolf Eichmann, the senior SS
commander in Budapest. Jewish property was confiscated, Jewish families
were forced into a string of ghettos, and then, beginning in May, trainloads
of Jewish citizens were assembled for transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Many were gassed soon after their arrival.
By this stage, Barlas had an ally in Hirschmann, who was committed to
using his funding and contacts to secure ships for rescue operations on the
Black Sea. The Hungarian situation presented a particular kind of
challenge. Much of the Jewish community had remained persecuted but
reasonably safe. Now the Nazi eradication effort was kicked into overdrive.
Nazi authorities were also aware of the particular concern that Allied
governments had developed for the fate of Jews, and officials in Budapest
sought to exploit this concern for reasons of propaganda and economics.
With Eichmann’s consent, in mid-May 1944 two emissaries, Joel Brand
and Andrea György, were sent to Istanbul to open secret negotiations with
the Allies. Brand, well known to Barlas and other Jewish agents there, was
a young Jewish industrialist in Hungary who had been active in attempts to
get Jews out of his native country. His traveling companion, György, was a
Hungarian Jew who had converted to Catholicism and a man equally well
known by a range of different names. He was sometimes called Grosz,
sometimes Gross or Grenier, sometimes Trillium, the code name that he had
been given by his American handlers: He was part of the OSS’s Dogwood
network and as such an invaluable informant for Allied intelligence.
Brand and György carried a grotesque offer: The German authorities
would agree to release Jews in exchange for needed goods. “We are in the
fifth year of the war,” Eichmann had told Brand in Budapest. “We lack
supplies. Well, you want to save Jews, especially the young and the women
of childbearing age. I’m a German idealist, and I respect you as a Jewish
idealist. You’ve got 1,200,000 Jews in Hungary, Poland, and so forth. I am
selling you the goods.” Eichmann’s terms were startlingly specific. A
limited number of Jews would be allowed to exit Hungary if the Allies
would provide the Germans with two million bars of soap, two hundred
tons of cocoa, eight hundred tons of coffee, two hundred tons of tea, and ten
thousand trucks.
The emissaries were detained by Allied operatives for further
questioning in Istanbul and Cairo, and the offer was roundly rejected. No
Allied government could bear the thought of paying blood money to the
Nazis, and the Soviets in particular feared that additional war matériel or
supplies might embolden the Germans to launch a new offensive on the
eastern front. Similar ransom plans had been proffered before; the yishuv
leadership was eager to explore any option for getting Jews out of Europe,
even if it meant making pacts with the devil. The Brand mission, however,
illustrated the desperation of the Germans—now clearly in retreat in the
east and focusing their attention on eliminating as many Jews as possible
before the war ended.
The Brand mission also showed that the window for action had not fully
closed. Escape routes might still be available, even as the deportations
accelerated. Through his channels of communication with church officials
in Budapest, Roncalli learned that Jews who had not yet been deported
might be allowed to exit the country. What they required was immigration
certificates for Palestine, certificates that could be obtained only in Istanbul.
But if the threatened Jews could not come to Turkey to receive the
certificates, the only possible solution was to take the certificates to them—
inside a Nazi-occupied country that had, by midsummer of 1944, already
deported more than 400,000 Jews to labor and death camps.
That was where Barlas and Hirschmann came to rely on the apostolic
delegate. In a series of exchanges that summer, the Jewish Agency and the
War Refugee Board made arrangements to transfer packets of immigration
certificates to Roncalli, for onward transmission via church networks to
Jewish communities in Hungary. Barlas authorized his team to identify as
many Hungarian Jews as possible. His associates scoured Istanbul for
people who might supply the names and addresses of friends or family
members. Others took to copying down any recognizably Jewish name from
the Budapest phone directory.
On June 5, Roncalli wrote to Barlas: “I am pleased to inform you that
the certificates for the Jews of Hungary which you passed to me are being
sent to Budapest by a reliable courier.” “Thanks to these documents,”
Barlas replied the next day, Hungarian refugees “could be saved.” In doing
this, Roncalli was circumventing his superiors in Rome. Before the
Hungarian deportations began, the War Refugee Board had informed him of
the plans for the mass murder of Hungarian Jews. Roncalli forwarded the
report to the Vatican—an eyewitness account by two Slovak Jews who had
managed to escape from Auschwitz—but with little public result. Later, the
papal nuncio in Budapest personally informed Rome of the round-up of
Hungarian Jews. Yet Pope Pius XII continued to refuse to name Jews as
Hitler’s principal victims or to condemn Nazi policies directed against
them.
At the very least, Roncalli was overstepping his role as a religious
leader with no diplomatic standing in a neutral country. He must also have
realized that he was actively participating in a plan that the church had
previously refused to endorse: the large-scale immigration of Jews to
Palestine. In the context of the Final Solution, the lines between rescue and
resettlement—effectively between immigration and Zionism—quickly
faded. In late July, Hirschmann called on Roncalli at his summer residence
on Büyükada. “He has helped the Jews in Hungary and I beseech his further
help,” Hirschmann wrote in his diary. Thousands of immigration certificates
had already been dispatched to Hungary, but further ships were now being
prepared to bring Jewish refugees across the Black Sea.

On Pentecost Sunday, Roncalli stepped into the pulpit of the Cathedral of

the Holy Spirit to give one of his most poignant and pointed sermons of the
war. “We are called to live in a painful epoch of destruction and hate,” he
said, “in which individuals are sacrificed to national egoism with a brutality
that is a disgrace to the human race.” Even as he spoke, Jews were on their
way to Palestine, many of them carrying papers that had been delivered by
Roncalli’s network.
Few of the escapees saw much of Istanbul en route, however. For those
arriving by train, the Turkish authorities carefully guarded the groups
during their transfer from Sirkeci station and across the Bosphorus to
Haydarpa a station. New arrivals had little time to take in their
surroundings. They were quickly moved along to the next stage of what
must have seemed a never-ending succession of trains, checkpoints, and
formalities. Similar strictures governed the transfer from sea to land.
At every step, the small group of activists from the Jewish Agency, the
War Refugee Board, and the Joint were responsible for organization and
provisioning. While Barlas and his associates took care of the paperwork
and Hirschmann handled the politics, the everyday details fell to Simon
Brod, a local philanthropist who had weathered the Turkish wealth tax and
was well regarded by both Allied and Jewish agents throughout the city. His
perpetual trail of cigarette smoke and tuft of white hair were often the first
thing that Jewish refugees saw in Istanbul.
The entire effort could seem abstract—a matter of lists, timetables, and
telegrams—until a ship or train that Hirschmann and Barlas had organized
actually arrived in Istanbul. In early July 1944, the Kazbek sailed into the
Bosphorus from the Black Sea with 758 people on board. The ship was
rated for only three hundred passengers, and Hirschmann recalled seeing
people sprawled over the deck as the ship pulled into port. The manifest
included 256 children rescued from Transnistria, the Romanian-occupied
area of Soviet Ukraine.
The city authorities allowed Hirschmann and a few other activists to
observe the arrival and departure from a bobbing launch that drew up
alongside. The refugees were disembarked, carrying bundles and small
packages of belongings, and escorted by Turkish police to second- and
third-class carriages waiting at Haydarpa a. As with all transports, the Joint
had provided food and water—typically hundreds of loaves of bread,
thousands of cucumbers and tomatoes, and plenty of packages of cigarettes,
even when many of these items were strictly rationed in Istanbul.
Passengers settled into their carriages quietly and stoically.
Suddenly, one of the refugees, a woman, ran down the quay, breaking
windows and shouting, before being restrained. She had been this way the
entire journey, someone told Hirschmann, ever since her mother and three
children were shot before her eyes. Other Jews resident in Istanbul crowded
into the station, seeking to make contact with someone who might know the
whereabouts of relatives. In some instances, Jewish Agency officials were
allowed to enter the carriages and bring back news about a specific family.
“As expected, it was very bad,” one of the inquirers later wrote in a thank-
you note to the agency.
The train finally pulled out after sundown, and on the cool ferry ride
back to the European side, Hirschmann watched as the early evening lights
came up across the city. He could look across to Sarayburnu and the spires
and domes of Topkapı Palace, its interior courtyards hidden behind stone
walls and cypress groves. The palace’s innermost areas—the sultan’s old
private quarters and the Harem—were accessed through an ornate portico
that the Ottomans called the Gate of Felicity. In the Ottomans’ diplomatic
correspondence, Istanbul itself was frequently known by a variant of the
same name, Dersaadet. Hirschmann realized that his work in Istanbul was
only one segment of a much longer chain, a line of the stateless and
homeless, passing through to somewhere else. The world, he said, seemed
very tired.
Ships and trains were now arriving with greater ease and regularity than
ever before. But the route was still treacherous. Later that summer, on
August 3, 1944, a convoy of three ships—the Morina, the Bülbül, and the
Mefkûre—left the Romanian port of Constan a, each crammed beyond
capacity with refugees bound for Istanbul. By the second day at sea, the
Bülbül and the Mefkûre had fallen out of sight of the faster Morina, with the
Mefkûre then falling even farther behind because of engine trouble.
Around 12:30 a.m. on August 5, the Mefkûre came under strafing fire,
probably from a Soviet submarine repeating the scenario that had doomed
the Struma more than two years earlier. Large-caliber bullets ripped into the
ship’s wooden hull. Fire quickly spread on deck. The Turkish captain and
four crew members escaped in the only available lifeboat.
A few dozen passengers jumped into the sea. The rest, asleep in the hold
when the attack started, went down with the burning ship, which sank about
a half hour after the gunfire began. Five passengers managed to survive by
clinging to a piece of debris and, four hours later, drifted on the sea’s
currents to within sight of the Bülbül. The rest of the 320 refugees were shot
or drowned.
The two remaining ships anchored off neada, a Turkish town near the
Bulgarian border, and their passengers were taken to Istanbul by train.
Exhausted but smiling with relief, they pushed expectantly against the
barriers at Sirkeci station and were offered lotus glasses of tea from a silver
tray. They soon made the transfer to Haydarpa a station and the route to
Palestine.
By the time the Mefkûre sank, Allied powers had landed in Normandy and,
on the eastern front, the Soviet Union was continuing its largest offensive of
the war. The Red Army had already liberated the first in a string of Nazi
death camps. Romania had evacuated Transnistria and, hoping to stave off a
full-scale Soviet invasion, announced later in the summer that it would
switch sides and join the Allied cause. Bulgaria, after a leftist coup, would
follow suit.
Rumors were rife that Turkey was planning to declare war on Germany.
The Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara were empty, with only a few boats
bobbing in the current. Turkish authorities had ordered naval and civilian
vessels removed offshore, for fear that the Germans would launch a
preemptive attack. Air-raid drills were stepped up, and blackout curtains
replaced drapes in businesses and apartments.
At the Park Hotel, the Germans ate in silence, and newspapermen
hovered in the lobby to cover Germany’s shifting fortunes. Rooms were
going for half price as Germans crowded the checkout desk with their
children and suitcases in tow, seeking to leave as soon as possible before
Turkey’s neutrality ran out. Franz von Papen, the German ambassador,
arrived from Ankara and quickly departed for Berlin from Sirkeci station,
waving his hat to a cheering crowd of local Germans, Japanese, and Turks.
In mid-August, the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that the
country was severing relations with Germany. Turkey formally joined the
Allied cause in February 1945.
After the war, people continued to filter through Istanbul toward
Palestine, but the flotillas, special trains, and desperate paper chase began to
slow as the immediate danger to the surviving refugees lessened. The
vessels that had carried them became part of the epic of forced exodus from
wartime Europe. Family histories now contained not only the names of a
long string of ancestors, running back to lost villages and emptied
neighborhoods in Poland, Hungary, or Romania. They also wove together
the exotic names of overcrowded ships that had ferried the survivors to
safety: the Milka and the Maritza; the Bellacita, Kazbek, and Morina; the
Bülbül, Salahattin, and Toros; along with the doomed Mefkûre and Struma.
These ships carried 4,127 refugees, and many more arrived in Istanbul by
train or in smaller groups aboard coasting vessels and small launches. In all,
from 1942 to 1945, a total of 13,101 Jews went via Turkey to Palestine and
other destinations. In the end, more than a quarter of all the Jews who made
it to Palestine during the Second World War passed through Istanbul to get
there. “The results of the immigration in numbers are in no comparison with
the tragic situation of Jewry in the enemy-occupied countries,” Barlas
reported, “but . . . I may say that it is a miracle that even this small number
has escaped from . . . hell.”
Chaim Barlas checked out of the Pera Palace and returned to Palestine,
where he became head of the immigration department for the entire Jewish
Agency, soon to form the new government of Israel. Ira Hirschmann left the
Park Hotel, returned to New York, and took up a vice president’s title at
Bloomingdale’s. He had only been in Turkey for about six months—coming
and going to keep up his networks and report on his efforts—but the
experience shaped the rest of his life in public service. When the United
Nations was created, he became one of its key administrators dealing with
the plight of refugees.
Angelo Roncalli left Istanbul as well. He was transferred to France in
1944 as papal nuncio. It was a post that called for a combination of tact and
decisiveness, since one of his most difficult tasks was to deal with the fate
of French priests who had collaborated with the German occupation during
the war. Pius XII eventually elevated him to the rank of cardinal, but this
was more a recognition of his piety and long experience in the field than a
statement of his power within the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He had been
abroad for a very long time, with little inside knowledge of the workings of
Rome and the networks that would allow him to become a major voice
among the princes of the church. It was therefore a stunning surprise when,
upon the death of the pope in 1958, his fellow cardinals raised him even
higher. He soon took the name John XXIII.
Of the people who departed from Istanbul as part of the rescue effort, at
least 3,994 of them—close to a third of Barlas’s total—had not experienced
the Holocaust at all. They were Istanbullus, either Sephardic Jews whose
families had lived in the city for generations or eastern European
immigrants who had already put down roots there. The wealth tax, the
antisemitic propaganda, and a secure lifeline to Palestine now prompted
many to leave, much as Armenians had done after the First World War and
Greeks after the end of the Allied occupation.
One evening in the late summer of 1944, as Istanbullus watched this
new wave of émigrés pass out of the city, most of the musicians of the Park
Hotel’s orchestra took the night off. The first violinist, Fritz Guth, stepped
onto the stage to give a solo concert. He put aside his jazz charts and
instead played Schubert and Mozart for the small number of paying guests
in the dining room. It was his last performance in Istanbul. The son of a
Viennese Jew, he had managed to get his name on one of Barlas’s lists, and
he soon left with his wife and baby for Palestine.
EPILOGUE
Two women share a bicycle on an Istanbul street.
E VER SINCE HE TOOK OVER ownership of the Pera Palace in 1927, Misbah
Muhayye had come to know more about departures than arrivals. The
tensions of the war years and the wealth tax had driven away business. The
1941 bomb explosion had scared away entire seasons of paying customers.
By the time Allied operatives and Jewish rescuers checked out at the end of
the Second World War, the Pera Palace’s reputation had come to rest on the
signatures in its old registry books. The most famous guest in recent
memory—Joseph Goebbels—was quietly left out of the marketing
materials.
Muhayye was in his late fifties at the close of the war. His adult life had
paralleled the rise of the Turkish Republic and the rapid expansion of
Istanbul’s culturally Muslim but deeply Kemalist bourgeoisie. He was
extraordinarily wealthy by any standard. A long string of investments,
running from Beirut to Istanbul, had paid dividends. He could afford the
annual write-off that the Pera Palace had become. Although he had no
children of his own, his summers were spent among nieces and nephews at
his Yeniköy yalı.
Through the 1940s and early 1950s, he visited the hotel regularly to
supervise its operation. The life had gone out of the party, however. Worldly
and adventurous Turks were looking for clean lines and modern
furnishings, not velvet curtains and imperial excess. The hotel was now
surrounded by tumbledown tenements. The front door opened onto dark,
narrow streets. The back side, still with one of the best sunset views in the
city, towered over gritty neighborhoods where Turkish migrants from the
Black Sea coast and central Anatolia hung laundry from the windows of
their apartments.
One day in October 1954, at the age of sixty-eight, Muhayye went up
to a room on the second floor and ordered a bottle of whiskey. Early the
next morning, the night porter heard a loud noise from inside the room and
opened the door to find his boss bleeding on the bathroom floor. Theories
swirled about a fatal mishap—a drunken fall on wet marble, maybe—or a
possible murder, but the hint of an explanation came from a comment he
had made to friends a few days earlier. “Now that my cat is dead,” he
reportedly said, “I can’t go on living.” When his will was later unsealed, no
one expected the news. He had turned over the hotel to three charities for
children, for the elderly, and for the fight against tuberculosis.
The hotel remained open, since the philanthropies wisely leased it out to
a private company for management, but the country was changing quickly
and, with it, the tastes and expectations of Istanbullus and travelers alike. In
1950, a few years before Muhayye ’s death, Turkish citizens had been given
their first chance to choose a parliament in free and direct elections. They
voted to sweep out the party that Atatürk had founded. Celebrations erupted
in the streets, an outpouring of popular enthusiasm for change not seen
since the revolution of 1908. President smet nönü stepped aside, opting to
head up the new parliamentary opposition rather than remain head of state.
Members of the rival Democratic Party filled senior government posts.
The old Republican People’s Party had claimed to have the wind of
history at its back. Atatürk had dragged Turks out of their imperial stupor
and had shaken them into modernity, the party maintained, and even after
death, Kemalist ideals would best be realized through the party that Mustafa
Kemal himself had founded. The new Democratic Party leadership, by
contrast, saw popular will, not national destiny, as its mandate. The
Democrats’ landslide victory at the polls seemed to confirm it. These dual
claims to authority would become one of the mainstays of Turkish politics,
regardless of the specific parties in power and in opposition. One group
wore the mantle of breakneck modernizer; the other promised to speak on
behalf of the previously silent masses.
The Democrats’ prime minister, Adnan Menderes, moved to dismantle
the old one-party system, even though he accepted the basic tenets of
Kemalism as a political ideology. Property belonging to the Republican
People’s Party was taken away and given to the national treasury.
Landholdings that party leaders had acquired under Atatürk were placed
under state control. Privatization enriched a new class of landowners and
industrialists. In foreign policy, the new government moved away from the
balancing act that had defined the Atatürk and nönü eras. Turkey had been
one of the founding members of the United Nations—a position facilitated
by its decision to join the Allies in the closing months of the Second World
War—and in 1952 the Menderes government secured Turkey’s role in
NATO, locking it in as a member of what was already called the free world.
Turkish troops shipped out to Korea, the first major time they had stood
alongside Western soldiers, rather than across from them, since the Crimean
War. All these policies were repaid at the next election two years later,
when the Democratic Party came away with even more seats in the Grand
National Assembly.
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 Tepeba ı, the
steep inclines of i hane and Tarlaba ı, 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 Çıra an 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 Re at, 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.
14 One 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.
15 Only a blind man: Herodotus, The Histories, 4.144.
16 But 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.
19 It 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.
20 On his first visit: Herbert, Ben Kendim, 26–27. Even the Divanyolu: Çelik, Remaking of
Istanbul, 4.
21 Photographs from the time: DBIA, 7:426–38. The airy, open vistas: Gül, Emergence of Modern
Istanbul, 49–51.
23 It could also be: Barsley, Orient Express, 20. Nagelmackers had visited: Behrend, History of
the Wagons-Lits, 3.
24 At 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.
25 It 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.
26 The property had once belonged: Çelik, Tepeba ı, 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 Da dalen, ed., Charles Edouard
Goad’ın stanbul Sigorta Haritaları.
27 When Le Corbusier visited: Quoted in Mansel, Constantinople, 354.

THE GRAY FLEET

32 More 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.
38 By 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.
39 However, 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.
40 “The grand sight”: Charles and Louisa Vinicombe to Hélène Philippe, Oct. 25, 1920, pp. 20–
21, C. Vinicombe Papers, IWM.
41 “It was a sight”: Entry for Nov. 12, 1918, F. W. Turpin Papers, IWM. Turpin carried over his
description into the next day, Nov. 13. Local Greek Orthodox: Musbah Haidar, Arabesque, 165.
Families had flattened: Mufty-zada, Speaking of the Turks, 150, 153, 229. “Effendi, what bad
times”: Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, 414.
42 Senegalese infantrymen: Sperco, L’Orient qui s’éteint, 46. Later, the French commander:
Bridges, Alarms and Excursions, 257. “It was . . . like having”: Bridges, Alarms and
Excursions, 258.
43 Istanbul had long been: Constantinople, 9. The Spanish flu: Musbah Haidar, Arabesque, 169,
187.
44 “Greedy or inviting”: Mufty-zada, Speaking of the Turks, 153. “Prostitution, dishonesty,
misery”: Mufty-zada, Speaking of the Turks, 153. Ottoman police officers: Mufty-zada,
Speaking of the Turks, 151.
45 By Ziya’s estimate: Mufty-zada, Speaking of the Turks, 150. “[W]hat will happen”: Mufty-
zada, Speaking of the Turks, 136–37.

OCCUPATION
49 “Pera has three things”: nalcık with Quataert, eds., Economic and Social History of the
Ottoman Empire, 2:651.
50 “To catalogue completely”: Carus Wilson to father, July 19, 1920, Carus Wilson Papers, IWM.
51 Each Friday the selâmlık: Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back, 106. Among the city’s non-
Muslim residents: Hissar Players program for “Nathan the Wise,” Jan. 28, 1920, GUL, Engert
Papers, Box 2, Folder 13. The Annual Yuletide recital: Yuletide Recital Program, Dec. 21,
1919, GUL, Engert Papers, Box 2, Folder 13. Its sister institution: Program from
commencement exercises at Constantinople College, June 1920, GUL, Engert Papers, Box 2,
Folder 13.
52 On the same day the Allies: Mango, Atatürk, 195–96.
54 Members of foreign delegations: Musbah Haidar, Arabesque, 166. “The rich, having made
money”: Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, 415–16. General Milne was staying: Price, Extra-
Special Correspondent, 103. A host should not be: Mansel, Constantinople, 388.
55 When they met: Price, Extra-Special Correspondent, 104. “What I want to know”: Price, Extra-
Special Correspondent, 104. “There will be a lot”: Price, Extra-Special Correspondent, 104.
The British kept crucial information: Criss, Istanbul Under Allied Occupation, 71. It was not
until November 1920 that Allied authorities could agree on who among them was in overall
charge, with the command shared on a rotating basis, beginning with the British.
57 By early 1919: Mango, Atatürk, 204. Just before the First World War: Toprak, “La population,”
64–65.
60 Jews had lived in Istanbul: Rozen, History of the Jewish Community of Istanbul, 10–11. Over
the next century: Rozen, History of the Jewish Community in Istanbul, 51, 87.
61 Down a winding street: See Shaul, From Balat to Bat Yam, 37–50. In the modern era: Eldem,
“Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” in Eldem, Goffman, and Masters, The
Ottoman City between East and West, 151–52. In 1934, the municipal administration’s official
guidebook to the city listed 192 distinct mahalles west of the Bosphorus, plus many others
sited to the east. stanbul ehri Rehberi, 206–8. “Ni a fuego”: Shaul, From Balat to Bat Yam,
46.
62 As late as 1922: Johnson, ed., Constantinople To-Day, 263. That social position: Shaul, From
Balat to Bat Yam, 59. A popular joke: Shaul, From Balat to Bat Yam, 59.
63 Jews were likewise divided: For example, the greatest of the city’s expatriate Jewish banking
families—the Camondos—oversaw a financial empire that stretched across the breadth of
Europe, with its epicenter in the narrow passageways of Galata. Istanbullus walked past the
stately Camondo mansion, mounted the steep streets by walking up the art nouveau Camondo
steps, or went to schools and hospitals financed by Camondo philanthropy. Over the course of
the nineteenth century, the family left the cosmopolitan world that had allowed them to flourish
under the Ottomans and decamped to Paris. It was in France that their Jewishness came to
matter most, and in the most tragic of ways. During the Second World War, the last of the
family line—the aging matriarch Béatrice de Camondo and her two children, Fanny and
Bertrand—were packed onto trains by the Nazis and deported from France. They perished at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Had the family stayed in Istanbul, the Camondo line almost certainly
would have survived the war.
64 He spent his youth: Sperco, Turcs d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, 146. Allied officials had a clear
preference: Toynbee, Western Question, 32.
65 “The Hellenic and Christian character”: Telegram, Jan. 16/29, 1920, NARA, RG59, M353,
Reel 21. “The best Turkish homes”: Furlong to Woodrow Wilson, Mar. 23, 1920, p. 1, NARA,
RG59, M353, Reel 21.
66 British soldiers would scream: Edib, Turkish Ordeal, 5.

RESISTANCE
69 He had taken over the Pera Palace: Çelik, Tepeba ı, 174. According to the memoirist: Mufty-
zada, Speaking of the Turks, 152.
70 He was married: Pelt, Tobacco, Arms, and Politics, 178. I thank Mogens Pelt for additional
biographical details. The Hellenic presence: Mango, Atatürk, 198.
71 But as a brother-in-law: Finefrock, “Ataturk, Lloyd George and the Megali Idea,” D1049.
72 When news of Smyrna’s capture: Alexandris, Greek Minority of Istanbul, 59. In February 1920:
Mango, Atatürk, 266; Criss, Istanbul Under Allied Occupation, 9.
74 Crucially, it was the first: Mango, Atatürk, 269. They were prepared: Letter of Mar. 24, 1920,
Wethered Papers, IWM. See also Garner Papers, IWM. Local police and military: Edmonds,
Occupation of Constantinople, 12. Rumors of it had circulated: Dunn, World Alive, 285–86.
75 The Ankara assembly prescribed: Mango, Atatürk, 279.
76 “The United States entered”: Bristol to Secretary of State, May 7, 1920, pp. 1–2, NARA,
RG59, M353, Reel 21.
77 “It is perhaps no exaggeration”: Winston S. Churchill, The Aftermath, quoted in Fromkin, A
Peace to End All Peace, 432.
78 Newspapers in Athens: Finefrock, “Ataturk, Lloyd George and the Megali Idea,” D1049,
D1053. Greek nationalists had earlier urged Constantine, upon his coronation, to take the name
Constantine XII, thus linking his own dynasty with that of the Byzantines, even though the two
had no familial links at all.
79 “The retreat that started”: Quoted in Hasan Kayalı, “The Struggle for Independence,” in
Kasaba, ed., Cambridge History of Turkey, 138. The two forces were roughly equal: Mango,
Atatürk, 338.
80 “The atrocities perpetrated by the Greeks”: Second Section of the General Staff, Greek
Atrocities in Asia Minor, First Part, 1. Mobs ruled the streets: Mango, Atatürk, 345. A fire
broke out: Price, Extra-Special Correspondent, 128. Some 213,000 people: Mango, Atatürk,
346. Three quarters of the city: Mango, Atatürk, 345. “Foreigners are nervous”: Hemingway,
“British Can Save Constantinople,” Toronto Daily Star, Sept. 30, 1922, reproduced in
Hemingway, Dateline: Toronto, 211. Processions of Turkish Muslims: Fox-Pitt to mother, Oct.
7, 1922, Fox-Pitt Papers, IWM, Box 2, File 10. “
81 A fear of the future”: Carus Wilson to father, Oct. 17, 1922, Carus Wilson Papers, IWM. A
special commission: Criss, Istanbul Under Allied Occupation, 76. Possible death sentences:
“To the Civilian Population of Constantinople,” Greco-Turkish War Intelligence Reports,
1922–1923, IWM. Before the Smyrna offensive: “Comparative Table of Dispositions of
Ottoman Forces During the Main Phases of the Nationalist Movement,” Greco-Turkish War
Intelligence Reports, 1922–1923, IWM.
82 “I know somebody”: Fox-Pitt to mother, Oct. 7, 1922, Fox-Pitt Papers, IWM, Box 2, File 10.
“No humbler setting”: Price, Extra-Special Correspondent, 132–33.
83 “Life went on gaily”: Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back, 106.
84 “There was something for everyone”: Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back, 106. The hounds
ran at Maslak: Bridges, Alarms and Excursions, 274. A small bear: Bridges, Alarms and
Excursions, 274. “[T]he main preoccupation”: Price, Extra-Special Correspondent, 136. On
November 4: Memo from British Delegation, Istanbul, Nov. 22, 1922, NAUK, FO 839/2.
85 “Measures now being taken”: Henderson to Foreign Office, Nov. 24, 1922, p. 1, NAUK, FO
839/2. “It certainly came as a surprise”: Harington to Secretary of State for War, Oct. 1923, p.
4, NAUK, CAB 44/38. “Considering my life in danger”: Quoted in Harington, Tim Harington
Looks Back, 125, 129. My account of the sultan’s departure from the palace is based on
Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back, 130–31; and Fox-Pitt to mother, Nov. 10, 1922, Fox-
Pitt Papers, IWM, Box 2, File 10.
87 They were eventually reunited: Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back, 131.

MOSCOW ON THE BOSPHORUS

91 Despite the Unionists’ deportation: Ekmekçio lu, “Improvising Turkishness,” 10. They now
shared space: Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement, 90.
92 The US Navy set up: “Russian Refugees in Constantinople,” p. 2, Bristol Papers, LC, Box 74,
File “Russian Refugees.” Members of Britain’s Hampshire Regiment: Harington, Tim
Harington Looks Back, 101. Within weeks of his arrival: Harington to High Commissariat for
Refugees, League of Nations, July 14, 1923, p. 1, NAUK, FO 286/800. Colored chits were
issued: Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back, 100. By the end of 1920: Harington, Tim
Harington Looks Back, 101.
93 It was all “a salad”: Bridges, Alarms and Excursions, 279. They formed the so-called
Volunteer Army: Robinson, White Russian Army in Exile, 3.
94 From the railings, people watched: Strafford to mother, Mar. 31, 1920, Strafford Papers, IWM,
Box 2, Folder “Transcriptions of Original Letters.” Exceptions were made on board the
transports for two horses—Minoru and Aboyeur—that were famous as winners of the Derby in
1909 and 1913. They had been sold to Russian owners and were only discovered by British
soldiers during the evacuation. They ended up safely in Serbia. Bridges, Alarms and
Excursions, 292. “The things in Russia”: Tenner to Strafford, Nov. 14, 1920, Strafford Papers,
IWM, Box 2, Folder “Transcriptions of Original Letters.” Twenty-year-old Vladimir Nabokov:
Nabokov, Speak Memory, 176–77.
95 His nickname referenced: Robinson, White Russian Army in Exile, 13. On Wrangel’s estimate:
Wrangel, Memoirs, 307. It was soon joined: Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 307. As seagulls
wheeled: Wrangel, Memoirs, 320–26.
96 “The plight of those poor people”: Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back, 101. Some of the
larger ships: “Refugees from the Crimea,” Dec. 18, 1920, p. 1, NAUK, WO 32/5726. [The
vessels were] “like cattle ships”: Bristol to Secretary of State, Nov. 19, 1920, Bristol Papers,
LC, Box 73, File “Russia—Denikin and Wrangel Campaigns, January–December, 1920.”
When a small group of caiques: Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back, 101. Harrington
boarded: “Refugees from the Crimea,” p. 1. Counting Wrangel’s flotilla: “Russian Refugees in
Constantinople,” p. 1. Peter Kenez gives the figure of 145,693 people evacuated in the Wrangel
exodus. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 307. The harsh winter: Bristol to Secretary of State,
Nov. 15, 1920, Bristol Papers, LC, Box 73, File “Russia—Denikin and Wrangel Campaigns,
January–December, 1920.” Representatives from the Pera Palace: Konstantinopol’-Gallipoli,
34. The hotel owners seemed more than willing: Stone and Glenny, Other Russia, 152. Istanbul
was probably outfitted: Hobson to Rumbold, Mar. 26, 1923, p. 1, NAUK, FO 286/880.
97 Dead bodies: Hobson to Rumbold, Mar. 26, 1923, p. 2. Baroness Wrangel: “Refugees from the
Crimea,” p. 2. fox terrier, Jack: Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 79. Camps were also set up:
Harington to High Commissariat, July 14, 1923, p. 1, NAUK, FO 286/800. “I think that one
could say”: Chebyshev, Blizkaia dal’ in Konstantinopol’-Gallipoli, 127.
98 “Some seem to be better off”: Carus Wilson to father, July 19, 1922, Carus Wilson Papers,
IWM.
99 “Thus, on one beautiful springtime day”: “Constantinople,” p. 2, HIA, Shalikaskhvili Papers,
HIA. Massive sheets of paper: “Constantinople,” p. 4.
100 Music was provided: “Constantinople,” pp. 7–13. Koki Dadiani and Niko Nizharadze:
“Constantinople,” p. 17. Located in a Pera side street: “Constantinople,” p. 20. The Gypsy
guitarist Sasha Makaraov: “Constantinople,” p. 22–24.
101 Food was still cheap: “Constantinople,” p. 29. Other young men: “Constantinople,” p. 35.
102 They continually fed: Bristol to Secretary of State, Aug. 22, 1921, NARA, RG59, M340, Reel
7. Their mother and sister: “Constantinople,” pp. 42–43. Secondhand shops: Bumgardner,
Undaunted Exiles, 56. A twelve-piece balalaika band: Memoir of George Calverley, p. 36,
Calverley Papers, IWM. A professor of mathematics: Stone and Glenny, Russia Abroad, 231.
103 From Graveyard Street: Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 142. Other people relied:
Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 148–58. The Muslim memoirist Ziya Bey recalled: Mufty-zada,
Speaking of the Turks, 124.
104 “Constantinople was a completely Russian city”: Giorgii Fedorov, “Puteshestvie bez
sentimentov,” in Konstantinopol’-Gallipoli, 273.
105 “I’m buying and selling”: A. Slobodskoi, “Sredi emigratsii,” in Konstantinopol’-Gallipoli, 80.
At the Grand Cercle Moscovite: Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 117–29. “It is the best food”:
Fox-Pitt to mother, Oct. 19, 1922, Fox-Pitt Papers, IWM, Box 2, File 10. Loose papers lay in
stacks: Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 42–44, 53.
106 Friends called him: Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 29. “Whittemore is never in a place”:
Prichard to Gardner, July 5, 1924, Thomas Whittemore Papers, DO-ICFA, Box 11, Folder 161:
“Materials from Isabella Stewart-Gardner Related to T.W.” (copy of letter from the Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, via Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).
107 Cavalrymen from the Imperial Guards: Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 172–73. Ladies were
assigned: Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 189–202.
108 Young Russian men were given bunks: Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 54–55. After weeks of
waiting: Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 55–56.
109 By the autumn of 1921: Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 20–25. “[H]aving acquired useful
learning”: Wrangel to Whittemore, Nov. 24, 1923, CERYE, Box 1, File 32. Shortly before he
gave the order: Wrangel, Memoirs, 311. A little belt-tightening: “Constantinople,” pp. 4–5.
110 “If the . . . martyrs”: Tolstoy, “Compensations of Poverty,” 308.

KONSTANTINOUPOLIS
113 After the end of the Russian civil war: Gatrell, Whole Empire Walking, 193. No accurate figures
exist for the total number of Russian refugees, with estimates ranging from 500,000 to 3
million. See Smith, Former People, 208. The city had shrunk: Toprak, “La population,” 70.
Letters about individual cases: See Bristol Papers, LC, Box 74, File “Russian Refugees.”
115 Portraits of Mustafa Kemal: Fox-Pitt to mother, June 25, 1923, Fox-Pitt Papers, IWM, Box 2,
File 10. “It is a humiliating business”: Fox-Pitt to father, June 7, 1923, Fox-Pitt Papers, IWM,
Box 2, File 10. There were still nearly 15,000: Printed Shipping Programme for the Withdrawal
of British Troops from Turkey, Aug. 1923, IWM. “It was a wonderful ‘send off’”: Harington,
Tim Harington Looks Back, 139.
116 By one estimate: Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 197.
117 Wrangel’s Volunteer Army had spent: Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 96–97.
118 “[A]nything more like a lunatic asylum”: Christie, Autobiography, 354. Just before the
foundation: Criss, Istanbul Under Allied Occupation, 46–48.
119 In response, some 50,000 non-Muslims: Alexandris, Greek Minority of Istanbul, 82, 96. Fed up
with the internal fighting: Alexandris, Greek Minority of Istanbul, 146–49. In 1924, for
example, secessionists: Alexandris, Greek Minority of Istanbul, 151–57.
120 If allowed to remain, Greeks would be “the means”: Quoted in Alexandris, Greek Minority of
Istanbul, 85.
121 “[T]oday thousands of once-prosperous people”: “Exchange of Population Between Greece
and Turkey,” Advocate of Peace Through Justice 88, no. 5 (May 1926): 276.
122 “There appeared to be no doubt”: Nansen, Armenia and the Near East, 25.
124 At the time, there were perhaps 40,000: Alexandris, Greek Minority of Istanbul, 117. On the
legal structure enabling the seizure of minority-owned assets, see Akçam and Kurt, Kanunların
Ruhu. On the eve of the Allied occupation, Istanbul’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry: See
Journal de la Chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Constantinople, June 1918 and Feb.
1921. Two thirds of the Greek barristers: On the shifting presence of Greeks in the economy,
see Alexandris, Greek Minority of Istanbul, 107–12.
125 The renunciations came only after: For a detailed treatment of these renunciations, see Bristol
to Secretary of State, Nov. 3, 1926, and Nov. 24, 1926, NARA, RG59, M353, Reel 21. In 1923,
the Pera Palace: Çelik, Tepeba ı, 174–75. However, four years later: Alexandris, Greek
Minority of Istanbul, 120.
126 For most of the 1920s: See NARA, RG59, M353, Reel 76. In 1934, a new law: Ekmekçio lu,
“Improvising Turkishness,” 166–69. The former Greek patriarch, Meletios: Quoted in
Alexandris, Greek Minority of Istanbul, 118, in the original French as “Bolchevico-
Communisme de Moscou.”
127 “I stood on the dusty”: Hemingway, “Constantinople, Dirty White, Not Glistening and
Sinister,” Toronto Daily Star, Oct. 18, 1922, in Hemingway, Dateline: Toronto, 229. He
returned with a pistol: “Londra Oteli Cinayeti,” Cumhuriyet, Sept. 9, 1929.
128 As proprietor: Pelt, Tobacco, Arms, and Politics, 78–79. “He was renowned”: Frank Gervasi,
“Devil Man,” Collier’s, June 8, 1940: 17. He was simply “the most powerful man”: Pelt,
Tobacco, Arms, and Politics, 81. In the summer of 1927: For property records, see Çelik,
Tepeba ı, 174–75. I am grateful to Meral Muhayye for sharing family stories and memories of
Misbah Muhayye in an interview in Istanbul, July 18, 2013.
129 Izmir, the former Smyrna: Finkel, Osman’s Dream, 547.
130 The flood of furniture: Ravndal to State, Nov. 26, 1923, pp. 4, 6, NARA, RG59, M353, Reel
49. Turkey as a whole: Finkel, Osman’s Dream, 547.

“THE POST-WAR WORLD WAS JAZZING”

136 “The man who raises a thirst”: Hemingway, “Hamid Bey,” Toronto Daily Star, Oct. 9, 1922, in
Hemingway, Dateline: Toronto, 220. “Beauty and wit”: Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 132.
Small beer halls: Carus Wilson to father, July 19, 1922, Carus Wilson Papers, IWM. Tom’s
Lancashire Bar: See the advertisements in Orient News, July 12, 1919. The facility was able to
accommodate: Greer, Glories of Greece, 319–20. The Pera Palace offered dinner: See the
advertisement in Le Courier de Turquie, Apr. 1, 1919. The bar had been opened: Adil,
Gardenbar Geceleri, 7–8.
137 A musical matinee was available: See the advertisement in Le Courier de Turquie, Apr. 1,
1919. Boxing matches were staged: Adil, Gardenbar Geceleri, 25–27. Boutnikoff’s Symphony
Orchestra: Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 141. “Artists cannot live in Russia”: Quoted in
Bumgardner, Undaunted Exiles, 143. At the Garden Bar, the memoirist Ziya Bey reported:
Mufty-zada, Speaking of the Turks, 152.
138 The whole neighborhood was like the slums: Gritchenko, Deux ans à Constantinople, 278–79.
Princesses of the imperial household: Musbah Haidar, Arabesque, 98–100. “At Petit Champs
[sic] you could watch”: Dunn, World Alive, 287.
140 Known by a variety of names: See Sperco, Turcs d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, 143; Mufty-zada,
Speaking of the Turks, 159; Orient News, July 13, July 18, and July 29, 1919. For biographical
details on Thomas, I am indebted to Vladimir Alexandrov’s painstaking research in his
biography The Black Russian. In the middle of the 1920s: Sperco, Turcs d’hier et
d’aujourd’hui, 143. “Never before were Pera and Galata”: Mufty-zada, Speaking of the Turks,
154. “[T]he only thing which this international crowd”: Mufty-zada, Speaking of the Turks,
154. When a group of American tourists: Farson, Way of a Transgressor, 470.
141 Other clubs were popping up: Sperco, Turcs d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, 140. “The post-war world
was jazzing”: W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez, “Life is Less Hectic in Constantinople,” New York
Times, July 8. 1928. It was all a sad affair: Sperco, Turcs d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, 144. A
mysterious group: Adil, Gardenbar Geceleri, 20–23.
142 Maxim’s dancing instructors: Sperco, Turcs d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, 143–44. In 1926,
municipal authorities issued: “Review of the Turkish Press,” Nov. 7–20, 1926, p. 9, NARA,
RG59, M353, Reel 75. On the “Charleston debate” in Istanbul, see Woodall, “Sensing the
City,” chapter 4. “They changed the shape”: Urgan, Bir Dinozorun Anıları, 155. According to
the seventeenth-century traveler: DBIA, 5:434. Anyone “who can fry three stinky fish”:
“Meyhaneler Ço alıyor,” Cumhuriyet, Jan. 12, 1939.
143 “My foot takes no step”: Evliya Çelebi, An Ottoman Traveller, 20–21.
144 About eight percent: Shaw, “Population of Istanbul,” 269. Given the need for food: For two
examples of memoirs that discuss local foodways, in this case in the Be ikta and Balat
neighborhoods, see Mintzuri, stanbul Anıları, and Shaul, From Balat to Bat Yam. “Narcotic
stimulants such as Indian hemp”: Balkanstaaten und Konstantinopel, 222.
145 Turkey was not a signatory: Russell, Egyptian Service, 239–40. The white powder was so easily
concealable: Woodall, “Sensing the City,” 67–79.
146 “[D]elete forever that misunderstood word”: Ellison, An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem,
17. “All that I have known”: Goodrich-Freer, Things Seen in Constantinople, 19.
147 In the late 1920s, as many as fifty: “Review of the Turkish Press,” June 28–July 11, 1928, p.
17, NARA, RG59, M353, Reel 76. One of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s eunuchs: Sperco, Turcs
d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, 122. Even Mustafa Kemal: Mango, Atatürk, 441. As part of the
empire’s modernizing reforms: See Wyers, “Wicked” Istanbul. I thank Wyers for my
understanding of changes to Istanbul’s sex trade from the Ottoman era through the early
republican period. One story—apparently true: Duke, Passport to Paris, 71.
148 At the YMCA: Commanding Officer to Senior US Naval Officer, Turkey, Feb. 9, 1919, Bristol
Papers, LC, Box 1, File “February 1919.” Venereal disease was “rampant”: “British Forces in
Turkey, Commander-in-Chief’s Despatch, Period 1920–1923,” p. 8, NAUK, CAB 44/38; and
Harington to High Commissariat for Refugees, League of Nations, July 14, 1923, p. 2, NAUK,
FO 286/800. A contemporary survey revealed: Johnson, ed., Constantinople To-Day, 356–57.
In another survey, police counted: Quoted in Bali, Jews and Prostitution, 27.
149 The majority of both proprietors and prostitutes: Johnson, ed., Constantinople To-Day, 356–57.
A two-week snapshot: Medical Officer to Senior US Naval Officer Present in Turkey, Feb. 25,
1919, Bristol Papers, LC, Box 1, File “February 1919.” Fortunately, there was a surfeit: See
the advertisements in Le Journal d’Orient, May 24, May 25, June 1, June 7, 1919. Since the
bar run by the sometime madame: Dunn, World Alive, 288, 420.
150 “Intoxicated sailors rock from side to side”: Mufty-zada, Speaking of the Turks, 151–52. Even
under the Ottomans, “white slavers”: Bali, Jews and Prostitution, 58–62.
151 The writer Fikret Adil dated the decline: Adil, Gardenbar Geceleri, 31–32. “Most of the people
in our country”: Quoted in Wyers, “Wicked” Istanbul, 137.

“THE PAST IS A WOUND IN MY HEART”

155 The first automobile: Çelik, Remaking of Istanbul, 103. “At Pera, where I live”: Bibesco, Eight
Paradises, 225–27.
156 “They exasperate and deafen”: “The Street Hogs,” Orient News, June 19, 1919. Especially
popular during Ramadan: Bali, Turkish Cinema, 28. “There are a lot of ‘movie’ shows”: Fox-
Pitt to mother, Oct. 14, 1922, Fox-Pitt Papers, IWM, Box 2, File 10. Istanbullus could see
French: “‘Glorya’ Açıldı,” Cumhuriyet, Nov. 7, 1930.
157 By the beginning of that decade: Bali, Turkish Cinema, 34–43. For the first time, Istanbullus:
Bali, Turkish Cinema, 21. Tickets were reasonably expensive: Bali, Turkish Cinema, 44.
158 A detailed survey of first-run films: The report, by Eugene M. Hinkle, is reproduced in Bali,
Turkish Cinema. The percentages are on p. 76. A widely reported legal case: Grew to Secretary
of State, Mar. 28 and Apr. 19, 1928, NARA, RG59, M353, Reel 50.
159 After painstaking research: Bali, Turkish Cinema, 81. Greta Garbo and Betty Blythe: Bali,
Turkish Cinema, 66. When Josephine Baker made a short personal appearance: “Jozefin
Beyker,” Cumhuriyet, Jan. 20, 1934; and “Jozefin Beykerle Mülakat,” Cumhuriyet, Jan. 20,
1934.
160 The same report: Bali, Turkish Cinema, 81. “For a city of its size”: Ravndal to State, Nov. 26,
1923, p. 2, NARA, RG59, M353, Reel 49. By the early 1920s, they could be had: Ravndal to
State, Nov. 26, 1923. Throughout the decade, importers brought: Ravndal to State, Nov. 26,
1923, p. 8. Barely had a dance tune: Ravndal to State, Nov. 26, 1923, p. 3.
162 But in the early Turkish Republic: I am grateful to Harold Hagopian for his insights into the
music of the period, as well as the liner notes to his rereleases of the music of these performers
on his Traditional Crossroads label.
164 “My soul, that’s enough now”: Eskenazi’s version of “Gazel Nihavent” is available on the
album Rembetika: A k, Gurbet, Hapis, ve Tekke arkıları (Kalan Müzik, 2007).
166 In 1933, when the Austrian writer Franz Werfel: “ stanbul Ermenilerinin F. Werfele
mukabelesi,” Cumhuriyet, Dec. 16, 1935.
171 The company’s local affiliate: Akçura, Gramofon Ça ı, 29–30.
172 During the Allied occupation, it was reasonably safe: Ravndal to State, Nov. 26, 1923, p. 4.
“The [manufacturing] process is a secret one”: Ravndal to State, Nov. 26, 1923, p. 4. There
the firm re-created: See the family’s historical timeline at www.zildjian.com.
173 The Erlegün brothers were too young: On the life and career of Ahmet Ertegün, see Greenfield,
The Last Sultan.
175 “[A] younger generation that knew not Thomas”: Tinckom-Fernandez, “Life is Less Hectic.”

MODERN TIMES
179 Never before had all Istanbullus: Sperco, L’Orient qui s’éteint, 131–32. As the Guide Bleu
explained: De Paris à Constantinople, 185.
181 Little boys threw rocks: Orga, Portrait of a Turkish Family, 223. Since the regulation did not
affect: “Review of the Turkish Press,” Dec. 19, 1926–Jan. 1, 1927, p. 17, NARA, RG59, M353,
Reel 75. The same year, drinking liquor: “Review of the Turkish Press,” Aug. 15–28, 1926, p.
24, and Dec. 19, 1926–Jan. 1, 1927, p. 15, NARA, RG59, M353, Reel 75.
184 As a diplomatic observer noted: Henderson to Vansittart, Oct. 31, 1923, NAUK, FO 794/10, ff.
5–6.
185 Close to seven hundred: Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity, 253. The
reevaluation of the early Kemalist period is now a major theme among historians of Turkey.
The leading figure in this reassessment has been Erik J. Zürcher, whose works are cited in the
bibliography. Small demonstrations or individual acts: On the elevation of small affairs into
major events, see the corrective in Brockett, “Collective Action.” Communal violence that fell
short: Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 61–70; see also Bali, 1934 Trakya
Olayları.
186 Still, eighteen armed uprisings: Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity, 251. Even
then, the turbaned pious: Ostrorog, Angora Reform, 74.
189 Five of the other largest mosques: “6 Camide Türkçe Kur’an,” Cumhuriyet, Jan. 29, 1932; and
“Türkçe Kur’anla Mukabele,” Cumhuriyet, Jan. 30, 1932. On the Night of Power: “70 Bin Ki
inin tirak Etti i Dini Merasim,” Cumhuriyet, Feb. 4, 1932. In the new republic, even God:
The ban on the Arabic-language call to prayer, although irregularly enforced, continued until
1950. See Azak, “Secularism in Turkey.” He arrived for the first time: Mango, Atatürk, 460–
61.
192 The Turkish Republic, by contrast: Pallis, “Population of Turkey,” 441. “I awoke . . . to an
oppressive silence”: Richardson to Grew, Oct. 29, 1927, p. 1, NARA, RG59, M353, Reel 57.
At precisely 10:15 p.m.: Grew to Secretary of State, Nov. 8, 1927, pp. 1–2, with the attached
“Communiqué of the Stamboul Vilayet Indicating the Manner in which the Census Shall Take
Place on Friday, October 28, 1927;” and Richardson to Grew, Oct. 29, 1927, all at NARA,
RG59, M353, Reel 57.
193 Previous estimates had put Turkey’s population: Pallis, “Population of Turkey,” 440–41. The
city was smaller than it had been: evket Pamuk, “Economic Change in Twentieth-Century
Turkey: Is the Glass More than Half Full?” in Kasaba, ed., Cambridge History of Turkey, 275.
Only two cities had more than a hundred thousand: Türkiye statistik Yıllı ı: 1950, 41. As the
newspaper Milliyet: Grew to Secretary of State, Nov. 8, 1927, p. 5.
194 In greater Istanbul, the census counted: Shaw, Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish
Republic, 287.
195 Prost’s plan called for cutting highways: For details, see Gül, Emergence of Modern Istanbul,
98–106; F. Cânâ Bilsel, “Henri Prost’s Planning Works in Istanbul (1936–1951): Transforming
the Structure of a City through Master Plans and Urban Operations,” and idem, “European Side
of Istanbul Master Plan, 1937,” both in mparatorluk Ba kentinden, 101–65, 245–76.
196 When John Dos Passos went to a cabaret: Dos Passos, Orient Express, in Travel Books and
Other Writings, 136. Prost probably would have cringed: It was no small irony that the
salvation of Gezi Park, which was slated to be replaced by a reconstruction of the old barracks,
became the inspiration for widespread antigovernment demonstrations in the summer of 2013.
The Turkish government insisted its plan to remodel the park was in fact about historic
restoration, reaching back beyond Prost to an authentic Ottoman past. The public saw it as
rampant destruction.
197 “Presenting the Turkish nation”: Quoted in “Review of the Turkish Press,” Mar. 7–20, 1929, p.
23, NARA, RG59, M353, Reel 77.

BEYOND THE VEIL

201 “The shape of social life changed”: Urgan, Bir Dinozorun Anıları, 155. Unlike the fez for men:
Mango, Atatürk, 434–35. Window screens: “Kafesler Kaldırılacak,” Cumhuriyet, Nov. 5, 1930.
202 The types and sizes of veils: Ekrem, Everyday Life in Istanbul, 98. Public harassment was
made: “Kadınlara Laf Atanlar Derhal Tevkif Edilecek,” Cumhuriyet, Sept. 10, 1929. Four
years later, the franchise: Ayten Sezer, “Türkiye’deki lk Kadın Milletvekilleri ve Meclis’teki
Çalı maları,” unpublished paper, Hacettepe University, available at
www.ait.hacettepe.edu.tr/akademik/arsiv/kadin.htm#_ftn21. The first Muslim female lawyer:
“Review of the Turkish Press,” Nov. 29–Dec. 12, 1928, p. 23, NARA, RG59, M353, Reel 77.
The first surgeon . . . first pharmacist: “Review of the Turkish Press,” Mar. 5–18, 1931, p. 9,
NARA, RG59, M1224, Reel 20; and “Review of the Turkish Press,” Apr. 16–29, 1931, p. 9,
NARA, RG59, M1224, Reel 20. The first wrestler: “Digest of the Turkish Press,” Aug. 21–
Sept. 24, 1932, p. 20, NARA, RG59, M1224, Reel 21.
203 The first female tramway conductors: “Tramvaylarda Kadın Biletçiler e Ba ladı,”
Cumhuriyet, Apr. 16, 1941. Even in the last days of the sultans: See Duben and Behar, Istanbul
Households, chapters 5 and 6. By 1920, more than a third: Yavuz Köse, “Vertical Bazaars of
Modernity: Western Department Stores and Their Staff in Istanbul (1889–1921),” in Atabaki
and Brockett, eds., Ottoman and Republican Turkish Labour History, 102. Tramcars
accommodated both genders: “Constantinople,” p. 37, Shalikashvili Papers, HIA.
204 Mass rallies in 1919 and 1920: Ye im Arat, “Contestation and Collaboration: Women’s
Struggles for Empowerment in Turkey,” in Kasaba, ed., Cambridge History of Turkey, 391. By
the time of the 1927 census: Shorter, “Population of Turkey,” 431, 433fn. “The duty of Turkish
Women’s Societies”: Quoted in Crosby to Secretary of State, July 18, 1927, p. 4, NARA, RG59,
M353, Reel 22.
206 She remained one of the principle expounders: On Afet nan, see Ye im Arat, “Nation Building
and Feminism in Early Republican Turkey,” in Kerslake, Öktem, and Robins, eds., Turkey’s
Engagement with Modernity, 38–51. The family mansion, covered in wisteria: Edib, Memoirs,
3.
207 Flouting Ottoman fashion: Edib, Memoirs, 23. She was slight and frail: Woods, Spunyarn,
2:66. Once she was old enough to begin: Edib, Memoirs, 149.
208 “No little Circassian slave”: Edib, Memoirs, 206.
209 “I became a writer”: Edib, Memoirs, 260. It was the first time in her life: Edib, Memoirs, 275.
210 He was short and round: Edib, Memoirs, 217. “I felt stupefied”: Edib, Turkish Ordeal, 3. Small
and pale: Biographical sketch of Adnan Bey in Dolbeare to Secretary of State, Jan. 3, 1923, p.
1, NARA, RG59, M353, Reel 21.
211 In 1919, Halide later recalled: Edib, Turkish Ordeal, 23. That summer, she was invited: Edib,
Turkish Ordeal, 31. “Brethren and sons, listen to me”: Edib, Turkish Ordeal, 33fn.
212 Mustafa Kemal met her: Edib, Turkish Ordeal, 127. “I feasted my eyes on the sea”: Edib,
Turkish Ordeal, 381.
213 It had been two years: Edib, Turkish Ordeal, 404. “Dr. Adnan Bey is one of the leaders”:
Dolbeare to Secretary of State, Jan. 3, 1923, p. 1. “I have seen, I have gone through”: Edib,
Memoirs, 275–76.
214 “There will be only the sum total”: Edib, Turkish Ordeal, 407.
215 History and culture, she said, had formed the Turks: Edib, Turkey Faces West, 209–10.
216 “It is after I have loved my own people”: Edib, Memoirs, 326. “Women,” she was fond of
saying: Edib, Conflict of East and West in Turkey, 235.

LIVING LIKE A SQUIRREL

219 “Girl,” she said: Hikmet, Human Landscapes, 72.
221 As a diplomatic report noted in 1930: “Review of the Turkish Press,” Mar. 19–Apr. 16, 1930, p.
16, NARA, RG59, M1224, Reel 20. He was born perhaps in 1902: I have relied on two
important studies—Blasing, Nâzım Hikmet, and Göksu and Timms, Romantic Communist—for
biographical details.
223 Relations between Mustafa Kemal’s nationalists and the Bolsheviks: Bristol to Secretary of
State, Aug. 22, 1921, NARA, RG59, M340, Reel 7. With so many penniless Russian-speakers:
Dunn, World Alive, 288. Allied police even detained Russians: N. N. Chebyshev, “Blizkaia
Dal’,” in Konstantinopol’-Gallipoli, 142–43. According to American intelligence sources:
Bristol to Secretary of State, July 21, 1926, p. 3, NARA, RG59, M340, Reel 8.
224 They eventually took for granted: See Hirst, “Anti-Westernism,” for a discussion of the
interactions between the two systems in this period.
225 A Turkish Communist Party was established: Mango, Atatürk, 293.
226 Right-wing Unionists were blamed: Mango, Atatürk, 303–4. In Moscow he read Marx: Blasing,
Nâzım Hikmet, 18.
227 He may have invented: Blasing, Nâzım Hikmet, 52. He was arrested and imprisoned at the
border: Blasing, Nâzım Hikmet, 78.
229 The record sold out: Blasing, Nâzım Hikmet, 93.
231 “Living is no laughing matter”: “On Living,” in Hikmet, Poems of Nâzim Hikmet, 132. “You
are a field”: “You,” in Hikmet, Poems of Nazim Hikmet, 155.
232 “Some people know all about plants”: “Autobiography,” in Hikmet, Poems of Nazim Hikmet,
259. He blew in on a winter gale: Trotsky, My Life, 547.

ISLAND LIFE
235 “Dear Sir”: Trotsky, My Life, 565–66. It was one of the coldest winters: “Review of the
Turkish Press,” Feb. 21–Mar. 6, 1929, p. 21, NARA, RG59, M353, Reel 77; “Dün Kar Tipisi
ehrin Umumi Hayatını Durdurdu,” Cumhuriyet, Feb. 3, 1929; “Fırtına stanbulu Kastı
Kavurdu!” Cumhuriyet, Feb. 4, 1929; “Kar Afeti Bugün De Devam Edecek,” Cumhuriyet, Feb.
5, 1929. Trotsky and his wife: Trotsky, My Life, 566.
236 On Stalin’s orders: The main Soviet security service was known by a succession of names,
from the Cheka, or Emergency Commission, to the KGB, or State Security Committee. The
service carried the name OGPU, or Unified State Political Administration, throughout much of
the 1920s and early 1930s. Yakov Minsky: Agabekov, OGPU, 225–26.
237 He had no desire to stay: “Troçki Anlatıyor,” Cumhuriyet, Mar. 20, 1929. Minsky, the Soviet
secret police agent: Van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile, 45. Exasperated, Minsky finally
booted: Agabekov, OGPU, 226. After another move: Van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile, 6.
238 For years afterward: Neave, Twenty-Six Years on the Bosphorus, 271.
239 “The waves of the Sea of Marmara”: Serge and Trotsky, Life and Death of Leon Trotsky, 164.
A fire, probably caused: Van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile, 25. Trotsky reportedly sued:
“Troçki’nin Ziyanı,” Cumhuriyet, Mar. 22, 1931. The family was once again: Van Heijenoort,
With Trotsky in Exile, 6–7. He routinely carried: Van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile, 18. Like
a crotchety old man: Author’s interview with Fıstık Ahmet Tanrıverdi, Büyükada, Aug. 16,
2012. Trotsky hired local guards: Tanrıverdi interview. When he happened to find: Van
Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile, 20.
240 He also had the habit: Van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile, 17. The two could be seen: Van
Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile, 12. Trotsky and Haralambos would call out: “Farewell to
Prinkipo,” in Trotsky, Leon Trotsky Speaks, 273. “Ah, Comrade Gérard!”: Quoted in
Rosenthal, Avocat de Trotsky, 96. Once, a small girl: Urgan, Bir Dinozorun Anıları, 155–56.
He started writing his autobiography: Serge and Trotsky, Life and Death of Leon Trotsky, 165.
Editorials and political essays: Churchill, Great Contemporaries, 198.
241 Autograph collectors kindly asked: “Farewell to Prinkipo,” in Trotsky, Leon Trotsky Speaks,
271. “Here on this island”: Quoted in Deutscher, Prophet Outcast, 216.
242 “He seems too small”: Eastman, Great Companions, 154. The American edition: Deutscher,
Prophet Outcast, 27. But Trotsky was spending: Eastman, Great Companions, 158–59; Serge
and Trotsky, Life and Death of Leon Trotsky, 189. To economize, he kept little: Rosenthal,
Avocat de Trotsky, 72. “We seemed to camp”: Van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile, 11. During
Eastman’s visit: Eastman, Great Companions, 158–59.
243 Trotsky had “followers”: Eastman, Heroes I Have Known, 248. “I do not measure”: Trotsky,
My Life, 581–82. Enemies, he would say routinely: Van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile, 42.
The British socialists: Trotsky, My Life, 577.
244 The years in Istanbul had been: Deutscher, Prophet Outcast, 217. “Our house is already almost
empty”: “Farewell to Prinkipo,” in Trotsky, Leon Trotsky Speaks, 272. His hair had gone white:
Van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile, 41. Heart trouble and gout: Memorandum, Mar. 19,
1930, LTEP, Item 15742. “The bearer of this passport”: Passports of Lev Sedof and Latalya
Sedov, LTEP, Item 15784. At the beginning of the 1920s: Dos Passos, Orient Express, in Travel
Books and Other Writings, 135.
245 A certain Kuznetsov: Robert Imbrie, “Memorandum of Bolshevik Activities at
Constantinople,” Feb. 1921, p. 1, NARA, RG59, M353, Reel 20. “The Bosphorus was a
dumping ground”: Dunn, World Alive, 282. Then came the YMCA: Dunn, World Alive, 282.
246 Settling in Istanbul: Trotsky, My Life, 567. “The network of spies”: Agabekov, OGPU, 208.
Agabekov claimed that virtually all: Agabekov, OGPU, 208. The Soviets were careful to
balance: Agabekov, OGPU, 211–13. Agents were proud of their roles: Nikolai Khokhlov, In
the Name of Conscience: The Testament of a Soviet Secret Agent, quoted in Wilmers, The
Eitingons, 149.
247 Agabekov himself had the dubious honor: Agabekov, OGPU, 247–48; Sudoplatov, Special
Tasks, 47–48; Brook-Shepherd, Storm Petrels, 107–51. Agabekov was reportedly assassinated
by Soviet agents in 1937 or 1938, either on the border between France and Spain or in Paris.
His body was never found. Streater died in 1971 in New York, where she had worked as a
secretary at the United Nations. Less than a year before: Agabekov, OGPU, 207. Even today it
is difficult to establish: Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 33–36. His travel documents identified him:
Agabekov, OGPU, 207. His superiors gave him: Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 31. In many ways
Eitingon had: I have taken family details about Leonid Eitingon and his relatives from
Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, especially chapter 2, and Wilmers, The Eitingons.
249 In 1929, when he was transferred: Agabekov, OGPU, 208. As chief “legal” OGPU officer in
Istanbul, Eitingon would have had ultimate operational command over the Trotsky case, even if
day-to-day operations might have been handled by the considerable “illegal” OGPU presence
in the city. “Legals” were officers who came with legitimate diplomatic cover and were
generally well known to the Turkish authorities. “Illegals” were those who operated in secret as
businessmen, journalists, or other unofficial roles. He briefly served as case officer:
Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 34. During the Spanish Civil War: Patenaude, Trotsky, 206. I have
taken Caridad Mercader’s biographical details from Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 70. On the
relationship with Eitingon, see Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and the Shield.
250 His only real advantage: On the code name as Eitingon’s idea, see Sudoplatov, Special Tasks,
69. A house alarm was sounding: Trotsky’s final hours have been narrated by a variety of
sources, but for overviews see Serge and Trotsky, Life and Death of Leon Trotsky, 266–70;
Deutscher, Prophet Outcast, 483–509; and Patenaude, Trotsky, 279–92.
251 For his service: Patenaude, Trotsky, 294.
252 “There is one small guaranteed way”: Quoted in Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 36.

QUEEN
256 “For four or five years now”: “Ba Muharririmiz Yunus Nadi Bey’in Bir Belçika Gazetesinde
nti ar Eden Beyanatı,” Cumhuriyet, Oct. 7, 1928. “Why Wouldn’t We Do”: “Aynı eyi biz niçin
yapmayalım?” Cumhuriyet, Feb. 4, 1929. The newspaper soon announced: “En Güzel Türk
Kadını,” Cumhuriyet, Feb. 5, 1929. It would be no different: “Güzellik Müsabakamız,”
Cumhuriyet, Feb. 14, 1929.
257 There would be no swimsuit element: “En Güzel Türk Kızı Kimdir Acaba?” Cumhuriyet, Feb.
15, 1929. Prostitutes were expressly forbidden: “Her Genç Kız Müsabakamıza tirak Edebilir,”
Cumhuriyet, Feb. 10, 1929. The recent winner of a European contest: “Türkiye’nin En Güzel
Kızı Olmak stemez Misiniz?” Cumhuriyet, Feb. 17, 1929. A jury of fifty notables: “Türkiye
Güzellik Kraliçesi,” Cumhuriyet, Sept. 2, 1929. By September 3, the results were in: “1929
Türkiye Güzellik Kraliçesi ntihap Edildi,” Cumhuriyet, Sept. 3, 1929.
258 Beginning in 1930, twenty finalists: “Güzellik Balosu,” Cumhuriyet, Jan. 8, 1930. “Beauty Is
Not Something”: “Güzellik Ayıp Bir ey De ildir,” Cumhuriyet, Jan. 13, 1930. When judges
selected: “Review of the Turkish Press,” Feb. 5–18, 1931, p. 11, NARA, RG59, M1224, Reel
20. The title of Miss Europe: “Mis Avrupa!” Cumhuriyet, Feb. 7, 1930.
259 Keriman was only ten: I am grateful to Ece Sarpyener and Ay e Torfilli, the daughter and
granddaughter of Keriman Halis, for sharing details of her biography and ancestry, along with a
home movie, in an interview in Istanbul, Oct. 9, 2012.
262 Twenty thousand Istanbullus: “20 Bin Ki i Dün Gece Kraliçeyi Alkı ladı,” Cumhuriyet, July 8,
1932. Along the way, crowds gathered: “Kraliçe Geçerken,” Cumhuriyet, July 14, 1932. In the
ensuing days, nearly thirty thousand: “Dünya Güzeli 30,000’e Yakın Telgraf Aldı,”
Cumhuriyet, Aug. 2, 1932. Yunus Nadi was summoned: “Gazi Hz. Ba muharririmize Dedi Ki:
‘Türk Milleti Bu Güzel Çocu unu, üphesiz, Samimiyetle Tebrik Eder,’” Cumhuriyet, Aug. 3,
1932. smet Pasha, the old war hero: “Digest of the Turkish Press,” July 24–Aug. 6, 1932, pp.
6–7, NARA, RG59, M1224, Reel 21. Cumhuriyet, never missing an opportunity: “Dünyayı
Fetheden Türk Kızı!” Cumhuriyet, Aug. 4, 1932.
263 She appeared in Berlin and Chicago: “Digest of the Turkish Press,” Feb. 5–18, 1933, p. 17,
NARA, RG59, M1224, Reel 21. At one gala dinner: “Digest of the Turkish Press,” Aug. 7–20,
1932, p. 6, NARA, RG59, M1224, Reel 21. When Istanbul’s commuters drove along: “Digest
of the Turkish Press,” Aug. 7–20, 1932, p. 4.

HOLY WISDOM
267 “If the Hellenes Are Doing It”: “Yunanlılar Yapıyor, Biz Neden Yapmıyalım?” Cumhuriyet,
Feb. 19, 1929.
268 “So the church has become”: Procopius, Buildings, in Procopius, 1.1.27. “Oh, Solomon”:
Quoted in Kinross, Europa Minor, 141.
269 According to tradition, a delegation of Slavs: Quoted in Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 14.
270 From that day, he ordered: Runciman, Fall of Constantinople, 147–49.
271 The Fossatis had also been the first to remove: Teteriatnikov, Mosaics of Hagia Sophia, 3.
272 He posed for noirish studio shots: Whittemore Papers, DO-ICFA, Box 9, Folder 144. Short and
thin-framed: Whittemore Papers, DO-ICFA, Box 9, Folder 151; Downes, Scarlet Thread, 39.
He could appear at the oddest of moments: “Yeats and Heifetz Sailing on Europa,” New York
Times, Dec. 27, 1932; Downes, Scarlet Thread, 39. Prichard may have been: Whittemore
probably also knew Gertrude Stein from her time as a student at Radcliffe in the late 1890s. See
Klein, “The Elusive Mr. Whittemore: The Early Years, 1871–1916,” in Klein, Ousterhout, and
Pitarakis, eds., Kariye Camii, Yeniden/The Kariye Camii Reconsidered, 473fn31.
273 In 1910, Whittemore visited: Klein, “The Elusive Mr. Whittemore,” 475. His mind, he once
confided to a friend: Whittemore to Isabella Stewart-Gardner, Aug. 24, 1921, Whittemore
Papers, DO-ICFA, Box 11, Folder 161 (copy from Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston,
via Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).
274 The lands under their control: Hélène Ahrweiler, “Byzantine Concepts of the Foreigner: The
Case of the Nomads,” in Ahrweiler and Laiou, eds., Studies on the Internal Diaspora, 2. “I
have reached at length”: Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 6:413.
275 The first journal of Byzantine studies: Elizabeth Jeffreys, John Haldon, and Robin Cormack,
“Byzantine Studies as an Academic Discipline,” in Jeffreys with Haldon and Cormack, eds.,
Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, 5. During the First World War, he had delivered:
Equerry of Queen Alexandra to “All Military, Civil, and Customs Authorities concerned,” Mar.
11, 1919, CERYE, Box 99, Folder 2.
276 “[H]e had a gift”: Runciman, Traveller’s Alphabet, 56–57. Whittemore’s version of events:
“Rose Petal Flavored Ice Cream in Company of a Harvard Scholar,” Boston Globe, Aug. 19,
1948. The Harem of Topkapı Palace: “Topkapı Sarayının Harem Dairesi Açılıyor,”
Cumhuriyet, Apr. 8, 1930.
277 In October 1930, the two countries: Alexandris, Greek Minority of Istanbul, 179. In the
summer of 1931, the Turkish Council of Ministers: Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 176.
278 Once they were exposed: Teteriatnikov, Mosaics of Hagia Sophia, 44. Islam prohibited human
images: “Mosaics Uncovered in Famous Mosque,” New York Times, Dec. 25, 1932.
279 Now, at last, the artistic glories: “Ayasofya’nın Mozayıkları: lme Hürmet Lazımdır,”
Cumhuriyet, Nov. 14, 1932. On the crowded train back to Istanbul: Whittemore to Gano, July
19, 1932, Byzantine Institute Records, DO-ICFA, Subgroup I: Records, Series I:
Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 5. Whittemore staged films of his team: See Byzantine Institute
Records, DO-ICFA, Subgroup II: Fieldwork Papers, Series IV, Subseries D: Moving Images
(16mm films).
280 It turned out to be: The Fossati brothers had made sketches of the mosaic and took steps to
stabilize it, but it had never been fully described or restored, a fact that led the great Byzantinist
Cyril Mango to describe Whittemore’s work as a “rediscovery” of the Deesis. Mango,
Materials, 29.
282 Whittemore’s team estimated: Teteriatnikov, Mosaics of Hagia Sophia, 47.
283 The higher the angle: Teteriatnikov, Mosaics of Hagia Sophia, 52. For an especially vibrant
effect: Teteriatnikov, Mosaics of Hagia Sophia, 56.
284 Plaster casts were also made: Teteriatnikov, Mosaics of Hagia Sophia, 61.
285 The Hagia Sophia “is the universe of buildings”: Quoted in Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 170. In
1934, the Turkish Council of Ministers: “Ayasofya Müzesi,” Cumhuriyet, Jan. 26, 1935.
Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson: See Byzantine Institute Records, DO-ICFA, Subgroup II:
Fieldwork Papers, Series IV, Box 45: “Photographs: Hagia Sophia and Kariye Camii, ca.
1930s–1940s,” Folder 482: “Photographs of Thomas Whittemore with Edward VIII of
England”; and Natalia Teteriatnikov, “The Byzantine Institute and Its Role in the Conservation
of the Kariye Camii,” in Klein, ed., Restoring Byzantium, 51. In the spring of 1939, a German
tourist: “Dr. Göbbels ehrimize Geldi,” Cumhuriyet, Apr. 13, 1939. “The dome has a graceful
elegance”: Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Apr. 14, 1939.
286 Life seemed wonderful: Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Apr. 14, 1939.

SHADOW WARS
289 At a funeral it doesn’t matter: Deringil, Turkish Foreign Policy, 184. “Where should we be
now”: Quoted in Knatchbull-Hugessen, Diplomat in Peace and War, 138.
290 The same month as Goebbels’s visit: von Papen, Memoirs, 446.
292 Yet, unlike a Mussolini: Knatchbull-Hugessen, Diplomat in Peace and War, 135. His skin had
gone sallow: Runciman, A Traveller’s Alphabet, 57. Cirrhosis of the liver had sapped: Mango,
Atatürk, 518–19. Children poured from schools: Sperco, Istanbul indiscret, 69.
293 Atatürk’s last words: Mango, Atatürk, 525. Nearly a dozen people: Mango, Atatürk, 525.
294 According to the British ambassador: Knatchbull-Hugessen, Diplomat in Peace and War, 144.
295 “You could almost throw a stone”: Transcript of Ira Hirschmann speech, Oct. 22, 1944, p. 2,
Hirschmann Papers, FDR, Box 3, File “‘Saving Refugees Through Turkey,’ Address by Ira
Hirschmann Over CBS, 10/22/44.”
296 When the first German professor: “Bir Ecnebi Profesör lk Defa Türkçe Ders Verdi,”
Cumhuriyet, Nov. 23, 1933. Albert Einstein might have been part: Shaw, Turkey and the
Holocaust, 5–8. For an exhaustive study of German academics and refugees, see Reisman,
Turkey’s Modernization.
297 Many of these expatriates: “The German N.S.D.A.P. Organization in Turkey,” Feb. 5, 1943, p.
1, NARA, RG226, Entry 106, Box 36. On Sundays, local Germans: Memorandum from Betty
Carp, Mar. 3, 1942, p. 1, NARA, RG226, Entry 106, Box 35. Many of the senior officers: “The
German N.S.D.A.P. Organization in Turkey,” Feb. 5, 1943, pp. 1–3. The Tokatlian Hotel: “List
of German and Pro-German Firms in Istanbul, Turkey,” Feb. 15, 1943, p. 1, NARA, RG226,
Entry 106, Box 36. With the boycott: Bali, Bir Türkle tirme Serüveni, 316–20.
298 Moreover, the presence of White Russians: “A History of X-2 in Turkey from Its Inception to
31 August 1944,” p. 1, NARA, RG226, Entry 210, Box 58, File 5. By one count, seventeen:
Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 5.
299 Rendel’s daughter, Anne: Rendel, The Sword and the Olive, 181. Two German security officers:
Rendel, The Sword and the Olive, 186. Farewells were toasted: Rendel, The Sword and the
Olive, 187. “My impression was strengthened”: Rendel, The Sword and the Olive, 188.
300 A flash of light: My account of the Pera Palace explosion is based on memoranda, photographs,
witness reports, and letters in NAUK, FO 198/106, 198/107, 371/29748, 371/29749,
371/29751, 371/37529, 371/48154, 781/57, 950/10, 960/139, and 950/631; and Rendel, The
Sword and the Olive, chapter 16.
302 The bag contained a fuse: Knatchbull-Hugessen to London, Mar. 12, 1941, NAUK, FO
371/29748, ff. 143–44. Bulgarian agents: “Background Paper on the ‘Pera Palace’ Explosion
of March 11, 1941, and Claims Arising Therefrom,” n.d., NAUK, FO 950/631. “Having come
to the conclusion”: Istanbul Assistant Public Prosecutor, “Copy of Decision,” Apr. 10, 1941, p.
4, NAUK, FO 371/37529. The British government eventually paid: “Pera Palace Claimants,”
n.d., NAUK, FO 950/10; and Knatchbull-Hugessen to Foreign Office, Mar. 13, 1941, NAUK,
FO 371/29749, f. 17.
303 Istanbul was on the front line: “Tehlike Kapımızı Çalarsa,” Cumhuriyet, Mar. 31, 1941. Trees,
sidewalks, and electric poles: “Seyrüsefer Tedbirleri,” Cumhuriyet, Nov. 28, 1940. During the
drills: “Bugün Dikkatli Olunuz!” Cumhuriyet, Jan. 20, 1941. To conserve fuel: “Balkan
Intelligence Center Report,” Nov. 1940, NAUK, WO 208/72B.
305 The sexual peccadilloes of diplomats: Woods, Spunyarn, 2:111. In those days, Muslims seen
conversing: Herbert, Ben Kendim, 37. “Istanbul has many people”: Boyd to Donovan, Sept.
25, 1944, p. 3, NARA, RG226, Entry 210, Box 58, File 4. The Emniyet regularly supplied: “A
History of X-2 in Turkey,” p. 10, and Lt. Col. John H. Maxson, “Report on Organization and
Operation of X-2, Turkey, 1944,” p. 16, NARA, RG226, Entry 210, Box 58, File 5.
306 When a newcomer arrived: Kollek, For Jerusalem, 42–43. In February 1943: On the details
surrounding the return, see Olson, “Remains of Talat.”
307 British intelligence services: See “Istanbul Office—History,” Mar. 15, 1945, NAUK, HS 7/86.
308 He had been recruited into the service: Boyd to Donovan, Sept. 15, 1944, p. 2, NARA, RG226,
Entry 210, Box 58, File 4. A detailed history of this silent war: See expense vouchers in
NARA, RG226, Entry 199, File 1193. If an agent needed a hernia belt: Receipt from Ucuz
Çanta Pazarı, Dec. 31, 1943, NARA, RG226, Entry 109, Box 187, File 1208. “Espionage
directed against other countries”: “A History of X-2 in Turkey,” p. 2.
309 The money he carried: Maxson, “Report on Organization and Operation of X-2,” p. 4. He was
given an office: “A History of X-2 in Turkey,” p. 3. Professors, receptionists, and the registrar:
“A History of X-2 in Turkey,” p. 3.
310 There she had regularly invited: Carp to Dulles, Mar. 13, 1942, NARA, RG226, Entry 106,
Location 190/6/4/03. Carp and Allen Dulles had known one another since Dulles’s brief period
at the American Embassy in Istanbul during the Allied occupation. He remained one of her
principal contacts in the OSS during the war and eventually became the first civilian head of
the OSS’s successor, the CIA. “Mr. Thomas Whittemore”: Carp to Gurfein, Jan. 12, 1943,
NARA, RG226, Entry 106, Location 190/6/4/03. “They are everywhere”: Wickham to
Donovan, Aug. 11, 1944, p. 11, NARA, RG226, Entry 210, Box 194, File 9. Within only a few
months: “A History of X-2 in Turkey,” p. 3. In particular, the Abwehr: “A History of X-2 in
Turkey,” p. 11.
311 Americans seemed especially willing: “A History of X-2 in Turkey,” p. 11. Tongues loosened by
alcohol: Maxson, “Report on Organization and Operation of X-2,” p. 22. Its words were
mimeographed . . . it became such a fashionable tune: “Addenda, History—Security Branch—
OSS Istanbul,” May 1943–Sept. 1, 1944, p. 1, NARA, RG226, Entry 210, Box 185, File 9; and
“History—Security Branch—OSS Istanbul,” May 1943–Sept. 1, 1944, p. 3, NARA, RG226,
Entry 210, Box 185, File 12. “I’m involved in a dangerous game”: “History—Security Branch
—OSS Istanbul,” May 1943–Sept. 1, 1944, Appendix C, p. 2, NARA, RG226, Entry 210, Box
185, File 12.
312 Most of the Dogwood reports had been: Wickham to Donovan, Aug. 11, 1944, p. 4. The Turks’
only complaint about him: Massigli, La Turquie devant la guerre, 133.
313 “You see, I hate the British”: Quoted in Moysich, Operation Cicero, 31. The considerable
sums of money: Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 247.
314 Even at Turkey’s Republic Day celebrations: Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 4. Teddy Kollek, an
Austrian citizen by birth: Kollek, For Jerusalem, 43.

PAPER TRAILS
317 He cabled Winston Churchill: Muhayye to Churchill, n.d., NAUK, FO 371/29751, f. 18. He
was eventually awarded: “Bombed British Officials Must Pay, Turks Decide,” New York Times,
Apr. 24, 1947. In 1935, a prominent Turkish diplomat: “Col. Aziz Bey a Suicide,” New York
Times, Oct. 1, 1935. In 1939, a Yemeni man: “50 Kuru la Perapalas’ta Üç Ay Ya ayan Adam!”
Cumhuriyet, Oct. 13, 1939.
318 Located not far from Taksim Square: Mansel, Constantinople, 419. In the restaurant, the
Japanese held court: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 136.
319 Before he retired to dinner: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 136.
320 Pushed along by the south-flowing: The most thorough account of the Struma affair is Frantz
and Collins, Death on the Black Sea, on which I have based some of the details in my own
retelling. The book contains a very fine essay by Samuel Aroni that tries to reconstruct the
passenger manifest, a much more difficult task than it might seem.
321 Sympathetic humanitarians could occasionally pass: Goldin to Jewish Agency, Feb. 26, 1942,
JAP-IDI, Reel 72. On January 2, 1942, six men: Ludovic, et al., to Director of the Port Police,
Istanbul, Jan. 2, 1942, JAP-IDI, Reel 72.
322 The Struma was to be towed: Goldin to Jewish Agency, Feb. 26, 1942. There is some debate
about whether the Struma even had an engine at this point, since the motor had earlier been
removed for repair and may never have been returned to the ship before the towing order was
put into effect. “Save us!”: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 5.
323 “Struma wrecked blacksea”: Goldin to Jewish Agency, Feb. 25, 1942, JAP-IDI, Reel 72. He
first included the names: “Survivors,” Mar. 8, 1942, JAP-IDI, Reel 72. Only nine passengers:
Frantz and Collins, Death on the Black Sea, 335. It turned out to be the handiwork: Sudoplatov,
Special Tasks, 35; Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 13–14.
324 The authorities had done everything possible: “Die Juden der ‘Struma,’ die England nicht nach
Palästina liess,” Türkische Post, Apr. 21, 1942. Saydam followed up by dismissing: Guttstadt,
Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 117. In fact, the Turkish agency reported not on the
sinking but on the day of mourning held in Palestine for the Struma victims. I thank Corry
Guttstadt for pointing out the difference.
325 “It was an avalanche”: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 17. Identified as an up-
and-comer: See Hirschmann, Caution to the Winds.
326 After reading about the disaster: Hirschmann, Caution to the Winds, 127.
327 “The president has just signed”: Quoted in Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 19.
After five days en route: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 22. “An old world seems
slipping away”: Hirschmann diary entry, n.d. [Feb. 1944], p. 2, Hirschmann Papers, FDR, Box
1, Folder “Portions of Ira Hirschmann’s Diary, Feb.–Oct. 1944,” Part 1.
328 Support was to be provided: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 23–24. Americans
were a people with a conscience: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 26. He began to
feel: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 33.
331 That satisfied the police: Kollek, For Jerusalem, 43–44.
332 Jews quickly found themselves trapped: Hirschmann, “Palestine as a Refuge from Fascism,”
Survey Graphic (May 1945): 195. The regulations were so strictly enforced: Memorandum
from G. V. Allen, Division of Near Eastern Affairs, US Department of State, Dec. 1, 1941,
Shaw Collection, USHMM, File 2, pp. 1–3. Since my research was conducted, the Shaw
Collection files have been rearranged, with a new finding aid available from USHMM.
333 But while these examples: Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 296–98. In
November 1942, the government enacted: Translation of “Law Concerning the Tax on Wealth,”
p. 1, Nov. 11, 1942, RG59, M1242, Reel 31. Some 114,368 individuals and businesses: “The
Capital Levy: A Key to the Understanding of Current Trends in Turkey,” p. 6, May 3, 1944,
NARA, RG59, M1242, Reel 31. “This law is also a law of revolution”: Quoted in Bali, “Varlık
Vergisi” Affair, 55. According to a secret report: “The Capital Levy,” p. 3. Muslims believed to
have Jewish ancestry—the so-called dönme, descendants of a Jewish sect whose members
converted to Islam in the seventeenth century—were given impossibly high assessments as
well. Many of the most successful businesses: Akçura, Gramofon Ça ı, 30.
334 It was all a shameful episode: Ökte, Tragedy of the Turkish Capital Tax, 14. The men of the
household: Murray to Welles, Mar. 13, 1943, pp. 1–2, NARA, RG59, M1224, Reel 31. In the
end, more than a thousand: Ökte, Tragedy of the Turkish Capital Tax, 73–74. Their personal
belongings were sold: Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 72–81. Greeks,
Armenians, and Jews owned: Ayhan Aktar, “‘Tax Me to the End of My Life!’: Anatomy of an
Anti-Minority Tax Legislation (1942–3),” in Fortna et al., eds., State-Nationalisms in the
Ottoman Empire, Germany, and Turkey, 211–12. “According to the best-informed”: Istanbul to
State, Dec. 8, 1942, p. 1, NARA, RG59, M1224, Reel 31.
335 But because of rationing: Goldin to Jewish Agency, Nov. 17, 1943, JAP-IDI, Reel 48. The
response was to accede: See Chaim Barlas, “Report on Immigration,” Dec. 15, 1943, JAP-IDI,
Reel 1. Moreover, the Turkish government: “History of the War Refugee Board,” Vol. 1, p. 14,
WRB, Folder 17. At that rate, Ira Hirschmann later reckoned: Hirschmann, Life Line to a
Promised Land, 32. The plan went into effect: Barlas, “Report on Immigration,” p.1. By
December 1943, Barlas had already compiled: Barlas, “Report on Immigration,” p. 1.
336 Small numbers of refugees had also arrived: Barlas, “Report on Immigration,” p. 1. In
December, Barlas wrote to Ambassador Steinhardt: Barlas, “Report on Immigration,” p. 2. In
fact, nearly twice as many: Barlas, “Report on Immigration,” p. 2. See also Resnik to
Hirschmann, July 3, 1944, JOINT, Reel 108.
337 The War Refugee Board persuaded: “History of the War Refugee Board,” Vol. 1, p. 15. Other
funds: “History of the War Refugee Board,” Vol. 1, p. 15. Further Joint-funded programs:
Resnik to Hirschmann, July 7, 1944, JOINT, Reel 108; and “Report on Activities from
February 1944 to March 21, 1944,” JOINT, Reel 111. Hirschmann was also in regular contact:
Macfarland to Donovan, Aug. 11, 1944, p. 3, NARA, RG226, Entry 210, Box 194, File 9.
338 Now, at last, he felt: Barlas to Hirschmann, Mar. 23, 1944, JAP-IDI, Reel 1. In the summer of
1938: Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 132–33. But the devil: Hirschmann, Life
Line to a Promised Land, 40–45.
339 “Send certificates”: Moshe Slowes to Abraham Slowes, Mar. 12, 1941, Slowes Collection,
USHMM.
340 “I venture to hope”: Abraham Slowes to Swedish Consul, Jerusalem, Aug. 18, 1943, Slowes
Collection, USHMM.
341 “With reference to your letter”: British Embassy, Moscow, to Abraham Slowes, Nov. 10, 1944,
Slowes Collection, USHMM. A follow-up note: T. C. Sharman to Abraham Slowes, Apr. 5,
1945, Slowes Collection, USHMM. Slowes’s mother and six other family members are
believed to have been killed at Ponary, an infamous mass-execution site in the suburbs of
Vilnius, Lithuania, in late 1941 or 1942. His father probably perished in a Nazi labor camp in
Estonia. The only immediate family member to survive was an older brother, Salomon, who
had the perverse good fortune of having been taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1939, which
meant that he escaped almost certain death when Germany invaded in 1941. Salomon later
joined Polish volunteers fighting alongside Allied forces in Iraq, Palestine, North Africa, and
Italy, and settled after the war in Tel Aviv.

AT THE GATE OF FELICITY

345 “It would appear from the telegrams”: Steinhardt to Secretary of State, Mar. 3, 1944, p. 4,
Hirschmann Papers, FDR, Box 1, Folder “Dispatches from U.S. Embassy, Ankara, to War
Refugee Board, 2/8/44–6/2/44.”
346 At a minimum, getting out of Romania required: Application materials of Marcel Leibovici,
Romanian General Directorate of Passports Office Records, 1939–1944, USHMM, Reel 3.
347 The form required that the applicant: Application materials of Linder Maier, Romanian
General Directorate of Passports Office Records, 1939–1944, USHMM, Reel 3. The Struma
affair had made the government: Steinhardt to Resnik, June 15, 1944, JOINT, Reel 104.
348 Even as seemingly simple a matter: Steinhardt to Resnik, June 8, 1944, JOINT, Reel 104. And
since some of them were expressly involved: Steinhardt to Barlas, June 5, 1944, JAP-IDI, Reel
1. See also Steinhardt to Pehle, May 18, 1944, and Steinhardt to War Refugee Board, June 1,
1944, Hirschmann Papers, FDR, Box 1, Folder “Dispatches from U.S. Embassy, Ankara, to
War Refugee Board, 2/8/44–6/2/44.” Earlier that spring, Foreign Minister: Steinhardt to
Barlas, Apr. 3, 1944, Shaw Collection, USHMM, File 3.
349 For that reason, Barlas: Kollek, For Jerusalem, 44. The old tombstones were rearranged:
Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back, 137.
350 They were “a strange community”: Nicolson, Sweet Waters, 23. The Levantines were: Mufty-
zada, Speaking of the Turks, 146–47. There were fewer than 23,000: Ives to Secretary of State,
Nov. 14, 1928, pp. 7, 10, NARA, RG59, M353, Reel 57. “Levantine” was not a category used
on Turkish censuses, so the figure presumably comes from an American diplomat’s use of the
term to describe local Catholics in general.
352 On February 12, 1943: Peter Hoffmann puts the first meeting on January 20, 1943, but this is
an inference based on materials that Barlas passed along to the apostolic delegate, rather than
on a record of the meeting itself. Given the telegram from Jerusalem on February 12, it seems
more likely that Barlas had not yet visited the cathedral when the telegram was received. But at
least by May, Barlas and Roncalli had established a regular series of meetings. Hoffmann,
“Roncalli in the Second World War,” 83; Barlas to Roncalli, May 22, 1943, JAP-IDI, Reel 1.
“He explained that when talking”: Tittmann, Inside the Vatican of Pius XII, 124.
354 He began learning Turkish: John XXIII, Journal of a Soul, 233. “My work in Turkey is not
easy”: John XXIII, Journal of a Soul, 234–35. The Turkish government had extended:
Massigli, La Turquie devant la guerre, 98. In 1939, when Roncalli contacted: Righi, Papa
Giovanni XXIII sulle rive del Bosforo, 194.
355 In Roncalli’s case: Massigli, La Turquie devant la guerre, 98. “Have seen today his eminence”:
Barlas to Herzog, June 12, 1943, JAP-IDI, Reel 1. On multiple occasions, he asked Barlas:
Roncalli to Weltmann, July 31, 1943; Weltmann to Roncalli, July 31, 1943; Barlas to Goldin,
Aug. 10, 1943; Barlas to Roncalli, Aug. 10, 1943; Barlas to Roncalli, Aug. 12, 1943; Barlas to
Roncalli, Mar. 27, 1944; Barlas to Roncalli, June 6, 1944, JAP-IDI, Reel 1. In November the
chief rabbi: Herzog to Roncalli, Nov. 22, 1943, JAP-IDI, Reel 1.
357 He was sometimes called: Friling, “Nazi-Jewish Negotiations,” 405. “We are in the fifth year”:
Quoted in Barlas, Hatsalah, 114. A limited number of Jews: Steinhardt to War Refugee Board,
May 25, 1944, Hirschmann Papers, FDR, Box 1, Folder “Dispatches from U.S. Embassy,
Ankara, to War Refugee Board, 2/8/44–6/2/44.”
358 Through his channels of communication: Schwartz to War Refugee Board, July 20, 1944,
JOINT, Reel 108.
359 Others took to copying down: Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, 127. On June 5,
Roncalli wrote to Barlas: Roncalli to Barlas, June 5, 1944, JAP-IDI, Reel 1. “Thanks to these
documents”: Barlas to Roncalli, June 6, 1944, JAP-IDI, Reel 1. Roncalli forwarded the report:
Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, 324–26. Later, the papal nuncio: Phayer, Catholic Church and the
Holocaust, 50. “He has helped the Jews”: Quoted in Hoffmann, “Roncalli in the Second World
War,” 90.
360 “We are called to live”: Quoted in Righi, Papa Giovanni XXIII sulle rive del Bosforo, 261. The
ship was rated for only three hundred: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 87.
361 As with all transports, the Joint had provided: Barlas to Hirschmann, Aug. 24, 1944, JAP-IDI,
Reel 1. She had been this way: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 88. “As expected, it
was very bad”: Frankfort to Goldin, July 10, 1944, JAP-IDI, Reel 1. The world, he said:
Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 87–89.
362 Around 12:30 a.m.: On the matter of Soviet responsibility, see Ofer, Escaping the Holocaust,
195–98. A few dozen passengers: “Report on the Sinking of the m/v ‘Mefkure,’” Sept. 9, 1944,
JAP-IDI, Reel 173.
363 Turkish authorities had ordered: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 142. At the Park
Hotel, the Germans ate: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 142. Rooms were going for
half price: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 144. Franz von Papen, the German
ambassador: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 145. These ships carried: “Boats,”
JAP-IDI, Reel 122. In all, from 1942 to 1945: “Summary of Immigrants from 1942 to the End
of 1945,” JAP-IDI, Reel 122. In the end, more than a quarter: Ofer, Escaping the Holocaust,
318.
364 “The results of the immigration in numbers”: Chaim Barlas, “Report on Immigration,” Dec.
15, 1943, p. 2, JAP-IDI, Reel 1. Of the people who departed: “Summary of Immigrants.”
365 The first violinist: Hirschmann, Life Line to a Promised Land, 147. I thank Corry Guttstadt for
discovering the violinist’s name.

EPILOGUE
370 Early the next morning: “Perapalas Otelinin Sahibi Odasında Ölü Bulundu,” Milliyet, Oct. 13,
1954. “Now that my cat is dead”: Quoted in “Millionaire, Broken Over Dead Cat, Dies,”
Baltimore Sun, Oct. 14, 1954. He had turned over the hotel: “Misbah Muhayye in Mirası
Tesbit Ediliyor,” Milliyet, Oct. 15, 1954; “Misbah Muhayye in Vârisleri Ço alıyor,” Milliyet,
Oct. 19, 1954.
371 Landholdings that party leaders had acquired: Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, 233.
372 At least eleven people: Güven, 6–7 Eylül Olayları, 40, 181. The number of deaths and level of
property damage remain controversial. For higher figures, see Vryonis, Mechanism of
Catastrophe, 549.
373 One who actually did was the poet Joseph Brodsky: “Flight from Byzantium,” in Brodsky, Less
Than One, 396–97.
377 It does not take too much effort: My reconstruction of the last moments before the explosion
relies on: “Pera Palace Claimants,” NAUK, FO 950/10; De Téhige to Ambassador, Apr. 21,
1941, NAUK, FO 198/106; “Pera Palas Bomb Outrage,” Apr. 2, 1941, NAUK, FO 198/106;
Vardarsu to British Embassy, Apr. 20, 1941, NAUK, FO 198/106; and a list of victims and
compensation from the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nov. 13, 1941, in NAUK, FO
198/107.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Bakhmeteff Archive, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York
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Major General W. A. F. L. Fox-Pitt Papers
Lieutenant C. H. Garner Papers
J. A. Graham Photograph Collection
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Major A. McPherson Papers
Air Marshal S. C. Strafford Papers
F. W. Turpin Papers
C. Vinicombe Papers
Commander O. F. M. Wethered Papers
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Photograph and Map Collection
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Mark Lambert Bristol Papers, Manuscript Reading Room
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National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland
State Department Records
Office of Strategic Services Archives
National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew
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Special Operations Executive Records
War Office Records
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York
Oscar Cox Papers
Ira Hirschmann Papers
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives and Library, Washington, DC
Abraham and Simone Slowes Collection
Jewish Agency for Palestine Records, Immigration Department, Office in Istanbul
Papers of the War Refugee Board
Romanian General Directorate of Passports Office Records, 1939–1944
Selected Records from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1937–1966
Selected Records from the Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1920–1950
Selected Records from Romanian Diplomatic Missions, 1920–1950
Stanford Shaw Collection
Ellen T. Meth Collection, Wang Family Papers
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Yapı Kredi Bank, Istanbul
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Milliyet (Istanbul)
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Stamboul (Istanbul)
Tarih ve Toplum (Istanbul)
Toplumsal Tarih (Istanbul)
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Türkische Post (Istanbul)
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RECORDINGS

One of the earliest sources for this book was the album Istanbul 1925 (Traditional Crossroads, 1994),
the work of the violinist and sound engineer Harold G. Hagopian, who accessed the original metallic
masters of Columbia recordings from the 1920s and re-created an audible world that few people
remembered ever existed. His Traditional Crossroads label has gone on to issue several other period
recordings, including the haunting Women of Istanbul (1998), where I first listened to Roza Eskenazi,
and two volumes of Udi Hrant’s early work. More recently, Ian Nagoski has cataloged the musical
world of the “Ottoman diaspora” in America after the First World War on the album To What Strange
Place (Tompkins Square, 2011).
The rerelease of old recordings is a booming business in Turkey, and at the center of it is Kalan
Müzik, a company that has reissued a trove of Greek, Armenian, and other music of Istanbul’s
minority cultures, as well as the forgotten art of Turkish tango and bel canto. I first heard the voice of
Seyyan on Kalan Müzik’s Seyyan Hanım: Tangolar (1996). The same company’s Kantolar: 1905–
1945 (1998) is an introduction to the light music of the Istanbul stage.
GLOSSARY

Alevis community of Muslims whose beliefs combine elements of

Shi’a Islam and Sufi traditions
aliyah bet illegal Jewish immigration to Mandate-era Palestine
bey gentleman; man of rank
caique narrow, oared boat used on the Bosphorus and Golden Horn
caliph supreme spiritual leader in Islam; title claimed by Ottoman
sultans until the caliphate’s abolition in 1924
çar af Islamic female covering, typically black and draping the
entire body
cherkeska long tunic with small ammunition-holders on the chest
worn by men from the Caucasus
Circassians cultural group with ties to the historic region of Circassia in
the northwest Caucasus in modern-day Russia
dervish adherent of a Sufi religious order
Emniyet Turkish secret police
esnaf guild of tradesmen or artisans
ezan Islamic call to prayer
gazi conqueror or hero in Islamic warfare
hamal porter
han hostel or boardinghouse, typically for traveling traders
hanım lady; woman of rank
harem household; wives and concubines of the sultan or other
Ottoman men of rank
haremlik; private portion of a traditional household reserved for
Harem family use
imam leader in Islamic worship
inkılâp revolution
janissaries elite infantry of the Ottoman Empire before the 1820s
lâiklik secularism; state management of religious institutions
Karagöz traditional entertainment featuring semitransparent puppets
on a backlit screen
Kemalism political ideology of modernity and secularism associated
with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Ladino language of Sephardic Jews, based on Spanish and written
in either Hebrew or Latin script; also called Judeo-Spanish
mahalle neighborhood
meyhane restaurant typically serving wine, raki, and small plates of
food
millet Ottoman legal category defined by membership in a
religious community (e.g., Muslims, Orthodox Christians,
Armenian Apostolic Christians, Jews)
millet system religious self-government in the Ottoman Empire, based on
quasi autonomy of millets
muezzin cantor who delivers the Islamic call to prayer
muhacirs Muslim refugees, especially from the Balkans and the
Caucasus
OGPU Stalinist secret police and predecessor of KGB
OSS Office of Strategic Services; American intelligence
organization and predecessor of CIA
oud musical instrument resembling a Western lute
pasha military general or high-ranking official
patriarch supreme leader of an independent Orthodox Christian
church
raki anise-flavored liqueur
rebetiko urban folk music associated with Greeks originally from
Smyrna and Istanbul (also spelled rembetiko)
selâmlık public portion of a traditional household used for business
or receiving guests; also, the sultan’s public procession to
Friday prayers
Sephardim Jews from the Iberian Peninsula who immigrated to the
Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century
eyhülislam chief Islamic cleric
sharia Islamic canon law
sheikh Islamic religious leader or saint, especially in Sufi orders
Shi’a community of Muslims who recognize the spiritual
successors to the Prophet Muhammad through Ali, his son-
in-law
SOE Special Operations Executive; British intelligence service
Sufi general term for a number of ecstatic or mystical religious
orders in Islam, typically associated with a founding sage
sultan ruler of the Ottoman Empire
Sunni community of Muslims who recognize the spiritual
successors to the Prophet Muhammad through a line of
caliphs
sürgün forced resettlement
Tanzimat period of centralization, reform, and modernization in the
Ottoman Empire, 1839–1876
tekke Sufi lodge or meeting house
tulumbacı foot-borne fireman
türbe mausoleum, especially of an Islamic sage or holy person
Unionists members of the Committee of Union and Progress, the
makers of the 1908 revolution; also known as Young Turks
wagon-lit sleeping carriage on a train
yalı house near the water on the Bosphorus, typically made
from ornately mitered wood
yishuv Jewish community in Mandate-era Palestine
Young Turks see Unionists
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“They are all writing their Turkey books,” says Aunt Dot in Rose
Macaulay’s novel The Towers of Trebizond. This one is mine.
Depending on how you count, it has taken three years or twenty-seven. I
have been enchanted by Istanbul since I first arrived there—with a
backpack and my college roommate, now Kevin Crumpton, MD—in the
summer of 1987. It is one place, perhaps the only place, that has seemed
entirely fresh and surprising to me on every visit. Across more than a
quarter century, I have had many people to thank for acquainting me with it.
Through the kindness of Hakan Altınay, Tony Greenwood, and Ka an
Önal, I have had the pleasure of staying in three of Istanbul’s most
intriguing neighborhoods: Rumelihisarı, Kuzguncuk, and Arnavutköy.
Tony, as director of the indispensable American Research Institute in
Turkey, always provided an excuse to return to Arnavutköy for insightful
conversation and good fish. Michael Thumann and Susanne Landwehr were
fonts of wisdom about contemporary politics and society. I have learned a
great deal from two former students of mine, Dr. Lerna Yanık and Dr. Nora
Fisher Onar, who have made Turkey their passion. A string of Turkish
language instructors, most recently Zeynep Gür, have tried to twist my brain
around subordinate clauses. Present and former colleagues Gábor Ágoston,
Mustafa Aksakal, Sylvia Önder, Scott Redford, Sabri Sayarı, and the late
Faruk Tabak were unfailingly kind to a novice in their field.
This book relies in part on the work of specialists from a variety of
different domains that are not normally put together, such as Turkey,
Trotsky, and tango. I am grateful to the many historians and others whose
writings are acknowledged in the notes and bibliography, in particular Rıfat
Bali, who has made available to the public so many primary sources from a
forgotten era. I have also benefited from conversations with Gökhan
Akçura, Ozan Arslan, Sava Arslan, Murat Belge, Elif Batuman, Andrew
Finkel, Caroline Finkel, Corry Guttstadt, Hope Harrison, Brian Johnson,
Tuna Aksoy Köprülü, Steve Lagerfeld, Ansel Mullins, Cullen Nutt, Yigal
Schleifer, Douglas Smith, Gerald Steinacher, Ronald Grigor Suny, Leon
Taranto, Frances Trix, Thomas de Waal, Sufian Zhemukhov, and my dear
companion, Margaret Paxson, who has always steered me true—bay mir
bist du sheyn. Lawrence and Amy Tal, Anatol and Sasha Lieven, and Leslie
Vinjamuri and Oliver Wright were welcoming hosts during research trips to
London. (Thanks also to Matthew, Luke, Phoebe, Misha, Katya, Alex,
Henry, Olivia, and Scrubby, whose space I occasionally borrowed.)
I am especially grateful to Abdullah Gül and Ayhan Uçar of the Yapı
Kredi archive in Istanbul, who facilitated access to the Selahattin Giz
photograph collection. Fra Lorenzo Piretto, OP, educated me about the
Latin community and showed me the wonders of the Church of St. Peter
and St. Paul. Fıstık Ahmet Tanrıverdi shared childhood memories of
Trotsky’s bodyguards and helped me find both of Trotsky’s houses on
Büyükada. In his Manhattan violin shop, Harold Hagopian re-created the
Istanbul music scene of the 1920s and 1930s. I sadly missed speaking with
Keriman Halis Ece, who died only a few months before I began this book,
but her daughter and granddaughter, Ece Sarpyener and Ay e Torfilli,
graciously shared recollections of her. Meral Muhayye took Margaret and
me on a magical Bosphorus boat ride and told family stories of her great-
uncle Misbah. Pınar Kartal Timer, general manager of the Pera Palace
Jumeirah, and Suzan Toma of the marketing department, enlightened me
about the hotel’s restoration and its recent history.
Fırat Kaya offered his extensive knowledge of Istanbul’s architecture
and urban landscape; our walks through the city—sometimes with a 1934
guidebook in hand—were the closest I will ever come to experiencing a
time machine. Ekin Özbakkalo lu carefully read through more than two
decades of Turkish newspapers and uncovered some gems. Fatima
Abushanab tracked down references and taught me about women and Islam.
Ronen Plechnin helped with a valuable source in Hebrew, as did M. Fatih
Çalı ır with one in Ottoman Turkish. This is the fifth book of mine for
which Chris Robinson has drawn the excellent maps.
Archivists and librarians at the institutions listed in the bibliography
guided me through their collections. Special thanks to Shalimar White and
Rona Razon of the Dumbarton Oaks Image Collections and Fieldwork
Archives, who helped me understand the life and career of Thomas
Whittemore. I am lucky enough to live within walking distance of two of
the world’s treasures: the Library of Congress and the US Holocaust
Memorial Museum. At the latter, Ronald Coleman, Rebecca Erbelding,
Krista Hegburg, and Vincent Slatt provided superb guidance.
All or part of the manuscript came under the careful eyes of Mustafa
Aksakal, Julia Phillips Cohen, Rebecca Erbelding, Ryan Gingeras, Corry
Guttstadt, Andrea Orzoff, Mogens Pelt, Michael Reynolds, and Shalimar
White. I am very thankful indeed for their criticisms and corrections,
although I alone am responsible for any shortcomings that remain.
In 1998, a Fulbright senior fellowship in Turkey and Romania sparked
some of the ideas that eventually led to this book. A fellowship from the
Wilson Center enabled me to spend the academic year 2012–2013 focusing
on Turkey’s past and present. The center’s library staff—Janet Spikes,
Michelle Kamalich, and Dagne Gizaw—were models of energy and
friendly responsiveness. Research funds provided by Georgetown
University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the
Department of Government allowed repeated visits to Istanbul. Thanks to
Dean Carol Lancaster, Senior Associate Dean James Reardon-Anderson,
faculty chairs David Edelstein and Jeffrey Anderson, and department chairs
George Shambaugh and Michael Bailey for their leadership.
This is the second book I have completed with William Lippincott of
Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. I would be adrift without his enthusiasm and
counsel. I have twice been privileged to work with Alane Salierno Mason at
W. W. Norton, a dream of an editor who has taught me so much about
writing with a reader in mind. Anna Mageras, Eleen Cheung, Nancy
Palmquist, and Kathleen Brandes were essential partners in the journey
from typescript to book.
C t lin Partenie is acknowledged on the dedication page. More than
twenty years ago, a chance encounter with him via an Oxford bulletin board
started me on a career in the other half of Europe.
CHRONOLOGY

7th century BC According to tradition, area of modern Istanbul settled

by Greeks from the Aegean coast, who name the colony
“Byzantium” after their leader, Byzas
330 AD Roman emperor Constantine moves capital to
Byzantium, soon renamed “New Rome”
537 Church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia)
consecrated during reign of Justinian I
1204 Constantinople sacked by Venetians and their allies in
the Fourth Crusade, who wrest power from the
Byzantines
1261 Restoration of Byzantine control
1453 Ottoman conquest of city under Mehmed II (the
Conqueror)
1520–1566 Reign of Süleyman the Magnificent: height of Ottoman
power
1839–1876 Tanzimat period: Ottomans begin range of modernizing
reforms
1853–1856 Crimean War
1870 Great Pera fire
1876–1909 Reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II
1883 Inaugural journey of the Orient Express
1892 Pera Palace Hotel established
1908 Young Turk revolution
1909 Exile of Abdülhamid II
1909–1918 Reign of Sultan Mehmed V
Oct. 1914 Ottomans enter First World War on side of Central
Powers
Dec. 1914–Jan. Battle of Sarikamish: Russian imperial forces inflict
1915 major defeat on Ottoman army in eastern Anatolia
Apr. 1915–Jan. Gallipoli campaign: Ottomans repel British, Australian,
1916 and New Zealand forces from peninsula southwest of
Istanbul
Apr. 24–25, 1915 Armenian community leaders deported from Istanbul,
with many later killed
1918–1922 Reign of Sultan Mehmed VI
Oct. 1918 Mudros armistice ends hostilities between Ottomans
and Allied powers
Nov. 1918 Armistice ends hostilities between Germany and Allied
powers; Allied naval detachment sails into Bosphorus
and takes up positions in Istanbul
May 1919 Hellenic troops occupy Smyrna (Izmir); Mustafa Kemal
arrives in Black Sea port of Samsun; beginning of
nationalist resistance to the Allies and the Turkish war
of independence
Mar. 1920 Allies announce formal military occupation of Istanbul
Aug. 1920 Treaty of Sèvres
Nov. 1920 Flotilla of White Russian army and civilians arrives in
Istanbul
Jan.–Sept. 1921 Battles of nönü and Sakarya: turning points in favor of
Turkish nationalists against Hellenic troops
Sept. 1922 Retreat of Hellenic army and flight of civilians from
Smyrna
Nov. 1922 Sultanate abolished; flight of Mehmed VI
1922–1924 Caliphate (but not sultanate) of Abdülmecid
Oct. 1922 Mudanya agreement paves way for transition to Turkish
nationalist control
July 1923 Treaty of Lausanne
Oct. 1923 Last Allied troops leave Istanbul; Ankara named capital
of Turkey; declaration of Turkey as a republic (Oct. 29),
with Mustafa Kemal as president
1924 Caliphate abolished
1925 Fez banned; calendar reform; “Sheikh Said rebellion”
among Kurds in eastern Anatolia; law on the
maintenance of public order allows shutting down of
newspapers and banning of opposition groups.
1926 Adoption of new civil code and abolition of religious
law; ban on public consumption of alcohol lifted
Oct. 1927 Mustafa Kemal’s lengthy “Nutuk” (Speech) sets out
narrative of the war of independence and the victory of
Turkish nationalists
1928 Disestablishment of Islam as state religion; adoption of
Latin alphabet for Turkish; unveiling of Republic
Monument in Taksim Square
1929 Leon Trotsky arrives in Istanbul
1930 Women allowed to vote in municipal elections
1931 Thomas Whittemore begins restoration of Hagia Sophia
1932 Keriman Halis wins Miss Universe competition
1933 Leon Trotsky departs Istanbul
1934 Law requires Turkish citizens to adopt family names;
women gain full suffrage; Mustafa Kemal becomes
“Atatürk”; pogrom against Jews in eastern Thrace
1937–1938 Military campaign against Kurds in eastern Anatolia
Nov. 10, 1938 Death of Atatürk; smet Inönü elevated to presidency
Sept. 1, 1939 Beginning of Second World War
Mar. 11, 1941 Suitcase bomb explodes at Pera Palace
June 22, 1941 German invasion of Soviet Union
Feb. 1942 Sinking of the Struma
Nov. 1942 Wealth tax aimed at Istanbul’s ethnic minorities
June 6, 1944 Allied landings in Normandy
Aug. 1944 Turkey breaks off diplomatic relations with Germany
Feb. 1945 Turkey declares war on Germany, becoming an Allied
power
May 8, 1945 End of Second World War in Europe
1950 First free and direct parliamentary elections in Turkey
Sept. 6–7, 1955 “September events”: mobs attack Greek and other
minority homes and businesses in Istanbul
INDEX

Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search
function to locate particular terms in the text.
Turkish historical figures who are generally known by their first names rather than by their surnames
are alphabetized accordingly.
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

Abdülaziz, Sultan, 14
Abdülhamid II, Sultan, 14, 32–34, 53, 59, 136, 147, 155, 207, 296, 305
Abdullah Efendi restaurant, 314
Abdullah Frères photographic studio, 59
Abdülhak Adnan (politician and husband of Halide Edip), 210–15, 255
Abdülmecid, caliph, 87, 180–81
Abdülmecid I, Sultan, 270–71, 279
Abwehr (German military intelligence), 310–13
Adil, Fikret, 151
Aegean coast, 36, 71, 75, 77, 194
Aegean Sea, 15, 40, 70, 72–73, 78, 121, 163
African-Americans, 138–41
Agabekov, Georgy, 246–47
Agamemnon, 40, 41
Ahmed Tevfik Pasha, 318
Albania, Albanians, 34, 61, 71, 79, 190, 191, 192, 286, 289, 313
alcohol, 142–43, 181, 187
Alexander, king of Greece, 71, 77–78
Ali Ayetullah, 208
Allenby, Edmund, 42, 58
Allies, 184
armistice with Ottomans by, see Mudros agreement
battleships of, 37, 72
Bulgarian armistice with, 39–40
concern for Jews by, 357–59
fleet of, 37, 40–43
Istanbul occupied by, 40–45, 49–66, 70, 72–76, 78–86, 96, 100–102, 106, 114–15, 118–20, 124,
127, 130–31, 135–36, 140, 151–52, 155, 157, 203–4, 206, 210–11, 213, 222, 223, 225, 245, 259,
271, 299
Istanbul’s sex trade and, 148–51
Normandy invaded by, 313, 362
refugees cared for by, 91–92
Russian Revolution and, 94
territorial goals of, 37, 82
Treaty of Lausanne and, 114–15
Turkish demands on, 74
in World War I, 35–40, 64, 71
in World War II, 291, 295, 297, 306–8, 310–11, 314, 326, 338, 348, 352, 356, 369
American College for Girls, 51, 207–8, 309
American Consulate, 308, 309, 318, 331, 373
American Embassy, 328
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (Joint), 325, 337, 360–61
Anatolia, 18, 31, 52, 55, 72, 74, 76, 78, 83–84, 91, 92, 118, 122, 165, 184, 192, 222, 225, 226, 327,
370
central, 73
coast of, 238
folk songs of, 161, 168, 170, 171
in Human Landscapes, 219–20
Muslim immigrants from, 49, 373
southeastern, 194, 210
southern, 52
western, 73, 91
withdrawal of Italian troops from, 79
Anatolia, eastern, 36, 37, 53, 57, 126, 129, 194, 211, 334, 375
anti-Kemalist uprisings in, 186
Armenian deportation from, 37–39
Armenian homeland proposed for, 59, 210
division of, 75
Ottoman positions in, 35
Soviet Union and, 290
Anatolian News Agency, 212, 255
Ankara, 77–79, 116, 121, 147, 184, 186, 212, 225, 276, 279, 293, 312, 313, 322, 323, 339, 347, 354,
363, 371
capital moved to, 4, 5, 75, 194
as center of government, 84–85, 115, 193, 194–95, 290, 314, 327–29
foreign embassies in, 295
Jewish community organizations in, 337
Kemal establishes headquarters in, 73, 255
population of, 193
Ansari, Abu Ayyub al-, 135
antisemitism, 332, 346, 365
and Jewish refugees, 330
Arabian Peninsula, 31, 51, 193
Arabic, 115
Arabic language, 9, 188–89, 227
Arabs, 31, 34, 36, 76, 145, 194, 350
in Palestine, 330, 332
revolt against Ottomans by, 37
Ardıç, Mahmut, 304–5
Armenia, 75
refugees from, 91
Armenian Apostolic Church, 10, 165, 187, 194
in Istanbul population, 58–59
Armenian Catholic Church, 351
Armenian genocide, 41, 42–43, 60, 129, 165–66, 194, 306
Armenian language, 118, 167
Armenian nationalism, 59–60
Armenians, 5, 8, 13, 17, 26, 27, 31–33, 44, 49–51, 61–63, 69, 72, 124, 142, 163–65, 171, 184, 191,
194, 207, 245, 246, 298, 374, 375, 377
Allied occupation and, 75
Allied preference for, 64–65
attacks on, 73
deportation from Anatolia of, 37–39
economic marginalization of, 121–31, 333–34, 365
genocide of, 39, 41, 42–43, 60, 129, 165–66, 194, 306
Hrant Kenkulian as, 162
as prostitutes, 139
religions of, 63
in Smyrna, 80
Unionists assassinated by, 42–43
Armstrong, Therese, 303
Atamansky Regiment, Cossack, 105
Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 8, 52–57, 72–75, 82, 85, 114, 129, 147, 151, 170, 173, 180, 183, 204, 210,
212, 223–25, 262–63, 278, 279, 306, 318, 349, 353, 371, 372, 375
adopted daughters of, 182, 186, 205–6
anti-occupation resistance by, 116, 255
appearance and personality of, 182–83
as commander in chief of Turkish forces, 79, 82, 183
death of, 184, 215, 292–93, 293
dictatorial aspects of, 214, 223
elevation of Turks to new nationality by, 190–91
enemies list of, 184–85
on Hagia Sophia, 276
Istanbul and, 189–90, 197
modernization and, 181, 277, 370
on neutrality, 289
“Nutuk” speech and official history by, 214–15, 219
personality cult of, 182, 206, 291–92
portraits of, 81, 115, 196
as president, 75, 115, 213, 304
Trotsky and, 235
as uncontested nationalist leader, 79, 255
women’s rights under, 202
Atatürk Cultural Center, 196
Athens, 70, 77–78, 119, 121, 124, 127, 263, 277, 278, 374
Roza Eskenazi in, 163–64
Atlantic Monthly, 110
Atlantic Records, 174
Auerbach, Erich, 296
Auschwitz-Birkenau, 357, 359
Austria, 9, 24, 45, 70, 165, 243, 246, 290, 314
Anschluss and, 297
refugees from, 295–96
Austria-Hungary, 24, 32, 34–35, 114
end of empire in, 45
Averoff, 41
Axis Powers, 291, 295, 298, 306–7, 308, 314, 320, 325–26, 331, 336–38, 345, 352, 355, 356
Ayasofya, see Hagia Sophia
Azerbaijan, Azerbaijanis, 99, 101, 183, 225, 245
Aziz Bey (diplomat), 317

Bacanos, Yorgos, 170

Baha (public prosecutor), 158–59
Baker, Josephine, 159–60
Balakian, Grigoris, 41
Balat (neighborhood), 61, 62
Balian family, 59
Balkans, 4, 18, 31, 41, 49, 52, 71, 91, 192, 274, 291, 298, 307
1870s territorial changes in, 33
Jewish refugees from, 325, 337, 345
Wehrmacht in, 303
in World War I, 35, 39
Balkan Wars, 8, 34, 162
Bandırma, 57
Barlas, Chaim, 329–32, 334–38, 341, 345, 348–49, 351–53, 355, 357–60, 364–65
Bartók, Béla, 168
Bazna, Elyesa, 313
beauty pageants, 254, 256–63, 261, 267
Bedreddin, Sheikh, 229–30
Beirut, 129, 351, 369
Belgium, 22, 24, 108, 192, 257, 258, 261–63, 267, 376
government-in-exile of, 300
Bell, Marie, 159
Benedict XI, Pope, 353
Ben-Gurion, David, 330
Bergson, Peter, 326
Berlin, 41, 42, 243, 263, 296, 306, 313, 363
Beylerbeyi (neighborhood), 8, 59
Bibesco, Marthe, 155
Black Sea, 15, 17, 24, 35, 39, 49, 57, 93, 98, 107, 226, 229–30, 289, 291, 320, 322–23, 332, 344,
357, 359, 360, 370, 375, 378
Bliss, Robert and Mildred Woods, 275
Bliumkin, Yakov, 249
Blythe, Betty, 159
Bodosakis-Athanasiades, Prodromos, 69–70, 72, 124–25, 127–29, 131, 255, 377
Bolshevik Revolution, 98, 106, 110, 183, 235, 237, 248, 276
Bolsheviks, 43, 93, 96–99, 101–2, 104, 106, 109–10, 116, 223, 225, 226, 239, 245, 248–49, 252, 295,
296, 352
Turkish, 225
“Boo Boo Baby I’m a Spy,” 311–12
Börklüce (leader of uprising), 229
Bosnia-Herzegovina, 34, 192
Bosphorus, 8, 15–16, 36, 51, 53, 60, 83, 86, 129, 155, 161, 189, 193, 206, 215, 234, 245, 259, 263,
274, 291, 295, 296, 297, 300, 320, 322, 360, 363, 376
Allied force in, 40–42
boatmen on, 17
metro line underneath, 18
waves and currents on, 18
Boston, Mass., 272, 276
Boutnikoff’s Symphony Orchestra, 137
Boyer, Charles, 159
Brand, Joel, 357–58
Breslau, 35
Brettschneider, Teodor, 321, 323
Bridges, Tom, 42, 93
Bristol, Mark, 51, 76, 96, 223
Britain, British, 24, 64, 117, 119, 170, 207, 209, 214, 237, 243, 289, 318
immigration quotas in, 330
imperialist tendencies of, 76
intelligence services of, 245–46, 307–8, 312–13, 314
mandate over former Ottoman territories by, 75, 290
Mehmed VI protected by, 85–86
military advisors to Ottomans from, 32, 55
in occupation of Istanbul, 4, 39–42, 50–52, 54–56, 74–76, 78–86, 91–92, 96–97, 99–100, 115–16,
118, 136, 148, 212, 244, 349
in Ottoman demise, 32, 35, 77
Palestine under Mandate of, 320–24, 329–32, 338–41
Turkey’s relations with, 294
in World War I, 35–40, 71, 94
British Consulate, 300, 318, 331, 373
British Embassy, 156, 322, 339
Brod, Simon, 321, 360
Brodsky, Joseph, 373
brothels, 147–52
disguised as harems, 201
legal, 3, 138, 147, 148, 151
see also prostitutes
Brussels, 23, 117
Bucharest, 339, 346
Budapest, 14, 339, 356–59
Bülbül, 361–63
Bulgaria, Bulgarians, 24, 53, 61, 79, 106, 117, 136, 162, 190, 192, 207, 230, 307, 318, 322, 354, 356,
362
armistice with Allies by, 39–40, 114
British diplomats expelled from, 298, 302
German troops in, 303
Germany and, 298–99
independence of, 34
Jewish refugees from, 326, 335, 339, 355
in World War I, 35, 39–40
Burgess, Guy, 249
Bursa, 205, 219
Busbecq, Ogier Ghiselin de, 13
Büyükada (Prinkipo), 238–44, 246, 249, 255, 359
Byzantine Empire, 238
architectural remainders of, 4, 373
conquest of, 76
Greek desire to restore, 71
history and image of, 273–75
Italian trade with, 49
Jews and, 60
Byzantine Institute, 276, 277–80, 285
Byzantium, 13, 270
art of, 274–75, 280–85
churches of, 267–68, 271, 376
earthquakes in, 18
economy of, 15–16
emperors of, 14
founding of, 15
Greek-speaking, 119
legal codes of, 15
old quarter of, 16, 20
see also Istanbul

Café Lebon, 64, 147

caiques, 16–17
Cairo, 263, 358
calendar, in Istanbul, 179–80
caliph, caliphate:
Abdülmecid as, 87, 180–81
abolished, 180–81, 186, 277
Mehmed V as, 35
Mehmed VI as, 43, 85–86
separated from sultanate, 87, 180
sultan as, 5, 10, 37, 58
Cambridge spy ring, 249
Çankaya Avenue, 238–39, 244
capitalism, 238, 241
Capitulations system, 63–66
Çapulcular (Thugs) Street, 26, 129
Carp, Betty, 309–10, 334
Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, 349, 351–53, 359–60
Caucasus, 32, 35, 37, 39, 84, 98, 102, 103, 105, 107, 190, 226, 227, 246
Celile Hanım (mother of Nâzım Hikmet), 221
Cemal Pasha, 34, 37, 42–43, 56
census, Turkish national, 192–93
Central Asia, 43, 235, 257
nomads in, 189
origin of Ottomans in, 16
Central Powers, in World War I, 35–40
Cevad (owner of Opera Cinema), 158–59
Chalcedon, 15
Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Istanbul, 124
Chamberlain, Neville, 332
Charleston (dance), banning of, 142
Chebyshev, Nikolai, 97
Cheka (Bolshevik secret police), 248
China, 248–49
Christians, Christianity, 39, 61, 229, 270, 278
Byzantine, 274
canon law in, 181
deportation from Anatolia of, 37
economic marginalization of, 121–31, 152
in Istanbul, 51, 121
Istanbul as epicenter of, 10
nationalists feared by, 118–19
as refugees in Istanbul, 92
response to Allied occupation by, 40–41, 64–65
taxes on, 58
women, 203
see also Greeks (ethnic), Armenians
Christie, Agatha, 14, 25, 118, 235, 373
Church of the Holy Savior in Chora (Kariye mosque), 267
Churchill, Winston, 78, 83, 241, 310, 317
Church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, 267
Cicero (double agent), 313
Çıra an Palace, 50, 376
Circassians, 43, 191
Columbia Gramophone, 170
Committee for the Education of Russian Youth in Exile, 106–10
Committee of Union and Progress, see Unionists
communism, 225, 227, 230, 241, 245, 248, 252, 352
Communist Party, Soviet, 224
Communist Party, Turkish, 225–26
Communist University of the Workers of the East, 226–27
Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands-Express Européens, 23–26, 69, 377
Constan a, 102, 320, 361
Constantine, king of Greece, 71, 77–78, 84
Constantine XI Palaeologus, emperor of Byzantium, 78
Constantine the Great, emperor of Rome, 13, 15
Constantinople, 10, 13, 25, 42, 268
see also Istanbul
Cossacks, 93–95, 98, 100, 102, 105, 107, 138, 245
Cox, Oscar S., 327
Crete, 34, 70, 303
Crimea, 94–95, 103, 105, 106, 107, 109, 160, 190
Crimean War, 371
Cumhuriyet (The Republic), 8, 256–57, 260, 262, 267, 279, 296, 303
Curtiss, Joseph, 309
cymbals, Zildjian, 172–73
Cyprus, 75, 372
Czechoslovakia, 108, 356
Czechs, in Istanbul, 308
Dadiani, Koki, 100–101
Daily Mail, 82
Damascus, 39, 224, 351
Danube River, 191
Dardanelles Straits, 15, 36–37, 39, 74–76, 82, 290–91
Democratic Party, Turkish, 370–71
Denikin, Anton, 93–94, 97–98, 117, 140
Deutscher, Isaac, 244
Deutsche Schule, 297
Divanyolu, 20
divorce, 202, 203
Diyarbakır, 210
Doctors’ Plot, 251–52
Dolmabahçe Palace, 41, 50, 59, 86, 189, 213, 292, 376
Don, 95
Donovan, William “Wild Bill,” 310
Don River, 93, 107
Dos Passos, John, 14, 196, 244–45
drag queens, 137, 162
drugs, 144–45
Dukelsky, Vladimir (Vernon Duke), 137
Dumbarton Oaks, 275, 285
Dunn, Robert, 138, 245

earthquakes, 18–19
Eastern Question, 31–32
Eastman, Max, 242–43
Ece, Keriman Halis, see Keriman Halis
Edip Bey (father of Halide Edip), 206–8, 215
Edirne, 185–86
education:
in French schools, 205
for women, 203, 207–8
Education Ministry, Turkish, 258, 296
Edward VIII, king of England, 285
Egypt, 150, 209, 275, 279, 327
as free of Ottoman control, 75
Eichmann, Adolf, 356–57
Einstein, Albert, 296
Eitingon, Chaim, 247–48
Eitingon, Leonid, 247–52, 323
Eitingon, Max, 248
Ellis, Gertrude, 303
Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, 326
Eminönü (neighborhood), 157, 376
Emlak Bank, 128
Emniyet (Turkish secret police), 304–6
English language, 118, 161
Enver Pasha, 34, 37, 42–43, 55, 56, 306
Ephesus, 229
“Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin” (Nâzım Hikmet), 229–30
Eristavi, Gigusha, 99
Eristavi, Princess, 100
Ertegün, Ahmet, 173–75
Ertegün, Münir, 173–74
Ertegün, Nesuhi, 173–75
Ertu rul, 189
Ertu rul, Muhsin, 157, 213, 220
Erzurum, 72, 129
Eskenazi, Roza, 162–65, 167, 169, 171, 284
Ethiopia, 146, 272
eunuchs, 134, 138, 145–47
Europe, 256, 295, 298
collapse of empires in, 6
colonies of, 241
eastern, 63, 356
Muslim exiles from southeastern, 8
occupied, 312
Ottomans in, 192, 193
Pullman cars in, 23
World War II in, 291
Evliya Çelebi, xv, 142–43, 151
Eyüp (neighborhood), 61, 135, 143
ezan, 187–88

feminism, feminists, 155

Muslim, 213, 216, 375
Ottoman, 146
Feriha Tevfik, 257–58
ferries, 17–18, 30, 53, 136
Feustel, Hans Walter (travel agent), 297
fez, banning of, 181, 201, 263
Filov, Bogdan, 299
fires, 19–22, 26–27, 49, 137, 163
Florya, 99–100, 117, 292
Foreign Affairs Ministry, Turkish, 335, 339, 354, 363
Foreign Office, British, 312–13
Fossati, Gaspare and Giuseppe, 270–71, 275, 278–79
Fox-Pitt, Billy, 82, 105, 115, 156
France, French, 24, 32, 39, 52, 64, 95, 108, 117, 141, 150, 156, 214, 237, 243–44, 255, 258, 288, 333,
355, 364
in occupation of Istanbul, 40–42, 50–52, 66, 69, 74–76, 115, 136, 148, 244
in Ottoman demise, 55, 75, 77–79, 290
refugees in Istanbul aided by, 91–92
republican tradition of, 183, 186–87
Turkey’s relations with, 294
in World War I, 35–40, 71, 94
Franchet d’Espèrey, Louis, 42, 58
Franco, Francisco, 250, 292
Frenc, David and Israel, 321, 323
French language, 49, 118, 161, 162, 240, 350
Furlong, Charles, 65–66
Fyodorov, Georgy, 104

Galata (neighborhood), 42, 49, 115, 118, 140, 297, 373

Galata Bridge, 30, 103, 192, 205, 218
Galatasaray Lycée, 8, 222, 288
Galata Tower, 49, 104, 300
Gallipoli:
battle of, 36–37, 52, 53, 222
refugee camp at, 97, 117
Garbo, Greta, 159
Garden Bar, 5, 136–37, 375
Gare de l’Est, 22
Geffner, Emanuel, 321, 323
General Kornilov, 95
George V, king of England, 51, 84
Georgia, 98–102, 117, 226
German Consulate, 297, 318
German Embassy, 313
German language, 296, 297, 310, 323
Germany, Germans, 24, 42, 45, 76, 78, 102, 108, 114, 117, 144, 237, 240, 243, 256, 323
Anschluss and, 297
armed interventions by, 32
armistice signed by, 40
bombings by, 299
businessmen from, 69
films from, 156
intelligence services of, 310–11
in Istanbul, 4, 297–98, 308, 318–19, 363
Jews-for-goods exchange and, 357–58
Jews prohibited from leaving by, 320
military advisors to Ottomans from, 32, 35, 70, 298
Ottoman alliance with, 35, 55
refugees from, 295–96
Soviet Union and, 289, 303, 306, 340
transfer of Jews to killing sites by, 338
Turkey’s relations with, 256, 290, 294, 298, 306, 363
in World War I, 35, 39, 70, 290
in World War II, 289–90
Gesarian, Aram and Vahram, 171, 333–34
Gezi Park, 196
Gibbon, Edward, 274
Gibraltar, 115
Giz, Selahattin, 7–9, 9, 162, 178
Glorya cinema, 156–57, 159
Goebbels, Joseph, 266, 285–86, 289, 290, 369
Goeben, 35
Gökalp, Ziya, 190, 210
Gökçen, Sabiha, 186
Golden Horn, 12, 14, 15, 20, 21, 26, 27, 42, 44, 49, 59, 60, 61, 68, 105, 136, 137, 143, 145, 151, 152,
195, 203, 267, 300, 349, 350
Goldin, Joseph, 323, 331
Gottschalk, Walter, 296
Gramophone Company, 170
Grand Bazaar, 19, 21, 49, 103, 150, 195, 286, 297, 309, 334
Grand Cercle Moscovite restaurant, 105, 117, 173, 375
Grande Rue (Independence Avenue; stiklâl), 3, 6, 14, 20, 26–27, 31, 37, 42, 74, 97, 98, 103, 116,
118, 141, 149, 155, 156, 160, 166, 187, 192, 195, 196, 208, 220, 276, 288, 297, 318, 331, 372,
373, 375, 377
Grand National Assembly, Turkish, 75, 84–85, 114, 124, 185, 262, 276
Adnan as president of, 213
Atatürk named by, 291–92
Democratic Party in, 370–71
Halide Edip in, 215
head of state selected by, 293–94
independence tribunals of, 227
monarchy abolished by, 85, 115
new caliph named by, 87, 180
troops of, 82
women in, 202
Graveyard Street (Kabristan), 25–27, 103, 129, 135, 149, 245, 300; see also Me rutiyet
(Constitution) Avenue
Great Depression, 248
Greece, ancient, 274–75
Greece (Hellenic state), 7, 9, 79, 108, 119, 222, 247, 290, 371–72
beauty contests and Turkish rivalry with, 258, 267
designs on Ottoman territory of, 77–79, 119, 211
exchange of minorities with Turkey in, 121–23
Greek refugees in, 120–21
Muslim refugees from, 8, 91, 123, 136, 157, 162, 170, 171, 190, 205, 221–22, 375
in occupation of Istanbul, 40–42, 50, 76
in Ottoman empire, 70, 77
PAOK soccer team in, 123
rapprochement between Turkey and, 277
revolt against Ottoman rule by, 70–71
Salonica taken over by, 7–8, 163, 222, 224
territory ceded to, 75, 76
Turkish battle against, 78–80, 84–87, 115, 120
in World War I, 35–36, 39, 64, 70–72, 113
in World War II, 303, 307, 336
Greek army (Hellenic army), 64, 73, 77, 91, 118, 171, 211, 294
in battle of nönü, 78–79
withdrawals by, 79–82
Greek language, 61, 69, 71, 118, 122, 240, 275
Greek Orthodox Church, 9, 59, 69–70, 118, 179, 187, 269, 277, 280, 351
patriarch of, 70, 119–20, 126
Greek Powder and Cartridge Company, 128
Greeks, ancient, as early colonists in Istanbul, 15, 59
Greeks (ethnic):
Allied occupation and, 41, 64–65, 75, 119
definition of, xiii
diaspora of, 80, 120–23, 127, 162–64, 171, 374
divisions among Istanbul’s, 119–20
economic marginalization in Turkey of, 121–31, 194, 277, 333, 334, 365
economic power in Istanbul of, 27, 44, 119, 121, 124
in Istanbul, 8, 17, 31, 32, 49, 51, 58–59, 61–62, 64, 70, 81, 122–24, 142, 149, 179, 184, 191, 194,
207, 240, 277, 283, 301, 375
in Smyrna, 80
in Turkey, 80, 120–23
Greeks (Hellenes), xiii, 70–72, 80, 152, 244
Gritchenko, Alexis, 138
Guernica, 186
Guide Bleu, 26, 179–80
Guth, Fritz, 365
György, Andrea, 357

Haganah, 330
Hagia Eirene, 267
Hagia Sophia, 18, 21, 189, 195, 256, 268–86, 310
Deesis in, 280, 281–84
mosaics of, 270–71, 277–80
as museum, 285
Haidar, Musbah, 41
Haifa, 321, 324, 339, 341
Halide Edip, 33, 206–16, 255, 259, 263, 305, 375
Halil Bey (parliamentarian), 276, 279
Halis Bey (father of Keriman Halis), 259–60, 262
hamals (porters), 103, 108, 155
Hampshire Regiment, British, 92
hans (commercial houses), 50
Haralambos (friend of Trotsky), 240
Harbin, 248–49
Harbiye (neighborhood), 349–51
harem:
foreign fascination with, 145–46, 201
Ottoman imperial, 134, 145–47
Harington, Charles “Tim,” 78, 81–83, 85–86, 91–92, 96, 115, 148, 213, 349
Haydarpa a station, 18, 53, 118, 219, 360–62
Hayırsızada, 238
Hebrew language, 331
Heimatlose (legally homeless), 296
Hellenes:
definition of, xiii
see also Greeks (Hellenes)
Hemingway, Ernest, 4–5, 80, 127, 135–36, 150
Herbert, Aubrey, 20
Herodotus, 15
Herzog, Isaac (chief rabbi of Jerusalem), 352, 355
Heybeliada, 222, 229
Hikmet Bey (father of Nâzım Hikmet), 221–22
Hindemith, Paul, 168
Hirschmann, Ira, 319, 324–29, 332, 335–37, 339, 341, 345, 357–61, 364
Hissar Players, 51
Hitler, Adolf, 256, 286, 290, 294, 303, 307, 313, 339, 348, 352, 356, 359
HMV (His Master’s Voice), 170–72
Holocaust, 326, 330, 356–57, 359, 364
Hôtel de Londres, 26, 127
Human Landscapes from My Country (Nâzım Hikmet), 219–20, 229, 231
Hungary, Hungarians, 102, 117, 257
in Istanbul, 308
Jewish refugees from, 326, 335, 339, 357–59, 363
Jews-for-goods exchange and, 357–59
Jews persecuted in, 355–57

neada, 362
Ilyich, 236
Imperial Ottoman Bank, 37
nan, Afet, 205–6
India, 37, 51, 214
Industrial Revolution, 194
nönü, battle of, 78–79, 82
nönü, smet ( smet Pasha), 120, 196, 262, 294, 306, 370–71
pekçi brothers, 157, 220
pek Film, 157
Iran, 192
Iraq, 118
Iron Duke, 51, 82
Islam, 6, 9, 17, 26
alcohol and, 143
caliph’s role in, see caliph
call to prayer in, 20, 187–89
images supposedly prohibited by, 270, 278
Istanbul’s place in, 10, 180–81
propriety and morality in, 151, 152, 182–83, 186
sharia law in, 181, 186
Shi’a, 187
Sunni, 187
Turkish disestablishment of, 181, 277
see also Muslims
Islamic art, 273
Islamic imperialism, 189–90
Islamophobia, 78
smet Bey, 78, 82–83; see also nönü, smet
smet Pasha, see nönü, smet
Israel, 364
Istanbul, 4, 5, 41, 44, 48, 57, 77, 119, 163, 164, 211, 212, 223, 276, 354, 372, 376–77
academic refugees in, 293–94
Allied occupation of, 40–45, 49–57, 62–66, 74–77
Armenians in, 91
Atatürk in, 72, 292
battle lines not far from, 34
British officials evacuated to, 299
changing landscape of, 21, 26–27, 195–97
civilian refugees in, 44
civil society of, 272
as democratizing, 158
departure of non-Muslims from, 119
dining in, 143–44
earthquakes in, 18–19
economy of, 52, 62, 114, 130
espionage in, 32–33, 102, 239, 244–47, 249, 295, 298, 304–14
European luxury goods in, 31
fires in, 19–22, 26–27, 49
foreign subjects in, 58, 63–66
geography of, 15
Germans in, 297–98
as global city, 9–10
Greek designs on, 71, 77–78
Greek legacy of, 277, 278
Greeks in, 8, 17, 31, 32, 49, 51, 58–59, 61–62, 64, 70, 81, 121, 122–24, 142, 149, 179, 184, 191,
194, 207, 240, 277, 283, 301, 375
historic areas of, 276–77
hüzün of, 5
immigrants to, 308
as island of outcasts and the self-made, 5
Jewish refugees and, 320–24, 326, 329–39, 349–65
Jews of, 321
keeping to one’s own sphere in, 61–62
Kemalism vs., 189–90
keyif of, 5
languages of, 118
mahalles (neighborhoods) of, 61–62
modernization of, 195–97
mood of hopelessness and resignation in, 5
as multicultural, 60–61, 118–19, 130, 149, 152
as Muslim empire, 41
as Muslim and modern, 5
Muslim refugees to, 32, 43, 49–50
names for, 13
national census in, 192
nationalist condemnation of, 152
navigating, 17–18
neighborhoods of, 60–61
nightlife in, 90, 135–52, 139, 178, 196
noise in, 135–36, 155–56
non-Muslim minorities in, 49, 51, 58
occupation of, 290
as Ottoman capital, 31
Ottoman conquest of, 13, 16, 21, 187
pandemonium of daily life in, 118
popular culture of, 62
population of, 9, 45, 57–58, 92, 96, 113, 129, 136, 192–93, 194
public parks in, 25
railway service to, 25
railway terminus of, 14–15
refugees in, 91–110, 147
sea approach to, 13–14
seven hills of, 20, 60
as sitting on two continents, 18
skyline of, 195, 197
suburbs of, 9
Trotsky in, 235–44
Unionist troops in, 34
use of name, xiii
Western immigrants to, 6–8, 10
and West’s image of the Islamic world, 6
women’s rights movement in, 204
in World War I, 35, 39
in World War II, 303
see also specific subject entries
Istanbul University, 215, 296
Italian language, 350
Italian Riviera, 87
Italy, Italians, 18, 76, 108, 243, 272, 316, 350
films from, 156
Jewish refugees from, 352
in occupation of Istanbul, 40–42, 50–51, 115, 136, 244
in Ottoman demise, 77–78
in trade with Byzantine Empire, 49
Tripolitania annexed by, 34, 53
Turkey and, 286
withdrawal of troops from Anatolia by, 79
in World War I, 71
in World War II, 289, 307
Izmir, 193, 337
see also Smyrna

Jacquart, Camille, 192–93

Jale, Afife, 167–68
janissaries, 19
Japan, 76, 208, 246, 279, 318–19
jazz, 7, 137, 151, 154, 166, 170, 172, 173
Jerusalem, 314, 323, 327, 340, 352, 355
Jewish Agency for Palestine, 321–23, 331, 336–38, 348–49, 355, 358–61
Immigration Department of, 330, 364
Jews, 8, 13, 31, 49, 50, 61, 62, 118, 124, 136, 164, 179, 207, 229, 247–48, 251–52, 297, 301, 374–75
Ashkenazi, 63
in Balat, 61
in Byzantine era, 60
chief rabbi of, 10, 59
departure from Istanbul of, 364–65
economic marginalization of, 121–31, 152, 333–34, 365
evacuation from occupied Europe of, 319–41, 344, 345–65
Final Solution as threat to, 326, 330, 359
immigration quotas for, 330
Istanbul as haven from antisemitism for, 60, 295–96
in Istanbul population, 58–59, 60
rabbinical decisions and, 181
Roza Eskenazi as, 162–63
Sabbath of, 61
in Salonica, 162–63
Sephardic, 7, 60, 63, 364
taxes on, 58
Tokatlian Hotel boycotted by, 297, 317
Turkish, 336
Turkish citizenship and, 333
violence against, 185–86
women, 203
John XXIII, Pope (Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli), 353–55, 358–60, 364
Joint Chiefs of Staff, US, 117
Justinian I, emperor, 14–15, 268, 285

Kadıköy (neighborhood), 220, 376

Kadınlar Dünyası (Women’s World), 204
kadıs (judges), Muslim, 147
Ka ıthane (neighborhood), 61, 135
Kalis, Erich (bookseller), 297
Kapps, Andres (bookseller), 297
Karabekir, Kâzım, 79
Karagöz, 156
Karantinos, Mr. (Pera Palace manager), 301, 377
Kariye mosque, see Church of the Holy Savior in Chora
Karpich’s restaurant, 141
Kazakhstan, 235–36, 240
Kazbek, 360, 363
Kemalist army, 82, 211, 223, 294
in battle of nönü, 79, 82
see also Turkish army
Kemalist revolution, 184, 305
Kemalists, Kemalism, 73–75, 77, 78–79, 81, 83, 91, 116, 118–19, 181–83, 189–90, 191, 197, 203,
206, 223, 226, 229, 230, 256, 263, 369, 370–71, 372
armed uprisings against, 186
authoritarian tendencies of, 225
five-year plan of, 224–25
history rewritten by, 184, 214–15
homogenizing ideology of, 220
modern European history accelerated under, 194
nation-building and, 194
rejection of, 230
secularism of, 182–84, 186–89, 277
see also Turkish nationalists
Kenkulian, Hrant (Udi Hrant), 162, 165–67, 169, 170, 172, 175, 229, 334
Keriman, Halis, 259–63, 261, 267, 277, 375
Kessel, Dmitri, 272
Kiev, 105
Kılıç Ali Pasha mosque, 269
Kitab-ı bahriye (Pirî Reis), 18
Knatchbull-Hugessen, Hughe, 294, 312–13
Kofakos (Greek hotelier), 127
Koki and Niko’s, 100–101, 105
Kollek, Teddy, 314, 331
Korea, 371
Krauss, Josef, 297
Krupp, 42
Kumkapı (neighborhood), 62, 165
Kurds, Kurdistan, 31, 34, 75, 186, 191, 194
aerial attacks on, 186
rebellions among, 227

Ladino language, 60, 61, 118, 374

Ladyzensky, Colonel, 99
“La Gioconda and Si-Ya-U” (Nâzım Hikmet), 228
Lale (singer), 170
Lausanne, Treaty of, 114–15, 120–25
Lawrence, T. E., 37
League of Nations, 115, 116, 122, 150, 330
Le Corbusier, 27
Lenin, Vladimir, 93, 98, 101, 115–16, 224, 227, 235–36, 248
Leopold II, king of Belgium, 24
Levantines, 69, 260, 350–51, 375
Libya, 34, 53
Lincoln, Abraham, 22–23
Litvinov, Maxim, 310
Livadia Palace, 94, 105
London, 14, 94, 139, 173, 246
Long, Breckinridge, 326–27
Ludovic, Edouard and Emanuel, 321, 323

Macedonia, 34, 192

Macfarland, Lanning “Packy,” 308–9, 312, 337
Makarov, Sasha, 100, 105
Malaya, 86
Malta, 57, 74, 115, 212
Maritsa River, 299
Marmara, Sea of, 14, 15, 35, 44, 79, 82, 99, 165, 195, 219, 222, 238, 239, 293, 324, 363, 376
Marmara Taksim Hotel, 196
Marx, Karl, 223, 226, 238
Maslak, 84
Matisse, Henri, 272–73
Maxim club, 5, 138, 140–42, 173, 178
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 228, 230
Mediterranean Sea, 15, 36, 59, 69, 71, 164, 189, 268, 275
Medovi , Nicolaus, 297
Mefkûre, 361–63, 344
Megali Idea, 71
Mehmed I, Sultan, 229
Mehmed II, Sultan, 16, 21, 43, 270, 285
Mehmed V, Sultan, 34, 35, 43
Mehmed VI, Sultan, 45, 51, 55, 65, 73, 103, 223
as caliph, 43, 85–86
deposing of, 4–5, 85–87, 91, 114, 136, 146, 180–82
Ottoman breakup accepted by, 74–78, 84
weakness of, 35, 81, 83, 173
Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst, 273
Meletios IV, patriarch, 119, 126
Menderes, Adnan, 197, 371–72
Menemencio lu, Numan, 348–49, 354
Mensheviks, 98–99, 226
Mercader, Caridad, 250–51
Mercader, Ramón, 250–51
Mesopotamia, 36, 39, 75
Me rutiyet (Constitution) Avenue, 129, 318; see also Graveyard Street
Mexico City, 244, 250–52, 255
Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 228, 230
Meyers Guide, 144
meyhanes (taverns), 142–43, 164
Middle East, 295, 298, 350
Midhat (public prosecutor), 158–59
millet system, 58–59, 120, 123
Milliyet (The Nation), 193–94, 197, 204–5
Milne, George, 42, 51–52, 74, 78, 83
Minsky, Yakov, 236–37, 247
Miss Turkey competition, 254, 256–61, 267, 297
Miss Universe competition, 260–63, 277
Moda, 95, 96, 239, 297
Montreux Convention, 291
Morina, 361–63
Moscow, 102, 105, 116, 117, 139–40, 227, 232, 247, 249, 250
Nâzım Hikmet in, 226–27
mosques, 20, 123, 187–88, 189, 269, 378
churches converted to, 268, 270
imperial, 49, 51
Moulin Rouge club (Mulenruj), 161
movies, 155–60
democratizing influence of, 158–59
Turkish, 157, 213, 220, 257–58, 263
Mudanya accord, 82–83, 85
Mudros armistice, 40, 53, 57, 72, 74, 75, 82, 113, 114, 184
muezzins, 187–88
muhacirs (forced migrants), 32
Muhammad, Prophet, 10, 43, 135, 179
Muhayye , Misbah, 128–30, 131, 303, 317, 369–70, 377
Muhiddin, Nezihe, 204, 206
Muhlis Sabahattin, 157
Murder on the Orient Express (Christie), 118, 235, 373
music, 5, 155–75
in Ankara, 194
genres of Turkish, 161
in Istanbul’s nightlife, 136–38, 141–42
loss and longing portrayed in, 162
recorded, 161–75
Muslims, xiii, 44, 49, 61, 72, 80–81, 124, 137, 162, 179, 222, 229, 301, 305, 374
Allied condemnation of, 43
antinationalist, 119
bathing areas of, 99
Bolsheviks and, 43
Byzantium and, 274
compulsory exile of, 120–23
discontents of, 64–66
education for women among, 207–8
expanding wealth of, 61
from Black Sea coast, 107
intellectuals, 259
in Istanbul, 45, 58, 73–74, 194
polygamy among, 207
reaction to Allied invasion by, 41, 65–66
as refugees to Istanbul, 32, 34, 41, 43, 49–50, 91–92, 171
secular, 350
in Turkish nationalism, 55, 80–81, 118, 126, 152, 190–91, 211–12
Turkish-speaking, 62, 71, 75, 162, 277
Unionists and, 37
women, see women, Muslim
see also Islam
Mussolini, Benito, 286, 292, 307
Mustafa III, Sultan, 19
Mustafa Kemal, see Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal
Mustafa Suphi, 225–27
Mutlugün, Re at, 304–5
My Life (Trotsky), 240, 242–43

Nabokov, Vladimir, 94
Nadir A a (eunuch), 147
Nagelmackers, Georges, 22–25
Nansen, Fridtjof, 116, 122
Nansen passports, 116
Na ide Saffet, 258
National Pact, 74
National Turkish Commercial Union, 124
Nation Awakes, A, 157
NATO, 371
Nâzım Hikmet, 219–23, 226–32, 228, 255, 305, 375
Nazis, Nazism, 290, 295, 307, 308, 314, 329, 346, 352, 358
Jews killed by, 326, 330, 338, 359
Jews stripped of citizenship by, 320
race laws under, 297
in Turkey, 297
Near East, 6, 71, 122, 223, 273
Necdet Rü tü, 168
Necip Celal, 168
Nerkis (singer), 170
Nesuhi (public prosecutor), 158–59
Netherlands, 243, 300
New Orleans, La., 44, 150
New Rome, 13, 15, 268, 274; see also Byzantium, Istanbul
New York, N.Y., 44, 109, 113, 114, 160, 167, 174, 215, 284, 324, 364
New York Times, 141, 175, 236
Nicholas I, Tsar, 31
Nicholas II, Tsar, 105
Nicolson, Harold, 350
Nizharadze, Niko, 100–101
Normandy, Allied invasion of, 313, 362
North Africa, 37, 55, 96, 306
nostalji (nostalgia), 161–62
Novorossiisk, 93–94
Nuruosmaniye mosque, 20
“Nutuk” (Atatürk), 214–15, 219

Odessa, 93, 139, 235–36, 356

Office of Strategic Services, US (OSS), 308–14, 333–34, 337
Dogwood network of, 312, 357
X-2 (counter-espionage) branch of, 309, 311
OGPU (Soviet secret police), 236–37, 246–47
Ökte, Faik, 334
On the Streets of Istanbul, 157
Orak-Çekiç (Hammer and Sickle), 227
Orient Bar, 3, 106, 131, 300, 317
Orient Express, 3, 22–25, 118, 180, 247
Orient News, 118, 155
Osman, House of, 7
Ottoman army, 52–53, 57, 73, 81–82, 149, 221
Ottoman Baroque style, 50
Ottoman Empire, 24, 26, 32, 64, 77, 79, 86, 150–51, 193, 197, 224, 271, 318
alcohol production in, 143
under Allied occupation, 40–45
armistice with Allies and, see Mudros agreement
boundaries of, 14, 51, 184, 192
Byzantium conquered by, 13, 16, 21, 60, 169, 267, 270–71, 274
Christians in, 32; see also Greeks (ethnic), Armenians
classical music of, 161, 164–65, 166, 170, 172
constitutional monarchy in, 33–34
construction regulations in, 19
demise of, 31–33, 75–77, 86, 91, 114, 210, 259, 330
domestic spies in, 32–33
duration of, 43, 58
European annexations of territory of, 34
imperial harem in, 134
infrastructure of, 24–25
as Islamic empire, 4, 277
Istanbul as capital of, 3, 6
modernization of, 208
as multicultural, 4, 31, 58–59, 73, 120
parliament of, 33, 73–75, 212
poetic conventions in, 220, 227
police officers of, 44–45
property records under, 69
reform movements in, 33–34
religion as social system in, 120–23
renamed Turkey, 74
seafaring by, 18
sürgün (forced resettlement) under, 21–22
Turkish rejection of past in, 4
Turks perceived by, 190
uprisings and rebellions in, 32, 34–35
in World War I, 35–40, 70, 289
Ottoman naval college, 222, 229
Ottoman Turkish language, 61, 118, 147
rank expressed in, 158
oud (ud), 165–67, 170, 171–72

Palestine, 39, 52, 75, 247, 290, 331, 363, 364–65

Arabs in, 330, 332
immigration quotas and certificates for, 328–29, 330, 331–32, 358–60
Jewish refugees and, 320–24, 328–30, 332, 335–41, 345, 348–49, 355, 362
Palm Beach Seven, 141–42
Paris, 22, 24–26, 75, 113, 117, 137, 139, 140, 160, 215, 225, 235, 244, 246, 247, 263, 276, 294
Park Hotel, 318–19, 331, 349, 363–65, 375
Parthenon, 277, 383
“Past Is a Wound in My Heart, The,” 168–69
Patria, 324
Pegasus, 94
Pera (neighborhood), 42, 43, 44, 49, 64, 72, 101, 104, 108, 123, 127, 140, 143, 147, 155, 160, 208,
237, 300, 350, 373
avant-garde popular culture of, 151, 167
decline of neighborhood, 3
department stores in, 203
as destination for visiting Europeans, 25
as district of debauchery, 143, 150, 151, 305
espionage in, 244–46
fire of 1870 in, 21, 25, 27
foreign embassies in, 3–4, 44, 295
as Istanbul’s most fashionable neighborhood, 3
nightclubs in, 136–52, 167, 196, 260
northward shift to social life in, 318
secondhand shops in, 102
three curses of, 49
Pera Palace Hotel, 64, 96, 118, 127, 137, 140, 149, 192, 267, 276, 297, 298, 305, 308, 333, 372, 373,
376–77
Atatürk at, 52, 54–55
bar at, 74
Barlas at, 329, 331, 345, 349, 351–52, 364, 369
Bodosakis’s ownership of, 13, 69, 124–25, 128, 377
bombing of, 300–305, 301, 307, 313, 317, 319, 369
Brodsky at, 373
change of ownership of, 66
Christie and, 373
declared state property, 125, 128
decline of, 3, 317–18
Dos Passos at, 244–45
espionage and, 32–33, 244–45, 298
Goebbels at, 285–86, 289
Hemingway and, 4
initial success of, 26–27, 31
Milne at, 42
modernization and, 195, 197
Muhayye ’s purchase of, 128–31, 317, 369–70, 377
music at, 136
on New Year’s Eve 1925, 179
noise and, 135–36, 192
as part of chain, 26
renovation of, 375
restaurant at, 203
view from, 135
as Western-style hotel, 4
Whittemore at, 105–9, 271, 273
Persia, Persians, 15, 61, 145
Persian language, 189, 227, 228
Petits-Champs Park, 25, 27, 136, 196, 203, 245
Petits-Champs Theater, 138
Petrograd, 93, 94; see also St. Petersburg
Phanar (Fener) neighborhood, 59, 61, 70, 120
Philhellenism, 70–71, 78
Picasso, Pablo, 230
Pirî Reis, 18
Pius XI, Pope, 354
Pius XII, Pope, 352, 354, 359, 364
Poland, 101, 102, 117, 221
communities destroyed in, 326
death camps in, 338, 352
government-in-exile of, 300
invasion of, 289, 294
Jewish refugees from, 335, 339–41, 346, 357, 363
polygamy, 202, 207
Prague, 117
press, 33, 197, 212
census questionnaire in, 193
control of, 185–86, 191, 227
move to Ankara by, 194
and Struma affair, 324
Trotsky and Western, 236
Turkish, 237
Price, G. Ward, 82, 84
Prichard, Matthew, 106, 272–73
Princes Islands, 44, 229, 238
Prinkipo, see Büyükada
Procopius, 16, 268
Proctor, Bertha, 140, 149, 246
proletarian revolution, 224–25
property rights, 202
Prost, Henri, 195–97, 277, 318
prostitutes, 96, 147–52, 256
transvestite, 3, 152
Pullman, George, 22–23
Punjabis, British unit of, 52
Pushkin, Alexander, 226
Putin, Vladimir, 117

railroads, 14–15, 22–26, 155

Ramadan, 156, 189, 376
Rand, Tamara, 373
rebetiko, 163–64, 171
Red Army, Soviet, 101, 235, 248, 339, 341
Red Crescent Society, 210
Red Cross, 106, 108, 137, 310, 335, 348
Refet Pasha, 84–85, 213
Régence restaurant (Rejans), 161
Rendel, Anne, 299–300
Rendel, George, 299–300, 317
Republican People’s Party, 204, 370–71
as only legal party, 184, 214, 221, 224, 304
six pillars of, 183
Republic Day, 186, 314, 318
Republic Monument, 196, 316, 318
Resimli Ay (Illustrated Monthly), 228–29
Righi, Vittore, 351–52, 355
Robert College, 51, 309
Roman Catholic church, 58, 63, 269, 350–55, 357, 359–60
Romania, 24, 102, 155, 172, 290, 320–22
Jewish refugees from, 326, 335, 337, 339, 346–47, 360–63
Jews persecuted in, 355–56
in World War I, 35
Romaniotes, 60
Romanov dynasty, 45, 224
Rome, 352, 359, 364
Rome, ancient, 268, 275
Byzantium as successor to, 273–74
Roncalli, Angelo Giuseppe (Pope John XXIII), 353–55, 358–60, 364
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 310, 327, 336
Rose Noire club (Roznuvar), 141, 161
Rosenthal, Gérard, 240
Runciman, Steven, 276
Russia, Russians, 4, 32, 62, 69, 76, 90, 222–24, 236, 246, 278
as empire, 26, 92–94, 97, 106, 109, 248
exiles in Istanbul from, 91–110, 113–17, 122, 126, 137, 139–42, 147–48, 150, 152, 160, 226, 232,
235–52, 260, 271, 276, 320
in World War I, 35–40
see also Soviet Union
Russian Archaeological Institute, 276
Russian Embassy, shifting power at, 97, 116
Russian Futurism, 228, 230
Russian Imperial Academy, 108
Russian language, 223, 240
Russian Orthodox church, 107, 270, 351
Russian Revolution, 45, 93, 113, 117, 139, 232, 237, 240, 248
Russo-Japanese War, 107, 208
Rustow, Alexander, 296
Rustow, Dankwart, 296

Safa, Peyami, 350

Safiye Ayla, 170
Sahibinin Sesi (HMV), 170–72
St. James’s Brasserie, 136
St. Petersburg, 98, 100, 102
Sakarya, battle of, 212
Sakarya River, 79
Salih Zeki, 208–9
Salonica Army, 52
Salonica (Thessaloniki), 33, 210, 372
Abdülhamid II exiled to, 34
Greek immigrants to, 127, 374
Hellenic takeover of, 7–8, 163, 222, 224
immigrants from, 8, 123, 136, 157, 162, 170, 171, 205, 221–22, 375
as multicultural, 8, 53, 162–64
Ottoman, 7
Salvador, 324
Samsun, 57, 72
Sanders, Otto Liman von, 35, 70
Saraco lu, ükrü, 289, 306, 333–34
Sarayburnu (Seraglio Point), 14, 320, 361
Sarikamish, 37
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 230
Schwartzer, A., 149
Schwarz, Alfred, 312
science, religion vs., 279
Sedova, Natalya, 235–37, 239, 244, 246, 251
Selimiye mosque, 20, 269
Senegal, 42, 66, 157
Serbia, 117
Serra, Mario, 136
Sevastopol, 35, 93, 95
Sèvres, Treaty of, 75–78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 210, 290
eyhülislam, 16, 186, 259
Seyyan Hanım, 162, 167–69, 171, 175, 229, 334
Shakhovskaya, Princess, 114
Shalikashvili, David, 102
Shalikashvili, Dmitri, 98–102, 109, 117, 226
Shalikashvili, John, 117
Shaul, Eli, 62
sheet music, 160, 171
sheiks, 187
Shi’a Islam, 187
Shirt of Flame, 213
Siberia, 107, 236
Simplon Tunnel, 25
Simpson, Wallis, 285
Sirkeci station, 14, 18, 22, 92, 155, 300, 334, 344, 360, 362, 363
Slavs, 13, 71, 269–70
Slowes, Abraham, 339–41
Slowes, Moshe and Malke, 339–41
Smyrna, 71–73, 75, 77, 79–84, 91, 113, 129, 163–64, 171
Hellenic occupation of, 204, 210
Turkish conquest of, 212
see also Izmir
Snarsky brothers, 100
socialism, socialists, 5, 33, 63, 98, 155, 230, 237, 240, 243
in Russia, 93, 94, 223
in Turkey, 221, 223, 227, 232
Socialist Revolutionary Party, 248
Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, 309
Sofia, 41, 299, 302, 326, 339, 355
Soviet Embassy, 236, 246
Soviet Union, 93, 126, 185, 235–37, 240–41, 246–52, 295, 310, 313, 328, 362
German invasion of, 303, 306, 352, 356
nationalization of industry by, 104
Nâzım Hikmet in, 226–27, 228, 230–32
propaganda from, 97–98
Struma and, 323
Turkish relations with, 115–16, 223–26, 230, 256, 290, 291, 294
in World War II, 289–90, 352, 358
see also Russia
Soviet Writers’ Union, 232
Spa, 261–62
Spain, 186, 243, 249–50
Jews from, 60, 63
Spanish Civil War, 128, 249–50
Special Operations Executive (SOE), 307–8
Sperco, Willy, 140–41
Spitzer, Leo, 296
SS, 356–57
Stalin, Joseph, 230–31, 235–41, 243, 247–49, 252, 290, 294, 339
Stalingrad, 306, 356
Standard Oil, 41, 108
State Department, US, 326–27
Stein, Gertrude, 272–73
Steinhardt, Laurence A., 327–28, 336–37, 345, 348–49
Stella bar, 140
Sterladkin, Aleksei, 114
Stoliar, David, 323
Strafford, Charles, 94
Streater, Isabel, 247
Struma, 320–24, 326–27, 329, 348, 362–63
Sudan, 146
Süleymaniye mosque, 12, 20, 68, 269
sultan, 26, 31, 50, 58, 59, 63, 120, 190, 191, 203, 215, 223
caliph as, 5, 10, 35, 37, 58, 85–86
deposing of, see Mehmed VI, Sultan, deposing of
selâmlık procession by, 17, 51, 85
see also specific sultans
Sultanahmet (Blue) mosque, 21, 74, 189, 206, 211, 269, 276–77
sünnet, 8
Sunni Islam, 187
Superb, 40, 43, 222, 299
surnames, law requiring, 126, 263
Sweden, 9, 64, 328, 340–41
Switzerland, 108, 180, 295
Syria, 18, 36, 75, 247, 290, 321

taksim, 167
Taksim Square, 72, 140, 195–96, 262, 316, 318, 349
Talât Pasha, 34, 37, 42, 56, 306
tango, 168–69, 172
Tanin (The Echo), 209
Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi, 180, 187
Tanzimat reform movement, 32–33
Tarabya, 42
Tatavla (Kurtulu ), 64
Taurus Mountains, 327
Tbilisi (Tiflis), 43, 100
Tcherniavsky, Mr., 114
Téhige, Madame de, 378
Tenner, Katya, 94
Tepeba ı, 300, 373
tesserae, 283
Teutonia Club, 286, 297, 310
Tevfik Fikret, 209
Thessaloniki, see Salonica
Thomas, Frederick Bruce (Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas), 138–42, 175
Thrace, 18, 51, 53, 77, 78, 82, 92, 193, 289, 299
Muslims in, 121, 123
violence against Jews in, 186, 356
time, in Istanbul, 179–80
Tittmann, Harold H., Jr., 352
tobacco, state monopoly on, 33
Togo, 208
Tokatlian Hotel, 26, 114, 118, 138, 317, 375
on Nazi approved list, 297, 331
Trotsky at, 237–38
Tolstoy, Leo, 110
Tolstoy, Vera, 110
Tolstoy family, 117
Tom’s Lancashire Bar, 136
Topkapı Palace, 14, 19–20, 44, 49, 95, 267, 361
Gate of Felicity of, 361
Harem of, 276, 361
Toronto Daily Star, 4, 127
Toynbee, Arnold J., 6
Trabzon, 225–26
Transnistria, 346, 360, 362
trolleys, 27, 112, 155, 188, 203, 336
Trotsky, Leon, 93, 224, 235–44, 246–52, 255, 257, 323
Trotsky, Lyova, 236–37, 241, 244
tulumbacıs (firefighters), 19–20, 64
turbans, restrictions on, 186
Türkische Post, 324
Turkish Airlines, 123
Turkish army, 84–87, 115, 120
in battle with Hellenes, 78–80
see also Kemalist army
Turkish Council of Ministers, 277, 285
Turkish Hearth movement, 203–4, 209–10
Turkish language, 9, 13, 43, 122, 126, 161, 167, 188–89, 240, 310, 375
reform of, 181, 189
Turkish nationalists, 64, 73, 75–76, 79–82, 84–87, 91, 113, 116, 129, 152, 173, 190–91, 194, 204,
206, 210, 211–12, 223–25, 259, 306
critics of, 220–21
Halide and Adnan as, 213–16
nönü’s version of, 294
violence against Jews by, 185–86
see also Kemalists, Kemalism
Turkish National Museum, 276
Turkish Orthodox church, 119–20
Turkish Republic, 155, 160, 173, 213, 219, 222, 230, 318, 369, 374
Allies joined by, 363, 371
cinema of, 157
clock and calendar change in, 179–80
clothing laws in, 181, 191, 201, 263
creation of, 115, 118
critics of, 221
economy of, 223–24, 225, 371
espionage in, 304–14
ethnic minorities in, 120–23
exchange of minorities with Greece, 121–23
first constitution of, 120
foreign policy of, 256, 291
geographic importance of, 295
Greece and, 277, 371–72
historians in, 219
homogenization of, 130, 333
ideology of, 189–90
industrial and agricultural development in, 225
Islam disestablished as state religion in, 181
Jewish refugees and, 320–26, 329–33, 338–41, 345–49
literature under, 220–21
marginalizing of non-Muslims in, 121–31
modernity and secularism of, 4, 6, 168, 181, 182–84, 186–89, 191, 197, 256, 263, 267, 277, 279
modern notions of citizenship in, 120–21, 152
multiparty democracy in, 215
national life centered in Ankara under, 194–95
as nation-state, 126
neutrality of, 289–91, 295, 303–4, 307, 326, 338, 348
new civil code of, 181, 202, 214
origins of, 73–74
in Ottoman demise, 77
population of, 193–94
as primarily rural, 224
purging of imperial influences by, 189
religious-leaning government in early 21st century, 182–83
reorganization of, 85
surnames required in, 126, 263
territory of, 192
Treaty of Lausanne and, 114–15
war of independence in, 57, 125, 127, 171, 189, 196, 214, 219, 223, 291
in World War II, 303
Turkish revolution, 77, 84–87, 181–82
Turkish Women’s Union, 204
Turks, 23, 50, 115, 301
ancestry of, 189–90
background and definition of, 190
ethnic, 194
Kurds, 194
Ottoman past rejected by, 4
secular, 279
Turpin, F. W., 41
Turquoise club (Türkuvaz), 141, 161, 258, 375
Tuzla, 97
typhus, 149

Udi Hrant, see Kenkulian, Hrant

Ukraine, 326, 346, 356, 360
Ukrainians, 99, 101, 246
Ülkümen, Selahattin, 333
Unionists, 91, 162, 183, 203, 209, 210, 214, 221, 222, 238, 255
Germany and, 35, 55, 306
Mustafa Kemal influenced by, 53
nationalism of, 73, 75
reforms demanded by, 33–34
right-wing, 226
Special Organization in, 37–38
in World War I, 35, 37
United Nations, 364, 371
United States, Americans, 24, 65, 76, 105, 117, 141, 146, 156, 172, 192, 214, 245, 256, 276, 278
immigration quotas in, 330
intelligence service of, 223, 308–12, 314; see also Office of Strategic Services, US (OSS)
in Istanbul, 3, 43, 50, 138–41, 318
Miss Universe pageant and, 260–61
Pullman railway carriages in, 22–23
racism and slavery in, 138–39, 150
refugees in Istanbul aided by, 92
in World War I, 76, 94
in World War II, 299
Urgan, Mîna, 201, 240
Üsküdar (neighborhood), 42, 143, 206

Valens, Aqueduct of, 41

Venice, 278, 283
Venizelos, Eleftherios, 71–72, 78, 263, 277
Vermehren, Erich, 312
Vertinsky, Alexander, 137
Vienna, 24, 41, 79, 137, 138
Vilnius (Vilna), 339–41
Vladimir of Kiev, 269–70
Volunteer Army, Russian, 93, 95–96, 105, 117, 139
von Papen, Franz, 290, 306, 312, 323, 363

wagon-lit, 23
Wagons-Lits Company, see Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands-Express
Européens
Walker, Archibald, 309
War Refugee Board, 327, 337, 345, 358–59, 360
Washington, D.C., 23, 114, 173–74, 275, 310, 312, 327, 328, 345
wealth transfers, 130, 333, 369
Webb, Beatrice and Sidney, 243
Wehrmacht, German, 303, 306, 340, 356
Werfel, Franz, 165–66
White, Charles, 17
White Russians, 92–110, 113–17, 126, 137, 139–42, 160, 223, 232, 237, 239, 243, 245, 248–49, 271,
295, 296, 298, 320, 374
Whittemore, Thomas, 117, 271–72
Byzantine art and, 273–86
Hagia Sophia and, 277–83, 286, 310
Russian refugees and, 105–10, 276
Wilhelm II, kaiser of Germany, 71
Wilson, M. M. Carus, 50
Winter Garden Theater, 136
women, 200–216, 200, 205
Kemalist values and, 197, 212
Kemal’s adopted daughters and new Turkish, 182, 186, 205–6
legal rights for, 202, 214–15, 259
in professions, 202–3
trafficking of, 150–51
in workforce, 204
women, Muslim:
in beauty contests, 258–62, 263
head coverings for, 201, 211, 212, 215, 259, 375
as performers, 167–68, 170
seclusion of, 138, 156, 159, 201–2, 259
women’s organization, 203–4, 209
Woods, Henry, 207
World War I, 44, 53, 64, 71, 77, 91, 97, 98, 106, 113, 120, 122, 129, 145, 146, 147, 156, 167, 172,
210, 214, 222, 275, 289, 339
aftermath of, 6, 10, 69, 83, 330
devastation of, 8
results of, 4
and Turkish boundaries, 192
women in workforce after, 204
see also specific countries
World War II, 128, 164, 167, 186, 230, 286, 288, 371, 377
Prost’s plan derailed by, 196
see also specific countries
Wrangel, Pyotr “Piper,” 95–98, 101, 104, 107, 109, 117, 137, 140, 232, 245, 320

Yalta, 94, 100

Yar restaurant, 105, 139
Yeniköy, 129, 369
Yeni (New) mosque, 205
Yıldız Palace complex, 32, 45, 50, 85–86, 136, 206, 296
YMCA, 3, 148, 245
Young Turks, see Unionists
Yugoslavia, 290, 303, 307
Yunus Nadi, 155, 212, 255–58, 260, 262, 267, 279, 296, 297, 303

Zaharoff, Basil, 64
Zarnekow, Countess, 100
Zarnekow, Petya, 99
Zehra (Atatürk’s daughter), 279
Zildjian family, 172–73, 175
Zionism, 63, 314, 320, 359
Ziya Bey, 43–45, 69, 103–4, 137, 140, 150, 350
ALSO BY CHARLES KING

Odessa
Extreme Politics
The Ghost of Freedom
The Black Sea
The Moldovans
Nations Abroad (co-editor)
Copyright © 2014 by Charles King

All rights reserved

First Edition

Photo credits: Frontispiece courtesy of Pera Palace Hotel Jumeirah. All other photos courtesy of Yapı
Kredi Bank Selahattin Giz Collection.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

King, Charles, 1967–

Midnight at the Pera Palace : the birth of modern Istanbul / Charles King. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-393-08914-1 (hardcover)
1. Istanbul (Turkey)—History—20th century. 2. Istanbul (Turkey)—Social life and customs—20th
century. 3. Istanbul (Turkey)—Social conditions—20th century. 4. City and town life—Turkey—
Istanbul—History—20th century. 5. Pera Palas Oteli (Istanbul, Turkey)—History—20th century.
6. Social change—Turkey—Istanbul—History—20th century.
7. Cosmopolitanism—Turkey—Istanbul—History—20th century. I. Title.
DR731.K56 2014
949.61´8024—dc23

2014012360

ISBN 978-0-393-24578-3 (e-book)

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