Istanbul
Traffic on the Bosphorus goes one way and then the other. One day it leads from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and from there through the Dardanelles, to the Aegean and then the Mediterranean. On alternate days, the other way. Often it seems Turkish history goes like that.
For instance, consider Dolmabahce Palace, on the European side of the Bosphorus. It was home to six sultans and served as the center of the Ottoman empire from 1856-1922. Even as the empire was crumbling—the construction costs (nearly $1.5 billion) of the palace put an enormous burden on the state’s already troubled finances—the Ottomans knew how to stage a political show. The palace’s crystal staircase, also known as the protocol staircase, was designed to impress, if not intimidate, foreign dignitaries, who ascending the staircase with gold, brass, crystal, and mahogany saw an expansive jeweled heaven opening above them, and understood they were dealing with people who were serious about the exercise of power.
Even as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk moved the capital to Ankara and created the Turkish Republic in 1923, he chose to die here in this landmark of Ottoman might in the fall of 1938. To the power he’d undone, he added his own luster to give it more life. This way, then that way. The Turkish tour group I was with seemed most awed by the presence of Ataturk’s modest deathbed.
Some contend that Ataturk conceived of the Republic at the Pera Palace hotel, where I’ve been staying the last few days. It’s a beautiful place, known as “the oldest European hotel in Istanbul,” built in 1892, that changed hands several times in its history before it was renovated in 2010 and reopened in its newest incarnation. Just off the lobby is the hotel’s centerpiece, a large tea room and library in deep red upholstery that captures what must have been the original inspiration for the place—a welcoming stance toward to the future, grounded in a past guided by confidence.
Originally built to serve the passengers who traveled to the eastern terminus of the Orient Express, Pera Palace was where the west and east meet, as the often cliché saying has it. Here there is something to it. It wasn’t just the intermingling of cultures that brought the two in contact but also on occasion military and political conflict. British forces that first occupied the city in 1918 made the surrounding area, Pera, its administrative center. One story holds that in the hotel’s Orient Bar a group of British officers invited the hero of Gallipoli, the biggest Ottoman victory of the Great War and a catastrophe for the British, to their table. The man who would become Ataturk politely declined and told them it was not appropriate for a host to go to the table of guests for a drink, but they were welcome to come to his table.
As Charles King, author of the magnificent history of modern Istanbul, Midnight at the Pera Palace, astutely notes, “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 he went to the Pera Palace precisely because it was the epicenter of the allied occupation.”
The midnight in the book’s title refers to New Year’s Eve 1925, when Turkey would switch to the Western calendar. Muslims, Greek Orthodox and observant Jews all had their own calendar, when the clock struck 12 on January 1, 1926 the modern Turkish republic all went on the same time. There were a host of other reforms in what was known as the inkilab, or revolution. The religious office of the caliphate was dissolved in 1924. Arabic script was replaced with Latin. A new civil code, based on Switzerland’s, was established. Men had to wear hats with brims, instead of the fez. “Little boys threw rocks to try to ping the old headgear off recalcitrant fez-wearers,” writes King. And it was now officially legal to drink alcohol in public—not that this had ever stopped anyone at the Orient Bar before.
After Ataturk, the bar’s more famous patrons included Nobel Prize for Literature winners Knut Hamsun and Ernest Hemingway, as well as John Dos Passos and John Dewey. Sarah Bernhardt stayed at the Pera Palace as did a less reputable, if more daring actress, Mata Hari, the German spy. In a sense, the Pera Palace is the Istanbul reflection of Vienna’s Café Central (weirdly, the Yugoslavian dictator Tito frequented both), where celebrities, and soon-to-be notorious figures rubbed elbows without quite recognizing each other’s destiny. This is what it meant to be an imperial capital like Vienna or Istanbul—to attract the talent of not only your own subjects, but also the risk-takers from the rest of the world, those who would seize the main chance anywhere, which is what filled these cities with both a sense of opportunity as well as danger.
Tonight however the Orient Bar is quiet. Winter is always a slow season and it’s snowed on and off here the last week, thought I’m thankful not to be caught in the blizzard back home in Washington. There was a terrorist attack attributed to ISIS in the Sultanahmet area two weeks ago that killed 10 tourists. In the summer the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) unilaterally ended the ceasefire with the Turkish government and reignited its 30-year-long war with Ankara, and while most of the attacks have been outside Istanbul, the violence is no doubt keeping some tourists away. Further, there are tensions over the Syrian conflict, including the number of Syrian refugees in the country, well more than 2 million by some estimates, as well as Russia’s escalation right on Turkey’s southern border. Worse yet, the Obama administration seems not to be overly concerned about the security of a fellow NATO member. The White House has partnered with the PKK’s Syrian franchise, the PYD, in its anti-ISIS campaign.
Still, where is everyone? I ask the bartender. “We need more Turks here,” says Emre Erkus. Istanbullus are pouring into a club across the street owned by some famous businessman or some other kind of celebrity, filling a venue that looks from the outside like a Lower East Side bodega. And all you can hear are the ghosts here in the extraordinary Orient Bar—Ataturk and the Brits, Hemingway and Knut Hamsun finding out they both lived in Illinois, with the latter working as a tram conductor in Chicago.
“I think we should make this a cigar bar,” says Emre. “That would bring in Turks, and the foreigners would enjoy it, too,” he says. “Meeting not just other foreigners but real Turks. The one club where you can sit in this city and smoke cigars, like men, like old times.” Istanbul goes this way, then that way, then this way again.
