Midnight at the Pera Palace

When 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. 

So begins Charles King's recent history, Midnight at the Pera Palace.  It is an enticing opening sentence, because family members and I first saw the Pera Palace exactly twenty years ago last month.  We were seeking neither rewiring nor prostitution, transgendered or otherwise. We were seeking the hotel in which Agatha Christie is reputed to have written her masterpiece, Murder on the Orient Express. 

We had drinks at the hotel bar, and wandered around the premises.  I recall feeling slightly disappointed with the overall appearance of the hotel.  If I'd been as good a writer as Mr. King, I would have written in my journal that the 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.

I do remember the bar as being empty and dark -- not dark in a mysterious and thrilling way, but in an abandoned, what's-the-use sort of way.

But King uses the Pera Palace -- much revitalized by new owners in the past twenty years, he notes -- as the central point around which revolves his history of Istanbul from the dying years of the Ottoman Empire to the post-War era.  From the hotel, he expands his narrative to the history of Istanbul, the dramatic transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the Turkish Republic, Turkey's difficulty in dealing with its minorities, the emigration of Russians into Istanbul, Turkey's complicated relationship with the Great Powers in both world wars, and the surprising (to me) role of Istanbul in the migration of Europe's Jews to the British Palestine mandate during and after World War II.

The book covers a lot of ground, but it does so by discussing the lives of those who suffered through the period, as well as those who shaped it and who benefitted from it.  And the narrative always returns to the role of the Pera Palace -- a writer's device that at times seems a bit gimmicky, but one which, in general, successfully centers the story, causing complex events to cohere in an understandable manner.

Some of the history -- such as Turkey's treatment of its Armenian and Greek minorities -- I was aware of, to some extent.  But the book provides an excellent and balanced treatment of Kemel Ataturk's program to change the cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire -- with its carefully balanced treatment of the many religions and ethnic groups that it encompassed -- into a nationalistic Turkish state.  This program, to some degree, merely reflected the Empire's loss of all its territories outside Anatolia and the European area around Istanbul -- but Kemel made a virtue of necessity, creating a more cohesive "modern" state, one that was more homogeneous ethnically and completely secular religiously.

He did so, of course, by disrupting or ending the lives of Greeks and other ethnic groups that had lived on "Turkish" soil for centuries.  He paints vivid pictures of the destruction of the Greek community in Smyrna (today's Izmir), and of the disruptive ethnic exchange by which Salonica (today's Thessaloniki), at the time a highly cosmopolitan city in what is now northern Greece, sent its "Greek-ified" Turks back to Turkey (especially to Istanbul), and accepted Greeks from Turkey in exchange. 

King reveals -- a revelation that was certainly a surprise to me -- Istanbul's bohemian lifestyle in the wake of World War I and the subsequent Allied occupation.  I would never have pictured a vibrant jazz club scene in the Istanbul of the 1920s -- a phenomenon that demonstrated the contrast between the modern, "Greek," "European" portions of the city north of the Golden Horn -- the area where we read about student demonstrations today, and where the Pera Palace and other large hotels are located -- and the "Turkish" area south of the Golden Horn where student backpacker hostels, the Hagia Sophia, Topkapi, and most of the other mosques that give Istanbul its iconic skyline are located.

Before Kemel's revolution, Turks living outside Istanbul were essentially Old World peasants.  Kemel, despite his destruction of much that was admirable in Ottoman society, brought these people into the modern world and gave them a self-respect and sense of unity and national pride they had never before experienced.  King quotes the chant that began each day of class in post-revolution schools -- a chant analogous to our own Pledge of Allegiance:

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.

A little collectivist for our tastes, perhaps, but admirable and perhaps preferable to the rather meaningless Pledge our own students recite.

Istanbul was an important conduit for Jewish refugees from Hitler's holocaust on their way to Palestine.  The maddening paperwork required by national bureaucracies allowed all too few to complete the journey, but the way was made easier by the work of the Vatican's Apostolic Delegate to Turkey and Greece, stationed in Istanbul -- an Italian named Angelo Roncalli (later known as John XXIII).  Msgr. Roncalli showed a far greater sense of compassion for the Jewish refugees, and urgency for their rescue, than that shown by Vatican officialdom, not hesitating to go beyond his instructions and beyond official Vatican policy in securing information about Jews trapped in Nazi-dominated states, and finding ways to effect their escape. 

 Midnight at the Pera Palace is a highly readable history that ably covers a large amount of material.  It focuses on the ways in which political, diplomatic, and military forces affected the lives of ordinary people, without failing to explain and investigate the nature and causes of those forces.  It reads almost too well to be a scholarly work, but the text is supported by voluminous footnotes at the end of the book, and by pages of bibliography.

An inspiring survey of an often ignored part of the modern world.