Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul Read online

  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.

  “AS 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 Haydarpaa 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.