by Charles King
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 hahambaı (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 Kaıthane, 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 aroun
d 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 Beyolu 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.
SVELTE 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.