Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  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—Turki
sh 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.