Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  The Garden Bar’s proprietors had their pick of artists because the city was crawling with out-of-work musicians and other performers, most of them part of the bedraggled White Russian invasion of 1920. Boutnikoff’s Symphony Orchestra, founded by a Russian émigré, offered concerts twice daily, marking one of the first sustained efforts to bring European classical music to the city. Popular music stars such as the singer Alexander Vertinsky, along with future notables such as the young jazz composer Vladimir Dukelsky—or Vernon Duke—performed at venues throughout the city. Russian circus artists had also made their way south with Wrangel’s forces, and Istanbul now saw a boom in knife juggling and acrobatics. When jobs were scarce, the local Red Cross office was inundated with requests for money. A troupe of eight Russian dwarfs applied for assistance with developing a new revue. A man with a menagerie of trained rats, dogs, and a pig requested help in placing his animal show in a suitable nightclub or performance hall. “Artists cannot live in Russia now,” the rat trainer said sadly. “The atmosphere is uncongenial to art.”

  Art was probably not on the minds of most people who ventured north of the Golden Horn, however. At the Garden Bar, the memoirist Ziya Bey reported, “soliciting by both male and female pleasure-seekers is now so aggressively indulged in that not even a self-respecting man dares any more to venture in the place.” The whole neighborhood was like the slums of Naples, recalled Alexis Gritchenko, a Russian painter. Misspelled signs in many languages lured customers through dark doorways. The smell of sour wine and rotten fruit wafted up from cellars and taverns. The windows of legal brothels glowed golden. Shouts and laughter continued through the night, broken only by the thunder of a giant hogshead of wine being rolled over paving stones.

  Outrageous entertainment and on-demand licentiousness had been part of the city’s social order for centuries. The difference now was that it all seemed to be so freely available—on display even—before crowds of strangers packed together inside bars, public gardens, and theaters. As late as 1916, when the first Viennese opera troupes began appearing in the city, concert organizers had to stage special performances for women only, so that the wives and daughters of pashas and beys would not have to interact with other men. Princesses of the imperial household had rushed giggling into the Tokatlian Hotel—the first time they had been allowed to enter a hotel lobby, in fact—surrounded by guardian eunuchs who ushered them through a back exit to the Petits-Champs Theater beyond. Now, in the 1920s, it was hard to imagine that such a chaste and naïve world had ever existed. “At Petit Champs [sic] you could watch Cossack dancers, see clean, U.S. tincan sailors piled out of arabas [trucks] into the stew of tarts cadging for champagne,” recalled Robert Dunn, an American naval official.

  The popularity of nightspots rose and fell, victims to changing fortunes, evolving tastes, or a single dull performance that took the life out of the party. That was the fate of one of the earliest sensations in the club life of Istanbul and a major rival of the Garden Bar, a large and hopping dance joint called Maxim.

  The club’s proprietor was an unlikely impresario. Frederick Bruce Thomas was the son of former Mississippi slaves. He had joined countless other black men from the southern United States who sought jobs and fortunes in Chicago and New York, waiting tables or working as valets. A sense of adventure and a desire to escape the everyday racism of Gilded Age America took him to London, Paris, and then, in 1899, to a place very few African Americans had dreamed of visiting: the Russian Empire. Within a few years, he had taken Russian citizenship, found a Russian wife, and—as Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas—set himself up as one of the premier maître d’s in Moscow. The establishment where he worked, Yar, was the city’s most elegant eatery and a restaurant known across the continent. He later opened his own Moscow nightspot, which debuted to rave reviews and record crowds.

  A chorus line: Female dancers at a revue in an Istanbul club.

  Thomas had crossed the color line, achieving a status he never could have reached had he remained in the United States, but the tide of politics and revolution was harder to manage. After the autumn of 1917, when Muscovites began taking sides in the emerging civil war, Thomas fled south to the relative safety of areas controlled by the Volunteer Army. Like many Russian subjects, he found a temporary refuge in Odessa, a port city that had passed back and forth between rival armies. In 1919, he moved again, joining thousands of former tsarist loyalists fleeing the Bolsheviks’ southward advance. He ended up in Istanbul, likely the only black White Russian to arrive with the remnants of Denikin’s and Wrangel’s forces.

  In short order, Thomas reestablished himself. He fell in with Bertha Proctor, a Lancashire barkeep and sometime madam whose bar near the Pera Palace was already regarded as one of the most successful in the city. Together they opened a new establishment at the end of a tramline in the ili neighborhood. Known by a variety of names—the Anglo-American Villa and Garden, Bertha’s, and finally Stella—it became one of the favorite haunts of Allied officers. Within a few years, business was so good that Thomas was able to trade up, and in the autumn of 1921, he inaugurated a new venue nearer the center of Pera on Sıraselviler Avenue. He christened the new dancing and dinner club Maxim, the name of his old business in Moscow and perhaps a clever rhyme with Istanbul’s nearby Taksim Square.

  In the middle of the 1920s, the grande salle of Maxim was “the most frequented locale not only for the Istanbul public but also for foreigners who happened to be passing through,” said the memoirist Willy Sperco, who was then living in the city. Even the acerbic Ziya Bey was moved to check out the popular nightspot, visiting with his wife and a Greek friend, Carayanni, who had become rich by jacking up prices on scarce food items during the war. “Never before were Pera and Galata as disreputable as now,” he wrote. He found Maxim full of Russian ex-nobles and amateur bohemians, everyone smoking and drinking, with a black jazz band on stage. People had begun to adopt the French habit of kissing women on the hands, but beyond that, few of the more refined habits of Parisian life had taken root in Istanbul. “[T]he only thing which this international crowd has adopted from the Quartier Latin of Paris is free love,” he concluded.

  Thomas was a talented survivor, and when the times demanded it, he could shift gears. He could transform himself from Western-style clubman to Turkish harem lord with literally the change of a hat. When a group of American tourists wandered in, Thomas would don a fez and order his chorus girls into Turkish pantaloons. The visitors were treated to an evening in a splendid Ottoman harem, with lounging slave girls and obsequious attendants serving a passable beefsteak with horseradish sauce. When the evening was finished, the exotic proprietor would bow, press the guests’ hands congenially, and then usher them out the door with a warm “Good-bye, effendi.”

  The good times could not last, however. Thomas had expanded the business too rapidly. The departure of the Russians took away both clients and employees, and rivals were eager to copy what had been a novel and brilliant model of drinking, eating, and dancing, all in one place, with young women serving as the waitstaff. Other clubs were popping up along the Grande Rue—the Rose Noire, the Turquoise, Karpich’s, the Kit-Kat. After only five years in the new location, Thomas had racked up a mountain of debt. His creditors forced him to pay up or declare the business bankrupt, much in the way that all non-Muslim businesses were being squeezed at the time. He closed the doors in 1927 and died the following summer. Turkish businessmen later opened a new version of Maxim as a casino, but the life had gone out of the party. “The post-war world was jazzing,” noted Thomas’s obituary in the New York Times, “and [he] saw to it that cosmopolitan Constantinople was not behind.” Newspapers labeled him “the sultan of jazz,” and a few dozen old friends came out for the funeral, but most of the former clientele had moved on to newer and more exciting venues. It was all a sad affair, remembered Willy Sperco, as depressing as the aftermath of an orgy.

  Among Istanbul’s local historians, Thomas is often credited with introducing
Istanbullus to everything from Western-style dancing to the entire concept of public nightlife. His Maxim probably did feature the first black dance bands in the city, which Thomas brought on tour from France and the United States. A mysterious group that contemporaries remembered as the Palm Beach Seven may have been the first ensemble ever to mute a trumpet or hit a rim shot in Istanbul’s history. Maxim’s dancing instructors, mainly young Russian women, helped train an entire generation of Istanbullus to do the foxtrot, the shimmy, and other fashionable steps. In 1926, municipal authorities issued orders banning the Charleston—not because it offended Muslim sensibilities but because record numbers of people were being admitted to the hospital for sprains and bruises. The ban was impossible to enforce, of course, and it was mercilessly mocked by the Turkish press, but it did reflect the rapid transformation of the city after the White Russian influx. “They changed the shape of social life,” the Turkish memoirist Mîna Urgan, then a young girl, recalled succinctly of the Russians.

  Newcomers such as Thomas, however, were actually slotting into a well-worn groove: the habit of eating, drinking, and carousing that Istanbullus themselves had already developed into a high art. European émigrés typically thought of themselves as having pioneered public entertainment in the city, and they probably were responsible for the idea of a restaurant—a place where you could go in the evening, sit at a cloth-covered table, and order from a limited but regularly changing menu, with plated dishes being delivered by a trained server. Nothing quite like that had existed in Istanbul before. But there was no shortage of public eateries and other distractions, even under the Ottomans.

  Rough wine and raki could be had at innumerable meyhanes, taverns usually owned by Greeks or Armenians. According to the seventeenth-century traveler Evliya Çelebi, the city boasted more than a thousand meyhanes in his day—not necessarily an accurate count but still an indication of how easy it was to procure alcohol in the capital of the Islamic world. In fact, the sense that the number of bars and eateries was out of control has been one of the constants in Istanbul’s social history. Anyone “who can fry three stinky fish in a pan gets a permit to open a meyhane,” complained a newspaper in the 1930s. The same sentiment repeated itself just about every time city administrators contemplated how to corral Istanbullus’ seemingly boundless desire to offer their neighbors something to eat and drink.

  Meyhanes were spread throughout the city, from Eyüp to Üsküdar, and, like neighborhood pubs, each had its regular clientele. Small plates of meze—assortments of sardines, fava beans, melon, white cheese, and other dishes—were provided to soak up the Bulgarian and Greek wine, which made slaves of those who drank it, according to Evliya Çelebi. On his own visits to such establishments in the mid-1600s, he regularly came upon drunken men complaining of their plight. “My foot takes no step but to the tavern!” they called out to him. “My ear hears nothing but the bottle’s glugging and the drunken cry!” He gave thanks to God that he himself never took anything stronger than sherbet made from Athenian honey, yet he was nevertheless able to recall eight of the most popular meyhanes by name, which he listed helpfully in his famous book of travels, the Seyahatname.

  Despite the theoretical ban on alcohol consumption by Muslims, the Ottoman Empire also developed an extensive alcohol industry, producing everything from anise-flavored raki to wines and beers, again typically the domain of non-Muslim proprietors. Being abstemious was a virtue observed mainly in the breach, which is why Pera was such a useful thing to have in Ottoman and republican Istanbul—an entire neighborhood, across the Golden Horn from the sultan’s oldest palace, where just about any kind of debauchery could be had at a price. It was almost as if Las Vegas were always only a bridge away.

  Eating and drinking involved being in the public eye. Until well into the twentieth century, a home-cooked meal was a rarity. This mode of dining was almost exclusively the purview of the wealthy, who could afford a permanent kitchen in their villa or mansion, one or more servants to go to the market, and a cook to prepare the food. Average Istanbullus got their food in groups—from street vendors, neighborhood bakers, soup kitchens attached to mosques, canteens associated with some professional class (such as soldiers or the service staff at imperial palaces), or the ubiquitous esnaf canteens, or tradesmen’s eateries, that serviced specific neighborhoods. People traditionally ate where they worked and worked where they lived, surrounded by other people just like them, such as coreligionists or members of distinct professions, since specialized workshops—coppersmiths, glassblowers, woodworkers—tended to be concentrated in the same parts of the city. In the 1880s, for example, a little over a quarter of Istanbul’s population—mainly unmarried men—did not live in private homes but were accommodated in mosque complexes, artisans’ shops, and other group lodgings. About eight percent of the people in the city had no fixed abode at all.

  Given the need for food that was easily prepared and easily served to large groups, simplicity was key. Minute gradations of quality depended not on doing something new but on doing something familiar particularly well. That is why so many of the memoirists of everyday life in Istanbul are most wistful when they recall a noted baker, the purveyor of an especially good yogurt, or a well-shaded teahouse. A traveler today can today go from a morning simit, a pretzel-like bread covered in sesame seeds, to a grilled fish or stew at midday, to a sludge-bottomed coffee in the afternoon and still approximate the foodways—and caloric intake—of average Istanbullus of the past. Classical Ottoman dishes eventually made their way into the city’s restaurants, but these concoctions with their whimsical names—such as the lamb and eggplant in hünkârbeendi (The-Sultan-Enjoyed-It), or the eggplant, tomato, and garlic in imambayıldı (The-Imam-Fainted)—would have been foreign to the vast majority of the city’s population.

  Beyond the variety of food and drink available in innumerable public venues, Western visitors have long had a particular fascination with Istanbul’s vices. “Narcotic stimulants such as Indian hemp and opium are available,” the popular Meyers Guide told German travelers as late as 1914.

  The enjoyment of marijuana and hashish enables one to continue working, erases pain, cures various diseases, and creates a pleasant intoxication that stimulates the imagination and increases both appetite and sex drive. . . . Opium smokers (mainly Persians and Arabs rather than Turks) tend to gather only in a few hidden coffeehouses in Yedikule [south of the Golden Horn] and indulge in this vice in secret. For Europeans, joining them is fraught with difficulties since in recent years the government has intervened vigorously against opium smoking.

  Illicit drugs remained a part of the city’s entertainment after the First World War, and styles and tastes came more in line with European sensibilities. Turkey was not a signatory to conventions on the transport of narcotics, and producers and traffickers flocked to Istanbul as the center of the cross-Mediterranean trade. Newspapers and journals railed against the scourge of one particular new import, cocaine. Because it required none of the complex apparatus involved with smoking hashish or opium, cocaine raced through Istanbul’s clubs and bars. New purveyors even set themselves up in the lobbies of major hotels. The white powder was so easily concealable that a vial of it could fit inside a woman’s high heel, an Istanbul magazine reported, which meant that no small number of women doing the Charleston or shimmy might also have been acting as well-dressed mules for the drug underworld.

  In the past, people interested in Istanbul’s seamier side had frequently focused on the one institution they understood the least: the harem. In the sultan’s court, the harem was the private and highly regulated world of the sovereigns’ wives and concubines. It was guarded by eunuchs and accessible only to a small stratum of men, typically the sultan and his preadult sons. Foreigners imagined a world of supine odalisques, opium pipes, and diaphanous gowns, but the imperial harem in fact was as politically complicated—and often as boring—as the private household of any other European monarch. Personal intrigues, family dispute
s, and generational power struggles, not rampant seduction, were its dominant idioms. The word “harem,” from the Arabic for “forbidden,” was originally more architectural than sexual, referring to the portion of a Muslim home reserved for private family use (the haremlik), as opposed to the areas intended for meeting or entertaining guests (the selâmlık). Simply substituting the word household would probably provide a more accurate and less salacious vision of how sex, power, and private life intersected in Ottoman Istanbul, both at court and in the lesser harems of Muslim high officials and elites. “[D]elete forever that misunderstood word ‘harem’ . . . and dispel the nasty atmosphere which a wrong meaning of that word has cast over our lives,” a prominent Ottoman feminist begged of an American journalist during the First World War.

  When Sultan Mehmed VI embarked on a British warship in 1922, he took a small retinue of servants with him, but most of the former guards of the imperial harem—the kara aalar, or black eunuchs—stayed behind. Like the castrati of Italian opera, these men, generally of Ethiopian or Sudanese heritage, had exchanged their sex organs for a profession that offered privilege and a certain degree of power—or, more frequently, such a transaction was forced upon them in childhood. They had been brought into slavery by middlemen on the far reaches of the sultan’s domains and eventually found themselves at the epicenter of the imperial system. But in a time of changing mores and political revolution, they were out of a job. Many of them drifted into penury. They could sometimes be seen begging on the street, their elongated limbs the visible signs of prepubescent castration. “All that I have known have been big, fine-looking men, very merry and good-natured, and useful mainly to go out with the automobile as a kind of footman. In the same capacity they stood about palace doors, preceded one into drawing-rooms, and served tea,” wrote one observer. “Their day is over.”