Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  As she and Adnan set up their new home in Istanbul, they both could sense a change coming. “I have seen, I have gone through, a land full of aching hearts and torturing remembrances, and I have lived in an age when the politicians played with these human hearts as ordinary gamblers play with their cards,” she wrote. “I who had dreamed of a nationalism which will create a happy land of beauty, understanding, and love, I have seen nothing but mutual massacre and mutual hatred; I have seen nothing but ideals used as instruments for creating human carnage and misery.”

  The promise of the republic was that it would put an end to the long period of discord that had defined the entire adult lives of Halide’s generation, from the Young Turk revolution through the First World War and the fight for independence. The promise was quickly broken, she felt. Mustafa Kemal’s willingness to buy off local warlords, his increasing suspicion of any form of disagreement, and the establishment of independence tribunals to mete out punishment to open rebels as well as quiet dissenters—all seemed the opposite of the world Halide had been trying to create. Mustafa Kemal looked more and more like a dictator and his Republican People’s Party like the only approved instrument of governance. The independence war had been a people’s struggle, she believed, and no individual could adequately represent the collective desire for freedom. “There will be only the sum total of a people’s sacrifice to bear witness to the guarding of their liberties,” she wrote in her memoirs.

  One after another of their old colleagues was falling away. Some who openly broke with Mustafa Kemal found themselves before a tribunal. Others retired from public life, quietly giving up power to the one-party state. In 1926, Halide and Adnan decided to leave Istanbul, the very year that Turkey’s new civil code established legal equality for women. They began a long period of self-imposed exile in France, Britain, India, and the United States. Like their escape from Istanbul under the British, their departure came just in time. The next year, Mustafa Kemal delivered a thirty-six-hour speech known as the “Nutuk,” a discourse that rewrote the history of the independence struggle by denouncing his enemies and placing himself at the center of the narrative. Political differences were now raised to the level of truth versus treason. Halide in particular was attacked as someone who had advocated Turkey’s becoming a protectorate of a foreign government—perhaps Britain, perhaps the United States—rather than a fully independent country. It was a charge that had little backing, but it was enough to write her out of the republic’s founding mythology.

  Halide used her time abroad to work on her memoirs, which offered a kind of alternative history of the early republic. The first volume was published in English in the late 1920s, but it had little impact in Turkey. She and Adnan spent time in Paris and New York, living the lives of émigré academics by lecturing, taking up occasional visiting professor-ships, and recalling old battles that might as well have been ancient history to their students. As Muslim women were taking up new rights in the republic—going about fully unveiled, working as doctors and professors, eventually voting and standing for parliament—one of the principal fighters for their cause was no longer around to witness the changes.

  It was not until after Mustafa Kemal’s death, in 1938, that Halide and Adnan were able to return to Istanbul. She served briefly in parliament once multiparty democracy was instituted after the Second World War. But the years of exile had made her a political outsider. She had been present at the birth of the republic, yet she had missed its painful adolescence. She ended her career, in a way, by coming back to her childhood in Edip Bey’s household on the Bosphorus. She became chair of the English Department at Istanbul University—the institution’s first female professor—and translated Shakespeare into Turkish. Her version of Coriolanus, about the journey from war hero to tyrant and from exile to revenge, is still admired.

  In her earlier years, Halide believed in a salvageable empire, a place where the sultan’s many subjects, regardless of confession, could find a place. The experience of war and occupation made her into a nationalist. She believed in the need for a Turkish homeland, but her version of nationalism had a cosmopolitan lining. History and culture, she said, had formed the Turks into the Protestants of the Islamic world—reformist, pragmatic, and naturally committed to the separation of mosque and state. Being a good nationalist required self-awareness, and embracing one’s country demanded that one learn how to criticize it. “It is after I have loved my own people and tried to understand their virtues and their faults with open-minded humility that I begin to have a better understanding of other people’s sufferings and joys, and of their personality expressed in their national life,” she wrote. Even then, gender still mattered profoundly when it came to the way people actually behaved. For all the claims to equality in an age of republics, nationalism as a political movement was almost always a man’s game. “Women,” she was fond of saying, “are all one nation.”

  Rights, Halide believed, were there for the recognizing. They were not granted or bestowed so much as finally accepted and acknowledged, like removing a veil shielding women from public view and clouding their own vision of possible lives. On the battlefield and in front of a mass rally, it was easy to imagine a future Turkey in which Muslim women could develop a feminism that placed them squarely alongside men, powerful and confident, with few of the strictures that religion and tradition had imposed in the past. As it turned out, women’s achievements would continue to be celebrated as evidence of the republic’s quick progress, but it would be decades before any women would achieve the independent public voice once claimed by Halide Edip.

  LIVING LIKE A SQUIRREL

  A public rally on Galata Bridge.

  AFTER 1927, MUSTAFA KEMAL’S “NUTUK” became the ur-text of republican history and the basic source for interpreting the end of empire and the birth of the Turkish nation-state. Only in recent years have Turkish historians begun to question its one-sided version of events. The sheer scale and complexity of the revolution, however, can best be appreciated not in a political speech or textbook but in a long-form poem titled Human Landscapes from My Country, the masterpiece of the writer Nâzım Hikmet. Nâzım began work on Human Landscapes in 1941 while interned in a prison in Bursa, a few hours from Istanbul across the Sea of Marmara. At some seventeen thousand lines, it is a vast canvas on which Nâzım gives his own account of the origins of the post-imperial era, told through the eyes of ordinary people caught up in the war of independence and the building of the Turkish Republic.

  The poem pans out from Haydarpaa train station, where Istanbul schoolgirls pass by in black satin uniforms, and plunges into Anatolia, where war and famine rage. There is no glory in the struggle, though. A woman advises:

  “Girl,” she said, “you’re young—

  grow up,

  marry,

  bear sons,

  then I’ll ask you

  what war is.”

  Its heroes are thieves, peasants, writers, and ordinary soldiers, a stunning array of characters passing across the stage of modern Turkish history—or, rather, caught by the author’s camera as it moves slowly across the Anatolian plateau. Earlier in his career, Nâzım had worked as a scenarist for director Muhsin Erturul and the production company run by the pekçi brothers, whose films played to sold-out audiences along the Grande Rue. He saw Human Landscapes as a kind of total art, with techniques drawn from filmmaking as well as poetry and prose. He worked in pans, zooms, and freeze-frames, free verse and narrative, and every literary form from autobiography to fantasy to folk aphorisms. Human Landscapes is a chronicle of a human and pluralistic world, one decidedly at odds with the homogenizing ideology that Kemalism seemed to preach. It remains perhaps the most creative and fine-grained assessment of Turkey’s transition from empire to republic, a kind of alternative history unspooling alongside the standard story of Mustafa Kemal’s necessary triumph and the single-minded modernization he wrought.

  By the early years of the republic, Turkish writers had
already thrown off the conservative conventions of Ottoman poetry. The republican literary scene was a mixed bag of paeans to the nation, nostalgic celebrations of village culture, and epics of everyday life, many set against the backdrop of national liberation and postwar struggle. But where other Turkish authors were asking how poetry should be written, Nâzım asked what it could do—whether it was possible not just to reflect reality in art but to shape social life at the same time.

  Nâzım Hikmet did more than any single individual to introduce Turkish literature to modernity, and today he is widely regarded as Turkey’s national poet. The small cultural center that bears his name in the Istanbul district of Kadıköy, with its shaded tea garden and artists’ stalls, is an important meeting spot for radical university students and old intellectuals alike. Few national poets have been so unwelcome in their own lifetimes, however. Nâzım spent a good part of his adult life in Turkish prisons. He was eventually stripped of his Turkish citizenship. After his death, his body was buried neither in Istanbul nor even in Turkey.

  The reason was that, in a country committed to revolutionism, Nâzım’s version of revolutionary zeal was long held to be of the wrong variety. His was a version of modernity that Istanbul, more than any other part of the republic, was well placed to embody: the quiet specter of socialism. Criticism of Turkish nationalism from the Left remained a constant feature of political life, even if much of it stayed, like other forms of opposition, underground. As a diplomatic report noted in 1930, the government’s normal stance was to assume that “any malcontent in republican Turkey is at least a communist and probably a spy.” The single-party political system meant there was no legal channel for expressing leftist views, and it would not be until several decades later—in the 1970s—that intellectuals could openly advocate socialist causes. Even then, the political establishment perceived activists on that end of the political spectrum as a major internal threat. Like most other rivals to Kemalism, socialism would soon be assiduously written out of the country’s history.

  Nâzım Hikmet was, like so many other prominent individuals of his day, a native of Salonica. He was born perhaps in 1902—he was never certain about his birth date—into a family of provincial Ottoman officials. On his mother’s side, his lineage included several distinguished soldiers and scholars, running back to a Huguenot orphan and a Polish count who converted to Islam and joined the Ottoman army. His mother, Celile Hanım, was an accomplished artist and one of the empire’s first female painters. One of his grandfathers was the last Ottoman governor of Salonica, and his father, Hikmet Bey, was a prominent local Unionist working within the Ottoman foreign ministry.

  When the Hellenes took over Salonica in 1912, what they got was a provincial Ottoman seaport that nearly burned to the ground only five years later. What Istanbul got, however, was a new soul. Thousands of Muslim families departed Salonica for the capital, carrying with them the European sensibilities and belief in progress that would shape Turkey’s first generation of republican elites. Clearly out of a job under the new Hellenic government, Hikmet Bey moved his family to Istanbul as well. He enrolled the young Nâzım in the prestigious Galatasaray Lycée and later pushed him to attend the Ottoman naval college on the island Heybeliada in the Sea of Marmara, where he began to write poetry as a distraction from the interminable lessons in hydraulics and navigation. A persistent lung condition kept him out of military service, and he watched the First World War from the sidelines. He was present in Istanbul when the British warship Superb sailed in to announce the beginning of the Allied occupation.

  Nâzım was too young to have played a role in the Young Turk revolution and too sickly to be mobilized during the First World War, but when news of Mustafa Kemal’s rival government filtered back to Istanbul, he, like many in his age group and social class, made plans to decamp to Ankara. Along with a friend, Vâlâ Nureddin, he made his way to Mustafa Kemal’s forces, arriving in early 1921, and presented himself as a foot soldier for the revolution.

  With few actual skills and no military real connections—the leaders of the brewing independence war, after all, were already seasoned officers who had fought at Gallipoli and elsewhere—Nâzım was quickly pushed off to a teaching job in a distant village. He could make the revolution from the ground up by educating the populace—a valuable component of the national struggle, if not exactly the role Nâzım had hoped to play in crafting the new world. He wanted to be on the front line of the struggle, not in its rear guard.

  After only a few months in Anatolia, he turned his attention northward, to Russia and the transformation that seemed to be happening there. Nâzım had been introduced to socialism on his way to meet Mustafa Kemal’s troops, but it was a familiarity that amounted to little more than conversations with someone who had read a few more Marxist tracts than he. To be on the Right was to support the decrepit sultan and the foreign occupation, he believed. To be on the Left was to value liberation and national rebirth. His understanding of Marx was rudimentary, but he didn’t need to be a deep theorist to understand the direction that the war of independence was already taking—away from its revolutionary roots and toward the consolidation of power in the hands of Mustafa Kemal and his closest supporters.

  To many observers, revolutionary socialism and Turkish nationalism had once seemed to be two strands of a single anti-imperialist uprising on the frontier of Europe and Asia. Relations between Mustafa Kemal’s nationalists and the Bolsheviks “probably form today the nucleus of one of the most important movements in the Near East,” US High Commissioner Mark Bristol reported in 1921. The tip of the spear would surely be Istanbul. Allied police kept strict watch on alleged underground cells in the city. With so many penniless Russian-speakers on hand, officials believed that it was dangerously easy to turn desperate Whites into Reds. Roundups of suspected agents were common. Allied police even detained Russians who happened to be attending a Berlitz course in Turkish for fear that they were Bolshevik spies underground seeking to brush up on the local language. According to American intelligence sources, the Bolsheviks had even attempted to convince Mustafa Kemal to bring Turkey formally into the Soviet Union, where he would be made the country’s federal president. It was an offer that Mustafa Kemal—if it ever reached his desk—quietly passed up.

  Bolshevik Russia and Turkey did have certain things in common. Both stressed the role of the state as the engine of social and economic transformation. Both countries had forsaken the multiparty parliaments that the Romanovs and the Ottomans, for all their faults, had managed to create in their final years. They eventually took for granted the view that statism—the government’s careful management of the economy and society—worked best when societal transformation was handled by a single political party, the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and the Republican People’s Party in Turkey.

  Vladimir Lenin and Mustafa Kemal also shared a set of ideological assumptions, not about the details of revolution—Mustafa Kemal looked to nationalism rather than Marxism as his bedrock philosophy—but about how it had to be effected and where their countries fit in the twentieth century’s emerging order. Both believed in the idea of a political vanguard and its historical mission of reshaping an entire society. Their strategic vision of the world to come was one in which colonialism would be gone, empires would collapse, and the old powers of the nineteenth century would give way to a set of new, postrevolutionary regimes. Neither man was opposed to the concept of a select group of powerful nations working their will in the international system. They simply believed that their own countries should be admitted to the club.

  The Soviet model had demonstrated the transformative power of class war and grassroots revolution. Turkey, however, was a country without a proletariat. Because of the loss of so many urban centers, from Salonica to Damascus, the new republic was even more rural than the Ottoman Empire. In Russia—itself overwhelmingly rural—Lenin and Trotsky had already shown that workers were not essential components of a workers’ revol
ution. All that was required was a small group of conspirators who could form a party, seize the state in the name of the oppressed, defeat the backers of the old regime in a civil war, and then set about building, through industrialization and radical land reform, the very proletariat that they claimed as their base of support. The Kemalist government eventually adopted the five-year plan as an approach to industrial and agricultural development. State-regulated monopolies were allowed to take over major industries, although Turkey did not impose direct government control over the economy. Senior bureaucrats were nevertheless required to be members of the only legal political party.

  But the brief courtship between the two revolutionary regimes began to sour even before the nationalists had ousted the Allies. Russia and Turkey had been strategic rivals for centuries, and this long history was difficult to overcome, especially in an era in which Soviets and Turks were both beginning to see themselves as contrasting models of modernity for oppressed peoples everywhere—one based on a proletarian revolution, the other based on a national one. In the contest between rival ideals, the Turks preferred the version that allowed them to build a nation of their own, not one that preached the end of nations altogether.

  Still, flirtation with leftist ideas was a consistent feature of early Turkish politics as well as a continuing source of inspiration for people dissatisfied with the authoritarian tendencies of the Kemalists themselves. A Turkish Communist Party was established by Mustafa Kemal’s closest military associates in October 1920, but the party seems to have been mainly a vehicle for outflanking other leftists. A rival party, in fact, had been established in Baku, in independent Azerbaijan, the previous month. Its leader, Mustafa Suphi, was a Turkish Bolshevik who had grown up in Paris. He saw himself as the natural conduit through which the tenets of communism would reach Turkey. With the help of Russian Bolsheviks, he and a group of comrades entered Anatolia from the Caucasus at the end of 1920. The following January, they made plans to travel from the port city of Trabzon, following the coast and then going overland to Ankara. By this stage, Mustafa Kemal’s power as leader of the national movement was in no sense secure. Mustafa Suphi may have aimed to challenge him.