Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  In the late 1920s, Keriman had little reason to frequent the jazz cafés and ballrooms in Pera, uphill from her family home. Finding someone of her breeding and social standing in such venues—surrounded by Russian singers, Levantine partygoers, and sometime prostitutes—would have been nearly unthinkable. But one of Yunus Nadi’s signature talents was bridging these two very different worlds.

  Istanbul was in many ways a big village, at least for the thin stratum of Muslims in the highest echelons of business and government. It was easy for one of the city’s most respected newspaper editors to fall into the orbit of Halis Bey and his talented and beautiful children. Yunus Nadi reportedly approached Halis Bey on more than one occasion to inquire whether Keriman might be allowed to stand as a contestant in his beauty contest. But in an age when seeing Muslim women on stage in any capacity was still a rarity, it was hard to imagine a father’s placing his daughter in a position where she would be intentionally examined by strangers. Keriman was technically old enough to participate in the competition, at least according to Yunus Nadi’s own rules, but her father was skeptical. On each approach Halis Bey had demurred. Finally, after several years of gentle cajoling, her father relented, and in 1932 Keriman Halis was put forward as an entrant in Cumhuriyet’s Miss Turkey contest. At the competition in Pera that July, she walked away with the prize.

  Yunus Nadi had far grander designs than simply ushering Keriman toward national fame, however. He immediately entered her into the competition known as the International Pageant of Pulchritude, more popularly known as the Miss Universe competition. Like Yunus Nadi’s contest, the pageant was a public relations stunt. Its origins had lain in Galveston, Texas, a city flattened by a hurricane in 1900 and, even three decades later, still seeking ways of luring visitors. Most of the winners had been Americans—most of the competitions, in fact, had been held in Galveston, even though they were marketed as global talent searches—but pageant organizers soon realized that they had a franchise that could be offered to any city or town seeking to revitalize tourism and develop a brand. That year, the competition moved to Spa, the resort in Belgium. With the worldwide economic depression, hotel and restaurant revenues had dwindled, and the pageant was intended to be a source of money as well as good press. In August 1932, contestants, friends, and reporters began arriving in Spa in droves, just as Istanbul was preparing to send off its own champion.

  Miss Universe, 1932: Keriman Halis in a publicity photograph.

  Twenty thousand Istanbullus reportedly turned up for Keriman Halis’s farewell reception in Taksim Square. She set off by train for Belgium with her father as chaperone. Along the way, crowds gathered at Turkish stations to see her pass by. Once in Spa, all the competitors were the object of intense media attention, but Keriman was of particular interest. She was the only contestant from the Muslim world and a young woman whose family background seemed to give her an air of respectability and grace—which was precisely why Yunus Nadi had worked so hard to convince her father to allow her to compete. It was also perhaps the reason that she took to the stage in Belgium with the full backing of the Turkish government, in great contrast to Yunus Nadi’s entrants from earlier seasons.

  In Spa, she performed much as she had done in Istanbul, walking regally in a ball gown, conversing with judges, and posing discreetly for the world’s press. By the end of the competition, she was certain one of the other contestants, a German, had won the grand prize. But when her name was called, she stepped forward with a tentative smile and into the flash of cameras. She was declared Miss Universe 1932. In the ensuing days, nearly thirty thousand telegrams came in with congratulations, and Yunus Nadi devoted an entire issue of Cumhuriyet to covering each minute detail of the story. Mustafa Kemal telegraphed his warm wishes, as did the Grand National Assembly, the minister of the interior, and the governor of Istanbul. Yunus Nadi was summoned to the president’s office to receive congratulations from Mustafa Kemal in person. smet Pasha, the old war hero and prime minister, rose in parliament to proclaim Keriman “a living argument against the numerous voices raised in our disfavor.” Cumhuriyet, never missing an opportunity for hype, dubbed Keriman “The Turkish Girl Who Conquered the World.”

  Public engagements and invitations followed. Keriman was hailed in Belgium, feted in Paris, and celebrated in Cairo. She appeared in Berlin and Chicago, and even stopped over in Athens on a courtesy visit with Eleftherios Venizelos, the old Hellenic enemy who had since patched up relations with Mustafa Kemal. She became an ambassador not only for the pageant but, even more important, for her country. She was never quite what her hosts expected. At one gala dinner, an enthusiastic organizer used small paper fezzes as centerpieces, thinking that the Oriental decorations would please the world’s first Muslim beauty queen. Since the hats were a symbol of the old empire and illegal in republican Turkey, she refused to enter the hall until they were removed.

  Keriman arrived back in Istanbul to an uproarious welcome. She toured the nation, greeted at each stop with an enthusiasm that rivaled only that shown for President Mustafa Kemal himself. She was invited to appear in a film but refused. Honor demanded otherwise, she said. She eventually married, started a family, and became a celebrated symbol of Kemalist virtue. Pageant participants would pay a ritual visit to her for decades to come. She always rejected the label of beauty maven and insisted that the competition had been an exhibition of female emancipation and Turkish modernity.

  Two years after her victory in Belgium, when Turks were required by law to take surnames, Mustafa Kemal announced that Keriman’s would be Ece—meaning Queen. It remained the family name thereafter. Halide Edip was still on the lecture circuit abroad, but Turkey’s most famous feminist had already been eclipsed by a person who had become both the republic’s most recognizable woman and, for an instant, the world’s. When Istanbul’s commuters drove along the coast road near the Bosphorus, past Keriman’s old family home, they found themselves traveling on a street that had been renamed Queen Avenue in her honor.

  HOLY WISDOM

  A friendly visit, April 1939: Joseph Goebbels (foreground center) and his entourage touring the Hagia Sophia.

  KERIMAN HALIS WAS CONSIDERED a national treasure not just because she defeated every other contestant in Belgium. More important, she had triumphed over any woman whom Greece had managed to put forward. That was precisely Yunus Nadi’s hope. The old Hellenic-Turkish rivalry was a trump card that he had played continually against conservatives who saw the entire concept of a beauty pageant as demeaning to Turkish dignity. The Hellenes had been sending their contestants to pan-European competitions for years, he pointed out, and Turks should not fail to do their part for national greatness by selecting their own native beauty. “If the Hellenes Are Doing It, Why Shouldn’t We?” a headline in Cumhuriyet asked. Keriman’s victory—and, by extension, Turkey’s—made his case eloquently.

  Just as Keriman was embarking on a world tour, Istanbul was also beginning another great experiment in beauty and modernization. This particular version, though, involved not besting the Greeks but, in a way, embracing them. Across the Golden Horn from the Pera Palace lay the remnants of what had once been some of the greatest churches in eastern Christendom: the Hagia Eirene, dedicated to Christ’s attribute of the “holy peace” and later ensconced inside the grounds of the sultan’s palace at Topkapı; the diminutive Church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, with its unique undulating dome; and the jumble of barrel vaults and arches of the Church of the Holy Savior in Chora, just inside the city’s land walls. After the Ottoman conquest, most of these and other churches had been either turned into mosques or allowed to decay. Towering above them all were the four minarets of the grandest mosque in Istanbul, the one the Turks called the Ayasofya, a rendering of the name it had borne as a Greek Orthodox church: the Hagia Sophia.

  The grand structure rises at the very heart of the original Greek colony of Byzantium and the political and religious core of Byzantine Constantinople. In the sixth centu
ry, Emperor Justinian I ordered a new church to be built on the site of two earlier structures, which he insisted had to be grander and more elaborate than those that had come before. Justinian had expanded the territory of his empire across the Mediterranean and presided over a period of confidence and rebirth in New Rome. The cathedral was meant to showcase that renewed power, and when it was consecrated in 537, its completion was hailed as nothing less than a miracle. “So the church has become a spectacle of marvelous beauty,” wrote Procopius, the opinionated chronicler of Justinian’s reign, “overwhelming to those who see it, but to those who know it by hearsay altogether incredible.” When Justinian entered the building for the first time, he is said to have compared his achievement to that of the biblical builder of the temple in Jerusalem. “Oh, Solomon,” he exclaimed, “I have conquered you!”

  The church was dedicated to the “holy wisdom”—literally, hagia sophia in Greek, one of the attributes of God—but the Byzantines knew it simply as the Great Church. Its shape, structure, and scale created the standard by which every other Byzantine church would be judged for the next millennium. The central area, or nave, is nearly square and surmounted by a central dome more than a hundred feet across. The Byzantines, heirs to ancient Roman architectural techniques, had solved a basic structural problem that would elude Western designers throughout the Middle Ages: how to cover a large space without interior columns. The building is in fact its own support.

  The weight of the dome cascades along the periphery of the nave through a series of semidomes, arches, and colonnades, all the way down to the foundation. The same techniques would be adopted by the Ottomans after their conquest of Constantinople, which is why all the great mosques of the Ottoman capital—the Süleymaniye and Selimiye, the Sultanahmet and the Kılıç Ali Pasha, all with airy interiors that can fit row upon row of the kneeling faithful at Friday prayers—in many ways compete to outdo the Hagia Sophia at its own game. Across the world, both Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches often took the Hagia Sophia as their model, from some of the great structures of the Italian Renaissance to the neo-Byzantine revival of the late nineteenth century.

  The church’s interior decoration consisted originally of patterned mosaics that probably did not depict human forms. In the eighth century, the Iconoclast movement in Eastern Christianity railed against human images, which were viewed as “graven” and therefore prohibited by the Ten Commandments. Enthusiastic monks raced around the empire literally defacing murals and mosaics in churches, monasteries, and public spaces. But shifts in attitude gradually allowed representational art to emerge inside the city’s most important sacred space.

  From the tenth century forward, the interior of the church was covered with serene angels and devout emperors towering above the nave and peering down from the galleries. A representation of the Virgin seated with the Christ Child on the throne of heaven filled the apse, while the dome sheltered one of the most common yet arresting scenes in Orthodox Christian art: the majestic image of Christ Pantocrator, the all-powerful Jesus with an expression at once kind and stern, his hand raised in benediction and reproach.

  The effect, with the eyes of saints seeming to glisten in the candlelight and twirls of incense wafting up into the gloom, must have been mesmerizing. According to tradition, a delegation of Slavs visited in the tenth century and reported back to their prince, Vladimir of Kiev, that “we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. . . . We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations.” On their recommendation, Vladimir adopted Christianity as the state religion and concluded a marital alliance with the sister of the Byzantine emperor, the beginning of what would later become the Russian Orthodox Church.

  Much of the interior decoration was chipped away over the centuries as souvenirs or loot. There was probably no better preservative, however, than Muslim conquest. When Mehmed II marched into Constantinople in 1453, he interrupted a Mass being conducted inside the church for the protection of the city. His forces battered down the imposing bronze doors and killed or captured the embattled worshippers, dragging priests away from the altar in midchant.

  But Mehmed quickly realized the architectural—and spiritual—treasure that lay before him. When he stood before the church’s gates in the hours after his armies had secured the city, he bent to the ground and scooped a handful of dirt onto his turban, a gesture of ritual purification before a house of God. Inside the vast space, he stood in silence, watching the play of light from thousands of flickering candles. A Muslim imam pronounced that there was no God but God, while Mehmed knelt in prayer before the apse, which pointed roughly southeast, toward both Jerusalem and Mecca. From that day, he ordered, the church would become a mosque. Four mismatched minarets were later added to the exterior. The human figures on the interior walls—in theory, prohibited in Islam—were dealt with as cheaply and efficiently as possible. They were simply covered with plaster and paint.

  Christian angels and Greek emperors thus lurked beneath the thin scree only inches away from where the sultan and his retinue came for Friday prayers. Under the Ottomans, they were partially uncovered on only one occasion. In the 1840s, as part of a plan for modernizing the capital, the reformist Sultan Abdülmecid I commissioned two Swiss architects, Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati, to revitalize the city’s most important mosque. The Fossati brothers reworked the exterior decoration, erasing centuries of grime and giving the walls more color and drama, including lateral red candy stripes, a version of European neo-Gothic excess.

  The Fossatis had also been the first to remove the interior plaster and reveal the intricate mosaics, which they had discovered by accident while repairing cracks and stabilizing the marble revetment on the walls. Abdülmecid saw himself as an emperor confident in his place in world civilization and able to look with interest on the achievements of the Christian rulers who had come before him. He was delighted by the discovery. For a few months, the mosque was transported back to an earlier time, filled with sparkling light bouncing from the diadem of an empress, the golden halo around the head of Christ, and the dazzling lapis lazuli of the Virgin’s cloak.

  The Ottoman Empire was given one of its first prolonged gazes at its own Byzantine past, but then, just as quickly, the Islamic state turned away from the representational art that lay beneath the walls of its greatest mosque. The Fossatis catalogued a portion of what they had discovered before the sultan, bowing to pressure from Muslim conservatives, ordered them to seal the images behind fresh plaster and whitewash. Nearly a century later, however, the mosaics would come to light again.

  From his suite in the Pera Palace, Thomas Whittemore had been one of the best-connected people in Istanbul in the early 1920s. He had overseen a mini-empire of charitable organizations, fundraising events, refugee assistance centers, orphanages, and student scholarship foundations, all focused on assisting White Russians in escaping their old empire and reinventing themselves in Turkey or elsewhere. He lunched with Allied high commissioners and generals, visited Ottoman dignitaries, and charmed the core activists of what would now be called Istanbul’s civil society, especially the many women who were in large part responsible for philanthropic work in the city.

  Whittemore was by nature flamboyant and reclusive, intensely private yet given to searching for the limelight, a depressive self-promoter of the first order, and someone awed by beauty and the thrill of discovery—in other words, the epitome of the public intellectual. In later life, he vamped in his signature trilby for the noted photographer Dmitri Kessel and a spread in Life magazine. He posed for noirish studio shots with a serious brow and brim pulled low. Short and thin-framed, he might show up at a meeting swallowed up in a striped North African burnoose, a Balkan shearling coat, or a Kurdish goatskin. He could appear at the oddest of moments—at the coronation of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie, on a transatlantic crossing with W. B. Yeats and Jascha Heifetz, or on the arm of the last king of Italy in the Palaz
zo del Quirinale. He cultivated in himself what he prized in others: a flair for the unexpected and a love of the “mystic,” a word he used with frequency.

  As a member of a prominent Boston family, Whittemore had spent his young adulthood, before the First World War, bouncing from one pursuit to another. He took a degree in English from Tufts College and later taught a few literature classes there. He attended graduate lectures at Harvard in art and art history. He dabbled in medieval studies. Through a friend, the renegade curator, art historian, and sometime secretary of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Matthew Prichard, Whittemore made his way through the transatlantic society of men usually referred to as aesthetes: fast-talking, witty, less well-read than well-informed, and confirmed bachelors in an age when everyone understood what that meant—Oscar Wildes, of sorts, but with Yankee accents. Traveling together in Paris, Prichard and Whittemore made the rounds of literary events and gallery openings. Prichard may have been the person who introduced Whittemore to his friend Henri Matisse, whom Prichard had met at one of Paris’s premier gathering places, Gertrude Stein’s salon. The three became close associates. Matisse’s sketch portrait of Whittemore remained one of Whittemore’s prized possessions.