Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  Whittemore’s team estimated that the Deesis panel had been created in the 1260s, a time when Byzantine art had already begun to incorporate some of the features of early medieval design from the West. The face of John was heart-wrenching in its weighty agony, yet it was also a lost example of what the Byzantine world might have become. The Byzantines had no Renaissance, but there is a quiet hint of it here, a faint glimmer of the sacred art that could in time have produced its own version of a Titian or a Michelangelo. It was also a reminder that, at least in the thirteenth century, the two halves of the church were not that far apart, both of them struggling, like John, to make sense of the incomprehensible Divine. But there was a further secret in the Deesis—a trait that, as it turned out, the mosaic shared with many of the other images adorning the church. It lay not in the subject matter but rather in its tiniest components: the tesserae that the Byzantine mosaicist had used to create the image.

  In testing the strength and bonding of each individual tessera, Whittemore’s associates discovered that they did not form a smooth surface. Instead, they jutted out at all angles, some of their corners exposed and others pushed deep into the layer of lime and marble dust that formed the base-level adhesive. This was not simply a result of age and the periodic rattle of earthquakes, however. The tesserae had been placed that way for a reason: to turn the golden background of the image, the halos, and even the eyes of the saints into hundreds of individual reflectors, shooting back the candlelight and sunlight. That technique could cause the images to step out of pious myth and into the world of the living. There was even a surprising regularity to the angles. The higher the angle relative to the flat wall, the more light was reflected at the observer: fifteen degrees for the tesserae in the vestibule, which was naturally brighter, and up to thirty degrees in the narthex, where sunlight had a more difficult time penetrating. For an especially vibrant effect, as in the Deesis background, the tesserae were laced with gold leaf and set in a scalloped pattern that made the background glitter and flare.

  Whittemore realized that, in the Deesis, his workmen had uncovered not simply an arresting image but also evidence of artists—Greeks, Venetians, or unknown others—who had managed to work within a visual convention while at the same time exceeding and deepening it. Whittemore’s team had inadvertently conjured a forgotten moment in time: weeks and months in the thirteenth century when one or more mosaicists, working individually or as part of a small team, stood on creaky wooden scaffolds near the top of what was, at the time, the largest church in the entire world, placing half-inch pieces of cut glass at precisely the right angles so that sunlight, pouring through the church’s many windows nearly seven centuries later, would be reflected in dazzling fashion. The Deesis mosaicists had managed to achieve an effect that was both more than and exactly equal to the sum of its parts.

  The Deesis and other mosaics that Whittemore unearthed sparked a revival of interest in Byzantine art. Each season’s work was covered in the international press, and in time Whittemore devised ambitious plans to copy the mosaics on a grand scale, so that they could be viewed by audiences around the world. His team attached huge rolls of tracing paper to the mosaics and rendered the exact outline of each tessera in pencil. The tracings were then photographed and backed with linen, to create stable platforms that could be painted with egg tempera, re-creating the colors as they appeared on the wall. Plaster casts were also made by running a thin cotton pad across the mosaics, pressing it into the tessera, stabilizing it with shellac, and then using the textured cotton as a mold. The resulting cast could then be painted as a three-dimensional replica of the original. The casts gave the observer the chance to feel the flatness and the crevasses of the glass tesserae. It was almost like being there oneself, teetering on top of Whittemore’s scaffolds.

  In 1941, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York spent $7,500 to purchase one of the copies of the Deesis. Three years later, it became the centerpiece of a grand exhibition dedicated to the restoration of the Hagia Sophia, and it is still there today, featured in the museum’s medieval hall. For the first time, thousands of people outside Istanbul were able to see the wonders that Whittemore’s ambition had wrought. The visitors no doubt included Greek families who had fled in the 1920s and were making new lives in America, consuming the recordings of Roza Eskenazi and now able to see a restored version of their city’s signature landmark. The grandson of a preacher whose core belief had been the oneness of humanity had renewed the public’s interest in one of the most religiously mixed-up places on earth—the world’s greatest church, then its largest mosque, then a museum housing an iconic wanderer, John, the First on the Road, eyes downcast before his majestic God.

  The Hagia Sophia “is the universe of buildings,” Whittemore wrote. “It is what the world needs most and has lost.” In 1934, the Turkish Council of Ministers formally declared it a museum, and by early the next year it was open to visitors. Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson stopped by, as did John D. Rockefeller Jr., and Matisse, Whittemore’s old friend from Paris. The tide of politicians, diplomats, and celebrities became so great that the Byzantine Institute began compiling logs of distinguished guests, the better to promote new projects to future funders. For centuries the most important building in the city had been a place of Islamic worship, accessible to the faithful but generally hidden from non-Muslims. Now it was open to everyone.

  The effect of walking into the space is as arresting now as it was then. Sunlight shot through the high windows and made the walls glow, much as they had done on the day Mehmed the Conqueror strode in solemnly in 1453. Whittemore commissioned filmmakers to make studies of light in the interior and to catch the progress of the sun’s rays across the floor, a way of understanding the ingenious angling of the tesserae and the optics behind the twinkling and sunbursts that had astounded earlier generations. Watching the films today—kept in the Byzantine Institute’s archives at Dumbarton Oaks, now a unit of Harvard University—is like seeing the preserved record of some natural ballet, mesmerizing in its effects, a gentle, almost loving statement of visitors’ persistent fascination with the intertwining of light and architectural form in Justinian’s Great Church.

  In the spring of 1939, a German tourist checked into the Pera Palace and made his way to the Hagia Sophia to see the results of Whittemore’s labors. “The dome has a graceful elegance, light and yet monumental,” he wrote in his diary on April 14. The sun, still low in the spring sky, illuminated the space and gave the entire scene a fairy-tale quality. He was on his way to lunch at the Teutonia Club with representatives of the local German community. The afternoon was taken up with shopping for carpets and tourist trinkets in the Grand Bazaar. “The folks at home will love these things,” he said.

  Life seemed wonderful in the old city, but he was struck by the contrast between the resplendent Hagia Sophia and the darkening mood—a kind of “psychosis,” he recalled—that seemed to infuse Istanbul. A week before, fascist Italy had suddenly invaded Albania, sparking fears that Benito Mussolini would soon come after Turkey as well. While looking up at the ancient mosaics, hands clasped behind his ecru mackintosh, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, knew that change was coming. Even in Istanbul, everyone was expecting war.

  SHADOW WARS

  Air raid drill, ca. 1944: Istanbul firemen in gas masks stand guard outside the entrance to Galatasaray Lycée on a deserted Grande Rue.

  FIVE MONTHS AFTER JOSEPH GOEBBELS checked out of the Pera Palace, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland and the Second World War began. Turkey soon affirmed its neutrality. The country had been an early joiner in the First World War, and Turkish politicians—not to mention the republic’s refugee citizenry—could remember the result. Few families had been untouched by the effects of genocide, foreign invasion, ethnic cleansing, and forced migration. At a funeral it doesn’t matter where you stand, the Turkish foreign minister told the British ambassador, so long as you’re not lying in the coffin.


  The commitment to staying on the sidelines was as old as the republic itself. Mustafa Kemal had articulated the principle of “peace at home, peace in the world,” and it became the polestar of the country’s foreign policy. The concept flowed as much from rational self-interest as from idealism. Turkey had sloughed off its old empire to its own great advantage. Smaller and leaner, the republic had few of the territorial problems that had bedeviled its imperial predecessor. “Where should we be now if, forced to mobilize and put our troops in Thrace, we had at the same time to defend the Yemen?” Prime Minister ükrü Saracolu explained to a colleague. But Turkey was still situated in a complicated neighborhood.

  In the Mediterranean, Italy’s ambitious rise was seen as a major threat, especially after the Italian occupation of Albania in the spring of 1939. Across the Black Sea, the Soviet Union had become a serious worry. The days of looking to the Soviet model of single-party rule, quick economic development, and breakneck nation-building were gone. Ankara and Moscow were united in a nonaggression pact left over from the early years of the republic, but the concern now was that Stalin would use war as an excuse to grab Turkish territory in eastern Anatolia or to realize the old Russian dream of controlling the Straits. To the south, British and French influence lingered on in those countries’ mandate administrations in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. Some Turkish politicians saw the old adversaries as prospective allies, but two decades after the occupation of Istanbul and the abortive Treaty of Sèvres, others still looked warily on relations with London and Paris. In the Balkans, Turkey was bound by a treaty with Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia. The pact committed the signatory states to stable borders and consultations in the event of hostilities, but Bulgaria’s refusal to join kept the region tense and Turkey’s border unsecured.

  Farther afield, Germany was Turkey’s most important trading partner and a core market for raw materials such as chromium, used in the German arms industry. Despite the disastrous alliance with Berlin during the First World War, there was considerable sympathy for the confident nationalism and state-dominated economy of Hitler’s new order. Some public figures in Istanbul and Ankara shared the Reich’s founding ideology as well, declaring Turks and Aryans natural allies in the coming racial struggle. The same month as Goebbels’s visit to Istanbul, Berlin deployed one of its most seasoned officials, former chancellor Franz von Papen, as the new ambassador in Ankara. Although a sometime critic of Hitler, von Papen had in fact been one of Nazism’s great enablers, assisting in Hitler’s rise to the German chancellorship and in winning over Austria to the German cause. His powers of persuasion now seemed to be aimed squarely at Turkey.

  All the countries that Turks had once seen as models of civilized behavior—France and Britain in the nineteenth century, Germany in the early twentieth, the Soviet Union during the war of independence—were hurtling toward mutual destruction. Turkish foreign policy thus involved careful balancing. The strategy was to build a protective web of alliances, counteralliances, and nonaggression agreements, all the while trying to convince each major power that Turkish neutrality was in everyone’s best interest. In 1936, Turkey had signed the Montreux Convention governing shipping on the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. The government was required to keep the Straits open to civilian traffic in peacetime and to restrict the deployment of naval vessels not belonging to states bordering the Black Sea. When at war, Turkey was authorized to place its own limits on the passage of both military and civilian craft of belligerent countries. Those provisions gave the Turkish government a convenient out: They provided a legally binding reason for dealing evenhandedly with all countries, whether Allies, Axis, or neither. But as Europe raced toward war, old treaties and commitments were falling by the wayside. Few people could predict how Turkey’s foreign policy might evolve in the immediate future. The reason was that the country was itself in the middle of the most profound period of political uncertainty since the foundation of the republic.

  When the law requiring surnames was passed in 1934, the Grand National Assembly voted to award Mustafa Kemal the name Atatürk, often translated as “Father of the Turks.” Atatürk was certainly perceived that way at the time: as the military liberator, first president, and visionary modernizer of his country—the true founding father and model citizen for the earliest generation of republicans. But a better translation would be something like “Papa Turk.” Not only was he the driving force behind the country’s sweeping cultural, political, and economic changes; he was also regarded as an avuncular figure whose every utterance gave rise to reverent and—so far as these things can be discerned—genuine adoration.

  Atatürk was very much in the mold of other twentieth-century dictators. He ground down political opposition and held firm to the belief that state planning could realize the true interests of the nation, without ever feeling the need to ask the nation what its interests happened to be. Yet, unlike a Mussolini or a Franco, he knew where to draw the line. He was one of the few supreme leaders of the era to develop a cult of personality that staved off its own inevitable decay. The reason was a matter of timing.

  Atatürk had the good fortune, in a way, to exit the stage while his reputation was still near its height. He spent the summer of 1938 in Istanbul, much as he had done each of the previous ten years, visiting Florya beach and lodging at Dolmabahçe Palace and aboard the Savarona, a yacht the Turkish government had purchased for his use. Much of his youthful vigor was gone, however. His stocky physique and upright bearing had given way to a stoop. His skin had gone sallow and green. Cirrhosis of the liver had sapped his strength, and nosebleeds, rashes, and pneumonia had caused him to withdraw from daily tasks. At a frail fifty-seven years old, he had become more a venerable head of state than the energetic head of government who had pushed through the last batch of monumental reforms—the surname law, women’s suffrage, a constitutional guarantee on secularism—only a few years earlier. In mid-October, he fell into a coma, recovered briefly, and then slipped back into unconsciousness. He died on the morning of November 10 at Dolmabahçe, the site of so many other defining moments in Istanbul’s modern history, from the exile of the last sultan to the departure of the Allied occupation force. To this day, the clock in his palace bedchamber is set permanently to 9:05, the moment of the president’s death.

  The city, like the country as a whole, went into a frenzy of grief. Children poured from schools weeping, to be picked up by worried parents who themselves had tears streaming down their faces. Newspapers appeared in midday editions with their pages framed by black borders. Atatürk’s last words had been a Muslim salutation—“Peace be upon you”—but his funeral arrangements were decidedly secular. His body was embalmed, rather than buried immediately as required by Islamic law, and lay in state at the palace for an entire week. The crowds were vast and inconsolable. Nearly a dozen people were trampled to death in the crush. A few days later, his coffin was taken in solemn procession to a battleship. As the cortege departed the city, hundreds of thousands of people watched from the shore, lined up like seabirds on piers and breakwaters. The ship continued across the Sea of Marmara and transferred its cargo to a train for the onward journey to Ankara, where the president was interred. He was later moved to an august mausoleum overlooking the capital.

  Atatürk’s final gift to his country was his failure to name a preferred successor. That act of silence meant that the regular process for selecting a new president was allowed to work. The constitution specified that the head of state was to be elected by parliament, as Atatürk himself had been, term after term. The Grand National Assembly soon selected smet nönü—the field commander from the war of independence and sometime prime minister—as the republic’s second president.

  A farewell salute, November 1938: Wailing crowds and police officers at the funeral procession of Atatürk.

  nönü had been one of Turkey’s great political survivors. He had managed to outlast most of the other early allies of Atatürk and had become a dutiful second-in
-command to the president, although by no means always within his good graces. His invented surname harked back to 1921, when, as smet Pasha, he had led nationalist forces at the dual battles of nönü, engagements that marked early milestones in the nationalists’ strike against the Hellenic army. In addition to the presidency, the parliament awarded him the honorific title of “National Leader,” but it was an uncomfortable fit. Thin and mustachioed, nönü was a manager and a strategist, with none of the charisma or drive of an Atatürk—a figure who, even in death, was given the even grander title of “Eternal Leader.”

  All of that turned out to be a good thing, however. nönü had done a great deal of backroom maneuvering to ensure his succession as president, but outwardly the transition was smoother than anyone had expected. According to the British ambassador, Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, “The only change noticeable was the introduction of a quieter and more orthodox life in political circles.” nönü flirted with a Turkish version of blood-and-soil nationalism and remained suspicious of ethnic minorities, but his approach to foreign policy was to embed Turkey in a set of treaties and explicit undertakings with rival governments. As Hitler and Stalin jointly occupied Poland, nönü first turned to the West, signing a mutual assistance pact with Britain and France. Once German troops marched into Paris and German planes began targeting London, that lifeline came to look more like a sea anchor threatening to drag Turkey into the conflict. In June 1941, Turkey pivoted and signed a nonaggression treaty with Germany. The same month, Hitler launched his sudden attack on the Soviet Union, opening a new front in the war and seemingly confirming the bet that Ankara had made on Germany’s ascendancy.