Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul by Charles King

Author:Charles King [King, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

At the beginning of the 1920s, John Dos Passos had come downstairs to find the lobby of the Pera Palace in chaos. In the lounge, Hellenic, Italian, and French gendarmes were trying to converse, each in his own language. A British member of parliament was downing a cocktail while attempting to explain something to a soldier. Bellhops and doormen were carrying out a man in an astrakhan hat and frock coat, leaving behind a pool of blood on the mosaic floor and a stained, plush-red armchair. The hotel manager was walking back and forth with sweat beading up on his brow, trying to learn what had happened. The envoy from Azerbaijan had been assassinated, someone said, and the gunman was a bearded Armenian. Or perhaps it was a clean-shaven Bolshevik, someone else said, who came right up to the doorway and shot him dead. Meanwhile, a waiter implored guests to settle their bills.

It was not an unusual scene, both during and after the Allied occupation. Intrigue of some sort seemed to be the city’s common currency. With so many Russians living in Istanbul and its outskirts, the city became both a battleground for intra-Russian disputes and a potential target for Bolshevik agents. In October 1921, the Wrangels’ residential yacht, the Lucullus, was rammed and sunk by a steamer while at anchor in the Bosphorus, a probable assassination plot that the general and his wife escaped only because they happened not to be on board at the time. A certain Kuznetsov, lodged at the Pera Palace, was known to be the centerpiece of Bolshevik propaganda efforts, with a particular interest in turning Cossacks and other White Russians to the communist cause.

“The Bosphorus was a dumping ground of all Europe’s war crooks and spies,” recalled Robert Dunn, an American naval official. The Pera Palace and Graveyard Street were natural points of attraction for foreigners and locals caught up in the game of intelligence gathering. The British Embassy stood at one end of the street, with a Turkish policeman permanently stationed outside to direct traffic to and from the Grande Rue. Farther along was the old Petits-Champs Park, with its theater and clubs. Next to the park was the Pera Palace itself and, next to that, the small grounds of the American Embassy. Then came the YMCA, followed by a British police station. During the Allied occupation, the headquarters of British naval intelligence and the officers’ mess of the British contingent were located in buildings just across the street. Bertha Proctor’s bar and sometime brothel anchored the southern end.

Even by the late 1920s, when the foreign presence in the city was much diminished, it was still advisable to be careful with conversation and to check around corners in that section of Pera. Settling in Istanbul had involved “little deceptions and coercions,” Trotsky’s wife, Natalya, recalled. Trotsky may have seemed a conspiratorial eccentric to the islanders on Büyükada, but paranoia is a reasonable response if someone really is out to get you. The Soviet

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