In a recent talk at the Center for European and Eurasian Studies, Charles King offered a bottom-up view of the birth of modern Istanbul, a city where people displaced by tectonic change remade themselves anew in the decades following World War I.

UCLA International Institute, March 24, 2015 — In a highly entertaining, nuanced presentation at the Center for European and Eurasian Studies on February 26, Charles King recounted the highlights of his new book Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul (Norton, 2014). King is professor of international affairs and governance at Georgetown University and author, among other publications, of Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (Norton, 2011) and The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (Oxford, 2008). The talk was cosponsored by the Center for Near Eastern Studies.

The Istanbul that emerged from King’s telling was a fascinating, cosmopolitan city full of refugees, spies, and “the losers of the great monumental changes of the early twentieth century.” Here, people pushed out of the three empires (Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman) that collapsed at the end of World War I remade themselves in an era when old landmarks had disappeared. It was a moment when former institutions, countries, borders and empires had melted away — in King’s words, “when all previous ways of making sense of your life [had] been thrown up in the air.”

Istanbul itself was struggling both to modernize and to redefine itself as the second city of the new secular Turkish Republic (established in 1923). No longer the capital of the Ottoman Empire nor the Islamic world as a whole (Atatürk abolished the caliphate), the city was flooded by refugees: Muslims from the outlying regions of the former Ottoman Empire, Armenians and Syrians from eastern Anatolia, Greeks from western Anatolia, Europeans uprooted by revolutions and the creation of new national states, and later, Jews fleeing Nazi Europe.

The polyglot, multicultural environment of the city produced remarkable music that blended east and west, including jazz, as well as record companies and instrument manufacturers. The influence of this music scene later had a huge impact on popular music in the U.S. and worldwide, as seen, for example, in Atlantic Records (founded and led by a Turk from Istanbul who grew up listening to jazz on U Street in Washington, DC) and Zildijan Cymbals (a Boston-based manufacturer of cymbals whose family owners were originally cymbal makers for the Ottoman Court).

“I’m trying to resurrect a moment in the history of the city,” said the author, “rather than telling the story of the necessary triumph of Kemalism* or Orhan Pamuk’s** view [of the era] as a time of melancholy.” King’s view from the ground up, said commentator Gabriel Piterburg (professor of history and director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA), is an example of “micro-history,” an approach to history pioneered by Erich Auerbach and Carlo Ginzburg. “It’s a method,” said Piterburg, “by which one takes a fragment of a text, an episode, an incident, and uses it to constrict the lens of the camera: to know less and understand more.”

King said that he wrote the book for three reasons. First, he sought to document how diverse groups of people — from former eunuchs to Russian aristocrats to women — transformed their lives in a time of monumental change. At the same time, he wanted to write a history of the early Turkish republic that excluded the Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) narrative, as well as examine what he called “the hidden Islamic jazz age,” when Turks created “a new way to be Muslim and modern at the same time.”
 
Pictures tell the story

King’s book is built around two major elements: the black-and-white photos of Turkish photographer Selahattin Giz (1914–1994) and the literary device of the Pera Palace, a luxury hotel and place of intrigue that was initially built in Constantinople in the 1890s by the Wagon Lit company of Belgium. The hotel passed through multiple owners of different ethnicities before suffering severe damage from a 1940 bombing. As the beguiling ad copy for the book puts it, “At the Pera Palace, Istanbul's most luxurious hotel, so many spies mingled in the lobby that the manager posted a sign asking them to relinquish their seats to paying guests.”

In fact, Istanbul was a major center of espionage during World War II, with foreign powers recruiting agents from the émigré populations living in the city. When going through the archives of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, precursor of the CIA), King found reimbursement paperwork that showed what U.S. handlers and agents paid their agents in Istanbul, as well as what they purchased for them (from suits to a hernia belt to musical instruments). British intelligence officers were also very active in the city, as they were throughout the Balkans, frequently cultivating agents who posed as Nazis. The Pera Palace bombing in 1940 was, in fact, a spy operation gone awry

It is the striking photographs of Giz, whose collection includes his own photographs as well as those of other photographers, which anchor the book. These photos, many of which King showed during his talk, illustrate the lives of all kinds of individuals in Istanbul during the interwar years. A photo of the first official meeting of the alumni of the eunuchs of the Imperial Harem — men of African origin dressed in suits with starched white collars and ties — gave King the theme of the book: the experience of living in a time of colossal change. “We have to wrench ourselves out of preconceived notions of what people even looked like,” he commented.

Research for the book involved reading the many memoirs of the period written by inhabitants of Istanbul of the time; investigating the archives of the U.S. embassy, consular office, and OSS; and reviewing the entire Selahattin Giz Collection (owned by the cultural association of the Yapi Kredi Bank).

Identifying the pictures required context, as none were captioned by the photographer/collector. For example, King recognized the meeting of former eunuchs only because he had read about it in the notes of a U.S. consular official. In another case, colleagues helped him identify Nazi Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels looking at the newly restored mosaics of the Hagia Sophia during a visit to Turkey in 1939, when Goebbels attempted to draw Atatürk’s government closer to Germany.

*Kemalism is the political philosophy associated with the founder of the modern Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal, also known as Atatürk.

**Orhan Pamuk is a contemporary Turkish novelist, Istanbul native and the author, among other works, of “Istanbul: Memories and the City.”

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Published: Tuesday, March 24, 2015