Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul- Book Review

Midnight at the Pera Palace was a book that I’ve come across several times during my search for a good read about modern Turkish history. The nature of this research is a bit peculiar in itself because I’m Turkish and I grew up in Turkey so one anticipates that Turkish history is something that I should be well educated about when in school. This peculiarity is originated from the education policies of the Turkish state. When the person starts to do their own independent reading, it forces you to either confront with extremely disturbing realities that your nation shamelessly denies for hundred years or you stop reading and choose the easy way of denying the honesty of the human stories which are indeed very hard to confront as facts. Well, even though there is a lot that needs to be discussed about these, this blog entry won’t be about the horrors of Turkish state education propaganda.

During my search for a good Turkish modern history read, I also found myself thinking how much easier and enjoyable it to read stuff written by foreign authors (like Charles King, Erik Zürcher) because of the ease they can talk about another place’s history without feeling the pressure of obligation to show an extravagant admiration for some names who have become cults in our country and similarly a reflex-like animosity towards the others. This ethos of cult dehumanizes the personalities and distorts the complexity, multi-sided nature of history. (This, I think, is what makes reading history such a joyful thing.) This changes the reading into a childish story where the world is composed of good and bad guys and the whole morale of the story is how cruel, relentless are the “bad” guys while we watch how divine are the “good” guys in awe. It is hard to name this kind of reading of past affairs as “history”. It is propaganda rather than history, consciously cultivated and is cultivated so well that most of the people don’t even feel the need of questioning its absurdity anymore.

Frankly, when I first considered reading this book a few years ago, I completely misinterpreted the content because of the name of the book. One expects (at least I did) a book about a specific place, Pera Palace Hotel, and this is why I was shocked by what I found when I actually bought the book from a second-hand book website and started reading. This book was about much more than a single hotel, it was a very well-written and well-researched history of Turkey spanning a time period from the late Ottoman Empire to the end of WW2. It focuses mostly on Istanbul and the cultural history with the stories of riveting writers, spies, singers, cabarets, hotels, Orient Express, even Trotsky!

Midnight at the Pera Palace surprised me on every page and it had a lot to offer than I’ve ever expected from it. It introduces you to the most extraordinary personalities whose paths crossed Istanbul like Selahattin Giz, an artist born to a Muslim family in Salonica and settled in Beylerbeyi after the Balkan Wars, Grigoris Balakian, Armenian priest and genocide survivor, Balian family, the architects of many great structures that we still glorify, Basil Zaharoff, the Greek arms dealer who was one of the richest men in the world during his lifetime, Thomas Whittemore, an archeologist who made numerous efforts on assisting the Russians seeking shelter in Turkish cities and initiated an unprecedented restoration and conservation project at Hagia Sophia. The story of some of these numerous people moved me so much that I found myself excitedly texting to friends of mine in the middle of the night.

Seeing the ethos of Istanbul during the Allied occupation from the eyes of Muslims, Christians, and Jews of several ethnicities was a quite startling way of seeing the affairs of that time for a person who is accustomed to reading the loss of WW1 as nothing other than a nationalistic catastrophe for Turkish people. We don’t seem to grasp the diversity of the Ottoman Empire and especially Istanbul of that time and how the victory of Allied forces was a hope of survival for some while it was a reason to flee the capital out of fear of the consequences of their war crimes for the others. One of these wasn’t more “Istanbullu” than the other.

“If journalism is the first draft of history, it is also sometimes a salutary shock: a way of forcing us to recall a mode of being that made sense at the time, of lives lived messily among neighbors who prayed and ate differently — Muslims, Christians, and Jews; religious and secular; refugees and natives — with everyone, in one way or another, starting over.”

The book combines the wartime history of Turkey and the history of the cultural scene of Istanbul in a way that deserves some praise. When you were reading about the fronts of the Turkish Independence war on one page, you can read about the famous quarters of the Istanbul nightlife like Maxim (which actually reopened in 1961 as Maksim Gazinosu and hosted many well-known names of Turkish music such as Zeki Müren, Sezen Aksu, Ajda Pekkan, İbrahim Tatlıses and many more) or Petit Champs (where you could watch Cossack dancers!) on the other. The chapter called “The Past is a Wound in My Heart” was an especially fascinating one to read. It is about the cinema and music scene of Istanbul and focusing on three names, Roska Eskenazi, (Udi) Hrant Kenkulian and, Seyyan “with their ability to encapsulate loss and longing in a single vocal phrase or pluck of a string. In their own ways, they had a better claim than many artists to capturing the essence of an era — a time when coming to Istanbul, or leaving it, was the defining journey for hundreds of thousands of old Ottoman subjects and new Turkish citizens.”

As someone who always found the chaos and complexity of Istanbul dazzlingly beautiful (people who live in Istanbul claim my good sentiments are because I don’t live there), I found myself taking a lot of pleasure in reading about those human stories, nightlife, music and, the drama of this beautiful city. The book covers such diverse aspects of the city and somehow turns back its attention to the Pera Palace Hotel. I found unexpected stories in every single chapter and couldn’t stop reading before my eyes started closing. But besides all of my pleasure, I couldn’t help feeling a bit gloomy because we are now able to experience that diversity of the city to a much less extent compared to older days. I think one of my favourite lines in the book reflects this feeling very well.

“There was nothing unusual about a world in which a Greek-speaking Jew became the voice of the Greek diaspora or a blind Armenian could revolutionize the playing of an instrument that Turks, Arabs, and Persians all think of as their own. People always somehow manage to lead messier lives than nationalists would like.”