City lights

Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul. By Charles King. W.W. Norton; 476 pages; $27.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

THE “Queen of Cities”, as it was known in Byzantine times, was perfectly sited at the intersection of continents, cultures and seas. Istanbul may have been a great and ancient centre of civilisation, but there is nothing serene or timeless about the place. The city has been shaken by abrupt alterations in its physical and cultural landscape, thanks to both human violence and acts of God. It has seen sieges, pogroms, earthquakes, and fires both deliberate and accidental. Between 1569 and 1918 it was transformed by at least 16 huge blazes.

Charles King, a historian and social scientist at Georgetown University, has chosen an unusual way of capturing this dizzying volatility. His book, “Midnight at the Pera Palace”, examines one shortish slice of history, from late Ottoman times to the second world war and its immediate aftermath, and one small site: a hotel which at various times has epitomised luxury, faded elegance, downright seediness and conspiracy.

Of course, the story of the Pera Palace, which was built in 1892, must be told in the broader context of Turkish and European history. So Mr King’s lens has to switch deftly between close-up and wide-angle shots. With nice vignettes, he explains how the hotel’s owners and clients shifted in response to the changing fortunes of the city and the country.

He traces the feverish prosperity enjoyed by some, especially local Christian minorities, on the eve of the first world war; the humiliation, for local Muslims, of an Allied occupation after the war; the influx of destitute Russians, a neglected episode; and the revenge of the Turkish nationalists who tried to remake a rambunctious metropolis in their own monocultural mould. In a subtler register he traces the city’s contrasting moods: a melancholy known as huzun competing with a hedonistic, happy-go-lucky impulse which Turks (and Greeks) call keyif.

This quirky establishment, with its wood-and-iron lift and gaudy marble, turns out to be an accurate barometer for wider developments. It was built by the Belgium-based Wagon-Lits company in the same spirit as their Orient Express railway that took wealthy travellers, in safety, to the edge of an exotic eastern world. The hotel was acquired in 1919 by a Greek wheeler-dealer, Prodromos Bodosakis. He duly offered a comfortable home to Allied officers who, in turn, relished the company of down-at-heel Russian princesses.

Political intrigue mingled with erotic adventures. The hotel’s customers included a Turkish officer called Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk, who tried in vain to convince his British counterparts that he and they could find a common purpose. In 1927, as businesses belonging to Istanbul’s Christian minorities were steadily expropriated, the hotel was bought by an ethnic Arab named Muhayyes who had served the Turkish nationalist cause. This acquisition looked unwise in March 1941, when the interior was flattened by a bomb directed at British diplomats on the run from pro-Axis Bulgaria.

The book’s title comes from a New Year’s Eve ball in 1925 which coincided with the introduction of a uniform Western calendar. Before that, the city’s Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities had observed their own, religiously based systems for keeping time.

If there is a theme that holds this rich, stimulating narrative together, it is the perpetual and often tragically unsuccessful search for terms on which the city’s communities could share the same hotly contested space. The list of injured in the 1941 attack is a reminder of how long Istanbul’s fertile cultural mix remained intact, despite the best efforts of various forms of nationalism to destroy it: two Jewish doormen, a Greek general manager and a Muslim chauffeur and nightwatchmen.

If Mr King ever pens a sequel to this book, it will have to include many more moments when the city’s cosmopolitan character was seemingly destroyed, only to rise again unexpectedly. He will have to bring in the anti-Greek riots of 1955 and the recent resurgence of Istanbul as a business and cultural centre, attracting residents from many countries, including Greece. That will not be an easy task, but it is certainly worth the attempt. Mr King has found a winning formula for depicting the micro- and macro-history of one of the world’s most seductive places.