Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul brings together serious and multi-sited archival research with the moving style of popular history, resulting in an unconventional narrative of Istanbul’s global making. Expats, exiles, migrants, and refugees are given atypically close attention in the book, which explores the formation of several cultural trends and political developments in Istanbul as part of the global flow of people that passed through, stayed in, and shaped the city’s life and culture from late Ottoman to early republican times. As such, the book’s focus on the people who passed through Istanbul resonates with the waves of change that have come to the city since the late 1990s, when Istanbul began to experience a rapid neoliberal transformation that attracted increasing numbers of international professionals and tourists, a process that culminated in the city’s proclamation as the European Capital of Culture for 2010. This celebrated moment was followed by the city’s reception of a massive flow of migrants after the 2011 outbreak of the Syrian Civil War, a gradual decline of the economic forces that had shaped the city in previous years, and a rapid drop in tourist numbers due to successive international crises and attacks. It now seems increasingly impossible to write on the city’s physical and social fabric without alluding to these “passing” actors, and Charles King argues that a similar point should be made for the turn of the previous century.

King situates his narrative in and around Pera Palace, the famous hotel built in 1895 to host the upper-class visitors carried to the city by the legendary Orient Express, with both the hotel and the railroad being owned by the Belgian rail company Wagons-Lits. Throughout the book, we follow various characters coming in from all over the world, as their journeys occasionally led them to Pera Palace. The backdrop to this story is the suffering experienced by the (sometimes former) peoples of the Ottoman Empire from the early 1900s onwards, when waves of political instability, persecution of dissent, endless wars, the Armenian Genocide, occupation, invasion, and forced migrations shaped the contours of Istanbul’s urban experience.

During the Allied Occupation after the end of World War I, high-ranking officers of both the defeated and the victorious sides of that conflict, including Mustafa Kemal, populated the lobbies of Pera’s hotels. In these uncertain times, all the venerated men of the old order attempted to find a place for themselves in this newly emerging world and to forge alliances with the assistance of Pera’s lively social scene. The occupation was soon overshadowed by the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, and King introduces into his narrative two characters who closely linked the history of that war to that of Pera Palace. The first of these is Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiades, an Orthodox Greek from the Adana region who had made a small fortune selling arms to the Ottoman army and who purchased Pera Palace in 1919. He left Istanbul shortly after the Kemalists established control over the country, subsequently relying on the transnational connections he had made in the hotel’s lobby to become one of the wealthiest men in Greece via the sale of arms. The second character is Misbah Muhayye, a Syrian Arab who was an acquaintance of Mustafa Kemal and who used his connections to supply the Turkish army with textiles, eventually acquiring Pera Palace in 1927, after it had been appropriated by the state as part of the efforts to “nationalize” the economy. Bodosakis and Muhayye, whose portraits still gaze at one another in the hotel, show the convoluted and, in some ways, mirrored fates of former Ottoman subjects who built their fortunes by making connections with the emergent state elites and providing resources for the war- and nation-building efforts of different sides.

King’s forte as a specialist of Russia brings an interesting angle to his study of Istanbul. He explores the primarily tragic but also sometimes lucrative fates of the thousands of “White Russian” refugees who escaped from Russia’s revolution and civil war to populate the streets and stages of Pera. They were soon followed there by one of their enemies, Lev Trotsky, the victorious general of the Red Army who was ousted by Stalin and found refuge on Prinkipo Island (today’s Büyükada), sending in material for publication from his temporary residency. And there was also Nâzım Hikmet, a graduate of Pera’s prestigious Galatasaray lycée, who would go on to become the communist “national poet” of Turkey while always remaining “at odds” (p. 220) with the official state ideology. Nâzım Hikmet represented a particularly tragic connection between Pera and Russia, eventually dying in Moscow while in exile.

One particular strength of the book lies in its attention to the history of senses. King gives an especially rich account of Istanbul’s changing soundscape: Russian performers populating the flourishing stages of Pera in the 1920s, the most famous of which, Maksim, was owned by the African-American “White Russian” Frederick Bruce Thomas, the son of former Mississippi slaves; the phonograph becoming a widely available commodity in Istanbul homes, where pirated recordings of Western music were played extensively; and the Arabic adhan or call to prayer being replaced by a version in Turkish in accordance with the modernist nationalism of the new regime. King also writes affectionately on three popular musicians: Roza Eskenazi, a Greek Jew from Istanbul who migrated to Greece in the 1920s but later returned with her voice and fame as a star of the rebetiko style of music, which King describes as “an Aegean version of the blues, sung in both Greek and Turkish” (p. 163); Hrant Kenkulian, an Armenian oud player and master of improvisation; and Seyyan Sunay Hanım (Aksoy), a Turkish Muslim whose unique style not only popularized but also localized tango. These early stars made use of new technologies and transnational connections to get their records sold around the world, even as their music and lyrics represented loss, remembrance, and issues of belonging in a world that had been shattered into various nation-states and diasporas: “[His Master’s Voice] stepped in to record [them] precisely because there were […] exiles, refugees, and migrants—who thought of the work of these artists as the background music of their own lives” (p. 171).

Throughout King’s book, Pera Palace and its environs also appear as a center of international espionage, diplomatic maneuvers, and humanitarian efforts. During the interwar years, Russians especially became the targets of such attention. At the beginning of World War II, those German Jewish academics who had found refuge in Istanbul’s newly developing universities were subjected to surveillance, and British and German diplomats were also busy courting their Turkish counterparts in order to try to draw Turkey to their respective sides. Pera Palace even witnessed a bombing aimed at the British diplomats residing in the hotel, where seven people were killed as a result of the explosion. The hotel also served as a central hub for international efforts to rescue European Jews from the Holocaust and settle them in Palestine: three key figures in this operation were Ira Hirschmann, the special representative of the United States’ War Refugee Board; Monsignor Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the papal delegate; and Chaim Barlas, representative of the immigration department of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, who ran the operation through a telegraph station located at Pera Palace.

The conventional historiography of Istanbul tends to emphasize the agency of the Ottoman state, the local Muslim and lately non-Muslim upper classes, and foreign experts, who are typically represented as if they always had concrete goals and were “rushing towards something” (p. 374). Many of the characters found in King’s book, however, arrived in Istanbul due to circumstances beyond their control, and the author’s narrative may serve as an invitation to include such contingent voices in later histories. The book also presents a challenge to more insular chronicles of the city inasmuch as it explores Istanbul not as a self-contained unit, but rather as a hub through which various characters and trends flowed in and out.

The focus on the global making of Istanbul’s culture is the book’s greatest strength, but therein lies its one major weakness as well. This weakness is embodied in the following phrase: “No one understood this world better than an American then living at the Pera Palace” (p. 105). While the author does try to incorporate local voices—literally so in the parts on Istanbul’s soundscape—the overwhelming perspective presented is primarily that of outsiders, and even some of the Ottoman/Turkish subjects who receive considerable time and space in the book are nevertheless figures who were rarely actually in Istanbul, such as Nâzım Hikmet.Footnote ¹

In the end, it is not entirely clear to what extent some of these characters—of whom there are many more than can be mentioned here—actually contributed to “the birth of modern Istanbul.” What King’s book chronicles via several loosely connected episodes is perhaps rather more along the lines of how Istanbul itself contributed to the birth of the modern world: from the advent of the settler state of Israel to the flourishing of an acclaimed international communist poet; and from the development of one of the largest business tycoons in Greece to the making of the global revolutionary movement of Trotskyism and even the transformation of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli into Pope John XXIII.

Consisting of seventeen partly chronological but primarily thematic chapters, which are accompanied by photos from the mid-twentieth century by the famous Turkish photographer Selahattin Giz, Midnight at the Pera Palace is a long, well written, and informative—albeit selective—account of Istanbul’s messy transition from Ottoman to republican times. For urban historians of Istanbul, the author hints at several key methodological questions, in addition to presenting a vast array of anecdotes excavated from a dizzying array of primary and secondary sources. Nonetheless, readers looking for an urban history of “the birth of modern Istanbul” should be warned that they may find less Istanbul than they would expect as they travel extensively alongside the characters to whom King gives central stage.