Midnight at the Pera Palace
Istanbul is unique for me among foreign cities, as it is the only one I’ve visited twice. Indeed, it was my freshmen year sojourn to Istanbul that solidified my desire to study abroad in Turkey. I was very much swimming in history in both trips; anybody that has done the circuit of Sultanahmet district sites such as the Ottoman Toplanti palace, the Byzantine Haiga Sophia, and the Sultanahmet mosque, would capture the collective grandeur of the civilizations that have lived in Istanbul. I was only there for a week my first time in Istanbul, and all of this was on the front door of my hotel.
My stay this time offered a similar window into Istanbul’s past, and yet it was totally different. Fans of Georgetown professors’ published work may be familiar with Professor Charles King’s recently published writing, Midnight at the Pera Palace, which chronicles the travails of the diplomats, artisans, and Jazz musicians that called the hotel home during the emergence of the Turkish Republic and Second World War. While we didn’t get to stay in this hotel (which is probably the most famous and expensive in Turkey to this day) we did get to stay “with a view of the best hotel” (in the words of our tour leader, the illustrious Ahmet Okal Bey).
Professor King’s book is a fabulous read, filled with descriptions of some of the hotel’s more exciting moments--notably an absurd bombing plot by agents allied with Nazi Germany that saw a bomb detonate in the lobby of the hotel and kill 6 British agents at the height of World War II--what I took away from the book was that history is just another normal day when it’s happening. Actually seeing the Pera Palace hits home the point that when a normal day becomes history, it becomes a window into an experience beyond your own.
My last day in Istanbul, very late and with a lot of down time (thank you midnight flights), I decided to go and poke my head around the Pera Palace in as non-intrusive a way as possible, curious about the place I had read about. Surprisingly, the palace knew it was a landmark (they even had a small case that was offering King’s book for ten liras, among other souvenir items), and I instantly felt like I was something other than an intruder. I walked the hallways for my brief 10-minute visit, and saw on display letters, delay notifications, and other banal of the past that we now celebrate as history.
Often in Istanbul, and in general while on the road, it is easy to get lost in the grandeur of historical places, of civilizations gone by while losing the basic human connection that grounds these experiences as a celebration of what we have in common. It is too easy to trivialize a culture as being markedly different from us, and see those visable difference as coming from something different inside of us. In reality, the most wonderful things about the markedly different and diverse cultures on display in istanbul is that the art, the cathedrals, the mosques, all these radiate from a common core that is humanity. Seeing the museum to the banality of traveling, the shrine to delay notifications in the midst of Turkey’s grandest hotel hit home that point, and even for shoestring travels I’d recommend grounding your Istanbul experience by spending a midnight in the city of a thousand names at the Pera Palace.