Midnight At The Pera Palace: The Birth Of Modern Istanbul, King - B

                                                The Pera was the grand hotel one stayed at before or after taking the Orient Express. "During the interwar years, the Pera Palace was not only the place where transients and newcomers began their reinvention. But for wave after wave of refugees, migrants and exiles, the storied old hotel was a symbol of the transition from a past age to a new one - a place that embodied the ties between the East and West, between empire and republic, and between nostalgia and experiment in the only place on earth to have been the epicenter of Christendom and global Islam." Both the hotel and the new train terminal came late in the 19th century as the diplomatic world awaited the demise of 'the old man of Europe'.  It came with a war that ended with an Allied occupation of Constantinople. It was the only capital city of the central powers that was occupied. British, French, Italian and even Greek troops were involved. In less than a year, a resistance and revolution began under Mustafa Kemal, who was elected president at the Grand National Assembly in Ankara. The peace treaty dismembered the  empire but left the sultan on the throne.  He voluntarily abdicated and lived out his life on the Italian Riviera. "The dynasty of the House of Osman, which had governed an empire for more than six hundred years and had commanded Istanbul for four hundred sixty-nine, was no more." By 1923, the Allies were gone and the Republic established.  The forced expulsion/exchange of a million-and-a-half Turks and Greeks made the country more rural, Turkic and Muslim. Also known as Ataturk, Kemal ruled until his death in 1938. He relentlessly pushed his modernizing agenda of better education, national identification with their Turk heritage, sectarianism at all costs, disestablishment of the Muslim faith, conversion of the Hagia Sophia from a mosque to a museum, banishment of the Caliph, synchronizing Turkey's erratic system of keeping time with Europe's, and establishment of equal legal rights for women. Istanbul was the home of 1932's Miss Universe.
                                              WW2 came perilously close, but both sides honored Turkey's declaration of neutrality.  That, however, did not prevent Istanbul from becoming one of the major locales of diplomacy, intrigue and spying.  More than a quarter of the Jews who made it to Palestine during the war came through Istanbul.  Rather late in the game, in February of 1945, Turkey declared war on its former ally, Germany.  Turkey joined NATO in 1952, flirted with the EU and has recently turned back toward Islam. The author clearly pines for the days when it was a much more diverse place. Throughout the narrative, he weaves into the story the role of the Pera, which stood at the commercial and social center of the city. It still stands and has been recently renovated by a firm from Dubai. All in all, this is an interesting read about one of the world's more fascinating cities.