A jumble of old wooden sailing boats on the Golden Horn, with the Süleymaniye in the background.
SVELTE AND WELL-DRESSED, with a tiny mustache and balding pate, Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiades—or Bodosakis, as he was generally known—was the very image of the urbane and confident Istanbullu Greek. He had taken over the Pera Palace from the Wagons-Lits company in 1919, in circumstances that remain unclear even in the Ottoman property records. The timing turned out to be excellent, however. British officers, disaffected Ottoman soldiers, and French and German businessmen found in Bodosakis a proprietor willing to accommodate just about any kind of guest. According to the memoirist Ziya Bey, the Pera Palace quickly established itself as a place where “foreign officers and business men are fêted by unscrupulous Levantine adventurers and drink and dance with fallen Russian princesses or with Greek and Armenian girls whose morals are, to say the least, as light as their flimsy gowns.”
Born to a Greek Orthodox family of modest means, and with barely a primary school education, Bodosakis had started his working life as a small-time trader in Adana and Mersin, two regional commercial centers along the Mediterranean coast. After the First World War, he came to Istanbul, throwing himself into the rough-and-tumble world of shipping and industry and carrying with him a considerable record as a wartime entrepreneur. As an Ottoman subject, he had moved relatively freely inside the empire; as a Greek-speaker, he had immediate entrée into the city’s commercial and financial elite. He also had family connections. He was married to the daughter of an Austrian engineer who in turn was related to Otto Liman von Sanders, head of the German military mission in Turkey. Von Sanders had helped run the war effort on behalf of the Ottoman army, and at least some of Bodosakis’s early wealth seems to have come from his role as a supplier to the army’s quartermasters. Even after the German and Ottoman defeat, knowing important people was still the first step in furthering an already successful business career, especially in a city crawling with foreign soldiers and émigrés.
Bodosakis had managed to thrive by negotiating several different economic and political worlds, but for many local Greeks, the arrival of the Allies posed more questions about the future than it answered. While the patriarch was the spiritual leader of Greek Orthodox Christians, there was a competing political authority emanating from Athens—the government of the Greek mainland, or the Kingdom of the Hellenes—that was now asserting its influence east of the Aegean Sea. The Hellenic presence among the Allies was relatively small: four warships out of dozens in the entire fleet, a few foot soldiers on patrol, and a detachment of Cretans guarding the Greek patriarchate in Phanar. But the presence of troops from Greece raised the fundamental issue of the future relationship between Istanbul’s age-old Greek community and the relatively young Hellenic state.
Less than a century earlier, the territory of Greece had itself been part of the Ottoman Empire. In the 1820s, a revolt on the Greek mainland sought to throw off Ottoman power and create an independent country. Hellenic revolutionaries were often little different from other anti-imperial movements of the era—a combination of liberal politicians, overblown romantics, and profiteers looking to rid themselves of a faraway sovereign—but sympathizers in Europe saw them as living relics of the glorious Athenian past: the noble, freedom-loving ur-source of Western civilization as a whole. Philhellenism—support for Hellenic culture and the political cause that sprang from it—swept across Europe and aided the revolutionaries in creating their own state in 1832. The new country eventually expanded to include neighboring areas populated by Greek-speakers as well as by Slavs, Albanians, and Turkish-speaking Muslims.
King Constantine, the reigning monarch at the outbreak of the First World War, was well aware of the British and French interest in pulling his country to the Allied side. Greece’s strategic position in the Mediterranean would be critical to the Allied war effort in the Balkans and the Near East. But as a brother-in-law of Kaiser Wilhelm II, he chose the middle path of keeping Greece neutral. As the war wound on and a German victory appeared less secure, however, pro-Allied factions within the Hellenic parliament rose against the king and, in 1917, forced him from the throne and into exile. Constantine’s son, Alexander, was elevated to the monarchy, and Greece entered the war on the Allied side. The war seemed at last to provide an opportunity to realize the Megali Idea, or “Grand Idea,” dear to pan-Greek nationalists: the dream of retaking Istanbul and restoring the Byzantine Empire under a Hellenic crown.
The power behind Alexander’s throne was Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, an experienced politician who had stage-managed the royal transition in order to bring Greece into the war. Venizelos was both visionary and pragmatic, and he saw clearly that an Allied victory would be in the long-term interests of Greece. To press its case for acquiring Ottoman territory, the Hellenic government launched its own occupation farther down the Aegean coast. On May 15, 1919, Venizelos’s troops marched into the major Ottoman port of Smyrna (Izmir). The British and French offered tacit support, mainly as a way of keeping the city out of the hands of the Italians, another Allied power with designs on Ottoman territory. But unlike the Allies’ arrival in Istanbul, the landing in Smyrna was a disaster. Disorder swept through the city as local Muslims tried briefly to fight off the occupiers. Stores were looted and the city’s many religious communities—Greek, Armenian, and Muslim—briefly descended into violence before Hellenic soldiers imposed martial law.
For local Greeks as well as Hellenes on the mainland, the seizure of Smyrna was a triumph, the first step toward the Megali Idea. (There were, in fact, more ethnic Greeks in Smyrna than in Athens at the time.) When news of Smyrna’s capture reached Istanbul, the streets of Pera were draped with the blue-and-white flag of the Hellenic kingdom, and a huge portrait of Venizelos was unveiled in Taksim Square. For Ottoman Muslims, however, it was a heart-stopping tragedy. Not only was the imperial capital now administered by the Allies, but in clear contravention of the Mudros armistice, Hellenic forces had seized the empire’s most important Aegean port. Unlike Milne’s troops in Istanbul, the Hellenes seemed intent on annexing, not just administering, their prize.
While Bodosakis was weighing up his own possible futures in the wake of the Hellenic advance, Mustafa Kemal, the Ottoman field commander, was on his way to Anatolia. He had arrived in Istanbul on an inauspicious day—November 13, 1918, the moment when Allied ships sailed into the city—and he departed for Samsun the following May 16, only a day after the Hellenes took Smyrna. Both events galvanized the growing opposition movement that he managed to organize in the east.
Abandoning the pretext for his army inspection tour, Mustafa Kemal set about rallying officers and field units dissatisfied with the inaction of the Istanbul government. Within a few months of reaching Samsun, he had enlivened colleagues among the Ottoman officer class. He had also helped stage two large-scale congresses in the eastern cities of Erzurum and Sivas, where delegates from military units and other sympathizers rallied around the anti-occupation cause. The congresses denounced the Hellenic invasion and proclaimed the creation of a national resistance to the Allies. By the end of 1919, Mustafa Kemal had established his headquarters in Ankara, a town in central Anatolia that was far enough away from Allied positions to be defensible and, with its own railway station, in easy contact with the remnants of the Ottoman armies still regrouping after the armistice. For the Allies, Mustafa Kemal’s expanding forces were a new and unexpected addition to an already complicated strategic and political environment.
With Ankara now becoming a rival pole to Istanbul, Allied observers came to describe the growing resistance movement as “Kemalists” or Turkish nationalists. The idea that Turks represented a distinct nation, rather than just part of the governing elite of a multinational empire, had been part of the Unionist cause earlier in the century, but under Mustafa Kemal, the nationalist message was married to the concrete political and military program of resisting the occupation and bucking up the enfeebled sultan. The Kemalists first turned their attention to the east, launching attacks on Armenians and other armed groups returning to areas from which they had been deported by the Unionists during the war. Over the next year and a half, violence spread to central and western Anatolia as well. Hellenic forces moved out of their enclave around Smyrna and extended their zone of control along the Aegean Sea. The sultan’s government looked on these events with powerless detachment. While Mehmed VI was still the legal authority in Istanbul and the wider empire, he watched as his officers and soldiers organized their own defense of the fatherland without royal aid or sanction. Muslim politicians and intellectuals soon flocked to Ankara. Thefts from arms depots in Istanbul and smuggling of guns to the Kemalists increased.
The feckless Ottoman parliament, which continued to meet through the spring of 1920, wavered between tacitly supporting the Kemalists and seeming to acquiesce to the Allied authorities, who still recognized the sultan and parliament as the only legitimate government. The preferences of Muslim Istanbullus were clear, however. In February 1920, a rally in the Sultanahmet district brought out perhaps 150,000 people to demand that the Turkish heartland remain part of a unified state with guaranteed control over Istanbul and the Straits. Later in the month, in its boldest act to date, the parliament adopted a declaration known as the National Pact, which set out the Ottomans’ core demands vis-à-vis the Allies—ranging from asserting the freedom and independence of the sultan’s state to insisting that the future status of controversial border regions be settled by referendum. Crucially, it was the first document produced by the Ottoman government that used the word Türkiye—Turkey—for the country previously known as the Ottoman Empire.
The growing disorder—as well as the fear that the sultan’s government, the Kemalists, and Istanbullus might eventually unite against the occupation—pushed the Allies into a fateful decision. On March 16, 1920, General Milne extended full military occupation over the city, a technical change to the status that Allied forces had enjoyed since 1918. In a move not sanctioned by the Mudros armistice, the new arrangement subjected all civilian and military institutions to Allied oversight. British soldiers walked down the Grande Rue with bayonets fixed and swords drawn. They were prepared for resistance, but in most instances detachments of Allied guards simply walked into government ministries and stood post outside office doors. Local police and military units were disarmed. Villages in outlying districts were searched for weapons caches. Further rounds of uncooperative Ottoman bureaucrats were shipped to British-controlled Malta.
The occupation came as no surprise to anyone. Rumors of it had circulated in the Pera Palace bar, and the French had shared the plans with select Ottoman officials, who were able to leave the city rather than face arrest or deportation by the British. But it was a rash decision and ultimately a foolhardy one. Mustafa Kemal’s associates in Anatolia could now argue that they represented the only truly national government, since the sultan had stood by quietly as Allied troops launched their formal seizure of the capital. In Ankara the next month, the nationalists opened their own parliament, the Grand National Assembly, which included some representatives from the defunct Ottoman parliament in Istanbul. Mustafa Kemal was elected its first president, becoming in effect the head of government of an as-yet-unrecognized country. The assembly issued a proclamation declaring that it had no intention of deposing the sultan, but, as with the Unionists’ attempt to save the Ottoman state from itself in 1908, relations were tense between the established regime and its alleged saviors. The Ankara assembly prescribed execution for anyone who challenged its legitimacy, while the sultan proclaimed the same punishment for Mustafa Kemal and his closest supporters.
The Allies had taken over Istanbul because of the threat posed by a unified Turkish Muslim front, but within only a month, the prospect of a multisided, fractious, and internationalized civil war seemed closer than ever. Ottoman loyalists denounced the Turkish nationalists. Turkish soldiers targeted religious minorities, believing that all Greeks and Armenians were potential supporters of the Allied occupation. Hellenic troops clashed with armed Turks. Brigands and local warlords threw their weight behind whoever seemed to be on top.
A continent away, diplomats were meeting in the Paris suburb of Sèvres to create a document that was intended to transform the shaky Mudros armistice into a lasting peace. In May 1920, Allied negotiators presented Ottoman officials with the draft of a final peace treaty. The terms were shocking. Syria, Mesopotamia, and Palestine were to be taken away from Ottoman control, paving the way for a system of mandates that would administer these territories under the French and the British. Much of eastern Anatolia was to be divided between an independent Armenia and a future Kurdistan. Egypt and Cyprus were confirmed as free of Ottoman control. Portions of the Aegean coastline around Smyrna were ceded to Greece. Istanbul and the Straits were to be governed by an international commission composed of representatives from Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Russia, Greece, the United States, and other countries.
These were precisely the arrangements that Allied representatives in Istanbul had urged negotiators not to put forward. The American high commissioner in the city, Admiral Mark Bristol, had sent a raft of telegrams and memoranda arguing that the partition of the country would inflame local sentiment against the occupation and provide yet another specific cause around which the nationalists could coalesce. It would also ensconce Britain as the dominant power in the region, to the exclusion of the other Allies and to the detriment of the Turks themselves. “The United States entered the war and sacrificed men and money to overcome the imperialism of Germany,” he wrote to Washington from his office next to the Pera Palace. “I must call attention to the evident imperialistic tendencies of Great Britain.” Allied negotiators, however, saw themselves as playing a continual game of catch-up, drafting terms of a final peace that were moot almost as soon as they were proposed, given the fast-changing military situation across Anatolia. The Hellenes were carving up the old empire already, and there seemed little hope of reversing that course. The best outcome, negotiators reasoned, would be a treaty that would at least bring some order to the Ottoman breakup and give its various pieces a kind of international blessing.
In August 1920, the sultan reluctantly accepted the deal. The occupation had dismantled the country de facto, but Sèvres divided it up de jure. Like the Byzantine Empire it had displaced nearly half a millennium earlier, the Ottoman state was now whittled down to a tiny, insignificant, and largely demilitarized power at the edge of Europe. News of the Sèvres accord had precisely the effect that Admiral Bristol and others had predicted. It was one thing for Ottoman officials to give up the outlying parts of the empire—letting the Arab lands go, for example—but agreeing to the effective partition of Anatolia and the elimination of local control over Istanbul and the Straits was a monumental concession. The Allies were no longer temporary occupiers seeking to ease the transition from armistice to peace. They had become acquisitive victors dividing up the spoils of war, all with the sultan’s blessing.
Lines on maps, international mandates, orderly population movements, and grand schemes for reforming governance were debated and redrafted by diplomats with little understanding of what was happening in the Ottomans’ old domains. After the Sèvres accord, Mustafa Kemal’s supporters were bolder and more convinced than ever of the justice of their cause. Hellenic troops continued to advance, pressing toward Istanbul overland through Thrace and up the Aegean coast from Smyrna. Each side—British, French, Italian, Hellenic, and Turkish—worked to create facts on the ground before the treaty could be fully implemented. The outcome, however, would be shaped by a bizarre event that unfolded more than three hundred miles away, in a garden outside of Athens. It turned out that Istanbul’s fate, and the Ottoman Empire’s, hung on a monkey bite.
Many people saw the affair as a bizarre form of cosmic justice, and it was wrapped up in one of the most complicated royal successions of the era. In early October 1920, King Alexander of Greece—the monarch who had ousted his father, led his kingdom to victory in the First World War, and now oversaw the troops marching toward Istanbul and Ankara—went walking with his German shepherd on his royal estate in the suburbs of Athens. Along the way, the dog leapt on a Barbary macaque, a monkey that belonged to one of the palace gardeners. Another monkey rallied to the defense, and the king ended up with a severe bite. He thought little of it at the time, but within a few days the bite had turned septic. The king took to his bed and died before the month was out.
“It is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite,” Winston Churchill later observed. The political effects were enormous. With Alexander dead, the losers of the 1917 palace coup invited Constantine to return from exile and resume his reign. New elections were called, and in the political bargaining that followed, Venizelos was dismissed as prime minister. The turmoil in Athens was felt most deeply across the Aegean, but the results were not what anyone might have predicted at the time.
Given the turbulent politics of Constantine’s sudden return, the momentum behind Hellenic advances in Anatolia might have dissipated; grand plans for seizing the coastline and eastern Thrace, and perhaps even pressuring the other Allies to hand Istanbul over to the Hellenic government, might have fallen away. But in this critical moment, Britain, the major occupying power, remained resolute. Islamophobic and philhellenic in equal measure, the British broadly endorsed Hellenic ambitions, tacitly urging Constantine to finish the job begun by Alexander and Venizelos. There was now a formal treaty in place—the Sèvres accord—and London dispatched a new commander, General Charles Harington, to take over from General Milne and implement the treaty that the sultan’s government had approved. The French and Italians, by contrast, wary of the return to power of the pro-German Constantine, began to pull back their support for the Hellenic cause. These fissures within the Allied side emboldened the newly restored Hellenic monarch, who was eager to display his ability to win the peace by winning yet another war. Newspapers in Athens featured pictures of Constantine slaying a Turkish dragon and marching into a reclaimed Constantinople, flanked by his namesake, the long-dead Constantine XI Palaeologus, the last Byzantine emperor.
More than ever before, Turkish nationalists now had a mission: preventing the Hellenic soldiers from threatening the core areas in central Anatolia, blocking their march on Ankara, and gradually pushing them back toward the coast. In January 1921, Kemalist troops, led by the talented tactician 
smet Bey, defeated Hellenic forces at the first battle of nönü, south of the Sea of Marmara. Another Turkish victory followed on the same spot in April. In response, the Hellenic army launched a major offensive in the late summer, but that too was repulsed, this time at the Sakarya River near Ankara.
Turkish fighters were beginning to see the conflict as their own war of liberation—ironically, following the example that Hellenes, Bulgarians, Albanians, Arabs, and other non-Turks had already set in their drive for freedom from the Ottoman Empire—and Sakarya became the signature moment of that struggle. The victory also propelled Mustafa Kemal, who had assumed the role of commander in chief of Turkish forces, to the position of unrivaled leader of the nationalist movement. It allowed him to outmaneuver other potential contenders, such as the successful general Kâzım Karabekir, whose credentials as a member of the Istanbul elite and a seasoned field commander outshone virtually all others. Mustafa Kemal was elevated to the rank of marshal and given the honorific title of gazi, a term formerly applied to the most illustrious of Islamic holy warriors. “The retreat that started in Vienna,” said a Turkish observer in 1921, referring to the zenith of Ottoman incursions into Europe in 1683, “stopped 238 years later.”
British diplomats tried desperately to salvage what remained of the Sèvres treaty, but the Allies were by now largely spectators to the unfolding violence. The cost of continued occupation was outstripping any strategic benefits. By the summer of 1921, the Italians made a separate deal with the Turkish nationalists and removed their troops from Anatolia. The French followed suit in October. Late the next summer, Turkish nationalists began an offensive against the remaining Hellenic positions, with the spearhead of the advance pointed toward the key redoubt of Smyrna, the city from which Greece had launched its bid for dominance three years earlier. The two forces were roughly equal in size—some 225,000 Hellenic troops against 208,000 Turks—but Hellenic emplacements were stretched across virtually the breadth of Anatolia, with nothing behind them but the sea.
Hellenic military detachments fled toward the coast. They left behind rubble-strewn villages, burned croplands, and toppled minarets. “The atrocities perpetrated by the Greeks, since they landed in Smyrna, exceed all similar crimes recorded up to now in the annals of history,” declared a Turkish report. “There is not the slightest doubt that the savageries committed by the Greeks of Greece and by that section of the indigenous Greeks, who sided with them, have been deliberately planned and carried out under orders proceeding from the Commanders of the various Greek military units.”
It took only days for the Turkish troops to reach Smyrna. On September 9, 1922, Turkish nationalists marched into the city and began pushing out the last remnants of the foreign army. Local Greek Orthodox Christians, fearing reprisals from the nationalists as well as from their Muslim neighbors, rushed to join the Hellenic soldiers in retreat. Refugees crowded the docklands. Mobs ruled the streets. The Greek archbishop was lynched by a Muslim crowd whipped up by the Turkish commander in the city. A fire broke out in the Armenian section of Smyrna and roared through other neighborhoods, turning the sea the color of burnished copper and pushing even more people toward the waterfront. In the panic and disorder, thousands died before Hellenic and Allied ships arrived to ferry the survivors to the Greek mainland. Some 213,000 people, mainly Greek Orthodox and Armenian families who had lived in Smyrna for countless generations, left it for good. Three-quarters of the city was in ruins.
As news of the Smyrna catastrophe reached Istanbul, locals and Allies worried that it might well turn out to be a dress rehearsal for what could happen in the old capital: a Turkish nationalist attack followed by the chaotic emptying of the city’s minorities and a dash for the door by the Allies. “Foreigners are nervous . . . remembering the fate of Smyrna,” Ernest Hemingway reported from the scene, “and have booked outgoing trains for the weeks ahead.” Processions of Turkish Muslims marched through the streets shouting, “Down with the English.” Portraits of Mustafa Kemal appeared in Muslim-majority districts throughout the city. Gone were the Hellenic flags and blue-and-white streamers that had once adorned the storefronts of Greek-owned businesses. “A fear of the future sits heavily upon these poor people now,” a British lieutenant wrote in a letter home. “What will become of them when we leave?”
A year before the fall of Smyrna, Allied generals had issued a directive in Istanbul reminding Turkish soldiers that they were required to salute uniformed officers of the Allied contingent. A special commission had been created to study the problem of whether an Allied officer was required to salute back. Now, power had clearly shifted to the Turkish side. General Harington, the British commander, was reduced to issuing more and more strident—and less and less effective—declarations to Istanbul’s civilian population. Possible death sentences were authorized for people found guilty of illegal possession of firearms, firing on Allied troops, destruction of telephone or telegraph lines, receiving stolen Allied goods, or “any other act or thing inimical to the interests or safety of the Allied Troops.” Few people believed the sentences could be carried out.
The British, as the lead partner in the dwindling Allied force, faced a common dilemma among occupiers. Their friendliest local partner—the sultan—was the least legitimate among the native population, while the most legitimate—the Kemalists—were making plans to march on Istanbul and send the occupiers running. Mehmed VI was weak and unpopular, as were the remaining ministers and advisers around him. Their acceptance of the Hellenic occupation of Smyrna and the Treaty of Sèvres had diminished the prestige of the old regime and made the Ottoman establishment even less credible as a future government for post-occupation Istanbul. The Allied powers had painted themselves into a corner.
Before the Smyrna offensive, Istanbul had been the only place in Turkey where troops still loyal to the Ottoman government outnumbered the nationalists: 1,200 Ottoman troops against 1,000 Kemalists. Over the coming months, however, that balance shifted dramatically in favor of Mustafa Kemal. In late September 1922, fresh from the fighting in Smyrna, Turkish nationalist forces entered a neutral zone that the Allies had established along the Straits. British and nationalist troops squared off across their own entrenched positions, exchanging potshots that threatened to destroy the armistice, which by now had dragged on for nearly four years. “I know somebody will let his rifle off cleaning it, and then there will be another European war!!!” wrote Billy Fox-Pitt, an officer in the Welsh Guards, from the trenches.
The British government was inclined to stand up to the nationalists and ordered General Harington to prepare to fight, but Harington astutely ignored his direct orders. He proceeded with plans to meet Turkish negotiators at Mudanya, a small town on the Sea of Marmara, to draft a new agreement that would take into account the radically changed military situation. “No humbler setting could have been chosen for the negotiations of an agreement upon which depended the issue of peace or war between the Allied Powers and the Turkish Nationalists,” wrote G. Ward Price, the Daily Mail correspondent who covered the talks. The British delegation arrived in force on the flagship Iron Duke. The Turks were led by smet, the hero of the earlier battles of nönü against the Hellenes. smet had emerged as one of the key military leaders under Mustafa Kemal and now held the rank of pasha, or senior general. In driving rain and high winds, on October 11, 1922, Harington and smet Pasha crafted an accord that, in a roundabout way, saved Istanbul from destruction.
The Mudanya document governed the evacuation of Hellenic troops from eastern Thrace and their replacement by soldiers of the Grand National Assembly, essentially providing a way for Turkish troops to surround Istanbul on all sides in an orderly and peaceful manner. Mudanya in 1922 was in many ways the bookend to Mudros in 1918—the moment when the political and military advantage shifted from the Allies to the Turks, with the latter now in a much stronger position to influence the terms of a final peace. In a city that had seen rather few real heroes for some time, the levelheadedness of Harington and smet prevented Istanbul from repeating the horrors of Smyrna. The Sèvres treaty—signed but never implemented—was now dead, and a new set of concerns began to occupy both Harington in Istanbul and Allied diplomats farther afield: how to end the occupation and turn over control of the city to the de facto rulers, the Kemalists, who had marched steadily westward out of Anatolia over the previous three years. Almost as soon as he left Mudanya and returned to Istanbul, Harington was faced with a direct challenge to the embattled ruler he had been trying to prop up: the Ottoman sultan.
General Charles Harington—or Tim, as he was known—was a professional soldier of cool judgment and, like his predecessor, General Milne, of considerable experience. But where Milne had the distinction of superintending the Ottoman capital on behalf of Britain and the Allies, Harington’s role was to figure out how to give it up.
Harington appeared at official functions in Sam Browne belt and beribboned tunic, the image of duty and resolve with his swagger stick and pencil mustache. Trained at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, he had served in the King’s Regiment during the Boer War. After the First World War, he was personally appointed by Winston Churchill, then Britain’s secretary of state for war, to manage the delicate situation in Istanbul. To foreigners and non-Muslims in the city, he had a reputation for keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of rapid change and near-miss calamities.
“Life went on gaily, especially at night,” Harington recalled in his memoirs. Ceremonial parades featured infantry march-pasts and gun salutes from ships on the Bosphorus. The British drank to the health of King George V on his birthday and held seven-a-side rugby matches on weekends. “There was something for everyone: hunting, polo, shooting, fishing, yachting, golf, cricket, hockey, tennis, squash, etc., a good club and good cafes.” The hounds ran at Maslak, in the European suburbs, chasing any animal worthy of sport. A small bear, Mishu, had been liberated by British soldiers from the Caucasus mountains and entertained the troops with acrobatics. When officers helped him down a glass of port at Christmas, Mishu attempted to walk along a railing at the edge of the Bosphorus and promptly toppled into the water. He was rescued by fishermen stunned at the odd catch they had drawn up from the swift current.
But the Allied occupiers, as well as the sultan, were living on borrowed time. “[T]he main preoccupation of the Allied Governments,” reported G. Ward Price, “was to withdraw their troops from Turkey with the minimum of humiliation.” The indecision regarding the final status of Istanbul and the empire, coupled with the devastating terms finally forced on the sultan’s government at Sèvres, had contributed to the disorder in Anatolia. Britain’s support had emboldened King Constantine and sealed the fate of Smyrna.
The Turkish nationalist government was in a stronger position than ever, with both the control of territory and the demonstrated military power to press its advantage. Turkish soldiers were encamped east and west of Istanbul, with Allied naval power the only obstacle to their taking the city by force. In Ankara, the Grand National Assembly was increasingly assertive, acting like the confident governing parliament of a real country, even if no major power accepted it as such. The assembly retroactively declared that Istanbul had ceased to be the capital from the moment the Allies took control of it. On November 4, 1922, Refet Pasha, a representative of the Grand National Assembly, arrived in Istanbul with the news that he would be assuming control of the city’s gendarmerie and police, customs houses, public sanitation, and other municipal functions. Allied officials expressed frustration at the rapid erosion of their authority, but they remained powerless to stop it as long as the city was surrounded by thousands of Turkish troops whose presence was protected by the Mudanya accord. “Measures now being taken by Nationalists simply aim at gradual extraction of our means of control at every turn and reducing of our occupation to a farce,” a British official cabled to London.
That was precisely what Refet Pasha, acting on behalf of Mustafa Kemal, had in mind. “It certainly came as a surprise to us when we realised we were passing through a revolution,” said Harington. Later in the month, the Ankara government began the fundamental reorganization of the state itself. The sultan had acquiesced to the occupation, signed a paper treaty that would have apportioned his lands to Greece and the Allies, and watched helplessly as the nationalists took the lead in pushing back the Hellenic invaders. The monarchy was now formally abolished. The emerging country was to be a republic.
This news was a particular problem for Mehmed VI, who remained ensconced in Yıldız Palace. On November 16, 1922, almost four years to the day after Allied troops first stepped ashore, General Harington received a visit from the chief bandmaster of the sultan’s household. Harington knew that the maestro was more than a court musician. He was in fact the sultan’s most trusted confidant, and he carried startling news. Given the Grand National Assembly’s recent declaration ending the monarchy, the sultan was convinced that his life was in danger and that plans were afoot to murder him during the next selâmlık. The Kemalists had done away with the sultanate; now he feared they were preparing to do away with the sultan, too.
Harington realized that the story, if true, would mark a turning point not only in the occupation but also in the history of the Ottoman Empire. He insisted on having the request in writing. Some time later the bandmaster returned with a note. “Considering my life in danger in Constantinople,” Mehmed wrote, “I take refuge with the British Government, and request my transfer as soon as possible from Constantinople to another place.” Harington and his senior officers were on the brink of achieving something that no foreign power in five centuries had dreamed possible: They were going to kidnap—at the monarch’s own request—the head of the Ottoman Empire and caliph of the world’s Muslims. Working with a small group of commanders, Harington devised a daring scheme to spirit Mehmed away from the city.
On Friday morning, November 17, the general rose at four o’clock and downed a breakfast of bacon and eggs. The late autumn rains had already descended on Istanbul, so the officers and men of the Grenadier Guards grumbled when Harington informed them that they would be conducting a predawn drill in the barracks yard near Yıldız Palace. Around six o’clock, the sultan, his son, and a small group of servants took an early morning walk in the garden. When they reached the section of the garden adjacent to the barracks yard, the servants threw open the back gate, exposing the garden to the drilling guardsmen.
A select group of British soldiers who had been briefed on the mission quickly bundled the sultan and his retinue into two waiting ambulances, which accelerated out of the parade ground. A nest of machine gunners covered the departure, while the rest of the surprised Grenadiers stood at attention. The ambulances raced down the hill toward Dolmabahçe Palace and pulled up at the quay. A small British naval detachment, supposedly on an early morning drill, sat waiting.
The sultan was transferred to the boats and then to the dockyards farther down the Bosphorus, where Harington stood waiting in his personal launch. From there, Mehmed joined the British commander for his last crossing of the Bosphorus, a short ride to the British battleship Malaya, and a long sea journey toward voluntary exile. Harington had hoped the sultan would give him a small token to commemorate the event—a cigarette case, perhaps—but Mehmed instead entrusted him with looking after his five wives, whom he had left at the palace. For some time thereafter, Harington acted as a messenger between the sultan and his family. They were eventually reunited in a haven for ousted monarchs and erstwhile nobles, San Remo on the Italian Riviera.
Later that day, thousands of people came out as usual for the selâmlık and waited patiently for the sultan’s carriage to appear. Hours went by, and the crowds eventually dispersed, left to wonder why the ruler had skipped the Friday service. The story of what had really happened soon spread through the city. The sultan had abandoned Istanbul and the empire. A few days later, the Grand National Assembly named the crown prince, Mehmed’s cousin Abdülmecid, as caliph but without the additional title of sultan. The roles of universal Islamic leader and imperial ruler were now separated for the first time in centuries. 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. The sultan himself had become a refugee.