“THE POST-WAR WORLD WAS JAZZING”

 

The old guard: Former “black eunuchs” of the Ottoman imperial harem, at a meeting in the late 1920s or 1930s.

 

THE CHOICEST ROOMS IN the Pera Palace were located near the southwestern corner of the building. From there, the windows looked out on the Golden Horn and the thin neighborhoods that had once marked the farthest reaches of the Ottoman city. In the distance, a dark band of parkland had been a favorite picnic spot for Ottoman beys and their families. Veiled ladies had once sat demurely on the grass while children frolicked amid wiry acacia trees or splashed in the twin creeks that emptied into the Golden Horn.

After the end of the empire, ferries still chugged upstream to deposit weekenders. Some were headed to the village of Eyüp and the türbe, or mausoleum, of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, one of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad, which had long been a pilgrimage site for devout Muslims. Others could be seen making for the trees of Kaıthane, which offered picnic spots and seclusion for courting lovers. Over the years, the city had crept into the sparsely wooded areas. Sunset at the Pera Palace made these newer neighborhoods glow. The fading pink and orange sunlight reflected off red tile roofs and plaster façades as lanterns and houselights came up after the late-afternoon call to prayer.

It wasn’t only the view that made the southwest side of the Pera Palace the most desirable, however. Since it was the farthest away from the bars and clubs of the old Graveyard Street, it was also the only part of the hotel where a patron could expect a decent night’s sleep. At the time of the Allied occupation, Ernest Hemingway had worried about what would happen to Istanbul’s nightlife once the Muslims took over the city from the British, French, and Italians. Rumor had it that the Turkish nationalists, bowing to Islamic convention, had outlawed cardplaying and upended backgammon tables in the areas already under their control. “The man who raises a thirst somewhere east of Suez is going to be unable to slake it in Constantinople once Kemal enters the city,” Hemingway predicted.

But in fact the city seemed to sprout new bars, restaurants, variety theaters, and cafés chantants by the week. “Beauty and wit and laughter and song were exalted and worshipped,” recalled an American visitor. Small beer halls opened in the tiniest of venues. Even a room that could fit only a few tables featured its own small orchestra. Local entrepreneurs knew an opportunity when they saw it, and the shifts in Istanbul’s population could be gauged by the drinking spots that arose to service specific subcategories of newcomers. Tom’s Lancashire Bar, run by an immigrant from Salonica, made a play for British clients from the north of England, while St. James’s Brasserie sought to attract a more refined English crowd. With the elimination of the sultanate in 1922, even the Yıldız Palace complex—where Abdülhamid II had busily spied on his restive capital—was repurposed. An Italian entrepreneur, Mario Serra, transformed the compound’s wood-and-stone chalet, set in a grove of pine, magnolia, and linden trees, into a casino. The facility was able to accommodate three hundred players at its gaming tables and featured restaurants, tearooms, a horse-riding arena, tennis courts, and a shooting range.

The Pera Palace offered dinner with musical accompaniment every evening, plus a thé concert on Fridays and Sundays at five o’clock. But just to the north of the hotel stood one of Istanbul’s premier nightspots, the Garden Bar, which occupied part of the Petits-Champs park. The bar had been opened by a Jewish immigrant from Bulgaria as a watering hole for artists performing at the nearby Winter Garden Theater. Like many buildings in the city, it went through several iterations, leveled by fire and then rebuilt by a new owner, but by the early 1920s it was drawing crowds of Muslims and foreigners, as well as plenty of visiting patrons from the Pera Palace next door. A musical matinee was available every afternoon and early evening from five to eight o’clock, plus a full variety extravaganza from nine to eleven. Musical touring companies from Vienna, Paris, and other European cities put on revues. A high-wire walker or trapeze artist might even swoop overhead, to the gasps of the crowd. Boxing matches were staged with local and international sportsmen, while drag queens on occasion would entertain the crowd with song and dance.

The Garden Bar’s proprietors had their pick of artists because the city was crawling with out-of-work musicians and other performers, most of them part of the bedraggled White Russian invasion of 1920. Boutnikoff’s Symphony Orchestra, founded by a Russian émigré, offered concerts twice daily, marking one of the first sustained efforts to bring European classical music to the city. Popular music stars such as the singer Alexander Vertinsky, along with future notables such as the young jazz composer Vladimir Dukelsky—or Vernon Duke—performed at venues throughout the city. Russian circus artists had also made their way south with Wrangel’s forces, and Istanbul now saw a boom in knife juggling and acrobatics. When jobs were scarce, the local Red Cross office was inundated with requests for money. A troupe of eight Russian dwarfs applied for assistance with developing a new revue. A man with a menagerie of trained rats, dogs, and a pig requested help in placing his animal show in a suitable nightclub or performance hall. “Artists cannot live in Russia now,” the rat trainer said sadly. “The atmosphere is uncongenial to art.”

Art was probably not on the minds of most people who ventured north of the Golden Horn, however. At the Garden Bar, the memoirist Ziya Bey reported, “soliciting by both male and female pleasure-seekers is now so aggressively indulged in that not even a self-respecting man dares any more to venture in the place.” The whole neighborhood was like the slums of Naples, recalled Alexis Gritchenko, a Russian painter. Misspelled signs in many languages lured customers through dark doorways. The smell of sour wine and rotten fruit wafted up from cellars and taverns. The windows of legal brothels glowed golden. Shouts and laughter continued through the night, broken only by the thunder of a giant hogshead of wine being rolled over paving stones.

Outrageous entertainment and on-demand licentiousness had been part of the city’s social order for centuries. The difference now was that it all seemed to be so freely available—on display even—before crowds of strangers packed together inside bars, public gardens, and theaters. As late as 1916, when the first Viennese opera troupes began appearing in the city, concert organizers had to stage special performances for women only, so that the wives and daughters of pashas and beys would not have to interact with other men. Princesses of the imperial household had rushed giggling into the Tokatlian Hotel—the first time they had been allowed to enter a hotel lobby, in fact—surrounded by guardian eunuchs who ushered them through a back exit to the Petits-Champs Theater beyond. Now, in the 1920s, it was hard to imagine that such a chaste and naïve world had ever existed. “At Petit Champs [sic] you could watch Cossack dancers, see clean, U.S. tincan sailors piled out of arabas [trucks] into the stew of tarts cadging for champagne,” recalled Robert Dunn, an American naval official.

The popularity of nightspots rose and fell, victims to changing fortunes, evolving tastes, or a single dull performance that took the life out of the party. That was the fate of one of the earliest sensations in the club life of Istanbul and a major rival of the Garden Bar, a large and hopping dance joint called Maxim.

The club’s proprietor was an unlikely impresario. Frederick Bruce Thomas was the son of former Mississippi slaves. He had joined countless other black men from the southern United States who sought jobs and fortunes in Chicago and New York, waiting tables or working as valets. A sense of adventure and a desire to escape the everyday racism of Gilded Age America took him to London, Paris, and then, in 1899, to a place very few African Americans had dreamed of visiting: the Russian Empire. Within a few years, he had taken Russian citizenship, found a Russian wife, and—as Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas—set himself up as one of the premier maître d’s in Moscow. The establishment where he worked, Yar, was the city’s most elegant eatery and a restaurant known across the continent. He later opened his own Moscow nightspot, which debuted to rave reviews and record crowds.

A chorus line: Female dancers at a revue in an Istanbul club.

Thomas had crossed the color line, achieving a status he never could have reached had he remained in the United States, but the tide of politics and revolution was harder to manage. After the autumn of 1917, when Muscovites began taking sides in the emerging civil war, Thomas fled south to the relative safety of areas controlled by the Volunteer Army. Like many Russian subjects, he found a temporary refuge in Odessa, a port city that had passed back and forth between rival armies. In 1919, he moved again, joining thousands of former tsarist loyalists fleeing the Bolsheviks’ southward advance. He ended up in Istanbul, likely the only black White Russian to arrive with the remnants of Denikin’s and Wrangel’s forces.

In short order, Thomas reestablished himself. He fell in with Bertha Proctor, a Lancashire barkeep and sometime madam whose bar near the Pera Palace was already regarded as one of the most successful in the city. Together they opened a new establishment at the end of a tramline in the ili neighborhood. Known by a variety of names—the Anglo-American Villa and Garden, Bertha’s, and finally Stella—it became one of the favorite haunts of Allied officers. Within a few years, business was so good that Thomas was able to trade up, and in the autumn of 1921, he inaugurated a new venue nearer the center of Pera on Sıraselviler Avenue. He christened the new dancing and dinner club Maxim, the name of his old business in Moscow and perhaps a clever rhyme with Istanbul’s nearby Taksim Square.

In the middle of the 1920s, the grande salle of Maxim was “the most frequented locale not only for the Istanbul public but also for foreigners who happened to be passing through,” said the memoirist Willy Sperco, who was then living in the city. Even the acerbic Ziya Bey was moved to check out the popular nightspot, visiting with his wife and a Greek friend, Carayanni, who had become rich by jacking up prices on scarce food items during the war. “Never before were Pera and Galata as disreputable as now,” he wrote. He found Maxim full of Russian ex-nobles and amateur bohemians, everyone smoking and drinking, with a black jazz band on stage. People had begun to adopt the French habit of kissing women on the hands, but beyond that, few of the more refined habits of Parisian life had taken root in Istanbul. “[T]he only thing which this international crowd has adopted from the Quartier Latin of Paris is free love,” he concluded.

Thomas was a talented survivor, and when the times demanded it, he could shift gears. He could transform himself from Western-style clubman to Turkish harem lord with literally the change of a hat. When a group of American tourists wandered in, Thomas would don a fez and order his chorus girls into Turkish pantaloons. The visitors were treated to an evening in a splendid Ottoman harem, with lounging slave girls and obsequious attendants serving a passable beefsteak with horseradish sauce. When the evening was finished, the exotic proprietor would bow, press the guests’ hands congenially, and then usher them out the door with a warm “Good-bye, effendi.”

The good times could not last, however. Thomas had expanded the business too rapidly. The departure of the Russians took away both clients and employees, and rivals were eager to copy what had been a novel and brilliant model of drinking, eating, and dancing, all in one place, with young women serving as the waitstaff. Other clubs were popping up along the Grande Rue—the Rose Noire, the Turquoise, Karpich’s, the Kit-Kat. After only five years in the new location, Thomas had racked up a mountain of debt. His creditors forced him to pay up or declare the business bankrupt, much in the way that all non-Muslim businesses were being squeezed at the time. He closed the doors in 1927 and died the following summer. Turkish businessmen later opened a new version of Maxim as a casino, but the life had gone out of the party. “The post-war world was jazzing,” noted Thomas’s obituary in the New York Times, “and [he] saw to it that cosmopolitan Constantinople was not behind.” Newspapers labeled him “the sultan of jazz,” and a few dozen old friends came out for the funeral, but most of the former clientele had moved on to newer and more exciting venues. It was all a sad affair, remembered Willy Sperco, as depressing as the aftermath of an orgy.

Among Istanbul’s local historians, Thomas is often credited with introducing Istanbullus to everything from Western-style dancing to the entire concept of public nightlife. His Maxim probably did feature the first black dance bands in the city, which Thomas brought on tour from France and the United States. A mysterious group that contemporaries remembered as the Palm Beach Seven may have been the first ensemble ever to mute a trumpet or hit a rim shot in Istanbul’s history. Maxim’s dancing instructors, mainly young Russian women, helped train an entire generation of Istanbullus to do the foxtrot, the shimmy, and other fashionable steps. In 1926, municipal authorities issued orders banning the Charleston—not because it offended Muslim sensibilities but because record numbers of people were being admitted to the hospital for sprains and bruises. The ban was impossible to enforce, of course, and it was mercilessly mocked by the Turkish press, but it did reflect the rapid transformation of the city after the White Russian influx. “They changed the shape of social life,” the Turkish memoirist Mîna Urgan, then a young girl, recalled succinctly of the Russians.

Newcomers such as Thomas, however, were actually slotting into a well-worn groove: the habit of eating, drinking, and carousing that Istanbullus themselves had already developed into a high art. European émigrés typically thought of themselves as having pioneered public entertainment in the city, and they probably were responsible for the idea of a restaurant—a place where you could go in the evening, sit at a cloth-covered table, and order from a limited but regularly changing menu, with plated dishes being delivered by a trained server. Nothing quite like that had existed in Istanbul before. But there was no shortage of public eateries and other distractions, even under the Ottomans.

Rough wine and raki could be had at innumerable meyhanes, taverns usually owned by Greeks or Armenians. According to the seventeenth-century traveler Evliya Çelebi, the city boasted more than a thousand meyhanes in his day—not necessarily an accurate count but still an indication of how easy it was to procure alcohol in the capital of the Islamic world. In fact, the sense that the number of bars and eateries was out of control has been one of the constants in Istanbul’s social history. Anyone “who can fry three stinky fish in a pan gets a permit to open a meyhane,” complained a newspaper in the 1930s. The same sentiment repeated itself just about every time city administrators contemplated how to corral Istanbullus’ seemingly boundless desire to offer their neighbors something to eat and drink.

Meyhanes were spread throughout the city, from Eyüp to Üsküdar, and, like neighborhood pubs, each had its regular clientele. Small plates of meze—assortments of sardines, fava beans, melon, white cheese, and other dishes—were provided to soak up the Bulgarian and Greek wine, which made slaves of those who drank it, according to Evliya Çelebi. On his own visits to such establishments in the mid-1600s, he regularly came upon drunken men complaining of their plight. “My foot takes no step but to the tavern!” they called out to him. “My ear hears nothing but the bottle’s glugging and the drunken cry!” He gave thanks to God that he himself never took anything stronger than sherbet made from Athenian honey, yet he was nevertheless able to recall eight of the most popular meyhanes by name, which he listed helpfully in his famous book of travels, the Seyahatname.

Despite the theoretical ban on alcohol consumption by Muslims, the Ottoman Empire also developed an extensive alcohol industry, producing everything from anise-flavored raki to wines and beers, again typically the domain of non-Muslim proprietors. Being abstemious was a virtue observed mainly in the breach, which is why Pera was such a useful thing to have in Ottoman and republican Istanbul—an entire neighborhood, across the Golden Horn from the sultan’s oldest palace, where just about any kind of debauchery could be had at a price. It was almost as if Las Vegas were always only a bridge away.

Eating and drinking involved being in the public eye. Until well into the twentieth century, a home-cooked meal was a rarity. This mode of dining was almost exclusively the purview of the wealthy, who could afford a permanent kitchen in their villa or mansion, one or more servants to go to the market, and a cook to prepare the food. Average Istanbullus got their food in groups—from street vendors, neighborhood bakers, soup kitchens attached to mosques, canteens associated with some professional class (such as soldiers or the service staff at imperial palaces), or the ubiquitous esnaf canteens, or tradesmen’s eateries, that serviced specific neighborhoods. People traditionally ate where they worked and worked where they lived, surrounded by other people just like them, such as coreligionists or members of distinct professions, since specialized workshops—coppersmiths, glassblowers, woodworkers—tended to be concentrated in the same parts of the city. In the 1880s, for example, a little over a quarter of Istanbul’s population—mainly unmarried men—did not live in private homes but were accommodated in mosque complexes, artisans’ shops, and other group lodgings. About eight percent of the people in the city had no fixed abode at all.

Given the need for food that was easily prepared and easily served to large groups, simplicity was key. Minute gradations of quality depended not on doing something new but on doing something familiar particularly well. That is why so many of the memoirists of everyday life in Istanbul are most wistful when they recall a noted baker, the purveyor of an especially good yogurt, or a well-shaded teahouse. A traveler today can today go from a morning simit, a pretzel-like bread covered in sesame seeds, to a grilled fish or stew at midday, to a sludge-bottomed coffee in the afternoon and still approximate the foodways—and caloric intake—of average Istanbullus of the past. Classical Ottoman dishes eventually made their way into the city’s restaurants, but these concoctions with their whimsical names—such as the lamb and eggplant in hünkârbeendi (The-Sultan-Enjoyed-It), or the eggplant, tomato, and garlic in imambayıldı (The-Imam-Fainted)—would have been foreign to the vast majority of the city’s population.

Beyond the variety of food and drink available in innumerable public venues, Western visitors have long had a particular fascination with Istanbul’s vices. “Narcotic stimulants such as Indian hemp and opium are available,” the popular Meyers Guide told German travelers as late as 1914.

The enjoyment of marijuana and hashish enables one to continue working, erases pain, cures various diseases, and creates a pleasant intoxication that stimulates the imagination and increases both appetite and sex drive. . . . Opium smokers (mainly Persians and Arabs rather than Turks) tend to gather only in a few hidden coffeehouses in Yedikule [south of the Golden Horn] and indulge in this vice in secret. For Europeans, joining them is fraught with difficulties since in recent years the government has intervened vigorously against opium smoking.

Illicit drugs remained a part of the city’s entertainment after the First World War, and styles and tastes came more in line with European sensibilities. Turkey was not a signatory to conventions on the transport of narcotics, and producers and traffickers flocked to Istanbul as the center of the cross-Mediterranean trade. Newspapers and journals railed against the scourge of one particular new import, cocaine. Because it required none of the complex apparatus involved with smoking hashish or opium, cocaine raced through Istanbul’s clubs and bars. New purveyors even set themselves up in the lobbies of major hotels. The white powder was so easily concealable that a vial of it could fit inside a woman’s high heel, an Istanbul magazine reported, which meant that no small number of women doing the Charleston or shimmy might also have been acting as well-dressed mules for the drug underworld.

In the past, people interested in Istanbul’s seamier side had frequently focused on the one institution they understood the least: the harem. In the sultan’s court, the harem was the private and highly regulated world of the sovereigns’ wives and concubines. It was guarded by eunuchs and accessible only to a small stratum of men, typically the sultan and his preadult sons. Foreigners imagined a world of supine odalisques, opium pipes, and diaphanous gowns, but the imperial harem in fact was as politically complicated—and often as boring—as the private household of any other European monarch. Personal intrigues, family disputes, and generational power struggles, not rampant seduction, were its dominant idioms. The word “harem,” from the Arabic for “forbidden,” was originally more architectural than sexual, referring to the portion of a Muslim home reserved for private family use (the haremlik), as opposed to the areas intended for meeting or entertaining guests (the selâmlık). Simply substituting the word household would probably provide a more accurate and less salacious vision of how sex, power, and private life intersected in Ottoman Istanbul, both at court and in the lesser harems of Muslim high officials and elites. “[D]elete forever that misunderstood word ‘harem’ . . . and dispel the nasty atmosphere which a wrong meaning of that word has cast over our lives,” a prominent Ottoman feminist begged of an American journalist during the First World War.

When Sultan Mehmed VI embarked on a British warship in 1922, he took a small retinue of servants with him, but most of the former guards of the imperial harem—the kara aalar, or black eunuchs—stayed behind. Like the castrati of Italian opera, these men, generally of Ethiopian or Sudanese heritage, had exchanged their sex organs for a profession that offered privilege and a certain degree of power—or, more frequently, such a transaction was forced upon them in childhood. They had been brought into slavery by middlemen on the far reaches of the sultan’s domains and eventually found themselves at the epicenter of the imperial system. But in a time of changing mores and political revolution, they were out of a job. Many of them drifted into penury. They could sometimes be seen begging on the street, their elongated limbs the visible signs of prepubescent castration. “All that I have known have been big, fine-looking men, very merry and good-natured, and useful mainly to go out with the automobile as a kind of footman. In the same capacity they stood about palace doors, preceded one into drawing-rooms, and served tea,” wrote one observer. “Their day is over.”

In the late 1920s, as many as fifty of these men established a mutual-assistance society to deal with their plight, setting up a headquarters in Üsküdar and exchanging information on new employment opportunities. Their old skills could be put to new uses. The harem, after all, had made them experts in propriety and politesse, and many of them spent the next several decades as museum guards, receptionists, ushers, and discreet maître-d’s at Istanbul’s leading restaurants. One of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s eunuchs, Nadir Aa, spent his days with retired imperial officials at the Café Lebon in Pera, speaking a painfully elegant version of Ottoman Turkish full of refined circumlocutions and interminable pleasantries. Even Mustafa Kemal reportedly employed a former imperial eunuch in his household in Ankara.

Where sexual life more closely approximated Western fantasies was in the same place those fantasies were frequently realized in the West—in brothels. As part of the empire’s modernizing reforms under Abdülhamid II, an entire system of regulated brothels was introduced in 1884, replacing the informal houses and freelance prostitutes, both female and male, of earlier eras. In the past, prostitution had been seen as mainly a moral problem, one best dealt with via punishments meted out by Muslim kadıs (judges) or through raids and banishments organized by individual neighborhoods. Now it became a social issue to be legislated by the state. Brothels were henceforth to be operated only with a government-approved license, with regular inspections by police and health officials, and concentrated in neighborhoods that had been specifically zoned for the sex trade.

This system disintegrated during the First World War. Refugeedom, foreign occupation, and desperate times combined to push women and, in some cases, children into sex work. Some were recruited by established brothel owners, while others were forced to solicit clients on the street, their oversize handbags and ribbon-covered parasols being the accepted trademarks of streetwalkers. One story—apparently true—told of a young Russian refugee who approached such a woman on the backstreets of Pera only to discover that she was both a former baroness as well as his mother.

After 1918, Allied high commissions set about reestablishing a formal system of brothel licensing and inspections, essentially re-creating some of the legal framework that had decayed at the end of Ottoman power. The French, a bit too predictably, were assigned the task of overseeing licensed brothels. They demarcated those reserved for officers and for ordinary soldiers, fixed prices in all the establishments, and arranged weekly medical inspections by French doctors. The British took a different tack. At the YMCA, an Anglican vicar organized Sunday afternoon teas designed to distract the minds of enlisted men, while women from the English community were invited along for conversation and music. (The French system, one suspects, worked rather better.)

Despite these efforts, Allied commanders were very much a product of their era when it came to the organization of sex. Regular sexual encounters for officers and men were seen to be a basic right as well as a useful tool for relieving boredom and maintaining morale. Especially for occupying armies—lodged far from home amid a tense and delicate political situation—providing opportunities for recreational sex was as much a part of a commander’s job as ensuring a steady supply of food and adequate equipment. The chief problem, however, was ensuring that Istanbul’s well-established industry of available sexuality did not at the same time weaken military units through illnesses acquired in the process.

Venereal disease was “rampant,” General Harington reported during the occupation, and he estimated there were perhaps 40,000 prostitutes in Istanbul. A contemporary survey revealed a total of 175 brothels operating throughout the city, most concentrated in Pera and adjacent neighborhoods, with as many as 4,500 women employed there—nearly an order of magnitude smaller than Harington’s figure and probably closer to the truth. In another survey, police counted 2,125 registered prostitutes, with another 979 unregistered, although “the number of women whose moral condition has changed for a variety of reasons, can be said to be in the thousands.” The majority of both proprietors and prostitutes were Greek and Armenian, but it was estimated that Russians accounted for up to a quarter of the women working there. It was the occupiers, however, who were both the main clients as well as the major vectors of disease, even if plenty of Muslim men probably also availed themselves of the women’s services. A two-week snapshot of hospital records in 1919 showed Ottoman soldiers mainly suffering from typhus or smallpox, while British and French troops reported two cases of typhus, one of pneumonia, six of influenza, and eighty-four of gonorrhea and syphilis.

Fortunately, there was a surfeit of doctors available to treat the problem, and their advertisements in the local press were a perfect reflection of the city’s multicultural kaleidoscope of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish professionals. From his offices in Kadıköy, Dr. Isaac Samanon promised to “treat all internal and venereal maladies using the newest discoveries of Science.” Drs. Mokin and Maxoud, situated in the Tünel Passage, specialized in venereal ailments as well as diseases of the skin. Dr. Ali Riza, a graduate of one of Paris’s finest teaching hospitals, received patients at his clinic off the Grande Rue. Dr. A. Schwartzer, late of Petrograd, relieved the distressed “according to the latest methods.” Dr. Yervant Tachdjian was available for consultations in Karaköy regarding syphilis, gonorrhea, and other genitourinary infections. Conveniently for many Allied officers, Dr. Djelal Chukri of the Clinique de Péra assisted with the treatment of venereal disease as well as female disorders at his clinic right across the street from the Pera Palace. Since the bar run by the sometime madame Bertha Proctor was just down Graveyard Street from Dr. Chukri’s office—a bar that employed women whose names are recorded in history only as Frying Pan, Square Ass, Mother’s Ruin, Fornicating Fannie, and Skinny Liz—it was possible for men and women to acquire a disease and be relieved of it on the same city block.

Regardless of the realities of the sex trade in the early 1920s—relatively small, geographically concentrated, and focused in large measure on servicing Allied soldiers and sailors—the image of Istanbul as a haven for vice and venality only grew. Ernest Hemingway and other correspondents reported on the seediness of Pera, where the mewlings of street prostitutes enticed foreign sailors to their doom. Ziya Bey, who had had some experience in New Orleans, San Francisco, and other notorious port cities, was nevertheless scandalized by what Istanbul had become. “Intoxicated sailors rock from side to side and disappear in little streets,” he recalled, “where organs grind their nasal notes of antiquated French, Italian, yes, even American popular songs and where harsh feminine voices greet prospective friends in an international vernacular.”

Observers were convinced that prostitution was only one part, although the most scandalous, of the continuing “white slave” trade in Istanbul. Forcible servitude had been common in the Ottoman Empire, even though the last open market for slaves, near the Grand Bazaar, had been closed down even before the abolition of slavery in the United States. In the new language of international law, however, outsiders came to decry the “trafficking” of women, a term invented at the beginning of the twentieth century. In a series of reports published in 1927, the League of Nations identified Istanbul as one of the major centers for the forced movement of women out of Europe and into the Near East. Women were being held against their will, the League said, with a wide network of brothel owners, shippers, and government officials complicit in the sex industry.

The Turkish government repeatedly protested the charges, claiming that much of the recent increase in prostitution could be blamed on the economic plight of the itinerant Russians. The government pointed to the League’s own findings that any commerce in women seemed to begin and end in countries such as France and Egypt, with Istanbul serving only as an unfortunate pass-through. Even under the Ottomans, “white slavers” had been regularly deported from the city, and police records showed most of them inhabiting the slippery professional world at the intersection of music-making, saloon-keeping, café-owning, and brothel-running. Officials had listed one deportee’s job title, for example, as “pianist/pimp.” But the increasing international attention prompted republican officials to act more decisively. In 1930, a government directive prohibited the opening of new brothels and placed the administration of licensed houses under the care of the police. A round of raids and closings followed. The writer Fikret Adil dated the decline of Istanbul’s jazz scene to the initial shuttering of the free-form sex trade after the republic’s new edict, and he probably had a point—an analytical one if not a moral one.

Three years later, the government backed away from an outright ban and issued a new directive that created a state bureaucracy to oversee the licensing, inspection, and regulation of brothels in the city. “Most of the people in our country are, in terms of culture, still quite primitive,” President Mustafa Kemal declared at the time. “The opening of brothels shall be permitted where necessary and according to law, and it is thus necessary that prostitutes be regulated.” The venues that were blessed as the new sites of acceptable vice were largely in the same places as during the Allied occupation, a fact that deepened the divisions between the old city south of the Golden Horn and Pera to the north. Travelers from Evliya Çelebi forward had taken for granted that the former was the domain of propriety and Islamic virtue while the latter was the realm of experiment and abandon. Rather than knitting together the former imperial capital, the new republic’s drive to modernize social and sexual life actually reinforced the canyon separating the two worlds on both sides of the water. Having a part of the city where anything goes had served the Ottomans well, and in a newly modernizing republic, Pera was beginning to play an even greater role as both the designated red-light district and the avant-garde of popular culture.

That connection certainly continued into the interwar years and beyond. The mutual parasitism of nightlife and vice was in essence little different in Istanbul from that in any large city. To anyone expecting a certain version of Islamic propriety in a country overwhelmingly Muslim by religion and cultural orientation, the enduring affection in Turkish popular culture for Istanbul’s drag queens, its famous madames, and its professional roués can come as a shock. Even today, family-friendly eateries share alleyways with transvestite prostitutes who toss down joking hellos from the windows of their second-story aeries.

Pious Turkish Muslims, by contrast, came to see the source of Istanbul’s loose behavior and pragmatic ethics as, in one form or another, aliens—at first the occupying Allies, then the refugee Russians, then the local Christians and Jews who, despite the shift in property ownership toward Muslims, still staffed the gin joints and cabarets north of the Golden Horn. Turkish nationalists tended to share that view, seeing Istanbul as a “Byzantine whore”—a common label for the city—that had offered itself up to the occupiers while patriots were dying to save the rest of the country from the Hellenes.

But an underground transformation was happening as well. The very values that many Istanbullus had long taken for granted—a certain cultural openness; an ability to embrace religious conviction and moral license at the same time; and a belief that modernity actually demanded a tolerance for raunchiness—were being written into the informal codes of public behavior then emerging in republican Turkey. In fact, unlike in the past, when the business of public entertainment had been dominated by European performers or down-and-out Russians, a new generation of native Istanbullus was emerging to record the city’s darker side in song.