Home Feed
Home
Search
Search
Add Review, Blurb, Quote
Add
Activity
Activity
Profile
Profile
Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul
Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul | Charles King
1 post | 2 read | 3 to read
“Timely . . . brilliant . . . hugely enjoyable, magnificently researched and deeply absorbing.”—Jason Goodwin, New York Times Book Review At midnight, December 31, 1925, citizens of the newly proclaimed Turkish Republic celebrated the New Year. For the first time ever, they had agreed to use a nationally unified calendar and clock. Yet in Istanbul—an ancient crossroads and Turkey's largest city—people were looking toward an uncertain future. Never purely Turkish, Istanbul was home to generations of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, as well as Muslims. It welcomed White Russian nobles ousted by the Russian Revolution, Bolshevik assassins on the trail of the exiled Leon Trotsky, German professors, British diplomats, and American entrepreneurs—a multicultural panoply of performers and poets, do-gooders and ne’er-do-wells. During the Second World War, thousands of Jews fleeing occupied Europe found passage through Istanbul, some with the help of the future Pope John XXIII. At the Pera Palace, Istanbul's most luxurious hotel, so many spies mingled in the lobby that the manager posted a sign asking them to relinquish their seats to paying guests. In beguiling prose and rich character portraits, Charles King brings to life a remarkable era when a storied city stumbled into the modern world and reshaped the meaning of cosmopolitanism.
Amazon Indiebound Barnes and Noble WorldCat Goodreads LibraryThing
quote
Zakia
post image

East meets West - I embark on a journey that so far is excelling itself in telling the complicated story of the birth of modern day Istanbul. Istanbul is an impossible cocktail of Muslim, Jewish and Christian cultures - and we all know how to get along. Therefore it is only apt that I sit in my English garden, drinking Greek coffee while reading about the birth pains of a secular Turkish republic. So far, Charles King has mesmerised me. 🇹🇷

7 likes1 stack add